This chapter considers the process by which an intelligence transfer of power took place in British India. This event ran parallel to, but was conducted in a very different manner and resulted in quite different outcomes from, the political decolonisation of South Asia. The chapter examines plans hatched by the British Security and Secret Intelligence Services to maintain an intelligence foothold in the subcontinent and unpicks how such schemes fostered a bitter and protracted struggle for bureaucratic power and influence between MI5 and MI6. It probes debates held at the highest levels within the British government over whether covert action should be undertaken in independent India, by whom, and to what purpose. It interrogates the efficacy of Indian agency in negotiating the security challenges confronted by an under-resourced post-colonial state, and that counterparts in the West (and the Eastern bloc) saw as a valuable Cold War prize.

Vengalil Krishanan Krishna Menon established a reputation as one of the most controversial and divisive figures in Indian and broader Cold War politics. Under Nehru’s patronage, Menon experienced a meteoric rise to political power. In 1947, he was appointed to the prestigious post of Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. However, his abrasive personality and readiness to listen to and, on occasions, publicly endorse, Soviet and Communist Chinese positions on a range of international questions ruffled feathers in London and Washington. In the United States, officials characterised the Indian diplomat as ‘venomous,’ ‘violently anti-American,’ and ‘an unpleasant mischief-maker’. Many British diplomats echoed such sentiments. This chapter examines the British government’s response to Krishna Menon’s appointment. It explores the nature of Menon’s relationship with the CPGB, the risk that communists working for him posed to British security, and the strategy that MI5 developed to meet it. It illustrates the Attlee government’s conviction that India, and more particularly, Krishna Menon, represented a weak link in the Commonwealth security and intelligence chain.

Spying in South Asia examines the misguided and self-defeating Cold War interventions undertaken by British and American intelligence and security agencies in post-colonial India. British and American policymakers mounted intelligence operations in the Indian subcontinent on the basis of questionable, and often conflicting assumptions: that covert action could steer Indian opinion in a pro-Western direction; that British and American intelligence agencies could be insulated from Indian antipathy for colonialism and neo-colonialism; that Western intelligence support would corrode India’s relations with the Soviet Union; that controversies surrounding American intelligence practice would not cut through with the Indian public; that the subcontinent’s politicians would not employ the CIA as a lightning rod for India’s domestic travails; and that secret intelligence activity could help to arrest a decline in British and American influence in India. Today, India’s emergence as an economic titan, renewed Sino-Indian tensions, and backwash from the ‘War on Terror’, keep the subcontinent in the global headlines.

This chapter constructs a picture of the struggle waged by Indian leaders to negotiate the seemingly contradictory demands of national security and upholding popular conceptions of state sovereignty. Attention is given to the strategies adopted by New Delhi to co-opt the assistance of MI5 in containing Cold War threats, in the guise of indigenous communist movements and external pressures from China and the Soviet Union. Britain’s intelligence agencies made an effort to transition from a role centred on subduing nationalism to that of a trusted and valued supporter of the ruling Congress Party. Establishing strong security and intelligence links with India, British governments rationalised, would help to preserve their considerable national interests in South Asia; keep India ostensibly aligned with the West; act as a barrier to communist penetration of the subcontinent; and demonstrate to the United States that Britain remained a useful post-war partner. However, ideological tensions and differences produced uncoordinated bureaucratic responses that allowed the forces of internal and external communism to claim political and geographic space in the region.

In several respects, history is at the forefront of terrorism scholarship through challenging the domination of the social sciences and conventional wisdoms of the present that do not hold up to scrutiny once historicised. Moreover, historical research frequently accomplishes this by accessing a rich supply of primary source material that is more readily available than contemporary records because the passage of time has rendered it less sensitive. Despite these factors, there remains a broader impression, especially among governments, that terrorism’s past has little relevance to its present, hence the placing of resources into contemporary social science research instead of into the historicising of terrorism. As with terrorism, counterterrorism is not solely a phenomenon of the present day. It has a history as long as that of terrorism. Whether it is in the form of counterterrorism methods, such as the reliance on human intelligence, the difficulty in striking a balance between civil liberties, human rights and security or how to define the threat needing to be countered, the issues of the twenty-first century are, to varying extents, re-emergent, not nascent. As scholars make increasing inroads into excavating the difficult and convoluted history of terrorism, the need to exhume another inherent element of the complex equation, counterterrorism responses in both the micro and macro, grows ever greater.