“Return of the Memons: A Pyrrhic Victory”continues…

CBI is purely an investigative agency and its Pakistani counterpart is perhaps the FIA (Federal Investigation Agency). In as much as collection of intelligence from overseas goes, we have our Research & Analysis Wing (RAW). Yes, the CBI has in the past investigated several terror cases in which the ISI has had a major role to play, the serial blasts in Mumbai of March, 1993 being one. Now even that tenuous indirect linkage is a thing of the past with the creation of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in 2009. Now cases of terror go to the NIA for investigation and never to the CBI.
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Having reached a tacit pact with the Director of one-to-one communication, the immediate task at hand for me was to make a booking for the Memons from Sharjah to Delhi in a manner that the ISI goons did not get a wind of it. My plans were to take them out from Sharjah while keeping the bookings from Dubai alive. I decided to call on AM Bhardwaj, Joint Secretary in Ministry of Civil
Aviation-cum-CMD of Indian Airlines. He was my neighbour and a nice affable man. I asked Satish Jha to come with me. It was around 10 in the morning when we reached the Indian Airlines office at Patel Chowk. When I began to share the outlines of the operation with the Chairman to make him feel involved, he said he only wanted to know what was required of him. Having served in the Indian Army before joining the IAS, he was conscious of sharing information only on need-to-know basis. I said I wanted a booking for a group of absconders on the Delhi-bound flight from Sharjah without their names going on the computer or flight manifest. He called up the Incharge of Indian Airlines (Operations) and directed him to pass on instructions to the Airlines’ Dubai office on similar lines.

To be continued…