Real-life story behind Indian spy novel revealed

Book cover

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A few years ago, Maloy Krishna Dhar, a longtime veteran of India’s Central Intelligence Bureau (CIB), wrote Mission to Pakistan, a spy novel about the ongoing intelligence war between nuclear powers India and Pakistan. Since 2002, when the novel was published, Dhar has maintained that the exploits of his protagonist, an undercover Indian spy leading a double life inside the Pakistani armed forces, were based on the true story of an unnamed CIB agent who was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It now appears that the real-life story behind the book is that of Ravindra Kaushik, an accredited CIB agent who moved to Pakistan from Dubai, converted to Islam, married a Pakistani woman, and joined the country’s Army under the cover name “Nabi Ahmed”. Kaushik grew up in Sri Ganganagar, a town just a few miles from the Pakistani border in India’s state of Rajasthan. In the early 1970s, he was recruited by CIB and was stationed in Dubai. It was from there that he moved to Pakistan with a fake Pakistani passport and began his double life. But in 1983, Inayat Masiha, an Indian intelligence operative who was captured by Pakistani counterintelligence agents, blew Kaushik’s cover. The undercover spy was arrested soon afterwards, and jailed in the central Pakistani city of Multan. He reportedly died there in 2002, aged 50. His brother, Rajeshwar Kaushik, who spoke to India’s Hindustan Times, told the paper that three days before his death, Ravindra sent his relatives in India a bitter letter, complaining that “[h]ad I been an American, I would have been out of this jail in three days”.