by Neena Gopal
Dixit writes in Assignment Colombo about the entry into the Colombo theatre of the CIA’s US Gen. Vernon Walters in 1983 as the new ambassador to Sri Lanka. He describes Walters as a ‘Cold War warrior, a Henry Kissinger wannabe’ and ‘the subterranean architect of many of the anti-Indian aspects of US policies on matters of India’s national security’.
The question is, what prompted Washington to throw a spanner in India’s works?
Walters, feeding into the Sri Lankan President’s marked antipathy towards the then Indian premier Indira Gandhi—a feeling shared by the US administration—aimed to cut Sri Lanka out of India’s sphere of influence by offering Jayewardene arms supplies and intelligence from Israel, as well as British mercenaries and Pakistani military officers, in return for being allowed to maintain a Voice of America broadcasting station in the strategic port of Trincomalee and the facility to snoop on India’s strategic assets.
By the following year, Unnikrishnan had handed over the exact locations of the training camps and the US had satellite photographs at the ready.
According to Dixit, Unnikrishnan ‘told his interlocutors in New Delhi that if India kept denying the existence of such camps and did not close them down, the US would release the satellite photographs to the media to embarrass the Government of India’.
Mrs Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 was perceived by the Tamils as a blow to their cause, and with her successor, Rajiv Gandhi, casting aside the pro–Lankan-Tamil line, India’s intelligence agencies lost what little clout they had over the insurgents.
Dixit himself was soon to run headlong into controversy. Just after the Indian Armed Forces touched down on Sri Lankan soil, co-ordination between the army, military intelligence and the high commission, which was hitherto intermittent to non-existent, turned counter-productive.
‘The GOC Gen. Harkirat Singh had a chip on his shoulder about even an MI presence in their midst; this was a malady that afflicted most Indian generals in those days because they never understood MI’s role and deployment,’ Col Hariharan says.
An object lesson in how things could spin out of control without adequate intelligence on the ground was the Jaffna University debacle in October 1987. RAW was fed false information that Prabhakaran was holed out in the Jaffna University football ground, while his cadres lay in wait for the Indian Army. Col Hariharan characterizes the move to nab Prabhakaran—by throwing not one but three different groups of soldiers, infantry and paras to capture him—as a major op failure. ‘MI was not even consulted before the ops.’
The worst was yet to come. The arming of Tamil insurgents, which the colonel had learnt of in 1984 but was ‘asked to shut up’ about, raised its head as the LTTE began to use those arms to eliminate hundreds of India’s Tamil protégés, slaughtering LTTE rivals from TELO and EPRLF.
‘When I drew the attention of the MI Directorate, I was asked to proffer advice only when asked, and told that in any case, the army was not training Tamil militants,’ he said.
But in an indication of how backing one Tamil militant group while going to war with another would backfire and blow up in India’s face, the LTTE began to build bridges with the new Premadasa government with one goal—the IPKF’s exit from the Wanni.
This was Prabhakaran at his wiliest, the classic feint of pretending to reach out to the Sinhala majority while using that as a cover to eliminate his rivals and, all the while, buying time to build his own state within a state.
Pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, the LTTE number two, Mahattaya, held extensive peace talks in Colombo. The Tiger insurgents even signalled they were committed to finding a political solution to the ethnic impasse by forming an LTTE political wing, the People’s Front of Liberation Tigers (PFLT) or Makkal Munnani, which Mahattaya was appointed to head.
Prabhakaran, the man who believed violence was the answer to all his problems, justified the move to mend fences with Sri Lanka’s UNP by spinning the fiction that after India’s betrayal, they would get a ‘better deal’ from Premadasa and thus save the Tamil people.
In reality, all he wanted was to use Premadasa who shared Prabhakaran’s virulent antipathy against ‘foreign troops’—read India—to run the IPKF out of the country.
The first benefits accrued pretty quickly—armed with the weapons supplied by Premadasa and the information on Indian troop movements shared by Sri Lankan intelligence, the Tigers effected huge losses in men and material on the Indian Army in the Wanni region.
‘We knew VP was in touch with Premadasa, and that Premadasa had operatives of the Sri Lanka Army spying on our ops and passing the information on to the LTTE. I don’t know whether NIB [the Sri Lanka intelligence unit, National Intelligence Bureau] was conducting it. In any case they were tapping my phone whenever I went to Colombo. So I knew that they knew,’ Col Hariharan says.
While the distrust between India and Prabhakaran persisted, a report that appeared in The Hindu on 24 July 1989, about two years after the IPKF’s arrival on Lankan shores, headlined ‘Prabhakaran Reported Killed in a Shootout’ was the proverbial red rag to the LTTE bull.
Once again, as with all secret ops, and unbeknownst to the army, MI or any other agency for that matter, an elaborate strategy by RAW to remove Prabhakaran and replace him with Mahattaya had been put in motion by 1989.
The story, planted in the highly respected Indian newspaper, was meant to unnerve the Tamil community and throw the LTTE off balance. What it actually did was to confirm all of Prabhakaran’s worst fears. It exposed RAW’s hand. It tipped Prabhakaran off on what awaited him, and it made him all the more relentless in his determination to get the IPKF off the island and wreak vengeance on the highest echelons of the Indian government for attempting to eliminate him. It almost certainly planted the first seed of suspicion in his mind about his deputy, Mahattaya, as he wondered whether he was now in RAW’s pay. The report said Mahattaya had killed Prabhakaran in a shoot-out, and proclaimed himself the leader of the Tigers in a widely circulated video.
The report said the shoot-out happened as a result of the two men’s differences over making a deal with President Premadasa. ‘In the last ten days, top political leaders of the Eelam movement have been eliminated violently . . .’ the report said, including ‘the outstanding moderate political figure, the veteran A. Amirthalingam, his colleague V. Yogeswaran (TULF), and the leader of PLOTE Uma Maheswaran who earlier lost to Prabhakaran in the violent struggle for supremacy in the militant movement.’
It went on to describe how people had gathered to pay homage to posters of Prabhakaran in the village of Ananthaperiyakulam, 20 kilometres from Vavuniya.
The report stated that the shoot-out, which claimed the life of Prabhakaran’s lieutenant Kittu, took place in the Vavuniya jungles from where Prabhakaran was driven out before being shot dead.
But, with Kittu and Maheswaran clearly very much alive, it tipped off the Tiger supremo on what RAW had planned for him. He knew he was the target, that this was a bid to take over the Tigers and place them under a new head, his deputy, Mahattaya. Four years later, Mahattaya, along with over 250 men who were loyal to him, would pay the price for RAW’s monumental bungling.
Prabhakaran was already deeply suspicious that the March assassination attempt—when a grenade was lobbed at Kittu in the heart of Jaffna city—was the handiwork of either RAW or Mahattaya. Over and above that, Mahattaya’s frequent two-way radio chatter with Madras—which was not with the LTTE remnants there—reinforced Prabhakaran’s suspicion that the man he had grown to trust was playing a double game.
But it would take the Indian Navy’s attempt to commandeer the ship in which Prabhakaran’s kinsman and key aide Kittu was attempting to re-enter the north, for Mahattaya’s fate to be sealed.
Kittu, crippled, left with only one leg, had been flown to Madras for treatment and was virtually written off as a fighter after that. He ran the LTTE’s operations from the Indian city thereon.
Kittu, originally from Velvettithurai like
Prabhakaran, and related to him by blood, as were many of the LTTE cadres, made a name for his ruthlessness and the cold-blooded manner in which he pumped twenty-eight bullets into TELO chief Sri Sabaratnam even as he begged for his life.
As one of the war wounded, he could not aspire to rival Mahattaya or, for that matter, Prabhakaran, whom he had reportedly sought to replace in Jaffna when the main LTTE operations were being run by the big chief out of India.
Kittu, entrusted with the LTTE’s operations in Madras in 1988, was both canny and ruthless. His brutal kangaroo courts almost always ended with the mass murder of Tamil civilians, whose bodies were ‘dumped’ in pits serving as mass graves that became common all across the north.
He oversaw the elimination of hundreds of TELO cadres and freely admitted it was not punishment for the alleged extortion of Jaffnaites—as put out by the LTTE propagandists—but for TELO’s links to Indian intelligence agencies.
But his hatred of India notwithstanding, sitting in Madras in 1988, where the LTTE still had the backing, both emotional and material, of the political class and many powerful Tamils, Kittu was not completely immune to RAW persuasion either.
Indian counter-intelligence operatives wooed him relentlessly, and the politically savvy Kittu is said to have finally agreed to send an emissary to Prabhakaran to find a way to end the war between the LTTE and the IPKF which had, at any rate, slowly pushed Prabhakaran back into the Wanni.
The emissary, a man named Johnny, flown in secret into the jungles by the Indian Air Force, didn’t get far, a RAW insider said. With no idea that there was even a separate, secret, inside peace track between RAW and the LTTE, IPKF soldiers gunned him down as he headed out on a bicycle towards Prabhakaran’s hideout. Even Prabhakaran didn’t know he was coming. And a war that could have ended a year and a half before it did, raged on.
By October 1989, Kittu—in a special arrangement with the British High Commission and through the good offices of LTTE ideologue Balasingham—was flown to London where he was met on arrival by officials from the Sri Lankan High Commission and ensconced in 52, Tavistock Lane in London. This left the field wide open for Mahattaya, Kittu’s rival for Prabhakaran’s affections, to live up to his nickname, ‘the big man’.
As early as September 1987, a month after the IPKF landed in Jaffna, Prabhakaran dispatched Mahattaya to trap the top leadership of the PLOTE, and shortly thereafter, to eliminate PLOTE vice chief R. Vasudeva and seventy others in cold blood under the guise of inviting them for a meeting in Batticaloa, while simultaneously sending out teams to wipe out leaders of the EPRLF and ENDLF.
Earlier too, it was Mahattaya who had been given the task of handing over the cyanide capsules to the Pulendran-led LTTE squad detained at Palaly that would set the stage for the final break with India over the IPKF. The same Mahattaya who, on 6 October 1987, killed five Indian soldiers in Kankensanthurai (KKS) with a garland of burning tyres, which finally led Indian army chief Gen. Sundarji to declare open war against the LTTE the next day, thereby ending the myth of ‘peace-keeping’.
It was again Mahattaya who, conveying on Prabhakaran’s behalf that the LTTE was in favour of peace, signed a fourteen-point agreement on setting up the interim administration for the Northern and Eastern provinces, counter-signed by the First Secretary at the Indian High Commission, Hardeep Puri, in 1990.
It would later come to light that while Mahattaya was in Colombo, he was assiduously cultivated by RAW’s Chandran.
This was the same top spook who had earlier closely worked with Prabhakaran when he was in India. In fact, many say he ‘babysat’ the Tiger chief through the time he was given arms training in Tamil Nadu, when he was under house arrest in Delhi at Ashok Hotel and, again, during the Thimpu talks. The two are said to have shared an excellent rapport.
One of the rare Indians who spoke and understood Sri Lankan Tamil, Chandran admits as much, saying that Prabhakaran never shared his innermost thoughts, but they did spend time together. ‘He loved to eat, he was always fat, not your typical leader on the run. But his appetite for violence was phenomenal.’
The July 1989 report in The Hindu on Prabhakaran’s death enraged the Tiger leader, frustrated as he was at being pushed back by the IPKF into the Wanni.
The move to contain his deputy-turned-rival would begin by chipping away at Mahattaya’s larger-than-life image to show he had blood on his hands. The role of the LTTE and Mahattaya in eliminating Amirthalingam and Yogeswaran was splashed all over Tamil newspapers.
Mahattaya was also given charge of the brutal anti-Muslim pogrom in the Eastern Province that would leave scores dead and displace thousands of Muslim families who were forced to live in camps thereafter, as they do even today. The idea of massacring the Tamil-speaking Muslim community may have been planted in Prabhakaran’s head by Colombo’s canny UNP leader—a friend of India’s—the man who wanted to be President, Gamini Dissanayake, as well as his rival, Athulathmudali, seeking to drive a wedge between the Tamils of the north and the east. Until then, no one treated the Hindu Tamil, Muslim Tamil or Christian Tamil as anything but Tamil.
What it was about Mahattaya’s movements that aroused the suspicions of the LTTE supremo and his inner coterie remains unclear. Kittu had been the target of a failed assassination attempt when a man shot at him and then threw a grenade into his vehicle while he was in Jaffna city en route to meet his girlfriend. Though he escaped with his life, he lost a leg. A similar method of attack had been employed against Pottu Amman who had had eight assassination attempts against him, but had escaped unhurt each time. The LTTE boss was led to believe by his inner circle that Mahattaya, at the behest of RAW, was behind the attacks.
Reports of Mahattaya’s popularity with both Premadasa and the Indians did not endear him to the leadership either, with Prabhakaran remaining committed to violence, not negotiations or talks, as the only viable means to achieve Eelam.
But when Mahattaya, during an IPKF encounter, inexplicably lost Chunnakam, and the entire Jaffna Peninsula was taken over by the Indian soldiers following a secret meeting at a house nearby with persons unknown, Prabhakaran smelt a rat. The shocking loss of the Eastern Province thereafter to the Sri Lanka Army in 1992, when ties with Colombo predictably unravelled—Colombo had regained control of much of the east and didn’t need Prabhakaran—rattled the LTTE leadership and demoralized the rank and file. Mahattaya, accused of poor combat tactics, was summarily relieved of his military responsibilities.
But it would be another three years after the IPKF’s exit from the Sri Lankan theatre of war—during which time Mahattaya was effectively sidelined and his rival, ‘Baby’ Subramaniam, rose to take his place as number two—before the RAW agent’s run would come to an end.
Setting the seal on Mahattaya’s gory end was the Indian Navy’s dramatic capture in January 1993 of a Malaysian-registered ship, the M.V. Ahat, that had Kittu on board. To evade capture, Kittu blew himself up along with the ship. The LTTE soon learnt that the man who had tipped off RAW about Kittu’s secret presence on the ship that had entered Indian waters and led to his death at sea, was none other than Mahattaya.
Vice Admiral (Retd) Jacob, then commander of the Eastern Fleet, recounts how the Indian Coast Guard’s surveillance aircraft, a Dornier, picked out a suspicious ship packed with arms and explosives and tons of fuel—tracked all the way from international waters—as it entered the Indian Exclusive Economic Zone on 6 January 1993, without switching on its lights. The M.V. Ahat was in Indian waters.
They had been tipped off by ‘actionable intelligence’ from RAW, Jacob said. The LTTE, which had been monitoring Mahattaya’s radio chatter, learnt that he was the one who tipped off RAW which in turn confirmed to Indian authorities that Kittu had boarded the ship in Singapore. They also confirmed that the ship was packed with arms and explosives for the LTTE that had been procured from Pakistan. Kittu had been expelled from the UK for ‘unlawful activities’ and met a similar fate when he stayed in France and later in Switz
erland, until he surfaced in Singapore, kitted out with a new artificial leg.
There was little doubt that Mahattaya wanted to prevent the return of an old rival. As a creature of RAW, it tied into what he was being paid to do.
The M.V. Ahat, originally the M.V. Yahata, which the LTTE had painted over, was registered to Honduras. It had set sail from Phuket, Thailand, and had already been marked out by Indian surveillance.
Shadowed for behaving suspiciously, for frequently changing course, it was asked for its call sign as it entered Indian waters. As the vice admiral said, the Indian Navy knew they had them when they gave out the wrong call sign. After being shadowed for three days, it was finally intercepted and escorted by two Coast Guard vessels, the CGS Vivek and the INS Kirpan, a missile corvette, towards Madras by the Indian Navy on 13 January.
As it approached Madras, some 700 kilometres from the coast, the crew abandoned the ship and Kittu and eight other LTTE cadres blew themselves up.
The vice admiral says he remembers ordering the blown-up ship to be boarded and every man on it to be taken into custody. ‘The smuggling of arms and weapons by the LTTE had grown. Our seas were infested with small boats and big boats carrying arms and ammo for the LTTE. The Sri Lanka Navy and the Indian Navy worked together very closely on this. Contrary to what is believed, it’s India that in recent years has supplied them with fast-speed attack boats and a newly refitted frigate,’ said the vice admiral who would go on to become India’s deputy National Security Adviser.
A couple of months later, after a public sharing of the charge sheet by an LTTE kangaroo court, a team of top LTTE commanders led by Pottu Amman and including the head of an elite hit squad and the naval chief of the LTTE’s Sea Tigers, Cdr Soosai, arrived at Mahattaya’s home base in Manipay on 31 March 1993. Reports say Mahattaya was taken to the LTTE camp in Chavakachcheri and tortured over a period of several weeks and months until he could barely speak, sit or stand. He was finally executed in December 1994, nineteen months after he was led away from his home. Some 257 of his men were executed and their bodies dumped, LTTE-style, in a pit and set on fire.
