The Hindu Business Line : Intelligence audit

It is an understandable tendency of intelligence agencies to claim that they have been on the ball in providing advance and actionable intelligence and attribute any catastrophic event affecting security and resulting in loss of lives, destruction of property, and so on, to the failure of administration, including the police, to take prompt pre-emptive measures to ward it off. The intelligence agencies themselves would be the first to admit the likelihood of their missing out on, or ignoring, crucial leads and clues as also misinterpreting them by way of either inflating or downplaying their purport.

Such instances occur in every country; even the UK and the US are no exception, despite the technological and manpower back-up the intelligence agencies there enjoy compared to India.

The period of 50 years, during which Britain and Northern Ireland were the targets of terrorist attacks by the Irish Republican Army, was marked by a number of tragic surprises due to want of intelligence. Coming to recent times, the 9/11 horror on US soil is a case of tell-tale clues being overlooked by both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The US is still paying the astronomical price of invading Iraq, misled by the wrong information furnished by the CIA about Saddam Hussein's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

In India, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) have played a notable role in taking care of the nation's interests and alerting authorities through periodical as well as special reports on lurking or emerging threats to security. However, especially in regard to, say, communal tensions or activities of insurgents, the Bureau, by way of abundant caution, keeps sounding general alarm of possible violent flare-ups, without any specific indication of time or place.

INDEPENDENT OVERSIGHT

The February 1966 uprising of the Mizo National Army (MNA), which took over large parts of the Mizo district of Assam, is a good example. The IB, of course, used to send to the Home Ministry generalised warnings of outbreaks anytime anywhere in the district. But this it had been doing for so long that the impact of its reports got diminished over time.

As early as in 1978, the Shah Commission, inquiring into the excesses of the IB and the CBI during the internal emergency of 1975-77, strongly recommended the setting up of an independent oversight committee composed of eminent non-official public figures of unblemished record of public service to periodically review the working of the Bureau.

It was expected to appraise the content, timeliness and accuracy of the intelligence provided with reference to the actual happenings on the ground. It was also meant to provide guidance to the IB on the threats on which it should focus at any given point of time and lay down the priorities so that the agency does not fritter away its resources on irrelevant pursuits. An independent performance audit of intelligence agencies has become all the more imperative with growing complexities in the security environment.

B. S. RAGHAVAN