Newsmaker: MK Narayan

The spy who came in from the cold

MK (Mike) Narayan has been made only an interim National Security Adviser following the death of JN Dixit.

This suggests the government needs time""what with handling the tsunami aftershocks, a volatile stock market and sundry other preoccupations""to apply its mind to reorganising the administrative national security apparatus.

Narayan, an IPS officer of the old stock""he belongs to the 1955 batch""is not bringing his ego into the fact that his appointment is only a stop-gap arrangement. The fact is, that the government is caught in a bind.

If the post of National Security Adviser is bifurcated into external and internal security, the government will have to find someone of Narayan's seniority to appoint to the job of National Security Adviser (external). There are not too many such former bureaucrats around.

Narayan's career has been dedicated to spookdom. He has been the director, Intelligence Bureau under five Prime Ministers.

He was trained under RN Kao, India's best known Intelligence Bureau chief, and was a "marked" officer. This means he served in no other branch of security but intelligence gathering.

Ranging from espionage to counterinsurgency to Left-wing extremism, Narayan was considered to have been an expert in all. He was nurtured by Indira Gandhi and because of his close proximity to the Gandhi household, Narayan was well liked by both Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia.

When the Chandra Shekhar government was sworn in, Gandhi was the one to insist that then Cabinet Secretary Vinod Pande's relative RP Joshi, who was made the director of the Intelligence Bureau by VP Singh, be sacked and Narayan brought back in.

Surveillance mounted on Rajiv Gandhi's residence by Haryana police was made a political issue later. It was the Intelligence Bureau that suggested that this was not an acceptable practice.

This finally brought down the Chandra Shekhar government Narayan had a job where success necessarily was shrouded in mystery and failure was immediately open to the public gaze.

Some people say his career is a string of failures""it was on his watch that the massive botch-up in domestic intelligence led to Indian Forces being sent to Sri Lanka.

Rajiv Gandhi's assassination could not be prevented. Insurgency in Punjab was tackled through a military rather than intelligence response.

And yet those who have worked with him recall his superb networking with the political establishment, his capacity to communicate to government and the bureaucracy, the need to have elaborate and powerful intelligence-gathering structures if intelligence was to be actionable, and the power that the intelligence-gathering community enjoyed during his tenure.

Few know the inputs that he gave during the struggle for power for the Congress presidentship in the last days of Rajiv Gandhi's prime ministership and even when the Congress lost power.

It was around this time that the likes of Umashankar Dikshit and Kamlapati Tripathi began to have designs on the top Congress job.