Sanjha Morcha

MILITARY LITERATURE FESTIVAL Bring intel arms of 3 services under DIA command: Ex-chief

Bring intel arms of 3 services under DIA command: Ex-chief

Former RAW chief AS Dulat (retd) speaks as (from left) Lt Gen Kamal Davar (retd), Lt Gen Sanjiv K Langer (retd) and IPS KC Verma look on at Lake Club in Chandigarh on Saturday. Photo: Ravi Kumar

Vijay Mohan

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 8

Former intelligence chiefs today suggested a change in the command and control structure and functional ethos of the intelligence set-up in India to make it a more effective instrument to assist decision making.

“I am afraid that at the apex level of intelligence, you have the NSA who is also coordinating the functioning of intelligence agencies apart from his other jobs. The country needs a Director of National Intelligence who coordinates the work of intelligence agencies as the NDA’s charter of policy making and advisory is far too large and significant for merely being a coordinator,” former Director General of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lt Gen Kamal Davar, said while speaking at a session ‘Wisdom of Spies’ at the Military Literature Festival.

He suggested that for the intelligence arms of the three services to be effective, they should be brought under the command of the DIA. The lack of expertise in languages was a major weakness with Indian intelligence and we needed to be much more serious about Asian languages, he added. 

The country had a good intelligence set-up with good coordination among different agencies, but we needed to sharpen our arsenal and covert capability, he said.

Pointing out that covert capability takes a very long time to build, but two Prime Ministers in the past dismissed a fair amount of such capability in an outright manner, Lt Gen Davar said decisions at the highest level have to be made carefully and deliberately and not based on emotions.

“Unfettered access to decision makers in a converged paradigm is extremely important in the Indian context and there is no question in a democracy of all intelligence agencies reporting to one man,” Lt Gen Sanjiv Langer, another former DIA chief, said.

Stating that we don’t want to create another J Edgar Hoovar (a former long-time FBI chief who wielded immense power), he said in the present Indian political environment, it would be suicidal to have one person controlling all agencies.

He said that in the present era, intelligence required marriage of intellect with technology and spies had to be treated as a capital asset and not just a resource that could be used and thrown away. Parliamentary oversight over intelligence agencies, an over-the-horizon vision and an attitudinal overhaul were required, he added.

While sharing his experiences of dealing with the heads of various foreign intelligence agencies, AS Dulat, former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing, suggested the recently elected Prime Minister of Pakistan has been in place for just a couple of months and should be given time to enable him to improve ties with India.