The Man Who Knew Too Much
But somehow his image persists, if only on the outermost striae of memory. Days or months later, if you chance across the photograph again, disparate parts of the puzzlement may come together to frame a question: Who was that man?
I never was at Pokharan, states R N Kao. An uncertain winter light floods his first-floor study. It reveals an immaculately dressed man, blanket across his knees, feet resting on a footstool below a solid mahogany table, looking straight at you. The face has a strong, almost patrician cast. On the table rests a Noam Chomsky hardback, Power and Prospects.
Below, in the drawing room, servants move about unobtrusively. On the mantelpiece over the stone fireplace stand three statues from the Gandhara school of art. A painting done in Paul Gauguins style hangs over the dining table. Cut-glass pieces adorn the shelves and the glass-top table in the middle of the room. It is a quiet house, almost an art collectors residence.
Kao, it would seem, pre-tests every constituent word before articulating it and beading it into a sentence. The accent is very upper class, the tone modulated. I never was at Pokharan.
For this third generation Kashmiri Pandit migrant perceived truth, rumour and outright fiction have always come together to make for an unavoidable but uneasy alliance. Its just another professional hazard for the founder of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and the countrys first, some would say greatest, spymaster. A man who has played the Great Game at the highest levels, through the most exciting period in Indian and international intelligence, simply learns to live with contradictions.
He may not, however, want to talk about them. Its as though I have undressed myself in public, he says at the end of a 90-minute conversation. Those in my business stay away from scrutiny... behind veils, you understand?
It has not been a life without its share of ironies. For Kao joined the intelligence service almost by default. Towards the end of 1945 he was offered a position in the Intelligence Bureau, because he was a police officer and it was the usual route of preferment. But his heart was set on entering the foreign service.
Earlier, he had joined the police also almost by default simply because the pay was better. His professors were convinced that the English Literature topper of the 1938 batch was committing career hara-kiri. I had very little choice, says the erstwhile student. As an assistant-lecturer I earned Rs 125 a month, while a police officers salary began at Rs 350. I had a widowed mother and a younger brother to look after.
The loss to the world of academia was to be a gain for those government departments where they buy intelligence, steal it or persuade someone to betray his country. It was indeed a hard choice. With his fathers death when Kao was just five, he was to embark on an itinerant lifestyle for the next fifteen years, moving between the homes of grandfather and uncles, from Unnao to Benaras, to Bombay and Lucknow. His formal education culminated in an MA in English Literature from the Allahabad University. I wanted to be an engineer, he smiles, but I wasnt good enough at the Sciences. And money, or its lack, was a constant thorn in his flesh.
Work was, however, never to become a full-time obsession for Kao. He did not fail to write home to his mother regularly, or catch his two English movies a week. It is entirely possible he anticipated lease-financing by fifty years he would get his suits tailored first and pay for them in instalments. I loved good clothes, he says, almost apologetically. Even now I do, as you can see.
But a turbulence was to attend his acquired profession. For the freedom movement had left its mark on the boy who joined the police in a subject nation. As a matriculate in Baroda he witnessed the struggle first hand and wore a Gandhi cap for years. And in Allahabad, as a member of the Students Union Committee, he got to meet Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
It was an unenviable baptism. The Quit India movement began in 1942 and a recently married trainee policeman who was scared of losing his job became a reluctant witness to the savage repression let loose by the British Empire, itself stuggling for survival. The policeman posted at Gorakhpur, in the incendiary region of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, was to experience the worst of it.
He would witness entire villages being burned down by the sarkar, soldiers shooting without provocation, people being hung upside down and thrashed. He saw his District Magistrate, the infamous E D V Ross, condone outright robbery by government servants because they were loyal. The young policeman was himself accused of racism by his English SP because I had smiled when told that a few Britishers had been forced to march up and down chanting nationalist slogans.
Another quirk of fate: the very officer once suspected of disloyalty was asked to join the Special Branch of Intelligence in 1945. The one and a half years spent there made for a political education. It had its pluses. As an intelligence officer, he says with a straight face, I was able to read forbidden communist literature. I admire their discipline and sense of organisation when it works.
From Special Branch to the Intelligence Bureau was a logical progression. But Kao put his foot down. The newly installed Indian Interim Government was trawling for officers for the foreign service. So he applied. And was successful. My mother, Kao reminisces almost fifty years later, was reluctant to let me go. And somehow in those days I was convinced that whatever she did not approve would not turn out well... He shrugs.
Looking back, he regrets neither his decision to join the police force nor the intelligence profession. Indeed, if the grapevine is to be believed, Kao took to spying like a duck to water. His accomplishments, mostly hidden from the public eye, are still spoken of in hushed tones. For instance his investigation of the crash of the Air India airliner, the Kashmir Princess, and the warning to the then Chinese premier of a possible assassination attempt.
In late 1968 RAW was created as an agency specialising in foreign intelligence. Soon after, he joined at its helm as Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat. In the years that followed R N Kao was to become the arch priest of Indian intelligence, moving easily in his shadow world, the man behind the men behind the men in long coats and dark glasses. Making history, but remembered only in the footnotes.
In 1974 came his crowning achievement when India tested a nuclear device in Rajasthans Thar desert. Hear it in his own words: It was a secret known to hundreds. But no outside power came to know of it in time. Not even the Americans. There is very evident pride in that statement. That was also the first time he was photographed for public consumption.
Three years later, in 1977, he was to go on long leave amidst great controversy the newly installed Janata Government under Morarji Bhai did not have time for spying or spymasters. The following year he retired after 38 years of service. Subsequently, he was called back as security adviser to prime minister Indira Gandhi and chairman of the Intelligence Board from 1980 to 1984.
What intelligent man or woman would desire to join Kaos claustrophobic and anonymous world? Who would enter a profession in which ones job designation cannot be described truthfully, even less its content? In other words, what is the psyche of the volunteer agent?
I never have given it a thought, replies Kao. Only those bitten by the bug enjoy it. For them it is a way of life. Only those with the right temperament can do it. You often dont work in company and sometimes communication becomes difficult. You work outside the country and outside the law. There is power but there is also the danger of going wrong. Such a man has to be the captain of his soul.
From truth to pure fiction is another natural progression. Just mention the celebrated spy-novelist John Le Carre, and for once, for just this once, R N Kao seems to be a trifle less in control, animated. The spare frame leans forward abruptly, a smile wreathes his face. John Le Carre? Le Carre? But of course!
Le Carre represents a certain stage in the development of British intelligence human intelligence, he says. Nowadays it is depersonalised. I suppose I am somewhat of a romantic. Only a human can express an opinion. And I think I have known and met some of the people Le Carre wrote about George Smiley ( Le Carres creation, the British masterspy), for example. Smiley took trouble with his agents. To him they were not expendable commodities.
A thousand questions crowd in. What does he think of Le Carre? What does he think of his characters? Does the spy face the same agonizing dilemmas in true life? Does the author write well enough to convince the professional intelligence agent? Are some of the incidents in Le Carres stories true? Which ones? Who was George Smiley in real life?
The quiet seems to deepen as the Ultimate Critic ponders long and hard before delivering judgment. Even for Le Carre this could be a first. He has verisimilitude, says Kao finally. He has verisimilitude, he repeats again, after a pause.
For that matter so does the clay sculpture of a horses head, placed on a raised table a few paces behind him. The artist is self-deprecating. I have had an interest in sculpting since 1945, he says. In the fifties, during the course of an eight month sabbatical, he even took time off to attend a training school in London. To his right sits another piece, draped in white cloth. Kao pulls off the covers. It is a nude done. He sculpted it while he was in London. When I brought it back my mother did not like it. So I covered it. For some time after retirement he was to attend sculpture workshops regularly.
The same pleasure underlines his passion for art-collection. The 200 AD Buddha sculptures on the mantelpiece in his drawing room are priceless today, though Kao bought them at a paltry Rs 35 after much haggling. Or for that matter the three two hundred-year-old Thomas Daniel lithos framed against the study wall. Or the four paperweights on his table. These are of Swedish origin, he says, picking one up. I cant afford too many. An expensive hobby, and money is always a problem, he adds.
However, he gets by. The waves created by the new economic order and liberalisation, it would seem, lap even the doorsteps of retired intelligence officers. In some cases they go on to become consultants providing foreign economic intelligence to businessmen starting projects abroad. I always work through a lawyer, says Kao. And apart from that I shall not tell you anything. You arent a client paying me, are you?
The man who attended Parliament during the transfer of power from the British regime is philosophical about change. We started with certain objectives, he remembers, but somehow... He does not waste time on the usual, hackneyed discourses concerning the general decline in values, lack of commitment of the present generation... All generations are the same. But I think it is important to know that one has to produce value before asking for your rights. Nothing is for free except the air, and in Delhi even that is ... The head inclines to one side.
He is tiring now. As he reaches for the phial of ayurvedic medicine on his table, he suggests once again, very politely and for the third time, that the interview be concluded.
Not this way, surely? Something to end with, a clincher, perhaps a summing up? R N Kao scholar, art collector, part time artist and whole time spy looks back on his seventy-eight-year old life. He ponders for a moment, then says: It was exciting... but I do not wish to repeat it. It would be like listening to an old gramophone record all over again.