Decoding A 1980s-Era Espionage Operation

Thus far, only one senior Indian Air Force (IAF) has gone public (see below) with a much-publicised espionage operation that had been mounted by the US in the early 1980s inside India.

In March 1983, India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) finally had the proof it wanted. Singh was approached by AVM (Ret’d) Kenneth Larkins on March 20 and asked whether he would consider passing on classified manuals of USSR-supplied MiG-23MFs and MiG-25Rs in the Indian Air Force (IAF) inventory. On March 24, Singh informed AVM Raghavendran that the approach had been made and that Larkins had promised him Rs.30,000 for each manual. Singh was instructed to pass on a classified manual on the MiG-23MF’s avionics suite, which he did when Larkins visited him in his office at IAF Headquarters on April 3. On April 5, Larkins returned the manual along with a preliminary payment of Rs.10,000. When shown the details of the surveillance, Frank Larkins quickly confessed. His 10-page confession led to the arrest of two more members of the spy ring, Jaspal Singh Gill, a Delhi-based businessman and his employee, Lt Col (Ret’d) Jasbir Singh. He was recruited by a CIA operative who was an Attache at the US Embassy. He in turn recruited the Larkins brothers who were asked to recruit more people. The original CIA operative had left India in 1982 and handed over the network to Harry L Weatherbee, the CIA man named in Larkins' confession who was given 24 hours to leave India after the spy ring was busted in early November. OnNovember 3, 1983 a posse of officers from the Special Branch of Delhi Police accompanied by IB sleuths quietly arrested Maj Gen (Ret’d) Frank Larkins from his Vasant Vihar house. AVM Kenneth Larkins was picked up simultaneously from his hometown of Lucknow just one week before he was scheduled to emigrate to Australia where his daughter lives.

However, it is now possible to connect two separate but related operations together, thanks to this book (see above) that was published early during the previous decade. From the contents of this book, one can safely infer that the wealth of information being supplied to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) since 1978 by Adolf Tolkachev, the Leading Systems Designer for the Scientific Research Institute for Radio-Engineering (Phazotron NIIR), was found to be too good to be true and consequently the CIA required a second source for confirming the authenticity of all the data that Tolkachev was providing. And that was the precise reason why the CIA launched a covert data-gathering operation in India by targetting those very weapon systems of USSR-origin that were then beginning to enter service with the Indian Air Force and Indian Army.

Over a six-year period (1978-1985), Tolkachev met with his CIA handlers 21 times on the streets of Moscow. Documentation supplied by Tolkachev by late 1983 had included: complete sets of engineering and technical data-packages of Phazatron NIIR’s Phazotron NIIR's N-003 Sapfir-23 X-band pulse-Doppler radar for the MiG-23MF, the 385kg N-019 Rubin RPLK-29/Sapfir-29 X-band pulse-Doppler radar with twist-cassegrain antenna and its successor, the NO19MP Topaz—both meant for the MiG-29B-12 and MiG-29B-13; complete sets of engineering and technical data-packages of JSC V Tikhomirov Scientific Research Institute of Instrument Design’s N-001 Myech/RPLK-27 X-band pulse-Doppler radar with twist-cassegrain antenna for the Su-27SK; complete sets of engineering and technical data-packages of the Zaslon RP-31/N-007 X-bnd PESA radar on-board the MiG-31; complete sets of engineering and technical data-packages of the Shmel 3-D radar for the Beriev A-50 AEW & CS from NPO Vega; and complete sets of engineering and technical data-packages of both 2K12 Kub MR-SAM family and the Buk-М1 MR-SAM. The Soviet news agency TASS announced on October 22, 1986 that he had been executed.