The War That Made R&AW

‘Knowledge is power, and the proverb holds true for Intelligence agencies more than any other entity.’Two events in the 1960s underlined the urgent need to restructure and revitalise India’s Intelligence system: the 1962 war against China, and the one against Pakistan in 1965, both shocking instances of failures in information gathering. The officer who would be given charge of this task was R.N. Kao—someone as unlike romanticised ideals of spies in films and novels as possible.The founder-chief of India’s Research and Analysis Wing lived and operated from the shadows. Understated and gentlemanly, he may not have looked the part, but Kao undoubtedly put Indian Intelligence on the world map.