R.N. Kao and RAW: how India built its own spy agency in 1968

The case for a separate foreign agency was structural, not personal. Domestic intelligence and foreign intelligence reward opposite habits. One is about surveillance and arrests inside a legal system; the other is about running agents in hostile countries where the rules of your own state do not apply. Blending them, the reformers argued, meant neither was done well. The choice of Kao was more personal. He had impressed his superiors — and foreign services — with his handling of the 1955 Kashmir Princess investigation, in which a bomb planted by Kuomintang agents destroyed an Air India aircraft chartered to carry the Chinese delegation to the Bandung Conference. Zhou Enlai survived only because he changed his travel plans. Kao's careful, discreet work reportedly earned him a personal note of appreciation from Zhou. He had also handled sensitive protocol assignments, including security during Queen Elizabeth II's 1961 visit. Colleagues described him as cultured, soft-spoken and obsessive about secrecy — a man who preferred that his agency, and he himself, stayed invisible. Indira Gandhi, consolidating power and facing hostile neighbours, wanted exactly that kind of professional: loyal, low-profile, and comfortable operating in the grey zone where diplomacy ends and espionage begins.

Rameshwar Nath Kao (1918–2002) — founding chief, 1968–1977. Built the agency's culture, its recruitment style, and its early operations. Returned later as security adviser to Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. Indira Gandhi (1917–1984) — the Prime Minister who ordered the split from the IB and gave Kao direct access to her office, which made RAW powerful but also raised questions about political control. B.N. Mullik — the long-serving IB chief whose combined internal-external model the 1968 reform broke up. Sankaran Nair — Kao's close deputy and successor, who worked with him through the 1971 war and briefly headed RAW after him. B. Raman (1936–2013) — an original 'Kaoboy' who served 1968–1994 and later wrote 'The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane' (2007), the most-cited insider memoir and a key, if admittedly subjective, source for this history. The Mukti Bahini — the Bengali guerrilla force RAW helped train and coordinate in 1971. Naming the credible chroniclers matters here: much of what the public knows about RAW comes from a small number of memoirists and journalists, not open archives, so their accounts must be read as informed testimony rather than settled fact.

In 1968, RAW was a tiny start-up: a few hundred officers, a modest budget, and a mandate that barely extended beyond India's immediate neighbourhood. Its early wins — the 1971 war, the technical listening posts of the Aviation Research Centre at Charbatia, human networks across South Asia — were built on personal relationships and Kao's own contacts. Communications were slow; satellite imagery was a foreign luxury; analysis was done by hand. By 2026, the agency it grew into is a very different animal. Modern RAW works with signals interception, cyber operations, satellite and drone imagery, and financial-intelligence tools that Kao's generation could not have imagined. Its remit now spans counter-terrorism, cyber threats, trade and technology espionage, and monitoring China's expanding footprint. What has not changed is the basic constitutional position: RAW still sits under the Cabinet Secretariat, still reports effectively to the Prime Minister's Office, and still operates without the kind of standing parliamentary oversight committee that scrutinises intelligence services in the United States or Britain. The tools have leapt across half a century. The accountability structure that Kao worked within in 1968 is, in its essentials, the one that remains today.

The human weight of RAW's founding is easiest to see in 1971. As millions of refugees streamed out of East Pakistan, RAW officers helped train, arm and coordinate the Mukti Bahini — by many accounts on the order of a hundred thousand fighters — turning a humanitarian catastrophe into an organised resistance that fed India's eventual military intervention. For the people of what became Bangladesh, that support was part of the road to a nation; Kao was later called, admiringly, an 'architect of Bangladesh'. But secret power has a darker human cost too. The Sikkim episode of 1975, in which RAW's role has been widely reported, ended a Himalayan monarchy and remains contested — celebrated in Delhi as a strategic necessity, remembered by some Sikkimese as an absorption they did not freely choose. And the officers themselves paid privately: a career in RAW meant a life of unacknowledged work, no public credit for successes, and sole blame when operations were exposed. Kao guarded his own anonymity so fiercely that very few photographs of him exist. The impact of an intelligence service, in other words, is felt by whole populations who never learn the details — which is precisely why the question of who watches it matters.

RAW attracts myth the way few institutions do, so it is worth being precise. Well documented: RAW was founded on 21 September 1968; Kao was its first chief until 1977; he investigated the 1955 Kashmir Princess bombing; RAW supported the Mukti Bahini in 1971; the Aviation Research Centre handled technical collection; there is no standing parliamentary oversight. These rest on the public record, memoirs like B. Raman's, and mainstream reporting. Reported but insider-sourced: the figure of roughly 250 founding officers, the 'one lakh' Mukti Bahini trainees, and RAW's precise role in Sikkim's 1975 accession come largely from participant accounts and journalism, not open archives — credible, but not independently verifiable. Legend, treat with caution: dramatic claims that RAW single-handedly 'created' Bangladesh, that it ran vast secret operations across continents, or specific tales of assassinations and coups are mostly untestable and often embellished. The honest position is that intelligence history is unusually hard to verify: the successes are hidden, the failures are hidden, and both sides have reasons to exaggerate. Admiring Kao does not require believing every story told about him — and the discipline of saying 'we don't actually know' is itself part of taking the subject seriously.

The deepest reason Kao's story still matters is that it created a permanent tension inside Indian democracy that has never been resolved. A modern state needs a capable foreign-intelligence service; a democracy needs to be able to hold its institutions accountable. RAW was built to be excellent and to be invisible — and invisibility is the enemy of accountability. Unlike the United States, where Congressional committees review intelligence budgets and operations, or Britain, where a parliamentary committee scrutinises the agencies, India has never legislated standing parliamentary oversight of RAW. Its budget is not debated in public; its operations are not reviewed by any body outside the executive; even the Right to Information Act largely exempts it. Defenders argue this secrecy is exactly what let Kao move fast in 1971 and what keeps sources safe today. Critics reply that unaccountable power is dangerous regardless of who holds it, and that the very success stories are impossible for the public to verify — the reason so much about RAW blurs into legend. That unresolved trade-off between capability and control is Kao's real inheritance. Every debate about intelligence reform in India circles back to the structure he helped design in 1968: brilliant, deniable, and answerable, in the end, only to the person at the top.