by Adrian Levy
It was not as if Ramm needed the work. His hands were full right now. ‘Keep me in the loop,’ he chirped as he walked out of the FCO, but he was worried that he already knew where this would end up. To him, the FCO was a collegiate supper club that smelled of Mr Sheen. The activities of the Yard, which he had joined in the sixties, ‘in the days when it was still a force and not yet a service’, as he liked to say, were underwritten by intelligence gleaned and action well-planned. And it was a meritocracy, albeit a predominantly male, white, Christian, working-class one, that had spent several decades defending itself against allegations that it was in thrall to the Masons and in the pay of organised crime.
Ramm was forced to ‘watch from the sidelines as in those first weeks the hostage negotiations went round in circles’, he wrote. He was shocked that ‘there was very little desire to increase the pressure over here, even though two British nationals were involved’. Then his worst fears had been realised with Ostrø’s death. Within hours, and with another deadline about to expire, Ramm received a ‘sombre’ call from Whitehall while he was out on a Sunday walk with his wife. He was called back to the woody whorl of the FCO for a briefing. Twenty-four hours later he was on a plane to New Delhi, with instructions to try to discern the Indian strategy, help shape it and move things forward. ‘After Ostrø’s death, it was like flicking a switch,’ Ramm said of the British government’s response. ‘It just went at a different speed.’ The previous mood of optimism among the diplomats in New Delhi had been ‘hammered into the red dust’.
The British team in New Delhi appeared relieved to see Commander Ramm. The High Commissioner, Sir Nicholas Fenn, had dispatched his own white Land Rover to collect the detective from Indira Gandhi International Airport. As soon as he reached the British compound in the manicured Chanakyapuri diplomatic enclave, Ramm tried to impose some order on the situation. The latest deadline had just expired, and they needed to wipe the slate clean and restore proper channels of communication with al Faran. Most importantly, India, a country fidgety about sovereignty and filled with post-colonial anxieties, fighting a proxy war stoked by its neighbour and under the scrutiny of London, had to open up and cooperate with them. ‘Our side only had to sneeze to put New Delhi’s back out,’ Ramm later wrote in his journal. He could see that it wouldn’t be easy. From what he had read of the case on the plane, he was also wary about al Faran: ‘Jittery, shocked by their own actions, maybe even a little revolted, the kidnappers will be feeling fenced in and frightened.’
An emergency meeting of the G4 was called at the US Embassy. Ramm was invited too. It was, he was advised, the right forum for throwing ideas around. ‘Thank God,’ he thought to himself. But on the way over he listened incredulously as the deputy head of the British mission briefed him on the philosophy of the G4 set-up. The four concerned nations had agreed to keep only one permanent representative in Srinagar, while a small team of diplomats based in New Delhi maintained daily communication with India’s Home and External Affairs ministries. They had also agreed an ‘all for one and one for all’ policy. All the hostages would have to be released in one group; there would be no trade-offs that saw a dribble of releases, one man at a time. Ramm thought, ‘What the fuck is that?’ It sounded a lot like socialism. In almost every kidnapping he had resolved, he had done it by gradually whittling away at the hostage-takers’ demands. He couldn’t believe the G4 had set the bar so high from the start. As far as he was concerned, pragmatism reigned in struggles to the death.
Ramm was glad to find a familiar face at the US Embassy: Gary Noesner, the head of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit, motto Pax per Conloquium, or ‘Resolution through Dialogue’. Noesner had an excellent record, with one significant caveat: Waco. Two years previously he had been the Bureau’s chief negotiator at the fifty-day siege of cult leader David Koresh’s Texas compound that had ended with a raid that left seventy-six dead, including more than twenty children. These days Agent Noesner used the episode to hammer home the lesson that negotiation almost always won out over tactical operations, bemoaning the FBI’s failure to establish proper channels with Koresh. Noesner was a bootstraps agent, just like Ramm, and they respected each other. But no sooner had they sat down with the US diplomats and a handful of State Department representatives than the temperature dropped a few degrees. ‘I sensed that my mere presence seemed to offend,’ Ramm wrote, concluding that the crowd from Foggy Bottom regarded the FBI and British detectives as ‘bottom feeders’.
He pressed on, directing a clutch of questions at Noesner, who was several weeks ahead of him on the kidnapping. How many kidnappers were there? What were their methods of communication? What about the psychological state of the hostages? Had anyone spoken to them directly? Had they debriefed John Childs? No one answered. Noesner looked shifty. Ramm began wondering if he was in the wrong meeting. This was not like any operation he had been on before. ‘There was some arse-watching going on here. Or perhaps client protection. It was as if the gathered diplomats were more concerned about feathering their relationship with India than about freeing the hostages.’ After Ramm’s pressing questions had been ignored, an FBI agent he had never met stood to explain that he would demand that India hand over documents and tape recordings as potential exhibits. He was looking to build cases for an extra-territorial criminal prosecution in a US court. Ramm cringed, realising that this agent was from a so-called witness testimony team that had been formed in the mid-1980s to gather evidence in foreign countries. They had been used in Liberia and Colombia, and their activities had sometimes led to audacious and controversial FBI actions, with foreign nationals seized without the knowledge or consent of their governments. ‘Cart before horse,’ Ramm later noted in his journal: two FBI teams working the same case, and not together. He worried that the team looking to prosecute perpetrators would alienate India, undermining the operation of the second, tasked with freeing the hostages, whose success hinged on India’s cooperation. ‘I felt uncomfortable that the element of the Bureau I believed could contribute most was starved of intelligence [by India] whilst another element, of which I knew very little, was likely to make things even harder with the host government,’ Ramm wrote. He did the sums: four embassies, four sets of military advisors, four sets of spooks, and two FBI teams, not to mention a hostile, go-it-alone Indian establishment and the ‘all for one and one for all’ policy of the G4. ‘Things were not good.’
Ramm was asked to leave while the diplomats thrashed out the details. ‘I know that some of what I said in that first meeting in the US Embassy may have made life briefly difficult for my diplomatic colleagues from the British Embassy,’ he reflected. However, much to his surprise, later that day he was appointed to lead a multinational team that he hoped was not already dead in the water. ‘On the Americans’ part I suspect there was also a measure of “Anything to get that Limey bastard out of our hair” about it,’ he said.
Roy Ramm had been in plenty of hot spots, but something about Srinagar appalled him. On the flight up he had been shocked to see foreign tourists clearly intending to go trekking, even with a hostage crisis ongoing. The scene on the streets was even more disturbing: Kashmiris carrying on with their lives as if the overwhelming military presence around them – more than half a million soldiers in a valley not much bigger than Hampshire – was invisible. ‘It was on a different planet to New Delhi,’ he wrote. Security Advisor Saklani had arranged for the representatives of the Yard and the FBI to be put up in state guesthouses in the complex in Church Lane where Jane, Cath, Julie and Anne had stayed. ‘We drove for about half an hour before arriving at a road with a heavily fortified guard post at its entrance,’ Ramm wrote. ‘We waited whilst soldiers looking for bombs peered beneath our vehicle with mirrors. Our operations base was a large, once-comfortable house with four bedrooms on the first floor and several rooms on the ground floor we could use as offices.’ From the back windows, across a lawn dominated by a generator and satellite communications dishes, he could see the
Jhelum River.
The house filled up fast: ‘There were two negotiators, always a British police officer – usually from the Yard – an FBI agent, diplomats from the USA, Germany and the UK and the odd soldier or two.’ Then there were the British and American spooks from MI6 and the CIA, as well as military advisors from both countries, who wore no uniforms but still all dressed the same: chinos, T-shirts and shades. With all the bedrooms occupied, Ramm unpacked in a ground-floor room, amid a collection of old car batteries used as a back-up power supply when the nightly ‘load shedding’ kicked in. One of his team, Chris Newman, an old colleague who had flown up ahead of him, gave him ‘some helpful advice about bed bugs, lice and sundry other unpleasant insects’, and briefed him on the Indian operation being led by Security Advisor Saklani from the villa next door.
Ramm’s first meeting with Saklani was scheduled for that afternoon. Philip Barton, the thirty-one-year-old First Secretary at the British High Commission, was also in town, and advised him to tread carefully. But then, British journalists had been critical of Barton too: Tim McGirk of the Independent reported that ‘some Kashmiris felt the diplomats were far too reliant on the Indian authorities to secure the release of the hostages’. The British diplomats had been assured that a ‘massive search’ was under way, although there was little evidence of one.
Ramm arrived for the meeting before the appointed time. Saklani’s office was already filled with unidentified officials. ‘We all sat in cinema rows in front of the General,’ Ramm wrote. A marble inkstand and paperweights formed a barrier across the glass-topped desk. Dressed in immaculately pressed military khaki and a silk cravat, Saklani had ‘distinguished grey hair, neatly trimmed and oiled in 1950s military style’. For Ramm, the protocols were too elaborate, ‘a succession of handshakes and small talk about the food, my journey and the weather, before tea and biscuits were served by a white-suited orderly’. The Yard had its own customs, but they ran more to a pint of Pride and a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps at the Feathers. ‘Saklani’s English was excellent, his Englishness over-manicured and anachronistic,’ Ramm wrote. He had not worked in India before, and had no understanding of Saklani’s background or intentions.
Ramm thought they hit it off. ‘He rather liked my rank, “Commander”. It was comforting, more naval than police.’ And after the pleasantries Saklani launched into a ‘useful’ briefing, and ‘told us what he could’. Ramm was surprised. This could work out after all, he thought, since Saklani was ‘a decent and fundamentally honest man’.
What could the Security Advisor tell him about negotiations, Ramm asked, referring to the secret talks he had read about in the newspapers. Saklani did not balk. ‘Mr Tikoo’, a senior Kashmiri police officer, was conducting them. What were their methods and means? ‘Conversations with al Faran usually took place on VHF radio, and Tikoo had to deal with them alone,’ Ramm wrote later, highlighting the sentence to show his concern. Afterwards he annotated this passage: ‘Negotiating is not the battle of two great minds, Karpov against Spassky, chess grandmasters computing every move in their heads. The normal Yard and FBI system was to have more of us than them.’
After the meeting Ramm made the first of many long-distance phone calls: ‘[A colleague in Colombia] was by now in the foothills of the Andes, trying to get the British soldier [who had been taken while birdwatching on his day off] freed. In hindsight these were extraordinary conversations. Two Metropolitan Police detectives, at opposite ends of the earth, in the remotest of locations, using skills learned on the streets of London to try to save the lives of Britons held by guerrillas and bandits.’ Maybe, he would concede later, when he had had time to come to terms with what was about to happen, this had been his first fundamental error, positioning the Yard as the saviour, when all along the answers lay with India.
Over the next couple of days Ramm got used to waiting in line to see Saklani, taking a seat in a fan-cooled antechamber, surrounded by old Kashmiri men and women who came in a steady stream seeking information about missing sons. ‘Saklani told me that there was not much he could do for any of them, so he doled out a few rupees, like alms, and sent them away,’ Ramm wrote. On al Faran matters too, Ramm could not shake the feeling that while Saklani was attentive, he gave away nothing of importance. More than anything else, Ramm knew he needed to get close to Rajinder Tikoo, the hostage negotiator, if he was going to have any influence over how things progressed. He explained this view to Saklani, telling him that negotiators in the West trained for years before they were let loose on a live hostage situation. Saklani had appeared irritated by this, Ramm recalled, then let slip that Tikoo was not always alone. Every night the Crime Branch IG attended a high-powered debrief with Indian intelligence, the army and the Governor – another meeting to which foreigners were not invited. Ramm saw a crack in Saklani’s defences. ‘I said, “Look, you have the cream of the world’s crisis-management teams sitting on your doorstep. We can help. Let us address the meeting or feed ideas into it.” The General said he would have to consult the security agencies, and here was the problem.’ The Indian officials in Kashmir were immersed in Kashmir, and believed their perspective could never be understood by outsiders. Murderous things happened in this lawless corner of the subcontinent that only made sense to battle-hardened Indians who were versed in the game. ‘This was not Dixon of Dock Green, where the Police and Criminal Evidence Act held sway,’ said Ramm.
Frustrated, the British officer returned to Church Lane. He didn’t want the keys to the bloody city, just a chance to recharge this flagging inquiry. ‘Saklani had a terrible dilemma,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘The hostage-taking was important to us and, I believed, to him, but it had to be seen in context. There was a war going on that Saklani and his comrades had been fighting for years. Apart from reports of diplomatic activity in New Delhi and occasionally in the United Nations in New York, I suspect Saklani had been isolated from direct contact with representatives of foreign governments for his entire career, and now he had four living in the house next door!’
Ramm’s team waited. They were not idle, using the time to transform their Church Lane villa into a forward command post. But they had been unable to get maps from the Indian authorities, as representations of this shifting area of disputed borders had been classified, seen as potentially confirming (or denying) one country’s claim over the other. Around the world there were numerous conflicts over statehood and identity in which maps with their defining boundaries were politically toxic, from Israel’s dispute with the Palestinian people to the civil war raging between Tamils and the government in Sri Lanka. Any maps, even the most basic tourist version, that showed Kashmir, or India’s sensitive borders with China, let alone Bangladesh, had been impounded in the national archives years ago, and the army and its agents had been removing road signs and destroying granite mileage markers throughout the valley since the early nineties, creating a nameless, routeless war in an area that had become engulfed in ambiguity.
Western embassies resorted to US military flight charts dating from the 1950s, single sheets that were overlaid to make composite maps. Having managed to patch together a visualisation of the terrain, Ramm’s team could begin to chart the movement of the hostages. In the absence of intelligence sharing, they drew most of their information from the press and the television news, as did Tikoo, using coloured markers and drawing pins to record sightings on their improvised charts. ‘In a typical hostage situation, you know where everyone is, and you pick up the phone and you know where to ring,’ Ramm said. ‘If you’re in London, and you have a kidnapping, you’re so proximate to it that the policeman says, “OK, let’s cordon off the area and kick the doors in until we find this guy.”’ But there was nothing typical about this crisis.
Ramm would have to be resourceful. He closely studied the short document that constituted John Childs’ debrief, and those of the Westerners who had escaped the kidnappers’ clutches in 1994. From what Childs had recalled, the original group of fo
ur captives were taken on a route that roughly shadowed the Amarnath trek, although they had shunned the regular paths through the Betaab Valley, choosing instead to make a series of punishing up-and-over climbs. For the first three nights they had camped above the treeline in remote gujjar communities, but on the fourth they had camped a few hundred metres above the Amarnath track. The locations from where Dirk Hasert and Hans Christian Ostrø had been snatched, Chandanwari and Zargibal, were both stopping-off points along the way to Sheshnag. Beyond Sheshnag Lake the path split, the Amarnath route peeling away to the north-east, while another, little-used route led south-east towards the treacherous Sonasar Pass and into largely uncharted territory. Which route had the kidnappers taken?
Foreign trekkers would invariably head north-east to Amarnath or north-west to visit sights such as Kolahoi Glacier, Sonamarg and Buttress Peak. But as far as the FBI could learn, there had been no sightings of the hostages towards the north, suggesting that the rebels had gone south, into a wild and remote area about which little was known. Given that Ostrø’s body had been found in this direction, this was the most likely theory. It gained ground after Ramm’s team quizzed foreign journalists who had been following the story from the beginning, who told them the gossip on the ground was that the hostages were in the vicinity of the Warwan, a wide, isolated valley running north to south between Sheshnag and the villages east of Anantnag, whose only links to the outside world were over a series of treacherous snowbound passes. One of these routes – the Sonasar Pass – split off from the Amarnath Cave route at Sheshnag, and involved a gruelling and dangerous southerly climb of twelve miles. Beyond, the Warwan widened out into a lush plateau more than twenty miles in length, with as few as a dozen villages lining its flanks.
