KGB records show how spies penetrated the heart of India
The Kremlin spent a fortune trying to influence the press, police, ministers and Indira Gandhi
By Michael Binyon
Saturday September 17 2005, 1.00am, The Times
A HUGE cache of KGB records smuggled out of Moscow after the fall of communism reveal that in the 1970s India was one of the countries most successfully penetrated by Soviet intelligence.
A number of senior KGB officers have testified that, under Indira Gandhi, India was one of their priority targets.
"We had scores of sources through the Indian Government — in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the defence and foreign ministries and the police," said Oleg Kalugin, once the youngest general in Soviet foreign intelligence and responsible for monitoring KGB penetration abroad. India became "a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government", he added.
Such claims have previously been ignored or brushed aside by Delhi. But the revelations from the KGB documents that form one