by Neena Gopal
Except, this particular intercept was as specific as it could get.
Prabhakaran’s ‘handler’ when the LTTE leader was in India, Chandran, is pushing eighty-five, but remembers the intercept as clearly as though it were yesterday. He recounts how everyone misread the signals—not just his men, but also agents from the IB who were tasked with monitoring the threat posed by Lankan Tamils residing in India, who had to trawl through hundreds of messages that went back and forth.
Chandran, additional secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat and in charge of RAW in Sri Lanka, was sidelined once the Rajiv Gandhi government fell, and his years of cultivating the Tamil militants came to nought.
‘By that time, the government had changed. Nobody wanted to hear what we had to say anyway. And I had been shunted out,’ he said.
‘The IB and RAW didn’t agree on much. If we had read the signals right, if we understood what was going on in Prabhakaran’s mind, who knows, we could have prevented this. It was our fault, we made a huge error of judgement. We misread Prabhakaran. We never believed he would turn against us in this manner. We should have seen it coming. We didn’t. We failed Rajiv Gandhi, we failed to save his life,’ he said, emotional and close to tears as he spoke to me from his office in New Delhi.
Twenty-five years later, neither Siddharthan nor Col Hariharan remembers more than this particular part of the intercept. But both say that if it had been taken on board, and acted on with the seriousness that such a tip-off deserved, history would have taken a different course.
It was brought to the notice of Siddharthan (now a Tamil National Alliance MP in the newly elected Sri Lankan Parliament) by an alert Jaffna Tamil in his employ who monitored radio communications between Tamils on the Indian mainland and Jaffna. The PLOTE leader, in turn, alerted Col Hariharan who served in Sri Lanka from 3 August 1987 to June–July 1990 and was reaching the end of his tenure.
At the time, the LTTE was the predominant force in the RAW-run training camps in India. Col Hariharan who also had a small army of Jaffna Tamils keeping an eye on the LTTE for him, says he too was taken aback when he was given the cassette to listen to and, from what his code-breakers told him, was alarmed enough to warn India’s IB that a plot was afoot to eliminate Rajiv Gandhi.
This was a full year before the suicide bomb blast claimed the former prime minister’s life.
‘It was the first time we heard any mention of Prabhakaran taking vengeance against Rajiv Gandhi,’ Siddharthan said, quickly correcting himself after having first used the word ‘revenge’.
But the warning—albeit tenuous and imprecise—instead of being investigated, was laughed out of court; it was simply set aside and forgotten.
It wasn’t the only warning that wasn’t fully investigated. In his book, Raman talks of another alert, this time from German intelligence, about the repeated visits of a Sri Lankan Tamil explosives expert and an LTTE sympathizer to Madras. But it was not sufficiently probed by the IB. Instead, it ignored the warning on the grounds that the Lankan Tamil wasn’t an explosives expert, and remained curiously blind to the question of what the man was doing in Madras in the first place.
In 1990, LTTE had the upper hand. PLOTE’s founder Maheswaran had co-founded the LTTE with Prabhakaran in 1976. But by 1982, the two had fallen out and almost killed each other in a public shoot-out in Madras. Maheswaran went on to found PLOTE but was murdered in broad daylight on a Colombo street in 1989.
PLOTE made every effort to stay one step ahead of the main person of interest at the time—their main enemy, ‘Baby’ Subramaniam, the LTTE commander operating out of Tamil Nadu. Subramaniam was the LTTE’s point person to eliminate all challenges to Prabhakaran.
‘Subramaniam was the darling of the Tamil Nadu politicians and knew exactly how to keep RAW and everyone happy while doing exactly what Prabhakaran wanted him to do,’ Siddharthan tells me. The intercept may have been to Subramaniam from someone speaking on Prabhakaran’s behalf. Together with other LTTE leaders, like the intelligence chief Pottu Amman and the deputy head of the women’s wing, Akila, Subramaniam was closely involved with the planning and execution of the plot to kill Rajiv Gandhi.
Even though the Indian Army was making tracks for home, Prabhakaran was relentlessly whipping up anger against the IPKF, blaming them for excesses against civilians.
This single burst of chatter should have alerted the then V.P Singh government and, subsequently, the Chandrashekhar government to restore the Z security that Rajiv Gandhi used to have before he lost the prime ministership. Opposition leader or not, he was on the hit list of the Khalistanis and the Sikhs, and warranted more than the negligible cover he had been provided.
Rajiv Gandhi was too proud to ask for it, and his political opponents lacked the generosity of spirit to give it to him.
The PLOTE alert—which may or may not have changed their thinking—did not even reach the Prime Minister’s Office. In fact, Col Hariharan said he had his knuckles rapped for raising the alarm about the plot to assassinate the former prime minister even though the intercept was nothing less than Prabhakaran putting a hit on Rajiv Gandhi.
‘I was asked to stick to my brief,’ Col Hariharan told me. The IPKF was after all, packing up to leave Sri Lanka, removing the main source of the grouse against Rajiv Gandhi. ‘Politically, we had become unwanted baggage in both Colombo and New Delhi; our mandate was finished, we were on our way out. But RAW, overconfident of its influence over the LTTE, failed to factor in that revenge was always on the cards when it came to VP [Vellupillai Prabhakaran].’
Raman, commenting on the LTTE’s poor communication security in his book, brings up the IB’s ‘better interception capability’—which gave them the ability to listen in on the Tigers—versus ‘R&AW’s better code breaking capability’, while driving home the larger point of how little trust there was between the various agencies running India’s biggest covert operation. He said the huge gaps left in the intelligence gathering on the Tamil groups, resulting from how little one agency knew about what the other was doing, did enormous damage to India’s conduct of its Sri Lanka policy.
More fatally, ‘The Monitoring Division failed to detect the conspiracy to kill Rajiv Gandhi before the tragedy took place,’ says Raman. ‘Sharing of knowledge of each other’s capabilities—particularly in respect of intelligence collection—and joint or co-ordinated exploitation of these capabilities should be the norm if we have to avoid such surprises,’ writes Raman, unsparing in his criticism of the agencies.
The critical intercept—a Tamil-speaking LTTE operative passing on the order to eliminate Rajiv Gandhi—was handed over by Col Hariharan to his old friend and IB additional director in Madras, the late K. Saranyan, within days of its receipt.
‘I sent it to him, rather than defence HQ or army HQ, because our brief in Sri Lanka was over,’ Col Hariharan said. ‘We were winding up our interception ops and we no longer had jurisdiction or responsibility. Saranyan was a good friend and I respected him. But his assessment was that LTTE would never do it because they were so “stupid”. I remember my response to him at that time: “My responsibility is over but I would never discount it just because the LTTE is stupid.”’
Col Hariharan, on his way to his new posting in Jammu and Kashmir, never asked the IB official about it again. That’s what he told the SIT when he was called in for questioning after Sriperumbudur. ‘Nobody took it seriously because no one believed that a man who owed everything to India and Rajiv Gandhi would undertake an operation of this scale, his fanaticism and commitment to Eelam notwithstanding,’ Hariharan tells me.
As the late Raman also pointed out in Kaoboys:
When there is such an assessment indicating the likelihood of a threat to a VVIP, the intelligence agencies are expected to initiate specific operations through their sources and through technical means to look for concrete indicators of such a threat. No such action was taken because everybody presumed—disastrously as it turned out—that, while the LTTE and ot
her Sri Lankan Tamil organisations might indulge in acts of terrorism against each other in Indian territory, they would not indulge in acts of terrorism against any Indian leader.
The entire focus of the intelligence coverage of the LTTE was on its activities in Sri Lanka, its gun-running etc. There was no specific focus on likely threats to Rajiv Gandhi’s security from it.
India’s intelligence agencies comprehensively failed to pool their not inconsiderable resources and work together to manage and monitor what was its most ambitious and certainly its biggest clandestine operation since the Mukti Bahini in 1970–71. If proof was required, one needed to look no further than the mole within the LTTE that one Indian intelligence wing nurtured and no one outside that circle, nobody in MI on the ground, or the IB, knew about—Mahattaya, real name Gopalaswamy Mahendrarajah from Point Pedro.
The man was cultivated and positioned by RAW as their mole inside Prabhakaran’s hitherto impenetrable ranks as early as 1989, one RAW operative, requesting anonymity, tells me. He would become their deep asset, the one who would subvert the insurgent movement from the inside, and had been tasked to eliminate Prabhakaran and take over the LTTE.
He was first noticed by Col Hariharan within months of the IPKF’s takeover at the Palaly airbase in 1987 and after the infamous suicide of an LTTE squad of twelve men early in October.
‘You tell the colonel that for these twelve dead men, they will have to collect the bodies of 1200 dead Indian soldiers.’ This was the parting shot of the newly appointed deputy head of the LTTE, Mahattaya, to Hariharan, when he came to collect the bodies of twelve Tamil Tigers, including those of Pulendran and Kumarappah, who had committed suicide on 5 October 1987. They had consumed the cyanide capsules that Mahattaya had secretly passed on to them.
Five more Tigers who had been detained along with the twelve off Palk Strait by the Sri Lanka Navy would die later that night. All seventeen ingested the capsules that Mahattaya had dispatched to them—in an engineered taking of their own lives—as the captured LTTE squad was being forced to board a flight to Colombo from the Palaly airbase, guarded by Indian and Sri Lankan soldiers.
Mahattaya’s outburst was provoked when he arrived in Palaly with Prabhakaran’s lawyer, Shankar, to collect the bodies from the Sri Lanka Army and overheard Col Hariharan warning the lawyer, whom he knew personally, against harbouring any thoughts of going to war with India.
The colonel recounts how he told the lawyer to tell ‘Thambi’ that it would be a bad idea to turn their guns on India, and that they had been fighting the Nagas for forty years and had the power to go on forever. ‘You tell Thambi not to do this,’ Col Hariharan said. Shankar smiled and said, ‘I may agree with you; but who is going to tell Thambi?’
(Thambi stands for younger brother in Tamil and is the moniker, along with Anna, or older brother, that was universally used for Prabhakaran).
This is when Mahattaya, who overheard the conversation, told Shankar to tell Col Hariharan in a not-so-veiled counter-threat, that the Indian army would have to collect 1200 bodies for the twelve dead Tamils.
Mahattaya had earlier been ill-advisedly allowed by the Indian Army to meet the squad, which is when he secretly handed over the cyanide to them. And India, in charge of their security, would be blamed for their deaths.
Col Hariharan recounts how he and a complement of Indian soldiers were forced to ‘watch dumbly as the Sri Lankan soldiers even resorted to kicking the dead LTTE cadres’. Protocol dictated they could not interfere.
‘I was there, present at the site, and watched as they chewed the cyanide capsules and immediately began frothing at the mouth. They were dying even as they were being loaded into the SLA ambulance,’ he said, the frustration of the time still rankling, twenty-eight years after the event.
‘We were given strict instructions to do nothing, to lay off,’ said the colonel. ‘We had provided doctors to the Sri Lankan military hospital to attend to them.’ But that was all India was allowed to do. Making matters worse was the relationship between the GOC Lt Gen. Harkirat Singh and High Commissioner Dixit.
The Indian Army commander, citing military protocol, refused to take instructions from the Indian high commissioner who wanted to stop the Sri Lanka Army from flying the LTTE men out. It was the starting point for an epic fallout between Lt Gen. Singh and Dixit that would ultimately end in the GOC being recalled.
The inability of the two men to see eye-to-eye on tackling the LTTE was a reflection of a long-running turf war between the military and civilian establishments that cast a dark shadow over Indian troop deployment in Sri Lanka. It marred military engagements and complicated matters even further for the duration of the IPKF’s deployment in Sri Lanka, and impacted relations between New Delhi and Colombo.
‘Nothing’s changed, it continues to this day,’ said Vice Admiral (Retd) P.J. Jacob, speaking from his office in Bengaluru. As head of the navy’s Southern Command, it was Jacob who oversaw LTTE commander Kittu’s watery grave. It was an operation which set off another controversy when the LTTE discovered that it was Mahattaya who had tipped off RAW, that had, in turn, alerted the Indian Navy. Kittu was one of RAW’s favourites; nurtured over the years, he was said to have been in the pay of the intelligence outfit. As RAW’s Chandran confirmed, ‘He was our man, he was always our man.’
Col Hariharan who quickly became a well-known face in Jaffna says, however, that MI was ‘never fully in the loop’, even as they all became larger-than-life targets. Hariharan and his brother, a surgeon who had treated the LTTE commander Kittu in Madras after a bomb attack blew off one of his legs, bore a striking resemblance to each other. The LTTE leaders knew Col Hariharan’s name and face, and who and what he stood for. He knew he was a marked man. ‘They kept an enlarged photo of me in their bunkers to potentially spot me and, who knows, take a pot shot. They even shot dead my orderly!’
More than anything, the Palaly incident drove home the point that the Indian military, the civilian intelligence and the diplomats worked at cross-purposes, the one not knowing what the other did.
Unlike the Bangladesh war which was planned with the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, and the military chief working in tandem, the deployment of Indian troops in Sri Lanka was a decision taken by Rajiv Gandhi and a few of his advisers, without the range of consultations with the army, headed by the flamboyant General K. Sundarji, or MI that was the need of the hour.
As Dixit admits in his book Assignment Colombo, Rajiv Gandhi had tried to persuade Jayewardene to drop his xenophobic anti-Tamil attacks for nearly four years. They went through not one but two rounds of talks at Thimpu, Bhutan, but finally decided to override both sides and push the Indo-Sri Lanka accord through and, with the best of intentions, sent Indian troops to enforce the deal.
The IPKF’s initial moves against the LTTE were naturally and expectedly disastrous, based as they were on assessments of the ground situation from the political class and from civilian intelligence that were wrong from the very start.
‘RAW may have had a number of moles, but in actual terms, VP [Vellupillai Prabhakaran] was an elusive entity and, therefore, not an easy read. He was autocratic, he was unpredictable, he didn’t trust anyone,’ says the colonel.
‘The army was not privy to inputs from either government or civilian intelligence; they were unaware that an Indo-Sri Lanka agreement was even being signed. This is how governments keep the army out of decisions when they go to war,’ rued Col Hariharan.
Vice Admiral (Retd) Jacob agrees, adding that the war against China was conducted by a bureaucrat in the ministry of defence. ‘It’s what happened in 1962; it’s what happened in 1965; it’s what happened in 1987.’
The colonel adds: ‘My friend in RAW who was put in charge of Sri Lanka operations told me that the army chief Gen. K. Sundarji was not consulted before the decision was made by the prime minister to go for the military option. He said the decision to go to war was made by Rajiv Gandhi, who gave direct instructions to the arm
y chief to send troops to Sri Lanka on the advice of his inner circle.’
The truth, of course, depends on whom you are talking to.
But that was not the only weak link. In October 1987, to the embarrassment of the entire RAW top brass, their main man in Madras, K.V. Unnikrishnan, was outed as a CIA mole. He had been leaking secrets on India’s clandestine funding, arming and training of Lankan Tamil insurgent groups—which the country had never publicly acknowledged—to the US, which in turn, had been sharing it with Colombo.
When he was arrested and interrogated, it was discovered that he had also shared details of funds, the clandestine arms shipments, all the secret hideouts on both coasts and the names of agents and the actual negotiations with the Tamils for over eighteen months. This was at the time that India and Sri Lanka were working on Rajiv Gandhi’s brainchild, the Indo-Sri Lanka peace accord. Rajiv Gandhi’s emissary P. Chidambaram was continually taken aback when the Sri Lankans seemed to know the exact details of what he had discussed with the Tamil groups well in advance of every round of negotiations.
The Thimpu peace talks had been similarly compromised and were doomed to fail spectacularly, owing to Unnikrishnan’s leak of critical Indian strategy and fallback positions to the CIA, which the US then passed on to Colombo.
The US may, in fact, have lured Unnikrishnan into their net long before he was outed. Unnikrishnan, who served in the Colombo mission, had been compromised when the CIA officer set up a honey trap with a Pan Am airhostess for the gullible Indian agent. No details of the arrest or the charges were ever made public as this would have forced India to come clean on the fact that it was supporting and nurturing an insurgent group.
While feeding the Jayewardene government with information, the CIA had India convinced it was on top of the Lankan crisis although it was completely off its game, with RAW unable to persuade the Tamil protégés they had propped up for so long to do their bidding.
