Book detailing KGB infiltration rattles India

NEW DELHI -- The documents paint a sordid picture of India's Cold War alliance with the Soviet Union: newspapers bankrolled by the KGB to plant thousands of articles and agents making midnight deliveries of suitcases full of cash to the prime minister's house.

It was a time, a KGB official said, when "the entire country was for sale."

The revelations, in a newly published book based on KGB archives, have embarrassed India's ruling Congress party -- in power then and now -- and have been a field day for the press.

"Indira's India was KGB playground," read the headline in India's Sunday Times, referring to then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

But analysts said the accounts, from a recently a published book based on notes that KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin smuggled out of Moscow when he fled to Britain in 1992, are unlikely to have a major impact on current politics -- with India now a firm U.S. ally.

Congress Party spokeswoman Jayanti Natarajan told The Hindu daily that the book's allegations were "preposterous," dismissing it as an attempt by the Western media at "maligning leaders of the Third World."

The Hindu nationalist opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, seized on the book as an opportunity to rally against Congress, now headed by Indira Gandhi's daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, saying Congress owed the Indian people an explanation.

"The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World," published last week in Britain, is the second volume based on the archivist's notes.

Mitrokhin, who died last year at 82, took handwritten notes from thousands of top-secret documents while he was supervising the 10-year-long move of the KGB's foreign intelligence archives to a new site, according to his co-author, Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge University history professor.

The two chapters on India detail the deep penetration of Ghandi's Congress-led government and the Communist Party of India by the Soviet espionage agency.

In the early 1970s, the region was an important Cold War battlefield. The Soviet Union was allied with India, while India's archrival Pakistan had the backing of the U.S. and China.

But according to the book, the Soviets did not rely on Indian feelings of socialist fraternity to ensure support, trying instead to manipulate the government through bribes and propaganda.

"We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government," the book quotes former senior KGB official Oleg Kalugin as saying. "It seemed like the entire country was for sale," he said.

Mitrokhin's notes describe how a senior New Delhi-based KGB operative, identified as Leonid Shebarshin, personally delivered millions of rupees to Indira Gandhi's principal fundraiser, Lalit Naryan Mishra, in late night meetings.

However, the book makes it clear that Ghandi herself was not on the KGB payroll and probably had no idea of the source of her party's funds.

The KGB did try to influence Gandhi by fueling her paranoia that the CIA was plotting her downfall.

In doing so, the spy agency infiltrated the media. By 1972, the KGB had 10 Indian newspapers on its payroll and had planted 3,789 articles, many alluding to CIA attempts at regional subversion, the book said.

Even before she came to power, the book said the Soviets cultivated Indira Gandhi's friendship, surrounding "her with handsome, attentive male admirers" on her first visit to Moscow in 1953.

"The Russians have been so sweet to me," she wrote in a letter to her father Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister.

The book's revelations made front-page headlines in many of India's newspapers and dominated editorial pages for the last week.

But analysts said the book would likely have little impact on Indian politics.

"While this is important historical information, the major political parties have not made much of it," said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst. "None of the key players are around anymore. The Soviet Union has gone."