There was a time when India was called the ‘Berlin of the East’, because it was the only place where spies from different countries could meet each other easily, Paul McGarr, academic and author, who teaches at King’s College, London, tells Sidharth Bhatia in an interview.

McGarr’s new book, Spying in South Asia-Britain, the United States and India’s Secret Cold War takes a deep look at how India was a theatre of intense spying from even before independence and more so in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and after, when the Cold War between the western and communist bloc was on. That’s when the west and the Soviet Union saw India as a valuable prize.

India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was wary of all that spying activity and Indira Gandhi constantly invoked the ‘foreign hand’ as trying to destabilise India. McGarr tells the story of two nuclear devices planted in the Himalayas by the Indians and the CIA to spy on China and how the story was handled when the it became public in 1978.

McGarr says Gandhi did sometimes exaggerate the 'foreign hand' but “her fears that the CIA was trying to overthrow socialist governments around the world was genuine.” In 1973, Salvatore Allende was ousted in a military coup by Augusto Pinochet with the help of the CIA and in 1975 Mujib ur Rahman was assassinated in Bangladesh and that confirmed her worst fears.

But, writes McGarr, even while politicians were attacking foreign intelligence agencies, spies from the west and India were talking to each other and even cooperating.

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