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Operation Hornet

R&AW launched an operation in Paris and London to neutralise UK-based Pakistani national Abdul Khan who was sheltering extremists and planning attacks in India with the help of ISI and renegade Indian businessmen Balwant, Harbakhsh Singh ++

++ BN Sandhu, Avtaar Sethi and Harpreet Ahuja. Indian agent Sanjeev Jindal was given clearance by his pop star of spies boss Anuj Bharadwaj to swing into action. With foreign operatives Clarke and Sophie, he foiled the plot and Khan was shot dead.

At the Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris, in November 1984, Sanjeev Jindal was lost in thought.... ‘Sir, we need to launch an operation… My information suggests ISI chief Akhtar Abdur Rahman is directly supervising the operation….’

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Sophie’s Choice: This was the beginning of Operation Hornet. Jindal had already identified the spy to be posted in London. The officer codenamed Mohan Narayanan had earlier worked in Prague. Sometime in late January 1985, Jindal was at Café Aida in Landstrasse, Vienna.++

He had waited for almost a week for this meeting with his old informer Sophie Klor. Jindal, known by a different name at the time, had dumped her two years earlier at the end of an operation he had run in Austria. It is not unusual for an intelligence officer to dump her ++

or his source or informer once the job is done. There are no permanent relationships in the world of espionage.

Everyone has an expiry date. But Sophie was perhaps an exception. Like the R&AW’s other subconscious agents in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, ++

she transferred money to moles, trained new assets in the target country and occasionally ran assets on behalf of the handler. But renewing contact with a subconscious agent was something he had never done before. ‘Just be honest with me. ++

I am getting worried about your sudden reappearance,’ said Sophie. ‘Do you know where Harpreet Ahuja is?’ Jindal asked. ‘The Indian guy who worked with our organisation? He left about a year ago. Why are you looking for him?’ ‘I want you to dig him out for me,’ ++

Jindal said, placing an envelope containing $10,000 on the table. ‘Don’t worry. Harpreet has always been nice to me.’ Sophie winked at him and left the café.

The London team, Narayanan and Clarke, had used cash to lure Abdul Khan’s gardener, a Pakistani named Tariq Siddiqui. ++

The list included officials from the ISI, the Pakistani army and Pakistan’s civil servants, as well as Sandhu and the two aides who were supposedly Sandhu’s bodyguards and another Indian… Harbakhsh Singh. ++

He also passed on classified information about Sandhu’s and Harbakhsh’s impending visit to Islamabad in February. After Narayanan paid him $5,000, Tariq promised to give him the letter. One document about a money transfer from a bank was significan, ++

the details about the key players arriving at Khan’s house gave the R&AW top brass valuable insights into the ISI’s plans and intentions.

At their meeting at Café Aida, Sophie recounted her hunt for Harpreet Ahuja. It had taken her to Salzburg, Bregenz and finally to Innsbruck.+

She told Jindal about going out with Ahuja on a date. ‘My priorities are clear. I can’t let this man slip out of our hands,’ Jindal said.

Jindal recruited Ahuja in Austria that April. Upon agreeing to work for the R&AW as a spy, Ahuja was given the codename Einsiedler.

But before the British could act, Harbakhsh disappeared from London overnight. Jindal and Bhardwaj suspected that he had been evacuated by the ISI before British security officials could interrogate him on his links with militants and Pakistan. ++

A source based in Pakistan informed Bhardwaj about the arrival of Harbakhsh and his family in Rawalpindi, in the neighborhood of Islamabad.

Sethi took a circuitous route to Paris in order to avoid ISI surveillance on his movements. Bhardwaj ++

Jindal and Narayanan held two day-long meetings with the dangerous financier of terrorism in India. In Jindal’s words, Sethi sang nonstop. He shared the smallest details of the Sandhu-Khan network, revealing the role of ISI officers posted under diplomatic covers in London. ++

The ISI had a special detachment in London for the India operation and a team of six officers had been deployed to create and continue sponsoring terrorist networks to carry out activities inside India. At the time, an ISI officer named Mahmood was running Sandhu and Khan. ++

Sethi said he was not aware if the ISI was handling any other anti-India module.

He provided a list of the officers, profiles of people connected to Khan and Sandhu, and above all, names of recruits in India who he believed were staunch supporters of the network.++

In the meantime, he forwarded the names of the Indian module to the R&AW headquarters. Jindal was informed sometime in April that eighteen people on the list had been neutralized in a covert operation and they had launched a manhunt for nine others. ++

The conversation among the network involving Khan, Sandhu and the ISI officers revealed a plan to expand the operation and the Pakistani intelligence officers assured substantial sums of money for the attacks. ++

In July and August, Bhardwaj was informed by his contacts in British counterintelligence agencies that the Pakistanis had been told to shut shop.

New plans were made every day to ambush Khan’s remaining network but none worked out because Bhardwaj was against covert action ++

in British territory. In the first week of May 1987, Narayanan informed him that Abdul Khan was planning to visit his hometown, Lahore, sometime in June. His plan was to meet the newly appointed ISI chief, Lt General Hamid Gul. ++

Jindal and Bhardwaj decided that Abdul Khan had to be killed in Lahore. The terror financier was gunned down by two motorcycle-borne men as he entered his house that fateful day in June. He was shot nine times in the head and the neck.++

The Lahore police believed that the killing was the result of an old business rivalry but the ISI knew it was the R&AW that had chased and killed the fountainhead of terror. At his burial, a R&AW asset noticed that flowers had been sent from Hamid Gul.
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THE LONDON team, Narayanan and Clarke, had used cash to lure Abdul Khan’s gardener, a Pakistani named Tariq Siddiqui. The list included officials from the ISI, the Pakistani army and Pakistan’s civil servants, as well as Sandhu and the two aides who were supposedly ++

Sandhu’s bodyguards and another Indian… Harbakhsh Singh.

JINDAL RECRUITED Ahuja in Austria that April. Upon agreeing to work for the R&AW as a spy, Ahuja was given the codename Einsiedler. But before the British could act, Harbakhsh disappeared from London overnight.++

From Kabul to Kathmandu, from London to Paris and Innsbruck, to Islamabad and Colombo, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) ran exciting operations using money, analysis, psy-ops, wet work and the occasional honey trap finally leading to Pakistani Abdul Khan shot dead.

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