PV Narasimha Rao misled Parliament on help to writer Seymour Hersh who called Morarji Desai a CIA mole

Morarji Desai

 PV Narasimha Rao

 NEW DELHI: PV Narasimha Rao, the then foreign minister, misled Parliament in the 1980s by insisting that Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who alleged that former prime minister Morarji Desai was a mole of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Cabinet, never contacted any Indian official before hurling the stunning charge in his bestseller 'The Price of Power'. Recently declassified documents establish that Hersh was in regular touch with Indian diplomats in the US and discussed the contents of his sensational book. In fact, the Indian diplomats helped him with books and articles, besides discussing classified information that Hersh had gathered from his US sources. The documents also show that Indian diplomats had pointed to Hersh, known for a string of global exposes, the error he had committed by saying that Desai was a member of Indira Gandhi's Cabinet during the 1971 Indo-Pak war. The veteran had parted ways with Congress after a bitter feud with the party in 1969. Hersh failed to correct the mistake in the first edition.
Hersh had contended in his 1983 book that Desai, a former senior minister in Indira Gandhi's Cabinet, had passed on information to the CIA and was paid $20,000 a year by the agency. Desai had dismissed the allegations as a "scandalous and malicious lie" and filed a $50 million libel suit against Hersh.
Morarji Desai never worked for us, CIA director had said
Former PM Morarji Desai was 93 by the time his $50 million libel suit against journalist Seymour Hersh for calling him a CIA mole went to trial.
Then CIA director Richard Helms and erstwhile secretary of state Henry Kissinger testified under oath that Desai never acted in any capacity for the CIA, paid or otherwise. As the scandal erupted, some media reports claimed that while writing the book, Hersh was in regular touch with Indian diplomats posted in the US, and that he had shown them the draft chapter containing the controversial references to Desai.
New Delhi flatly denied these claims, perhaps because they suggested that the government did not move swiftly and aggressively to nip the grave charge against a former PM. P V Narasimha Rao, the then foreign minister, told Parliament that Hersh was not in touch with any Indian diplomat while writing his book. The newly declassified documents have a different story to tell.
"Mr Hersh has, however, been in touch with the embassy since it is a common practice for embassies in the United States to keep in contact with prominent journalists. In such informal contacts, the substance of the said allegations was mentioned to some of our officers who pointed out that during the period (1971), Shri Morarji Desai was not even in the Cabinet," a detailed note on the controversy in the MEA file shows. It was part of a "note for supplementaries", as a preparation ahead of a parliamentary discussion on the issue.
This paragraph is marked "for the FM's information only". Narasimha Rao kept to the script and did not reveal these details to the House in August 1983. Hersh claimed that in 1971, during the tense Indo-Pak standoff and war that led to the liberation of Bangladesh, the CIA had a contact in the Indian cabinet. He identified the CIA mole as Desai.
An Indian embassy cable dated November 16, 1979 to erstwhile MEA spokesman JN Dixit gave details of a lunch meeting between an IFS officer and the celebrity investigative reporter.
"Hersh told me he had commenced work on his book which should be going into print around mid next year. He had already secured a large amount of hitherto highly classified information," the officer said in his cable.
The diplomat said he gave copies of books and articles to the journalist.
"On my suggestion, he has assured me that no reference will be made in his book to any part of it being based on Indian source material. On his part, he requested that the contents of our conversation should be kept completely confidential as he did not want Kissinger and others to know about his forthcoming book," he wrote to Dixit.