The men in uniform worked on test sites only at nights. They did this to avoid satellites to capture clear images.
In fact, these men in green uniform were scientists of DRDO and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Whenever they visited the test sites, they went undercover and wore army fatigues.
They were also provided false names. APJ Abdul Kalam was codenamed Major General Prithvi Raj and then atomic energy chief Rajagopala Chidambaram was called Nataraj.
Also, code words were profusely used for shafts. One shaft was named "White House" or "whisky", while the other was called "Taj Mahal."
This was done to counter spying on communication.
Many officials were kept in the dark, including then Defence Minister George Fernandes. He was not told about a confidential meeting, which was held between Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Kalam and Chidambaram. The discussion was on the nuclear weapon tests.
Also, many ministers did not have any idea about the tests, except LK Advani, George Fernandes, Pramod Mahajan, Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha.
After all these clandestine exercises, five nuclear bombs were detonated at Pokhran in Rajasthan.
Amid these events, the United States and CIA failed to identify in advance the Pokhran-II test, despite satellites worth billions were used to spy on Pokhran at all times.
Yet another CIA activity which prominently gets space in the Indian media is about the use of "philanthropic foundations" to deliberately and consciously work against India's interests. One such example is the largescale protests against Koodankulam nuclear power project in Tamil Nadu and the commercialisation of GM food crops in the year 2012.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh then had alleged that the NGOs opposed to the nuclear power project were funded by foreign countries. In fact, Congressmen targeted the CIA for every campaign against them and for nearly every failure to control law and order.
Exposing these anti-India activities in detail by the Indian media is absolutely fine, but the same vigour is not reflected when it comes to detailing nefarious activities of KGB. This is because, most of the mediapersons are left-leaning and sold-out.
But for the KGB files reproduced in "Mitrokin Archive II", the dark side of these left-leaning media would not have been known.
The files showed that ten Indian newspapers and one press agency were on the Soviet payroll during Indira Gandhi's rule. In 1972, the Russian spy agency claimed to have planted more than 3,500 articles in highly influential India newspapers.
At one time, Moscow's access to The Press Trust of India had earned the news wire the title "Press Tass of India" after the Russian news agency TASS.
The files also revealed KGB's conspiracies to foment trouble in Assam and Punjab, millions of roubles pumped into governing party Congress party and successful plots of the Soviet to use honey traps and 'swallows' to seduce Indian diplomats.
The KGB channeled 10.6 million roubles into Indira Gandhi's India, through her party fund-raiser Lalit Narayan Mishra, who accepted suitcases of money for Congress without thinking to inform the prime minister.
Thirty years on, his murder still remains a mystery. The Opposition had charged Indira Gandhi for getting rid of an embarrassingly corrupt minister, who refused to resign and threatened to implicate Gandhi on charges of corruption.
Mishra and 12 others were severely injured after a grenade was lobbed at a function to inaugurate a broad-gauge line between Samastipur and Muzaffarpur in Bihar, on January 3, 1975.
Instead of moving Mishra to 30-minutes journey to Darbhanga, he was taken to Danapur, which is 220 kms away from Samastipur and had inadequate medical facilities.
The train carrying him, also, did not stop at Patna, where a team of surgeons, were waiting. Worse still, the train was stopped at several places, delaying treatment that could have saved him.
Surprisingly, Mishra was carried in an ordinary passenger train when Railway Ministers have personal saloon cars at their disposal. Even more mysterious was that no post-mortem was ever carried out on his body.
All these chain of unexplained events, after the bomb blast, had suggested a conspiracy.
There are many such conspiracies mentioned in the Mitrokin Archive II, including the death surrounding late Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent.
Keeping all these facts in mind, it is all the more important for citizens, especially mediapersons interested in India's betterment to pursue fair journalism, or else it is better for them to enter the sewage business, which at least does humans some good.
Jai Hind ...
No comments:
Post a Comment