Earlier this month, a senior Lashkar-eTaiba commander did something no LeT figure has done before. In a video that surfaced online on August 3, Rizwan Hanif, the group’s deputy chief for Pakistan occupied Kashmir, told a gathering of terrorists that more than 30, and at one point nearly 40, members of the outfit had been killed by “unknown gunmen” across Peshawar, Karachi, Rawalpindi, Muzaffarabad and Rawalakot over the past three to four years. He blamed Indian intelligence agencies directly. Later, Indian security agencies verified the authenticity of the video and confirmed that the man in it is a senior Lashkar terrorist wanted by India. The Sunday Guardian’s previous reports had revealed how Pakistan-based commanders and cadre of Lashkar, Jaishe-Mohammed and other anti-India terror groups had gone underground or taken up blue-collar jobs and farming over the last one and a half decades, fearing for their lives in the wake of killings by unknown gunmen.
They had also complained that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence, had failed to protect them from “RAA”, as they refer to Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India’s external intelligence agency, which will complete 58 years of existence next month. There was no Indian announcement claiming credit for those killings. There rarely is. Research and Analysis Wing does not confirm its operations, leaving adversaries’ admissions, often unverifiable and shaped by their own propaganda interests, among the few public traces of its activities. That pattern is more than fifty years old. A declassified memorandum of 19 September 1973, Oval Office meeting between then US President Richard Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto records a discussion over the American military supply relationship with Pakistan.
The conversation came in the context of Washington’s efforts to maintain military support for Pakistan despite congressional restrictions. Nixon told Bhutto that the United States had discussed with the Shah of Iran the transfer of military equipment to Pakistan and that former CIA director Richard Helms would visit Pakistan. “We are going to play this in a very low profile,” Nixon said. Kissinger then raised the problem of using Iran as a channel for moving equipment into Pakistan. “How can Pakistan get equipment that Indian intelligence does not learn about immediately?” he asked, adding that the Indians would “make a storm in a teacup” over even a small quantity of matériel reaching Pakistan. The exchange, preserved in the US government’s Foreign Relations of the United States archive, offers a rare contemporaneous window into how Indian intelligence was viewed in Washington and Islamabad just five years after R&AW’s creation in 1968.
It does not describe an R&AW operation, identify a source or explain how India obtained information about Pakistani military procurement. What it records is narrower but significant: two governments trying to arrange military supplies were working on the assumption that Indian intelligence could learn about the movement almost immediately. Much of R&AW’s history remains outside the public record by design. Intelligence agencies do not publish their sources or operational successes. Records such as the Kissinger-Bhutto memorandum therefore assume importance because they show how foreign governments assessed India’s intelligence reach and incorporated it into their own calculations. The Kissinger-Bhutto exchange came less than two years after the 1971 IndiaPakistan war, when Washington was closely tracking India’s military posture and the crisis unfolding in East Pakistan. A 25 May 1971, memorandum from National Security Council staffers Samuel Hoskinson and Richard Kennedy to Kissinger, prepared ahead of a Washington Special Action Group meeting on IndiaPakistan, described substantial Indian Army forces along the East Pakistan border as being on high alert. It said intelligence reports indicated that India was taking military preparatory measures along the western border, including the dispersal of fighter aircraft and possibly moving additional combat troops and armour into forward areas.
The same memorandum recorded US assessments of Indian military preparations and possible contingency planning as Washington considered the risk of a wider India-Pakistan war. None of this establishes that R&AW supplied Washington’s intelligence picture. India had multiple military and intelligencegathering channels in 1971, but it was a common knowledge who was leading the series of covert activities at that time. What the record does show is the environment in which R&AW was operating as it matured. On 4 May, the US Embassy in New Delhi had already raised with Foreign Minister Swaran Singh allegations concerning the training and arming of Bengali freedom fighters inside India, which Singh rejected. By the end of May, US officials were incorporating Indian military preparations on both fronts into their assessment of the possibility of war. What connects 1973 to 2026 is not any single operation but the nature of the available evidence. There is no Indian claim of victory in the Kissinger memorandum and no R&AW statement explaining how Pakistani procurement may have become known to India. There is instead a foreign government’s private acknowledgement that Indian intelligence was a factor that had to be planned around.
The Hanif video presents a similar evidentiary limitation, but from the opposite direction. In 1973, US and Pakistani officials were privately discussing how to prevent Indian intelligence from detecting military supplies to Pakistan. In 2026, a senior Lashkar commander is publicly alleging that Indian intelligence was responsible for the deaths of members of his organisation. Pakistani officials have made similar allegations to international outlets since at least 2021, claiming Indian involvement in a series of killings of wanted terrorists on Pakistani soil. New Delhi has consistently rejected such allegations. Neither the 1973 memorandum nor the 2026 video proves an R&AW operation. The two records nevertheless illustrate the impact of an intelligence agency whose activities are rarely acknowledged publicly. Its history is often visible through the calculations of governments and organisations on the other side of its operations, in what they sought to conceal, what they tried to plan around and, in some cases, what they later claimed had happened. There was no Indian claim of responsibility in either record.
What survives in the public record instead are the calculations of those on the other side: in 1973, American and Pakistani officials were concerned that Indian intelligence could quickly detect military equipment entering Pakistan; in 2026, a senior Lashkar commander publicly attributed the deaths of members of his organisation to Indian intelligence.
