During the first two decades following India’s independence, the CIA had a complex, and often conflicted relationship with the ruling Congress party and the Indian media. Despite public and private criticisms levelled at the Agency by Jawaharlal Nehru, a number of CIA covert operations in the subcontinent were undertaken with the full knowledge and support of India’s intelligence service and senior figures within the Congress Party: In Kerala, in the late 1950s, the CIA worked with the Congress Party to destabilise a democratically elected communist administration; following an abortive Tibetan uprising in 1959, India’s Intelligence Bureau chose to ‘look the other way’ as CIA aircraft transited through Indian airspace in support of Agency sponsored resistance operations in Chinese-controlled Tibet; and CIA operatives spirited the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa and into northern India. This chapter probes the genesis and evolution of the CIA’s relationship with India during the Agency’s so-called ‘golden age’ in the long 1950s, when a series of major US covert operations were conducted across the globe, in places such as the Congo, Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, and Tibet.

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.

In the late 1960s, a spotlight cast upon some of the CIA’s more questionable activities in the subcontinent had a profound and enduring impact on Indian perceptions of the United States’ government and its external intelligence service. In the wake of the Ramparts scandal, the CIA came to occupy a prominent place in mainstream Indo–U.S. cultural and political discourse. For the remainder of the twentieth-century, and beyond, anti-American elements in India drew repeatedly upon the spectre of CIA subversion as a means of undermining New Delhi’s relationship with Washington. The blanket exposure given by the world’s press to CIA indiscretions, exemplified by the international media circus surrounding Congressional probes into the U.S. intelligence community, made a deep psychological impression in South Asia. This chapter traces the socio-political impact of Indira Gandhi’s assertions that the malevolent hand of the CIA lay behind India’s problems, foreign and domestic. It recovers South Asian agency in intelligence terms by interrogating the utility of Gandhi’s policy of exploiting the CIA’s reputation as a socio-political malefactor to court popular legitimacy.

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.

On 20 October 1962, a border dispute between India and the People’s Republic of China erupted into open warfare, leaving the Indian Army reeling and the country’s political leadership in a state of panic. A State of Emergency was declared, a National Defence Fund established, and recruiting stations for India’s armed forces were flooded with eager volunteers. This chapter dissects the impact of joint covert action operations undertaken by India and the United States in the wake of Sino-Indian hostilities. It examines how and why the CIA assisted the IB in equipping and training a clandestine warfare unit tasked with monitoring Chinese military supply routes into Tibet and oversaw the insertion of nuclear-powered surveillance equipment on two of India’s Himalayan peaks to collect data on Chinese atomic tests. Coming at a point when new mechanisms for the implementation of covert action where being introduced by Whitehall, including the Counter Subversion Committee and the Joint Action Committee, the chapter also analyses how the border war was approached by Whitehall as an opportunity to test new British covert capabilities and to roll-back communism in South Asia.

The CIA remained a fixture at the heart of Indian civil debate throughout the 1980s. To the very end of the Cold War, the political fortunes of Indira Gandhi, and her son, and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, were intertwined with a series of espionage scandals in which, almost inevitably, the CIA figured prominently. This chapter examines the Reagan administration’s reliance of the CIA as a cold war foreign policy tool and its difficulties in securing Indian support to counter what officials in Washington perceived to be an alarming and unacceptable expansion in Soviet disinformation activity in the subcontinent. It explores the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi and how these two tragic events came to be connected by South Asians with the Agency and its earlier CIA involvement in subversion and political assassination in the Global South. As the Cold War approached its end, and Hindu nationalism, rampant corruption, and political violence gripped India, the chapter considers why national powerbrokers in the subcontinent were once again unable to resist urging citizens to ‘look the other way’ and attribute the country’s troubles to a ubiquitous foreign hand?

Spying in South Asia’s conclusion addresses the impact of the end of the Cold War, and the onset of a ‘war on terror’, on British and American intelligence relationships with India. It explores the rationale behind Indian governments’ softening of anti-CIA rhetoric from the mid-1980s, and the implications for New Delhi’s intelligence agencies of the precipitous collapse of the USSR, and the abrupt conclusion of the Cold War. It assesses factors underlying the post-Cold War recovery of Western secret services from the position of public pariahs in India to that of New Delhi’s principal partners in intelligence and security matters. In 1947, as the Cold War dawned and the newly independent subcontinent confronted formidable threats to its stability and security, New Delhi turned to London and Washington for covert support. Some half-a-century later, after decades of what might best be described as circumscribed cooperation compromised by conflict and conspiracism, the intelligence services of India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, once more found compelling reasons to put their differences aside, and work together as close partners in a new secret war.

The seeds of books germinate in both well-lit and shadowy imaginative spaces. In this way, books exhibit an affinity with the dreams Sigmund Freud studied in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), where he learned that identifying the “background thoughts” from which dream symbols emerge, particularly those intricate or bizarre images resistant to quick explanation, was hardly a simple task. The search for their origins led him to free association, a process in which a patient focuses on specific images, not on a complete dream narrative, and to the conclusion that “interpretation en detail and not en masse” better enables an investigator to uncover the overdetermined nature of dream images—their provenance in several sources, not just one. Like dreams, books often arise from an untidy jumble of places: an archive of prior cultural texts (scrivened, visual, aural); major social, scientific and historical developments; and the imprints of individual experiences, large and small, etched on a writer's memory. Some of these are transformative or, in the worst of cases, traumatic—a stunning success or mortifying failure, a once-in-a-century pandemic and a pitched medical battle to vanquish it—while others are tethered to the banalities of everyday life that, surprisingly, demand expression. Such is the case with From the “Troubles” to Trumpism.

As a student of Irish history and culture for over forty years, I have enjoyed numerous opportunities to visit Ireland and Northern Ireland, and written about both, most often discussing literature, drama and theatrical production. This engagement constitutes one source of the pages that follow but, again, there are others. One in particular motivates the political bristle of this book: recent socio-political discord in America, particularly that associated with the presidential election of 2020, the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the shocking state of affairs (and indictments) prefatory to the 2024 elections.

There is an incisive exchange about history and collective memory in Bernard MacLaverty's Cal, a novel (and, later, film) set during the Troubles complete with Orange Lodge parades, deadly ambushes and the firebombing of Catholic homes. Over his career, MacLaverty has written several novels and short stories portraying in often excruciating detail the emotional toll of living through such violence, with Cal being, arguably, the most poignant. When discussing the novel, critics often point to similarities between the dilemma of its main characters and that of Shakespeare's “star-crossed” lovers Romeo and Juliet, as its protagonist Cal McCrystal (McCluskey in later printings), an unemployed, working-class Catholic, falls in love with Marcella Morton, the young widow of a Protestant policeman in whose murder Cal was complicit. In this “love across the barricades” story, as in Shakespeare's play, a sense of tragic foreboding is occasionally relieved by glimmers of possibility—for example, when Cal finds fulfilling work on the Morton family farm and makes a new home there to be near Marcella. His days of living on the dole may be over, and his new job hints at a better future. Unlike the protagonists of Romeo and Juliet whose fates are tied to family lineages and histories they cannot alter, Cal seems convinced that he possesses the agency to escape his connection to sectarian violence. Sadly, in the novel's closing scene, his arrest and imminent punishment destroy any possibility of a future with Marcella. But the question remains unanswered, to recall Haines's observation in James Joyce's Ulysses, of how “history is to blame” for Cal's fate. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps historical memory and the at times nefarious uses to which history is put are the culprits (Figure 6).

Unlike Cal, MacLaverty's later novel Grace Notes (1997) develops tensions between memory and aspiration that lead to a happier, even refulgent conclusion. The novel begins with a fledgling composer, Catherine McKenna, returning to Northern Ireland from Scotland to attend her father's funeral. At the cemetery where he is interred, she passes the grave of a boy she once knew who “gave his life for Ireland,” as an inscription beneath his name on his headstone clarifies. Reading the epitaph, Catherine wonders what musical composition might best represent the militant nationalism for which her former classmate sacrificed his life.