TEAM HERALD
NEW DELHI: Questions are being asked over who blew up the cover on the super-secret technical capabilities of the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), a highly specialised cyber-intelligence gathering agency, in the course of releasing information about a Pakistani boat burnt in Indian waters after a chase by the Coast Guard off the Gujarat coast on the night of December 31 to January 1.
The Defence Ministry was very careful in its official press note, talking nothing more than the Coast Guard getting “intelligence inputs,” but someone in the government chose to spill the beans of how NTRO picked up calls and tracked down the boat right from the time it sailed from Karachi, giving its coordinates to the Coast Guard to hunt it down.
The technical capability acquired by the intelligence agencies are always kept under wraps for security reasons, but NTRO’s capability has now become public for neighbours like China and Pakistan to take steps to remain protected from its ears and eyes.
Security experts say Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar was exposing the political expediency of the NTRO when he declared that India would make public the evidence on the terrorists sent by Pakistan on that ill-fated boat. They say such disclosures would only compromise NTRO further.
They point out how India had lost such capability in the past during the previous NDA regime in 1999 in the midst of the Kargil war when the government released the transcript of a telephone conversation between then Pakistan army chief General Pervez Musharraf, who was visiting China, and his commanders.
Disclosure of the transcript was felt expedient to establish Pakistan army’s direct involvement in the conflict, but it only helped the Pakistan Army to change its modes of communication to avoid being tapped by Indian agencies.
The same purpose of linking the Pakistan army with the boat that carried the suspected terrorists aboard must have made the enemy more alert with the knowledge on how India has acquired the capability to track the movement of suspected non-state actors and their channels of communication, the security experts said.
Most upset must be those in the NTRO as they felt the information was so sensitive that they did not share it even with the intelligence agencies like IB and RAW or with the Gujarat Police but got in touch with the Coast Guard having its ships and aircraft in the area to deal with the threat.
