India — The Battlefield Both CIA and KGB Fought Over

 

The full picture as admitted by both sides:

The CIA was running a magazine called Imprint in India — revealed decades later by CIA station chief Harry Rositzke himself. It was intended to counter the influence of Soviet magazines flooding the Indian market. Scroll.in

The CIA's own assessment was that the Soviets gave substantial financial assistance to Indira Gandhi's Congress (I), the two communist parties, and individual politicians of different political parties. They probably matched each other personnel for personnel inside India. Scroll.in

So here is the full picture that both the CIA and KGB eventually admitted: India was their most contested battleground in all of Asia. Both superpowers were running media operations, funding politicians, recruiting bureaucrats, and placing agents inside Indian institutions — all at the same time.

And in the middle of all this? RAW — born in 1968 with 250 officers and a converted theatre as an office — was expected to fight them both.

That it survived, and that India remained sovereign, is perhaps RAW's most underappreciated achievement of all.