Authors: Adrian Levy
‘
A humdilallah
[by the grace of God], we have given you the list.’ The man was not ready to play games.
Tikoo tried another tack. ‘You are ringing me. You made this call. I am now authorised to talk to you, so can you
please
tell me, for God’s sake, how do we start? OK: “these people”. Who is the first? Who is the second? Who is the last? Which category? How did you choose them? Do you get me? I am trying to sort this out. I don’t want you to have to kill. Look, this conversation is now fifteen minutes old. I am sure you would like to break off and call me tomorrow. You call me at another number, and I will try to get permission to help you.’ He gave the caller his home telephone number. ‘Call me later, at 3 p.m. And at my home. You give me an order for who we release, etc. We can end this. We can sort this out. You and me.’
There was a long pause. ‘By the grace of God, good night.’
He had done it. Had he done it? The intermediary had not said no, so Tikoo thought he had just got himself another twenty-four hours.
‘Good night,’ Tikoo said, noticing how sweaty his hands were, and folding up his notes. Suddenly he was back in the plain surroundings
of Saklani’s bedroom. He rushed downstairs, eager to share the news. But the Security Advisor was preoccupied with another matter, and simply showed Tikoo the door. ‘Keep up the good work, old chap,’ he said. The IG Crime slid back into his white Ambassador, and was driven to his bungalow on Transport Lane, just north of Maulana Azad Road, behind the Holy Family church.
Outside his front door was a little-used exercise bicycle. He was going to have to get back into shape, he recalled thinking. He was surprised at how that disembodied voice had got under his skin. It was the kind of voice he heard in jail cells and holding centres every day. But the telephone conversation, where neither of them could see the other, had felt perilous. Five lives hung by the copper telephone wire, and upon his canny knack of ‘walking into a shitstorm’ with no gloves, or even a hat.
The modest rooms he shared with his wife were all civil-service-issue brown beams and cream walls. A bathroom was off to the right, and his golf bag leaned against the wall in one corner. The dressing table in front of him faced a large window: ‘We looked out onto a brick wall. Beyond that wall was another. And then the wide-open greens of the SP College playing fields. So I almost had a view.’
For Jane, Julie, Cath and Anne, who knew almost nothing about the back channel, other than that it had just commenced, every day felt as if it could be the last. They were relieved by the news from their liaison, Altaf Ahmed, that the deadline had been nudged back an inch, but to them it still felt as if a gigantic boulder stood before the mouth of a cave in which the captives were being held. Then on 15 July Saklani asked them to hold another press conference, ‘so as to encourage al Faran to keep talking’. The women had only just recovered from the first one, but they reluctantly agreed, so long as Saklani could find a less formal and formidable venue this time.
Suzanne Goldenberg, a foreign correspondent for the
Guardian
, grabbed a seat in the garden of the state guesthouse. How exhausted they look, she wrote as they took their seats in a shady corner, and wondered if any of them would stand the pace. Cath set things off,
reading from a script: ‘We are glad to hear from al Faran that the five hostages are in good health. But we repeat that the five are merely innocent tourists and are not responsible for the situation.’
Goldenberg could not take her eyes off Julie, who rested her head on Jane’s shoulder, tears brimming. Anne stared at a vanishing point beyond the garden, as if she was in another time and country. All of them looked bewildered. Were they aware of what Indian intelligence had advised the press, Goldenberg wondered. In her report, she would write: ‘In the past two months, tension in the Kashmir Valley has risen after the destruction of Charar-e-Sharief.’ She noted also that one spy had told her: ‘After Mr Childs’ escape the remaining hostages had been stripped and beaten … they had since been forbidden to sleep in their clothes. Shoes, too, had been confiscated.’ She had heard from local journalists that there were said to be sixteen men guarding the hostages, some of whom were believed to have been involved in the 1994 kidnappings of Kim Housego and David Mackie. The story doing the rounds this morning was that officers from IB and RAW, India’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, were linking the two events, even as New Delhi and Western diplomats were not. The spies, Goldenberg wrote, gave the impression of knowing intimate details about the kidnap drama, such as the beatings supposedly administered to the remaining hostages after John Childs’ escape. She suggested that this was either a crude attempt to blacken the Kashmiri militant outfits, or an indication that India had assets close to the captives. Perhaps they were readying themselves for a raid.
16 July, 3 p.m. Tikoo’s phone rang. He grabbed the receiver, hoping that something from the women’s press conference, which he had watched on the television news that morning, had reached the Pir Panjal mountains. ‘Hello, my friend,’ he began, reassured that the caller had rung at exactly the agreed time. ‘What can I do for you?’ He was off again, sight-reading and completely on his own, with no analysts standing in the wings, or psychologists listening in to offer another view. Only Tikoo, his new adversary, and a notepad – although he presumed that IB would be listening in from somewhere.
‘We want our comrades freed. Do not mess us around. There are lives at stake. Have you consulted? When will our demands be met? We need answers now!’
There was a different tone to the voice. The intermediary sounded tired, irritable and out of breath, as if he had had to run to make the call in time.
Tikoo, hoping to extend the deadline again, tried a different tack. ‘OK, my friend. I’ve been asking around. I’ve done the groundwork, but there are problems. Suppose I have to get someone from a prison in Rajouri, another from a prison in Jammu, someone else from Srinagar, or Agra, or Jaipur. How many people? What numbers? I need to know all the details, an order and a place to start. I told you this. A name to be the first. Have you brought the list and ordered it?’
In the silence that followed, Tikoo decided not to ask the man’s identity, tempted as he was. Deep down, as a specialist in intelligence and a lover of minutiae, he wanted to trade names and do a verbal handshake. ‘I must not put him off,’ he thought. ‘I wanted to say, “Are you the commander? The deputy commander?” So on and so forth.’ But he was concerned that this might make the man feel threatened.
‘You already have our demands,’ the caller said sullenly. Tikoo wrote every word down. His notes would be stored on file in Crime Branch headquarters.
The IG pressed home his advantage. ‘Well, my friend, what can I do? We must discuss some priorities with your demands. I told you to bring the list.’
‘I will ring back,’ said the caller grumpily. ‘You have until tomorrow. We will not kill the tourists until then. We will talk, and if you have concrete news then we can make progress.’
Was this what Tikoo was supposed to be doing? He had no idea, as no one had told him. But he rang off elated at having extended the deadline once again. If the authorities were looking for a way out, planning a raid, gathering intelligence, then he was playing his part. During the next call, on 17 July, he would pry a little, he told himself, gently applying pressure. This was becoming a passive-aggressive interrogation, and he was rather good at those. ‘We had our methods.
You may call it hot and cold, or good and bad. But I was pinpoint accurate at leveraging, and I knew how to squeeze a man.’
He was starting to feel that this crime could be solved. ‘Earlier we had done the same with Mr P.K. Sinha, an esteemed MLA [Member of the Legislative Assembly] from Bihar state, who had got himself kidnapped in Kashmir while on holiday,’ Tikoo recalled, referring to an incident that had taken place in May 1993. ‘It began all blood and death, with “cut off his head”. By Day Three the kidnappers told me: “Look, sir, we are in a bad shape. Make a raid and make it look like we put up a fight, and we will leave the MLA out in the field for you.”’ Tikoo had worked his magic, and the captors had reduced their demands to just two: ‘We’ll settle for some ammo and a couple of bulletproof jackets. Throw that in, and the useless politician is yours.’ Tikoo had done it, without telling anyone: the Bihari had walked free. The kidnappers kept their dignity. No one was the wiser. He hoped he was doing it again.
The price of being in the negotiator’s chair was that IG Tikoo knew little about how the police criminal inquiry into the kidnappings was progressing. Since 14 July he had been relieved of his normal duties, and only caught glimpses of what his officers were up to if he bumped into a colleague on the golf course or in the clubhouse.
These days he gleaned most about the case from television. He learned from the morning news that John Childs had been flown out of Kashmir on 10 July. Five days after that he was back in the United States, sweeping up his two daughters at Bradley International Airport in Connecticut, the string on the money pouch he had kept around his neck throughout his ordeal visible inside his shirt in the television footage. Tikoo was astonished: ‘Letting go of your main witness went against every rule in the book.’ Childs too had been perplexed by the speed with which he was hustled out of India, and told his family as much.
Tikoo began to dwell on the other potential obstacles that might impede the progress of this inquiry. The longer things ran on, the more chance there was of ‘a Kashmiri screw-up’, as he called it, a situation where internal conflicts led to an external crisis. Such things were normally triggered by the proliferation of army, paramilitary, intelligence and policing outfits in the valley, one of the most heavily militarised areas in the world. Despite Saklani’s Unified Command, which brought the heads of all of these security outfits together daily, the vicious competition between them continued, something that could potentially undermine the case.
From the start, Saklani had made it clear that the Indian Army was to be in charge of all efforts in the mountains to resolve the crisis. But the
yatra
pilgrimage was in full flow, with 150,000 Hindus heading for the Amarnath ice cave. Tikoo worried that protecting their security would distract the army from the plight of the five Westerners, forcing it to slow down or even stop its investigation until the pilgrimage was completed in early August, losing valuable weeks. The army, he believed, also had a problem with its temperament and methods. Although it was adept at eliminating militants and disrupting their networks, it was less comfortable with operations that demanded subtlety, or at taking a back seat while a peaceful solution was negotiated.
If the army was headstrong and unwilling to play second fiddle, India’s primary domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, IB and RAW, were slippery and opaque. Their intelligence was largely withheld from the local police, shared mostly in high government circles in Srinagar and New Delhi, and revealed only when it served the spooks’ (and India’s) agenda, which at the moment was to highlight Pakistan’s meddling in the valley and its involvement in acts of terrorism. Tikoo had watched as IB and RAW agents jumped on the kidnappings, making sure they became global news, with Pakistan portrayed as a state sponsor of terrorism. Tikoo went back to his paradigm about Governor’s Rule, in which intelligence both fed government with secrets and devised policy based on those secrets, making him worry that agents would feel they had little to gain by wrapping the case up quickly.
Was he being too cynical? He hoped so. He was wishing he had never begun this exercise, which was making him spiral into depression. He had to finish what he had started, and he mulled over how beneath the carnivorous army and the foot-dragging spies were the paramilitaries of the Indian CRPF and the BSF, both of which were bull-headed and also distracted by the
yatra
effort. These men’s primary skills involved raw firepower and indiscriminate brutal encounters, regardless of collateral damage (or evidence of guilt), which could lead to the five Westerners becoming victims of an
ill-thought-out mountain assault. At the very bottom of the pile was the Kashmiri police, which, unable to rely on the help of any of the groups above it, would have to create its own streams of intelligence, battering down doors and knocking heads together, playing to its strength, that of being the only truly grassroots agency that understood how Kashmiris thought and acted.
Meanwhile, as the various agencies ‘stovepiped’ information, bickering and sniping, the kidnappers’ clock continued to tick. And it would fall to Tikoo to explain to al Faran’s frontman on the line, whoever he was, why no decision on its demands was forthcoming. For this reason, Tikoo had decided to keep a transcript of all their conversations. He had a feeling that later on, he might need to defend himself.
Finally, he contemplated the potential repercussions of his necessary prevarication. Tikoo feared that it might lead to a slaughter in the mountains. He had been deliberating about the likelihood of a so-called ‘show kill’, the execution of one of the hostages early on in proceedings, an act calculated to demonstrate that al Faran had the guts to follow through, and would not tolerate being messed around. Death was a powerful tool, and many times Pakistan-backed militant groups had shown that they were willing to kill hostages, such as the shooting in cold blood of the Vice Chancellor of Kashmir University and his assistant in 1990 together with the general manager of Hindustan Machine Tools,
and the execution of Major Bhupinder Singh in 1994. Both of those murders had involved the Kashmiri militant known as Sikander, who Tikoo strongly suspected was behind these latest kidnappings. ‘I tried to put all these phantoms to one side,’ he recalled. ‘I had to keep my mind clear for the job at hand.’ The next deadline was fast approaching, and he needed to reassure al Faran’s intermediary that he remained open to all suggestions. Even if that was untrue.