Turning Just For The Spin

Several books on ‘deception’ during World War II have appe­ared in the past. Thaddeus Holt’s The Deceivers: Allied military deception in the Second World War (2004) was a masterpiece. Now, Mihir Bose has unveiled an action-packed story of one such operation, ‘Silver’, in his well-researched book, The Indian Spy. The hero of this story is Bhagat Ram Talwar, who dec­eived Italians, Germans, and Russians from 1941 before finally serving British spymaster Peter Fleming during 1942-43. With a life so full of dark crevices, we still do not know whether he was faithful even to the British.

Unlike other ‘deceivers’, who were specially recruited by warring powers, Talwar was a ‘walk-in’, who found that he could make a business out of this life in shadows. His transformation from a Gandhian to a Kirti faction Communist plotting insur­ge­ncy in the North-West tribal areas was a radical shift. In 1941, he was tasked to aid the escape of an insurance inspector named Mohammed Ziauddin from Pes­ha­­war to Kabul. The traveller was Subhas Chandra Bose in disguise, who crossed the difficult terrain by trekking, hitch-hiking or using mules and tongas. Perhaps that was the only task Talwar carried out faithfully in his life. Yet that did not prevent him from betraying Bose to the Rus­­sians and the British, just as he dou­­ble-crossed his own colleagues.

Mihir Bose’s story holds lessons even to modern spy agencies, by highlighting how gullible the Kabul-based Italian, German and even Russian spymasters were. All of them believed the Talwar’s unverified con­c­­octions drafted by his friend Guru­bachan Singh Sainsra and pumped money into his spurious operations for engineering tribal uprising. Talwar adroitly played one against the other, depending on who was more beneficial to him.

A high point in Talwar’s career is worth quoting. That was during his sixth visit to Kabul on January 12, 1942. He had made in all 12 such visits during 1941-1945. Hit­ler’s Wehrmacht was facing its first major reversal outside a freezing Moscow, but by then the Japanese had overrun Hong Kong, Manila, Malaya and had launched their invasion of Burma. Japan would go on to occupy Singapore and Burma and would pose a threat to India’s Northeast. This time, Talwar met Zaman, the NKVD (Soviet precursor of the KGB) ‘handler’, on priority. He later met Rasmus, the Nazi case officer who introduced him to the Dietrich Witzel, who was deputed by Ber­lin for setting up radio communications, in anticipation of the German sweep acr­oss the Caucasus towards India. Wit­zel gave Talwar training in sabotage and secret writing. “The moment Witzel’s tutorial had finished Silver [Talwar’s code name] went straight over to the Russians and spilled the beans,” writes Bose.

Talwar’s ‘deception finale’ against his own country was audaciously participating in a seminar commemorating Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s birthday on Jan­uary 23, 1973 in the presence of celebrities. Mihir Bose says: “With the conference delegates having no knowledge of Silver betraying Bose and spying for the Russians and the British, Silver was very much an honoured delegate”.

In the final analysis, intelligence professionals are painfully aware that such ‘dec­eption’ operations do not drastically change the course of war or diplomacy. It only helps tactical shifts to facilitate certain local situations. Thus, historian Chr­­istopher Andrew, who was given acc­ess to secret MI-5 records since its inception, does not mention Operation Silver in his mammoth official history. In fact, he mentions that initially Germany had an upper hand in deception during WWII.

Hence it is difficult to believe the British claim that they had known the route taken by Bose to escape in February 1943, but did not intercept him for fear of jeopardising ‘Operation Silver’. British Secret document POL(S) 1267, dated 18.6.42, had anticipated all other routes except the northern port of Kiel, taken by Bose. German archives describe how sub­marine U180 carrying Bose to Madagascar was instructed to travel through the Norwegian coast, then between Ireland and Faroes, to evade the Allied blockade and how it took 10 days to reach the Atlantic. Yet, at the Cape of Good Hope, it sank a British oil tanker. German archives also say that U180, on its return voyage had audaciously sunk a British freighter in the South Atlantic, whereupon it was strafed by an Allied bomber. Other sources say that it also sank the Greek freighter Boris, west of Ascension Island, on June 3, 1943.

(The writer is a former special secretary in the cabinet secretariat and author of a recent biography of A.C.N. Nambiar, Netaji’s deputy in Berlin)