1
00:00:00,480 --> 00:00:02,359
Speaker 1: Welcome back everyone, and today we're going to be taking

2
00:00:02,399 --> 00:00:04,320
a journey to a different part of the world in

3
00:00:04,360 --> 00:00:07,320
the world of espionage. We're going to go to India.

4
00:00:07,440 --> 00:00:10,720
We've covered a lot in England and some in France,

5
00:00:10,759 --> 00:00:13,240
and of course a lot in the US. But we're

6
00:00:13,279 --> 00:00:15,119
not the only countries with spies, so I thought it

7
00:00:15,199 --> 00:00:17,760
might be interesting to see other spy stories from around

8
00:00:17,800 --> 00:00:20,640
the world. Today we're looking at the Black Tiger, the

9
00:00:20,760 --> 00:00:25,239
raw spy who became a Pakistani major. Ravandra Koshik was

10
00:00:25,239 --> 00:00:28,399
born on April eleven, nineteen fifty two, in Rajasthan, a

11
00:00:28,440 --> 00:00:31,760
town that sits near the border. His father served in

12
00:00:31,760 --> 00:00:34,520
the Indian Air Force. The Wars of sixty five and

13
00:00:34,600 --> 00:00:37,320
seventy one were not distant history for him. There were

14
00:00:37,320 --> 00:00:40,320
the background noise of childhood. In college, he studied commerce,

15
00:00:40,359 --> 00:00:42,600
but what stood out was his stage presence. He liked

16
00:00:42,600 --> 00:00:46,600
to act and he liked to debate, something that intelligence

17
00:00:46,640 --> 00:00:50,679
officers noticed. In nineteen seventy three of twenty one, he

18
00:00:50,719 --> 00:00:52,640
told his family he was taking a job in Delhi.

19
00:00:52,759 --> 00:00:54,840
Stead he entered two years of training with the Research

20
00:00:54,840 --> 00:00:57,960
and Analysis Wing. They taught him Urdu. They taught him

21
00:00:57,960 --> 00:01:02,240
the rhythms of Pakistani life. He underwent circumcision. Every official

22
00:01:02,240 --> 00:01:05,719
Indian record of his existence was eventually erased, and in

23
00:01:05,840 --> 00:01:10,480
nineteen seventy five he crossed into Pakistan as Nabi Ahmen Shakhir.

24
00:01:11,280 --> 00:01:14,359
He enrolled at Karachi University and completed a law degree.

25
00:01:14,439 --> 00:01:17,799
Then he entered the Pakistan Army, not as a frontline officer,

26
00:01:17,840 --> 00:01:21,200
but as a clerk in the military accounts department. Over

27
00:01:21,280 --> 00:01:23,680
time he rose to the rank of major. From nineteen

28
00:01:23,719 --> 00:01:27,920
seventy five to nineteen eighty three, he lived the life completely.

29
00:01:28,120 --> 00:01:30,879
He was married, they had a son. To his wife

30
00:01:30,879 --> 00:01:33,439
and colleagues, he was a Pakistani Muslim working inside the

31
00:01:33,439 --> 00:01:38,239
military system. To raw he was a pipeline the intelligence.

32
00:01:38,280 --> 00:01:42,000
He passed troop movements, logistical details, a kind of persistent

33
00:01:42,040 --> 00:01:45,480
in reporting that shapes decisions. Earned him the informal title

34
00:01:45,560 --> 00:01:49,519
Black Tiger from Indira Gandhi. For nearly eight years, the

35
00:01:49,640 --> 00:01:52,079
cover held as part of the story that still feels

36
00:01:52,079 --> 00:01:56,359
almost unreal, total immersion, day after day, year after year,

37
00:01:56,840 --> 00:02:01,840
while knowing a single slip could end everything. In September

38
00:02:01,840 --> 00:02:04,280
of nineteen eighty three, the end came through another agent.

39
00:02:05,159 --> 00:02:08,759
Ross sent a low level operative named yat Masi to

40
00:02:08,840 --> 00:02:14,159
re establish contact with Koshuk. Pakistani counterintelligence caught Masi. Under pressure,

41
00:02:14,199 --> 00:02:15,840
he gave up the identity of the man he was

42
00:02:15,879 --> 00:02:19,599
supposed to meet. Issi arranged a meeting in a park.

43
00:02:19,719 --> 00:02:23,439
When Kashak arrived, they arrested him. What followed was not

44
00:02:23,639 --> 00:02:28,840
pleasant interrogation and torture. In Salkot, accounts described two years

45
00:02:28,840 --> 00:02:31,479
of sustained pressure. He never broken the sense of turning

46
00:02:31,479 --> 00:02:35,199
against India. In nineteen eighty five, at Pakistani court, suddenced

47
00:02:35,240 --> 00:02:38,080
him to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

48
00:02:38,280 --> 00:02:42,319
He spent the next sixteen years moving between prisons. At

49
00:02:42,360 --> 00:02:44,479
this stage he was in nineteen he was thirty two.

50
00:02:46,319 --> 00:02:48,759
He was being moved from Salkot to kot law Pot

51
00:02:48,800 --> 00:02:52,520
to finally Central Jail in my own wally. From inside,

52
00:02:52,560 --> 00:02:55,280
he managed to smuggle letters to his family in India.

53
00:02:55,400 --> 00:02:58,240
The tone is not heroic. It is exhausted and bitter,

54
00:02:58,400 --> 00:03:00,560
and one he had asked in essence whether this was

55
00:03:00,680 --> 00:03:04,840
but people who sacrifice for a large country like India receive.

56
00:03:05,800 --> 00:03:07,719
In another written near the end, he said that if

57
00:03:07,719 --> 00:03:09,639
he had an American agent, he would have been out

58
00:03:09,840 --> 00:03:14,360
in three days. His health collapsed under the conditions. Pulmonary

59
00:03:14,400 --> 00:03:18,560
toberculosis and heart disease finished him. He died in two

60
00:03:18,599 --> 00:03:20,960
thousand and one at the age of forty nine. His

61
00:03:21,039 --> 00:03:24,199
family learned of the death through unofficial channels. His father,

62
00:03:24,360 --> 00:03:28,000
the former Air Force officer, reportedly suffered a heart attack

63
00:03:28,080 --> 00:03:32,319
shortly after receiving the notice. The Indian government never publicly

64
00:03:32,360 --> 00:03:35,199
acknowledged Kaushik as one of its own during his lifetime

65
00:03:35,680 --> 00:03:40,319
or even immediately after. There was no diplomatic campaign ever

66
00:03:40,360 --> 00:03:42,919
for his release, no state recognition. While he was alive,

67
00:03:43,759 --> 00:03:48,039
the family received modest monthly support than silence for them.

68
00:03:48,159 --> 00:03:51,919
The silence was the second betrayal. There are complications in

69
00:03:51,960 --> 00:03:54,879
the record, some details of exact rank, the precise value

70
00:03:54,879 --> 00:03:57,439
of the intelligency delivered in the full extent of his life,

71
00:03:57,439 --> 00:04:03,759
family life undercover very across accounts Indian reporting agree on

72
00:04:03,759 --> 00:04:07,759
the core timeline. Recruitment in the seventies, insertion in seventy five,

73
00:04:07,840 --> 00:04:10,199
exposure in eighty three, death in two thousand and one.

74
00:04:10,960 --> 00:04:14,800
Bollywood has circled the story ek the Taiga Romeo Akbar

75
00:04:14,879 --> 00:04:17,720
Walter without fully owning it. His family has claimed the

76
00:04:17,720 --> 00:04:21,040
films drew from his life filmmakers have denied it. The

77
00:04:21,120 --> 00:04:23,519
result is a strange half life. The story is known

78
00:04:23,639 --> 00:04:26,079
enough to be referenced, but not enough to be settled,

79
00:04:26,560 --> 00:04:29,680
but makes Kashik's case lingers the completeness of the erasure.

80
00:04:30,480 --> 00:04:33,279
Most spies retain some thread back to their real identity,

81
00:04:33,639 --> 00:04:37,680
some safe house, some periodic extraction plan. He lived as

82
00:04:37,759 --> 00:04:41,279
Nabir Shakir for years, built the family, wore the uniform,

83
00:04:41,319 --> 00:04:44,959
and still fed information home. When the cover collapsed, there

84
00:04:45,040 --> 00:04:47,800
was no extraction. There was only the long decline inside

85
00:04:47,800 --> 00:04:51,480
the prison. The letters he sent are the closest thing

86
00:04:51,480 --> 00:04:54,000
we have to his final voice. They don't ask for metals.

87
00:04:54,000 --> 00:04:56,560
They ask a harder question about the reciprocity between the

88
00:04:56,560 --> 00:04:58,920
individual who disappears for the state and the state that

89
00:04:58,959 --> 00:05:03,240
prefers the disappearance to remain complete. And that question is

90
00:05:03,279 --> 00:05:05,439
not unique to India or to the nineteen eighties. In

91
00:05:05,439 --> 00:05:10,600
that fact, Ravenda Kashik' story is clean in its outline

92
00:05:10,600 --> 00:05:13,040
and messy in its aftermath. A young man recruited for

93
00:05:13,120 --> 00:05:15,560
theater and nerve two years of training that rewrote him.

94
00:05:15,759 --> 00:05:19,720
Eight years inside the target military, sixteen years of imprisonment,

95
00:05:19,800 --> 00:05:23,879
death of a disease in a Pakistani jail, a title

96
00:05:23,959 --> 00:05:27,000
Black Tiger that floated for decades without an official owner.

97
00:05:27,439 --> 00:05:29,040
I think we'll leave it there tonight