What made AK Verma a great intelligence officer

The late Anand Kumar Verma was gifted with an extraordinary ability to forecast strategic developments affecting our security. In addition, he had a prodigious capability to direct discreet operations to tighten our security net. I worked as his principal staff officer during his tenure as the head of our external intelligence agency (1987-1990).

During the height of the Cold War, Verma had alerted prime minister Rajiv Gandhi that the Soviet Union was gradually withdrawing from African commitments due to financial stress. None in our government could believe this as Mikhail Gorbachev had appeared to be dominating the world scene from 1985.

In February 1989, Western governments were advising us at the highest level that the Najeebullah government in Afghanistan would collapse soon after Soviet withdrawal. They advised thinning out our embassy staff as they were doing.

The prime minister asked Verma to undertake a secret visit to Kabul to report the situation without our mission's involvement. We travelled by a foreign airline and stayed there for two-three days, meeting key contacts. Verma came to a conclusion that there was no imminent danger to the Najeebullah government. In his report to the PM he said that Najeebullah could survive indefinitely if he could resist the Mujahideen for six months. Interestingly we could observe at Kabul airport an Indian Airlines plane loading our mission's family members.

Later events proved Verma hundred per cent correct. Najeebullah survived till March 1992 when Soviet aid completely stopped. In that year he made a desperate appeal to America to help him. The New York Times (March 10, 1992) quoted Najeebullah telling America that "we have a common task... to struggle against fundamentalism". America did not listen. Soon thereafter Najeebullah was overthrown. In 1996 he was killed mercilessly by the Taliban.

Verma's most important achievement was getting discreet and direct access to China's highest policymaking level before Rajiv Gandhi's epoch making visit on December 19-23, 1988. Our foreign office was not at all keen on this visit.

In fact they had discouraged the PM. Even the legendary RN Kao who had made repeated attempts to contact Beijing's top level with the full backing of Indira Gandhi could not succeed. But it was the PM's priority task to Verma. We worked on this assignment for almost two years through other intermediaries, details of which I cannot disclose now. One day before the PM left for Beijing, we received a communication through our special channel that the visit would be "successful". Perhaps that was the highest point in our organisation's record.

It is of course another story that all these efforts were cast away through prime minister AB Vajpayee's letter of May 11, 1998 to US president Bill Clinton justifying Pokhran II nuclear tests due to threats from "an overt nuclear weapon state on our borders, a State which committed armed aggression against India in 1962". The Chinese took it as an insult when The New York Times published it on May 13. Their confrontation with us started from that day.

Verma was a hard task master. He did not bother to be popular. He himself worked very hard and expected his officers to do so. He compulsorily made his senior officers to read general books and circulate book reviews. He was appalled that intelligence officers read nothing more than files. He used to tell me quoting William Casey, CIA director for six years, that the best in an intelligence officer comes out only if he is put under maximum pressure. But that was also the era when our organisation had received the highest tribute through Yasser Arafat who told Rajiv Gandhi that Pakistan was more afraid of RAW than Indian Army.