The Arrests That Revealed the Network
In 2023, Indian intelligence agencies — the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) — confirmed the arrest of at least one serving RAW officer who had been recruited by American intelligence. The officer, whose identity was not disclosed publicly, had access to classified operational information about India's intelligence assets in Pakistan and China. The arrest was treated as a counterintelligence success and handled with minimal public disclosure, consistent with India's longstanding practice of managing intelligence embarrassments discreetly.
This was not an isolated case. Between 2021 and 2024, Indian intelligence agencies conducted multiple arrests of individuals suspected of working as agents of foreign intelligence services, with several cases reportedly linked to American intelligence operations. The specifics remain classified. What is not classified is the broader context: the United States and India are nominally strategic partners — members of the Quad, with extensive defence cooperation agreements, joint military exercises, and formal intelligence-sharing arrangements under the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA) signed in 2020. The simultaneous operation of recruitment efforts against Indian intelligence assets is not a contradiction of this partnership. It is an accurate description of how great power relationships actually function.
Every intelligence service, including India's, conducts operations against its allies. The United States taps the phones of German chancellors and French presidents. It runs recruitment operations in the intelligence services of countries with which it has formal partnerships. This is not aberrant. It is the normal operating environment of great power competition. What is significant about the recent arrests is not that they happened — they have been happening for decades — but that India's intelligence services are now detecting and publicising them at a rate that indicates either a significant improvement in Indian counterintelligence capability, or a political decision at the senior level to be less discreet about what has always been the case.
Seven Decades: The Historical Record
The CIA's involvement in Indian politics and strategic affairs did not begin with the Modi era or with India's growing strategic independence. It began with Indian independence itself.
Declassified CIA documents from the 1950s — available through the National Security Archive at George Washington University — show that the agency viewed India's non-alignment under Nehru as a strategic problem. A genuinely independent India, capable of organising a significant portion of the developing world around a non-Western political framework, threatened the bipolar architecture that American strategy required. The CIA maintained extensive networks within Indian political parties, the media, labour movements, and academic institutions throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
The Congress party's receipt of CIA funding during this period is documented. The Indian journalist and historian Seymour Hersh reported in 1974 on CIA payments to Indian politicians. The Church Committee hearings (1975), which examined CIA covert operations globally, included references to India in classified annexes that have subsequently been partially declassified. The scale of CIA involvement in Indian political life during the Nehru-Shastri-Indira Gandhi era was sufficiently extensive that Indira Gandhi's 1971 decision to sign a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union was partly motivated by the calculation that the Soviet intelligence relationship would provide some counterbalance to American penetration.
The Kashmir Architecture
The most consequential and least discussed element of American strategic operations against India is the CIA's role in constructing and sustaining the Pakistani intelligence-jihadi infrastructure that has prosecuted proxy war in Kashmir since 1989.
Operation Cyclone — the CIA's $3 billion programme to arm Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan — ran from 1979 to 1989 through the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency. The ISI was the CIA's implementing partner: it received the weapons, the training, the funds, and the operational latitude to manage the anti-Soviet campaign according to its own priorities. Among those priorities was the cultivation of a jihadi infrastructure that could be redirected, once the Soviets were defeated, toward other objectives.
The jihadi infrastructure that emerged from Operation Cyclone — the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen — began conducting operations in Kashmir from 1989 onward. The CIA was not unaware of this. Intelligence reports from the period document the flow of Afghanistan-trained fighters into Kashmir. The American strategic calculation was straightforward: a destabilised Kashmir kept India's military and political attention focused on its western border and away from the development of power projection capabilities that might challenge American strategic preferences in Asia.
This is not conspiracy. It is the well-documented operational history of American strategic policy in South Asia during the Cold War, maintained by inertia and institutional interest well into the post-Cold War period. The Clinton administration's response to the Kargil crisis (1999) — in which Pakistani military forces occupied Indian territory — was to pressure Pakistan to withdraw rather than to apply the sanctions that Pakistan's nuclear tests and its military's direct role in the operation warranted. The American interest in maintaining Pakistan as a functional strategic client exceeded its interest in holding Pakistan accountable for actions that killed Indian soldiers.
Northeast India and the Insurgency Networks
Kashmir is not the only theatre. India's northeastern states — Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Assam, and the broader Seven Sisters — have experienced sustained insurgencies from the 1950s to the present. The CIA's involvement in supporting Naga insurgents in the 1950s and 1960s is documented in declassified State Department cables and in the accounts of American missionaries who served as intermediaries.
The strategic logic was consistent: a fragmented, unstable northeastern India was a strategically manageable India. The region shares borders with China, Myanmar, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Control over, or sustained influence in, India's northeastern periphery provides intelligence access to all of these borders. The insurgent groups — the Naga National Council, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, the United Liberation Front of Assam — that received varying levels of external support over the decades kept India's security establishment engaged in a costly internal security operation that consumed resources and attention.
The current government's accelerated development of northeastern infrastructure — the roads, bridges, rail connections, and border trade facilities that the region had been denied for decades — represents a direct strategic response to this history. Connectivity is the antidote to insurgency. Economic integration is the antidote to separatism. The Indian government understood this; the delay in implementing it was partly a function of the political and resource constraints that sustained internal conflict creates.
The Khalistan File
The most active current vector of American intelligence operations against India — and the one that has produced the sharpest diplomatic confrontations — involves the Khalistan separatist movement and its diaspora infrastructure in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In 2023, India expelled a Canadian diplomat and downgraded diplomatic ties with Canada following Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's assertion in parliament that Indian government agents may have been involved in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen designated as a terrorist by India for his role in Khalistan fundraising and organisational activity. The assertion was made without evidence being publicly presented and has been contested by India. What was not contested was the broader dynamic: the Canadian government's political dependence on Sikh-Canadian votes, particularly in Ontario ridings, had created a structural incentive to tolerate Khalistan organisational activity on Canadian soil that India considered directly threatening to its territorial integrity.
The American dimension is less publicly discussed but equally significant. American intelligence's historical relationship with Khalistan-adjacent organisations — during the 1980s, when the movement was most violent domestically — included monitoring, intelligence gathering, and in some documented cases, arms supply to factions that served American interests in destabilising India under Rajiv Gandhi. The current American government's reluctance to designate multiple Khalistan organisations operating in the US as terrorist organisations, despite Indian requests, reflects a continuation of the same political calculus: the organisations provide intelligence value and political leverage that outweighs the cost of the relationship to US-India ties.
Why a Strong India Threatens the American Architecture
To understand the persistence of American operations against Indian stability, it is necessary to understand what a genuinely strong and unified India means for American strategic options in Asia.
India's population will reach 1.7 billion by 2050. Its economy is projected to become the world's second or third largest by 2050. Its military — already the fourth largest by expenditure — is developing power projection capabilities including a carrier-based naval force, long-range missile systems, and space-based intelligence assets. An India that achieves its economic potential, maintains its territorial integrity, resolves its border disputes with China and Pakistan, and develops genuine strategic autonomy is an India that does not need American patronage, does not accept American strategic direction, and constitutes an independent pole in the emerging multipolar order.
This is precisely the outcome that American strategic planning has consistently sought to prevent — not because American planners are uniquely malevolent, but because the preservation of American strategic primacy in Asia requires that no single Asian power achieve the combination of economic weight, military capability, and political cohesion that would make it genuinely independent of American strategic frameworks.
China is the obvious target of American concern. But India presents a subtler and in some ways more threatening case: a democratic, values-compatible, English-speaking, nuclear-armed power that explicitly refuses American alliance and insists on strategic autonomy. Such a country, if successful, provides a model for every other nation currently calculating whether American partnership is worth the strategic constraints it imposes. The decline of the American world order is accelerated by every nation that demonstrates the viability of independence. India's insistence on independence — its refusal to sanction Russia, its BRICS membership, its independent China policy — makes it a particularly consequential demonstration project.
What India's Intelligence Services Are Doing About It
The Indian response to American intelligence operations has evolved substantially over the past decade. Under previous governments, the diplomatic calculus consistently favoured quiet management — arrests handled discreetly, expulsions avoided, public attribution kept minimal — to preserve the overall relationship. The current government has shown a greater willingness to publicise counterintelligence successes, use FCRA enforcement aggressively against foreign-funded organisations, and accept diplomatic friction as the cost of defending Indian sovereignty more assertively.
The FCRA cancellations of Amnesty International India, the Ford Foundation restrictions, the scrutiny of Oxfam India, and the suspension of licences for hundreds of smaller NGOs are not primarily about the specific organisations targeted. They are about establishing the principle that foreign funding of Indian political and civil society activity is a matter of Indian sovereign interest, not a universal right of civil society that foreign governments are entitled to defend. The principle is uncontroversial in its application elsewhere: no foreign government could fund American civil society at USAID's India budget levels without triggering FARA enforcement and Senate hearings.
The arrests of foreign intelligence assets within Indian institutions — including the RAW officer case — represent the operational complement to the legal and administrative pressure. India is signalling, in the only language intelligence services understand clearly, that the recruitment of Indian officials by foreign services carries a price. The fact that at least some of these recruits were working for an ostensible partner rather than an adversary is the message.
The Stand
The CIA's operations against India are not ancient history. They are current, documented, and continuing. The arrests are the visible evidence of a subterranean competition that has been running continuously since 1947 — a competition in which American intelligence has consistently worked to keep India's neighbourhood unstable, its internal politics contested, its northeastern periphery insurgent, and its Sikh diaspora politically weaponisable.
None of this means India and the United States cannot have a functional relationship. Great powers spy on each other, fund each other's opposition, and maintain their bilateral relationships simultaneously. The USSR and US managed this for 45 years. India and the US are managing it now, across the most significant strategic partnership India has ever maintained with a Western power.
What it means is that India should enter every element of this relationship with clear eyes about what the United States is simultaneously doing in the other hand. The intelligence relationship formalised in BECA and the preceding agreements provides India with genuine capabilities — satellite data, signals intelligence, defence technology. It also provides America with deep access to Indian strategic thinking, military planning, and intelligence operations. The question, for each successive Indian government, is whether the exchange is worth it on its current terms — and whether India's own intelligence and diplomatic capabilities are sufficient to ensure that the balance does not tip irreversibly in the wrong direction.
The answer, on current evidence, is that India is getting better at this calculation. The arrests are the proof of that. So is the fact that they are now being discussed.