‘No substantive increase, sir. But continuing.’
Hamid Khan stood up and opened the door to his office to look out on the war room. It was dominated by maps of Kashmir, a scene familiar to Khan throughout his military career. Over the years, the war room had transformed: once little more than a meeting room with dog-eared charts pinned on the wall and the changing order of battle written on a blackboard, now it was alive with colourful computer imagery. One whole wall was taken up with Kashmir itself. Smaller areas were magnified to show details of the shelling on Indian towns like Kargil and Drass; reinforcements in the Pakistan city of Muzafarabad, the capital of the nominally independent Azad Kashmir; and the strategic forward sectors of Tatta Pani, Darra Sher Khan, Bhattal Ghambeer, Khoi Ratta and Pir Badher. A special screen illuminated the tightly guarded sector of Kahuta, the site of Pakistan’s uranium-reprocessing plant, a key element of its nuclear weapons programme, which in an air war would be vulnerable to Indian attack. In 1994, both countries had agreed not to target each other’s nuclear facilities. But if the conflict worsened, Hamid Khan would have to assume that the agreement was null and void.
Khan knew each of the sectors well. He had fought in them, controlled them, watched men die in them, and he understood enough about the Kashmir terrain to know that the war was unwinnable without a political settlement or the complete defeat of either India or Pakistan. As he stepped out, the colonel in charge of the shift walked straight over. ‘The Indian army has ordered the evacuation of two hundred villages along the Punjab border with Pakistan, sir.’
Khan took the sheet of paper the colonel was holding.
‘These are from Chinese satellite surveillance,’ explained the colonel. ‘The town of Khemkaran, population sixteen thousand, thirty kilometres south of the main Lahore— Amritsar road.’ The colonel ran his finger down the blurred image of the main street. ‘We estimate only five hundred people are left there. The people are moving everything away — household possessions, vehicles, if they have them, even livestock.’ He handed Khan another photograph. ‘This is what is coming in.’
Khan could see clearly the columns of tanks and artillery shuffling west past the refugees to take up their positions on the Pakistan border.
Briefing
In May 1998, India stunned the world when it conducted five underground nuclear tests in the space of forty-eight hours, signalling her emergence as a nuclear power. The exact scope of the programme is still under dispute, but on 11 May, in tests known as Shakti, meaning ‘power’, India claims to have exploded two fission bombs and a thermonuclear — or hydrogen — bomb. On 13 May, two more sub-kiloton — or low-yield — weapons were exploded. Pakistan responded. It says it conducted five tests on 28 May and another two on 30 May. Two of the tests are believed to have been low-yield and none thermonuclear. At the time, it was estimated that India had stocks for up to thirty-five warheads and Pakistan had no more than fifteen bombs — although these figures were constantly disputed. By 2005, India possessed 150 warheads, and Pakistan 82. Despite the recent election of a Hindu nationalist government, which had cited nuclear testing in its manifesto, the American intelligence services had failed to detect signs that the tests were about to take place.
National Security Council, Washington, DC
‘These have come in in the past hour, sir.’
Tom Bloodworth, the National Security Advisor, was working alone under a single desk light when his office door was pushed open with a light knock by his second-shift secretary, who was on duty from 1800 until midnight. His office was in a building in the White House grounds, connected by a passageway to the West Wing, where most of the presidential business was conducted.
He opened the folder of photographs which Judy Lewis put on his desk. ‘Give me half an hour undisturbed, will you, Judy,’ he said, meaning no calls from Asia, which was beginning to buzz at this time. The prints had been processed by the Directorate of the National Photographic Interpretation Center and delivered to his office through a high-capacity fibre-optic cable link. Bloodworth spread out the photographs on his desk just like he had in his early days as one of the twelve hundred specialists at the Office of Imagery Analysis. Now it had become part of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, jointly run by the Pentagon and the CIA and operated from the Washington Navy Yard.
He had sworn by IMINT (imagery satellite intelligence) for most of his career as an intelligence officer, until May 1998 when India surprised the world by conducting five underground nuclear tests. Four satellites had been deployed full time on India, with cameras powerful enough to read the time on a soldier’s wristwatch. Analysts had previously picked out bursts of activity at the Pokharan testing range in 1982, 1995 and 1997, which had led to American questions about the nuclear weapons programme. But they failed to detect India’s entry onto the nuclear stage. The CIA was guilty of one of the biggest failures in its history.
Admittedly, the Indians had carried out most of their work at night and under cloud cover when satellite vision was poor. They also knew the time the satellites would be overhead and avoided activity during that time. They used intricate communication codes. Scientists dressed in camouflage uniforms to make them look like soldiers in training. But none of that was an excuse. At the nearby village of Khetolai, a stone and sand Rajasthani settlement with a population of twelve hundred just three miles from Pokharan, even farmers knew. An Indian army major drove there shortly before the tests, warning the villagers that there would be some heightened activity. One villager, who remembered the shuddering of the ground during the 1974 nuclear tests, replied: ‘Don’t worry. We know you’re going to do another test.’
Bloodworth, who then headed the CIA’s South Asia desk, called for a list of consumer products used in Khetolai. He found it was among the poorest and most basic communities in India. The villagers used the Parachute brand of coconut oil, made by Marico Industries, and detergents such as Surf, a product of Hindustan Lever; the only luxury of any kind was the Hero bicycle, made in Jalandhar City in Punjab. If these goods were in Khetolai, they would be all over India. Bloodworth set about creating a network of low-level agents, known as HUMINT or human intelligence. Truck drivers and sales representatives would be debriefed on a regular basis to get first-hand intelligence.
Bloodworth used the cover of multinationals such as Motorola, Coca-Cola and Hewlett Packard, together with the more grass-roots retailers such as Hindustan Lever, to ensure that America would know as soon as India conducted unusual military operations anywhere again.
Now, many years later, he was the National Security Advisor, a friend of the President, with an eye automatically glancing towards the sub-continent. The media, and therefore the American public, might ignore it, but Bloodworth knew it was the most explosive place on earth. The photographs in front of him confirmed reports he had been getting from the ground. India was moving a formidable force of armoured vehicles and artillery towards the border with Pakistan. The operation was being run from the Southern Command Headquarters at Pune near Bombay, or Mumbai, as India’s financial capital was now called.
The analysts had identified Soviet-made 130mm and 152mm guns mounted on Vijayanta chassis, British-made 140mm guns, together with the British 105mm self-propelled Abbot gun and the Indian Pinaka multi-barrel rocket-launchers. The network of Soviet surface-to-air missile systems was being increased with extra batteries installed in camouflaged positions throughout Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and the Punjab — the 2S6 Tungushka air-defence systems working with the Indian Akash missiles. Twenty SA-316B Chetak observation and liaison helicopters had been identified off-base, together with five Mi-25 and six Mi-35 Hind attack helicopters. Two extra mountain infantry battalions had been moved from the Northern Headquarters at Udhampur and were taking up position close to the LoC at Kargil. Columns of regular troops, travelling mostly at night, were pouring into Kashmir. But what worried Bloodworth more than anything was the activity much further south in Rajasthan, with tanks moving out from bases in Jaisalmer and Bikaner, mainly the older Soviet-made T-55s and T-72s. But north of there around the city of Amritsar several of the new T-90s had been spotted, together with the updated version of the indigenous Arjun main battle tank.