RAW (Research and Analysis Wing), India
Founded in 1968, India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) is one of the most secretive of the world’s agencies. Unlike other intelligence services, RAW reports directly to the office of the Prime Minister rather than an oversight committee or department director. This enables RAW to apply a degree of secrecy to both their internal workings and operations that several competing agencies can only dream about. Although RAW’s heritage extends into the 1800s, the agency is a relatively recent development, and its origin is rather straightforward. Of course, two monumental foreign intelligence failures less than four years is probably enough to convince most nations to change their strategy.
India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), established in 1887, spent its infancy primarily as a British apparatus designed to monitor Russian activity. The Bureau evolved and expanded throughout the decades, particularly in the years prior to, and during, World War II. Indian independence in 1947, however, devastated the agency. British departure removed a huge swath of trained operatives, and the agency’s new budget was a massive reduction. Combined with the sharp drop in staff and funding, the IB’s equally sudden increase in responsibilities set the stage for disaster.
The 1962 Sino-Indian War is what happens when an underfunded military and an underfunded intelligence agency pursue an expansionist policy while completely misreading their opponent’s intentions. In other words, India’s ambitions could not compare with the Chinese military buildup IB completely missed. Several intelligence fiasco(s) played out in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, including: the abject failure to predict the Pakistani invasion, which caught India completely off guard, and pre-positioned heavy artillery at Chumb escaped detection, inflicting significant losses.
The fallout from these two failures spurred India’s creation of a standalone agency responsible for foreign intelligence. In 1968, the Indira Gandhi administration established RAW, allocating roughly $300,000 to the new unit. This is a far cry from contemporary estimates that place RAW’s estimated operating budget around $400,000,000.