Starting 1981 until 1986, the United States covertly sold arms to Iran during its long war with Iraq. The arms sale was illegal as it had been banned by the US Congress. And the money from the sales was funnelled into funding the “Contras” fighting the communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

As the details of the Iran-Contra deal shook the world, the Ronald Reagan administration’s first defence was that it was a “rogue” operation, not authorised by the National Security Council headed by the US president. The “rogue” in this case was Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a US Marine in the council. 

After the initial denial, Reagan took full responsibility for the scandal – but only for the part relating to the arms sale in Iran. He claimed it was done to bring home hostages being held by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and denied all knowledge of the Contra link. Oliver North and his boss, national security advisor John Poindexter, were fired.

Closer home, Pakistan is the country that has often fallen back on the “rogue” operatives trope when confronted with evidence of state complicity in its support of terrorists. Most famously, it used this trope in the discovery of Osama bin Laden in a house in Abbottabad in the neighbourhood of the Pakistan Military Academy. Some would say this was to hide its own involvement in Operation Neptune Spear, the CIA-led US Navy Seal mission in which OBL was caught and killed in that Abbottabad house.

India has always sneered at Pakistan’s rogue claims, calling it out as a ploy for plausible deniability. But now, the wheel seems to have come full circle. 

In November 2023, the US alleged an Indian government official was involved in a plot to assassinate Sikh separatist leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. The plot was subsequently prevented by undercover US agents. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Indian authorities investigating the plot had found the involvement of “rogue operatives” and that the operation had no official authorisation.

The new twist to the Pannun case is not without its own questions. Experienced hands in the espionage game say blaming rogue operatives for the Pannun operation is “as good as an admission of guilt”. Genuine rogue operations – where the head does not know it’s being wagged by the tail – in intelligence agencies do take place. But they are rare in countries that pride themselves on the deep institutional character of their national security agencies. Yugoslavia at the time of its breakup is cited as an example of an intelligence free-for-all.

In some cases, unauthorised operations can be a result of rivalries between security agencies of the same country. In 2012, retired General VK Singh, who had just completed his controversial tenure as army chief,, was accused of using the army’s technical services division to carry out wire-taps on the then defence minister. The allegation then was that Gen Singh had carried out a “rogue” operation.

If the Pannun plot was indeed masterminded by a rogue in India’s Research & Analysis Wing, it constitutes a serious breach. It’s also a self-downgrade – an admission of leadership failure, that the bosses had no idea the rogues were playing such a high-stakes game under their noses – that can have damaging consequences on the organisation’s credibility. 

Both the attempt to kill Pannun and the involvement of an Indian official in the plot were first revealed in a chargesheet filed by US investigators in a court in New York. The charges, which used evidence gathered from intercepted calls and messages, named an Indian businessman, Nikhil Gupta, as a conspirator in the case. It withheld the name of a co-conspirator – identified in the document only as CC1 – but described him as working for the Indian government.

The chargesheet quoted CC1 as identifying himself to Gupta as a “senior field officer” previously working in a central paramilitary organisation with responsibilities in “intelligence” and “security management”. CC1 arranged for an advance of $15,000 to be paid in cash to Gupta’s “criminal source” who was, in fact, an undercover agent, as was the hitman to whom the money was paid as part of a total deal of $100,000 for the assassination.

RAW insiders say a senior field officer is not high up in the organisation’s hierarchy. But if he was acting without authorisation, his ability to raise and transfer funds to Gupta in a foreign country suggests only two explanations: an impressive and enviable independent network of “rogues”, literally a parallel establishment; or official sanction.

Assuming the operation was unauthorised, it is puzzling that the Indian national security apparatus made no effort to find out who was doing Delhi the favour of eliminating (or plotting to eliminate) its declared enemies on foreign soil – and why. This includes the murder of Canada-based Khalistani activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June 2023.

On social media, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval was being directly credited for several killings of Khalistanis and Kashmiri or Pakistani militants in Lahore, Karachi and in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, the death of one Khalistani leader in the UK, and Nijjar in Canada. He was hailed as India’s James Bond as social media warriors congratulated him and themselves on RAW’s transformation into a gun slinging organisation. But some also warned that the operations could have been masterminded by Pakistan’s ISI to give India a bad name.

Had the RAW been curious about the killings in June, then the claimed rogues within the organisation might have been discovered much earlier. It would have helped Delhi better manage the Canadian allegations, first made public in September, about an Indian hand in the Nijjar killing and also avoid the unpleasantness with Washington. 

Instead, Delhi chose an epic meltdown with Canada. And the Pannun plotcast a shadow over otherwise sunny US-India relations and is widely believed to be a reason why President Joe Biden did not accept India’s invitation to be chief guest at this year’s Republic Day parade. As it happened, it was sustained US pressure over nearly five months that forced India to announce its investigation last November – and only after details spilled into the open with the indictment of Messrs Gupta and CC1.

Delhi has apparently conveyed its findings to Washington and shifted out the person identified as CC1. There has been no official statement in this regard either from India or the US State Department. But on the day Bloomberg published its report, Donald Lu, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, told a US congressional hearing that Indian authorities need to carry out a quick and transparent investigation and ensure that justice is done.

However, the American record also shows willingness to accept “rogue” explanations where expedient. For years, the US displayed remarkable tolerance of ISI’s “rogue theories” – regarding bin Laden, the Indian embassy bombing in Kabul, the bombing of the US embassy, and others – because it needed Pakistan’s cooperation during the war in Afghanistan.

In the Iran-Contra case, several officials were indicted. Some of those convicted, like Oliver North, were later acquitted by courts. And the remaining received pardons from Reagan’s successor George HW Bush, who was vice-president during the scandal and was himself under a cloud for his possible involvement in it.

Given India’s current importance to the US on China and in its wider geopolitical calculus in the Indo-Pacific and West Asia, a similar willingness to accommodate India’s “rogue” explanation would not come as a surprise.

That still leaves the puzzle of the Nijjar killing, which was linked to the Pannun case by CC1. According to the chargesheet, CC1 was quick to share with Gupta a video clip of the Nijjar killing, “just hours” after the incident on June 18 in Surrey in Canada’s British Columbia. The next day, Gupta told the “hitman” that Nijjar “was also the target” and “we have so many targets”. Now to see if Canada will also be given the same “rogue” explanation, and if Trudeau, with far higher political stakes in Canadian Sikh constituencies, will accept it.

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