According to a book by journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, India, which was ignored by the CIA over Pakistan during America’s “war on terror” and the decades before it, became a member of an exclusive surveillance group after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, making it a formidable intelligence force.
Despite being enriched with billions of dollars after 9/11, Pakistan’s entropy, according to the book “Spy Stories – Inside the Secret World of the RAW and ISI,” released this week, brought the American intelligence community to Delhi, albeit reluctantly.
The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) was invited by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to join a regional body known as SSPAC (Signals Intelligence Senior Pacific) in 2008, according to the book, which was a “step up” for India, which had been attempting to gain Washington’s attention for a long time.
The so-called Five Eyes countries – the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom – as well as South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand – were all members of this exclusive surveillance group.
The SSPAC is a technical intelligence sharing platform where countries pooled their signals gathered through eavesdropping while also building trust and learning new surveillance techniques.
According to the book, the RAW finally broke through and won NSA accolades. “The RAW officers were now ‘read into’ some highly classified reports and exposed to data generated by cutting-edge technology and coding that bore into Islamist hotspots,” according to the report.
To find suspects and describe their relationships – which extended to even larger friendship circles – massive amounts of sensitive metadata from a massive volume of calls and messages in Five Eyes member states and (secretly) beyond were pooled.
“This meant the sender and recipient details for emails, or the phone numbers someone called from, and to, as well as time stamps for when these messages, emails, and calls were sent and made. All of it would be funnelled into a new reference repository, known as SMAC, or the Sensitive Metadata Analytic Collaboration programme,” the authors write.
A significant part of the surveillance was “contact chaining,” a method used by British technical intelligence at GCHQ in Cheltenham, to describe entire networks linked to a single exposed phone. “Analysts examined calls, messages, and emails from one suspect and derived from them lists of others and their associates, building a matrix of association in top-secret projects, code-named CLASP and Prime Time,” the book adds.
Agencies developed work on tracking Thuraya satellite phones and countering burner phones as a result. The book claims that Burhan Wani (Hizbul Mujahideen commander), the face of Kashmir’s new wave of militancy, was constantly tracked through his Thuraya satellite phone before being killed by security forces on July 8, 2016.
According to the writers, apart from 18 detailed briefs with likely targets, numbers of attackers, and other information shared by the CIA, information for 26/11 had also come through SSAPC, according to a RAW defector identified by her nom de guerre Monisha.
However, the foundation for SSAPC was laid in January 2004, when India and the US signed the “Next Steps in Strategic Partnership” under former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, which allowed Delhi to receive assistance with its civilian space programmes, high-tech trade, missile defence efforts, and civilian nuclear activities.
According to Levy and Scott-Clark, the by-product was closer cooperation between the US and Indian militaries, including intelligence services, much further down the line, resulting in an alliance that would immediately worry Beijing.
“Geopolitical fault lines had made Pakistan a necessity in 2001, but as Islamabad’s economy collapsed and its institutions crumbled, overcome by the terror war, so India began to shine by virtue of not succumbing, emerging as a bulwark to emerging superpower China,” the book says.
