He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book describes the extent to which the Central Intelligence agency (CIA) developed a large and active presence in Cold War India. The CIA operated several stations, or bases of operation, in India that were concerned not only with espionage, or undercovering the secrets of the Indian government and Eastern bloc missions in the subcontinent, but also covert action, or hidden activity conducted to influence political events. Page 99 details how, somewhat paradoxically, and following the outbreak of a brief and bloody war between India and China over a contested Himalayan border, the Indian government turned to the CIA to help it gather intelligence on its Chinese adversary and conduct paramilitary operations intended to destabilise China’s borderlands and occupy Beijing’s security forces.Learn more about Spying in South Asia at the Cambridge University Press website.
Appropriately, page 99 provides a clear insight into a central theme in my book. Namely, the complicated, often conflicted, and ultimately counterproductive secret relationship between the CIA and Indian governments during the Cold War. In many ways, page 99 encapsulates in a few short paragraphs the essence of the nearly hundred pages that proceed it and the two hundred or so pages that follow. These expand upon and illuminate the interventions that foreign intelligence services, in the form of the CIA, Britian’s secret agencies, and Soviet bloc bodies, such as the KGB and GRU, undertook in India and the significant and enduring impact these have had on the political and social fabric of South Asia. The spectre of a ‘foreign hand’, or external intelligence activity, real and imagined, has come to occupy a prominent place in India’s contemporary political discourse, journalism, and cultural production. Spying in South Asia sets out how the nexus between intelligence and statecraft in the subcontinent and the relationships forged between external secret agencies and India’s governments to promote democracy came to be associated at all levels of Indian society with covert action, grand conspiracy, and justifications for repression. In doing so, my book uncovers the ongoing and troubling legacy of a fifty-year Cold War battle for hearts and minds in the Indian subcontinent.
--Marshal Zeringue
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