Barnes: Did he write it?

New Delhi, Aug. 1: Intelligence experts have expressed serious doubts about Jaswant Singh’s mole letter, calling it a possible “disinformation piece” written by an Indian to confuse sections of the country’s polity.

Former spooks, experts at verifying the authenticity of documents, say the style, tense as well as the “contradictions” in the letter make its authenticity “highly suspicious”.

“Mr Jaswant Singh ought to advise his publishers to suspend the sale of this book till the authenticity of the letter is established,” B. Raman, former additional secretary, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), told The Telegraph.

“There are at least four or five points which indicate that the letter was not genuine,” another former Intelligence Bureau official said.

The most “glaring contradiction” that the experts point out relates to a crucial top secret meeting between then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and his security advisers in Bangalore in end-1995. The meeting was to decide India’s future course on nuclear missile testing in the wake of increasing American pressure to suspend them.

In the letter, a copy of which has been published in a magazine, the sender, former US ambassador to India Harry Barnes, according to Jaswant, initially talks of the Bangalore meeting in future tense.

“The Prime Minister has called a super secret meeting to be held in Bangalore to debate whether India should resume nuclear testing, deploy the Prithvi missile and take ‘other steps’,” it says.

After “the discussion” with the mole on the issue, the sender, according to the letter, spoke to a “junior official”. In this case, he refers to the same meeting in past tense.

“After this discussion, I had an hour-long debate/heated argument with a more junior official who had participated in the Bangalore conference, where he had been an advocate of incremental steps, including placing some Indian reactors under safeguards,” the letter says.

The style of writing and the spellings — the use of “defence” instead of “defense”, they say, also points to an Indian having written the letter. “One cannot be sure, but it certainly appears an Indian conjured this letter,” a top former IB official, who was in service at the time, said.

At one point in the letter — to US senator Thomas W. Graham — the sender expands the ACDA as the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, an American government body, while most other abbreviations were not expanded.

“If I had to write to a top government official, I would not specifically expand MEA while not expanding more non-obvious (for Indians) abbreviations,” Raman said.