Speaker 1: Welcome back everyone, and today we're going to be taking
a journey to a different part of the world in
the world of espionage. We're going to go to India.
We've covered a lot in England and some in France,
and of course a lot in the US. But we're
not the only countries with spies, so I thought it
might be interesting to see other spy stories from around
the world. Today we're looking at the Black Tiger, the
raw spy who became a Pakistani major. Ravandra Koshik was
born on April eleven, nineteen fifty two, in Rajasthan, a
town that sits near the border. His father served in
the Indian Air Force. The Wars of sixty five and
seventy one were not distant history for him. There were
the background noise of childhood. In college, he studied commerce,
but what stood out was his stage presence. He liked
to act and he liked to debate, something that intelligence
officers noticed. In nineteen seventy three of twenty one, he
told his family he was taking a job in Delhi.
Stead he entered two years of training with the Research
and Analysis Wing. They taught him Urdu. They taught him
the rhythms of Pakistani life. He underwent circumcision. Every official
Indian record of his existence was eventually erased, and in
nineteen seventy five he crossed into Pakistan as Nabi Ahmen Shakhir.
He enrolled at Karachi University and completed a law degree.
Then he entered the Pakistan Army, not as a frontline officer,
but as a clerk in the military accounts department. Over
time he rose to the rank of major. From nineteen
seventy five to nineteen eighty three, he lived the life completely.
He was married, they had a son. To his wife
and colleagues, he was a Pakistani Muslim working inside the
military system. To raw he was a pipeline the intelligence.
He passed troop movements, logistical details, a kind of persistent
in reporting that shapes decisions. Earned him the informal title
Black Tiger from Indira Gandhi. For nearly eight years, the
cover held as part of the story that still feels
almost unreal, total immersion, day after day, year after year,
while knowing a single slip could end everything. In September
of nineteen eighty three, the end came through another agent.
Ross sent a low level operative named yat Masi to
re establish contact with Koshuk. Pakistani counterintelligence caught Masi. Under pressure,
he gave up the identity of the man he was
supposed to meet. Issi arranged a meeting in a park.
When Kashak arrived, they arrested him. What followed was not
pleasant interrogation and torture. In Salkot, accounts described two years
of sustained pressure. He never broken the sense of turning
against India. In nineteen eighty five, at Pakistani court, suddenced
him to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
He spent the next sixteen years moving between prisons. At
this stage he was in nineteen he was thirty two.
He was being moved from Salkot to kot law Pot
to finally Central Jail in my own wally. From inside,
he managed to smuggle letters to his family in India.
The tone is not heroic. It is exhausted and bitter,
and one he had asked in essence whether this was
but people who sacrifice for a large country like India receive.
In another written near the end, he said that if
he had an American agent, he would have been out
in three days. His health collapsed under the conditions. Pulmonary
toberculosis and heart disease finished him. He died in two
thousand and one at the age of forty nine. His
family learned of the death through unofficial channels. His father,
the former Air Force officer, reportedly suffered a heart attack
shortly after receiving the notice. The Indian government never publicly
acknowledged Kaushik as one of its own during his lifetime
or even immediately after. There was no diplomatic campaign ever
for his release, no state recognition. While he was alive,
the family received modest monthly support than silence for them.
The silence was the second betrayal. There are complications in
the record, some details of exact rank, the precise value
of the intelligency delivered in the full extent of his life,
family life undercover very across accounts Indian reporting agree on
the core timeline. Recruitment in the seventies, insertion in seventy five,
exposure in eighty three, death in two thousand and one.
Bollywood has circled the story ek the Taiga Romeo Akbar
Walter without fully owning it. His family has claimed the
films drew from his life filmmakers have denied it. The
result is a strange half life. The story is known
enough to be referenced, but not enough to be settled,
but makes Kashik's case lingers the completeness of the erasure.
Most spies retain some thread back to their real identity,
some safe house, some periodic extraction plan. He lived as
Nabir Shakir for years, built the family, wore the uniform,
and still fed information home. When the cover collapsed, there
was no extraction. There was only the long decline inside
the prison. The letters he sent are the closest thing
we have to his final voice. They don't ask for metals.
They ask a harder question about the reciprocity between the
individual who disappears for the state and the state that
prefers the disappearance to remain complete. And that question is
not unique to India or to the nineteen eighties. In
that fact, Ravenda Kashik' story is clean in its outline
and messy in its aftermath. A young man recruited for
theater and nerve two years of training that rewrote him.
Eight years inside the target military, sixteen years of imprisonment,
death of a disease in a Pakistani jail, a title
Black Tiger that floated for decades without an official owner.
I think we'll leave it there tonight