How Indian Army's Military Intelligence Directorate works
The Indian Army's Military Intelligence Directorate, which tipped off Sheikh Hasina, is a lean, mean machine.
On the topmost floor of Sena Bhavan in Delhi are the headquarters of one of India's 21 intelligence agencies, the Indian Army's Military Intelligence Directorate (MI). The building, located behind South Block, is the closest India gets to the Pentagon. Its warren of corridors and cramped offices helps India's military spies maintain a veneer of anonymity.
It was the MI that warned Sheikh Hasina about a coup brewing in the Bangladesh Army. The incident brought the agency's role into focus. The agency was set up in 1941 to generate field intelligence for the Indian army. Post independence, it became a small army department primarily that investigated corruption within the force. It survived the embarrassment of the 1978 Samba spy case, where it falsely implicated three Indian Army officers as being Pakistani spies. The agency gathered momentum in the 1990s especially after the Kargil conflict with Pakistan. The army chafed at the poor quality tactical intelligence provided by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and R&AW. It boosted MI's mandate.
Today, the organisation comprises just over 700 officers, including women officers, and over 3,000 men. It is still tiny when compared to r&aw and IB, whose staff is over 25,000. MI's operating budget, too, is a tiny fraction of the well-entrenched IB and R&AW, though all three agencies have somewhat overlapping mandates vis-a-vis trans-border tasks.
The director-general, MI, a lieutenant general-rank officer who reports directly to the army chief, is indispensable when it comes to furthering Indian Army's diplomacy and exchanging intelligence with friendly countries like Myanmar, Israel, Afghanistan and Vietnam.
MI was initially tasked with generating only tactical or field intelligence in all countries bordering India. Its geographical mandate was set to 50 km from the border. These limits were quickly crossed in the mid-1990s when the organisation began playing an increasing role in countries within the subcontinent and its outer periphery.
MI operatives moved into Tajikistan and later Afghanistan in support of the Ahmad Shah Massoud-led Northern Alliance that overthrew the Taliban in 2001. Besides furthering national strategic goals, MI officials say these 'third country operations' allowed the agency to peep into countries of their immediate interest. MI was also active in Myanmar, which nurtured insurgent groups. In 1998, an MI operative impersonated a Khalistani terrorist and infiltrated a gun-running Myanmarese insurgent group. He led them into a death trap in the Andaman islands. Operation Leech, as the operation was called, marked the start of the Indian Army outreach to the Myanmarese junta in the 1990s. It also aimed to offset China's expanding footprint on India's eastern border.
Bangladesh is another country that has figured high on the MI scanner, particularly because of the safe sanctuaries provided to insurgent groups like the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the United National Liberation Front of Manipur (UNLF) and the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation of Assam. Within months of the Hasina government taking over in 2009, the entire leadership of the ULFA and UNLF was handed over to Indian authorities.
MI's mandate also includes counterterrorism in the north and North-east and generating pinpoint intelligence for small team operations. It is also tasked with counterintelligence in the army, which entails detecting spies in military areas.
MI survived the post-Kargil loss of turf to two new intelligence agencies, the National Technical Research Organisation and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). dia took away some of its signal monitoring capabilities and foreign military attaches who used to report to MI. A measure of the turf wars between India's spy agencies is brought out by the pithy remark of an MI official: "Let us remain low profile, we don't want to tread on too many toes."