New Delhi’s 113-year old Delhi Gymkhana club has been asked to vacate its premises by June 5, 2026. The eviction notice from the central government cites ‘national security, defense infrastructure’ and ‘urgent public interest’ in taking over the 27-acre club, located a stone’s throw away from the Prime Minister’s residence on 7 Lok Kalyan Marg. The club with its manicured lawns, two dozen tennis courts, a swimming pool, a wooden-floored ballroom, and multiple bars, serves Delhi’s elite. Nearly fifty years ago, the club was also a drop site for the egregious leak of Indian military secrets. This incident was detailed in granular detail in ‘See No Evil’, the 2002 autobiography of a former CIA agent Robert Baer.
The Gymkhana Club then was one of the places where spies disguised as diplomats could mingle with Indian officials, bypassing government rules forbidding contact with foreign nationals. Spies could also enter the club and shake off determined ‘tails’ from India’s Intelligence Bureau.
The story began in the late 1970s with the arrival of Baer, a freshly minted CIA agent to the US Embassy. The Cold War was then at its peak. NATO and Warsaw Pact armies stood ranged against each other, on hair-trigger alert, across Europe. Among the growing mass of military hardware were some cutting edge Soviet platforms that caused the West serious worry.
If the Cold War burst into a hot war, titanium-hulled Alfa class interceptor submarines would barrel down the Atlantic Ocean to hunt NATO warships, stratosphere-skimming MiG-25 ’Foxbats’ would shoot down US bombers, and on the ground, a new battle tank, the T-72 would lead Soviet armoured spearheads across the Fulda Gap into West Germany.
The Pentagon and the CIA pursued these advancement in Soviet hardware with relentless zeal— to understand their capabilities, detect their vulnerabilities and field countermeasures.
The T-72 was of great interest to the Pentagon. A 41-tonne medium tank that was a generational leap over the older T-55s and T-62s, it was armed with a new 125 smoothbore gun that fired kinetic energy rounds at 1,800 meters per second, several hundred meters per second more than Western tanks. Its glacis— the sloped frontal part of the tank— was protected by ceramic/steel laminate armour, it had a laser rangefinder, an auto-loader which eliminated the need for a fourth crew member. The tank reached full scale production in 1979, when the USSR produced 2,000 T-72s that year.
The West relied on intelligence coups like the defection of Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko who flew his MiG-25 into Japan in 1976. Western engineers took the jet apart to understand the secrets behind the world’s fastest jet. But such coups were rare. It was difficult to persuade someone to not just betray his country but also take a piece of sensitive military technology while doing so.
So, the next best thing was to rely on what the CIA called SOVMAT— Soviet military manuals, which minutely detailed the capabilities of the hardware. The CIA efforts to vacuum SOVMAT extended into the Warsaw Pact countries and interestingly, India. By the 1970s, India had become the biggest buyer of Soviet hardware— tanks to fighter jets and submarines.
‘Since the Soviets typically would sell India their most advanced weapons, it had also become the most important country in the world for vacuuming up information on the Soviet military,’ Baer writes.
In 1978 the Indian Indian Army directly imported the first batch of 500 T-72, T-72M and the T-72M1 tanks from the Soviet Union. The CIA station in New Delhi intensified its efforts to obtain information on the Indian Army’s newest acquisition. Baer claims these efforts ranged from trying to get an Indian military contact to do a ‘Belenko’— drive a T-72 tank across the border into Pakistan to bribing a contact in a tank depot to drill a core sample into a T-72 hull to understand its armour composition. These efforts came to nought.
There was also the constant threat of surveillance by India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), an agency which Baer calls ‘focused, disciplined and tough’. The IB could field thousands and thousands of surveillants on foot and in cars. Their job was to keep a watch on foreign diplomats, particularly spies. A few years before Baer was posted in Delhi, the IB caught a CIA case officer with several sub-sources. The case officer and the station chief in Delhi were sent home and Indian operations were shut down for almost two years. The IB was one reason Baer says ‘India was one of the toughest operating environments in the world.’
Sometime in late August, Baer hit an intelligence jackpot. One of his Indian agents brought him a duffel bag filled with T-72 tank manuals.
‘The T-72 tank manuals were the Holy Grail we’d been after for years, the keys to the kingdom of knowledge. My heart started racing, especially when the agent said he had to have them back in two hours. The sergeant who had borrowed the manuals needed to return them to the safe before he went off duty. There wasn’t enough time to go to the office, copy them, and run a good counter surveillance route. Worse, at that hour New Delhi would be crawling with IB, but I could take them that night or maybe never.’
Baer chose to take the manuals. He slammed on the brakes, pushed the agent out of the car and yelled at him to meet me in two hours behind guest house number three at Delhi’s Gymkhana Club.
At the US Embassy, Baer copied the tank manuals. He had exactly 17 minutes to drive back to the Gymkhana Club. By now there were three pairs of car lights behind him which he hints at being his IB surveillants. By the time he pulled through the Gymkhana’s gates, the three pairs of lights had grown to five.
‘In my rearview mirror I watched them file through the gates one by one. The closest car was maybe ten feet from my rear bumper. There wasn’t any more road, but I kept going- right down a gravel walking path between two tennis courts. I figured they wouldn’t follow me. I was right. All five cars stopped in front of the club’s main building and started deploying on foot. I hit the brakes, stuffed the duffel bags with the manuals in it into a tennis bag, and ducked between two tamarind trees. Footsteps echoed behind me as I followed a path bordered by tall myrtle until I came to a protected section of the hedge that fronted guest house number three. I could see the agent’s shadow through the foliage, right where I had told him to be. Without stopping, I pulled the duffel bag out of the tennis bag and tossed through the hedge in one quick motion. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the agent pick it up and walk away.’
Baer then entered the Gymkhana’s bar through the back door. ‘The place was empty except for a distinguished Indian gentleman in a three-piece suit, sitting alone and reading a newspaper. I walked over and sat next to him. Without saying a word, I summoned a waiter and ordered two double Scotches, straight up and no ice, for both of us. It wasn’t until I struck up a conversation as if we were old friends that he looked like he might run for it.’
When the CIA agent glanced at the back door, he saw two IB surveillants looking at the two of them. ‘I could tell that their interest was quickly narrowing down to the Indian gentleman, trying to figure out why I had been in such a hurry to come see him. By the time they got around to questioning him, the agent would have long cleared the area and returned the manuals to the sergeant.’
Copies of the tank manuals made their way back to the CIA headquarters in Langley, and to the Pentagon. Interestingly, a 1982 CIA SWOT analysis of the T-72 tank based its observations on the T-72M export model of the tank. One of its biggest strengths, a fire control system superior to previous versions, which used optical gyrostabilised sights and automatic changes in the ballistic cam when different types of ammunition were selected. A critical weakness the CIA observed, the T-72 had extremely poor night fighting capabilities, its thermal sights had a range of just 800 metres.
These revelations would have been shared with the US military industrial complex— Chrysler defence was then producing the new MBT the M1 Abrams and Hughes Aircraft making the Javelin anti-tank missile. The intelligence might also have been given to the Pakistan Army, a frontline US ally and potential Abrams buyer.
After a three-year stint in Delhi, Baer went on to serve in the Middle East where his exploits framed him as one of the CIA’s most celebrated field agents in that geography. He quit the agency in 1997, around the time a handful of field agents had begun worrying about the threat posed to American interests by a former Mujahideen fighter, Osama bin Laden.
Baer finished writing his book just two months after the CIA’s most spectacular intelligence failure— the September 11, 2001 ‘ 9/11’ attacks. The attacks were masterminded by bin Laden, a civil engineer brought in by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The title of Baer’s book ‘See No Evil’ is a dig on the CIA’s post Cold War bureaucratisation, when the agency fell in love with technology and got rid of human intelligence assets. This led to intelligence failures like missing 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta openly recruiting suicide bombers from a mosque in Hamburg for a spectacular strike on the US.
Baer’s book hit the stands in 2002 after being cleared by the CIA’s Publications Review Board which eliminated classified information from it. Strangely, the book went unnoticed in India.
The book was adapted into a critically acclaimed 2005 film ‘Syriana’ starring George Clooney, playing a character loosely modelled on Baer. The CIA activities in India were unrelenting continuing well beyond the Cold War. In 1987, the CIA honey trapped KV Unnikrishnan, the R&AW station chief in Madras. In 1996, a senior IB official Ratan Sehgal was forced to retire following his contact with the CIA station chief in Delhi. In 2004 Rabinder Singh, a senior R&AW officer and long time US mole, defected to the US with his wife.
The identities of the mystery men who provided Baer the T-72 tank manuals at the Delhi Gymkhana were never disclosed. What other national secrets did these spies betray to foreign agencies ? And more importantly, are they still active?
We may never know.
Source: India Today
