Inside raw: the story of India's secret service

No intelligence organization in the world has been subjected to such tumult and criticism as the Indian Foreign Intelligence Agency -the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) of the Cabinet Secretariat-during the short span of the twelve years of its existence.
A flood of "misinformation" (using the intelligence jargon) has poured out to the public in the movies, books, magazine articles. and newspaper reports-giving a distorted picture. A lot more has been said with varying degrees of ignorance rather than knowledge. The general belief that RAW has had more failures than successes is incorrect. No government, even our own, will tolerate for long a costly agency that has more failures than successes. The "Spies" as the men in RAW have been referred to, have kept "mum," having little option. Surprisingly the governments have followed the same dictum, whenever the "anti-intelligence" lobby has raised its head. It was only on July 9, 1980, in New Delhi, that the Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, for the first time, addressing the concluding session of the Criminal Investigating Department (C.I.D.) referred to the campaign mounted against RAW during the rule of the previous government (Janata government) and said: "In Parliament, and outside, a belief had grown that this organization (RAW) was interfering with the affairs of the country. This was far from correct."
A book about intelligence demands a word about sources, for it is obvious because of the nature of the subject, that little or no documented information can be available to the author. One thing that did help me in writing on the subject was the sensational head lines and public criticism that motivated many in the establishment' to brood and reflect upon their own time spent in RAW.