UK spy role in Nepal: Book

ROBIN PAGNAMENTA, The Times, TT, Aug. 30: British spies knowingly allowed Maoist rebels to be tortured and killed during a UK-backed intelligence operation conducted during Nepal’s bitter civil war, a new book has said.

It claims that agents of MI6, Britain’s external intelligence agency that is better known across the world as James Bond’s employer, were complicit in the torture and death in custody of prisoners who were interrogated during the mission, Operation Mustang, which ran from 2002 to 2006.

Evidence contained in Kathmandu, by journalist Thomas Bell, claims that the British government bankrolled, trained and equipped Nepal’s government for an anti-Maoist crackdown designed to arrest and turn communist guerrillas seeking to overthrow the monarchy and establish a people’s republic.

A total of 16,000 Nepalese died in the decade-long war, which ended in November 2006. About 1,200 people are still missing.

Several of those interrogated in Operation Mustang died in custody, including Sadhuram Devkota, a Maoist leader arrested in Kathmandu in 2004.

According to Nepalese intelligence officers, British intelligence provided money and practical support to Nepal’s spy agency, the National Investigation Department (NID), as it battled the growing Maoist threat.

“The British, I think, helped the NID a lot,” said one senior Nepalese officer interviewed in the book. “Whatever success or whatever you call it, that we had, maybe it was down to that. Otherwise, it would have been worse.”

Another officer is quoted as saying that the British “helped us organise our intelligence” and “worked wonders”.

Significant numbers of Maoists died in Nepalese custody after being arrested following intelligence generated by the operation — many after being handed over to the Royal Nepalese Army for further interrogation.

According to one UN report, up to 49 people were extra-judicially killed in one notorious interrogation centre called Bhairabnath during three months at the end of 2003 alone.

Nepalese officers interviewed for the book claim that the intelligence officers were fully aware that some of the Maoists who were being arrested because of intelligence gathered during the operation were likely to be tortured or killed.

“They knew,” said one. “Being British they must have thought about human rights also, but they knew exactly what was happening to them.”

At the time, the use of torture and executions by Nepal’s security forces was widely publicised by human rights groups, including Amnesty International. As well as advice and training, MI6 offered practical support, bankrolling the purchase of dozens of motorcycles, mobile phones, night-vision binoculars, computers, cameras, radios, air-conditioners, fridges and furniture.

British money was also used to supply secure radio networks and to fit out three safe houses in Kathmandu.

Some of this equipment was allegedly later stolen by Nepalese officers, who sold it on to rival spy agencies.

UK involvement in the operation became increasingly fraught after Nepal’s then king Gyanendra began planning a coup, which Britain could not support publicly.

Although they had an inkling that a coup was likely, when it eventually took place on February 1, 2005, the timing apparently caught the British by surprise. That week MI6 had chartered a cargo plane to deliver a consignment of equipment.

A spokesperson for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office declined to comment on intelligence matters but said: “The UK does not participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. We neither condone such activity nor do we ask others to do it on our behalf.”

A statement added: “We would never authorise any action in the knowledge or belief that torture would take place at the hands of a third party.”

Bell, a British journalist, has lived in Nepal for most of the past 12 years. He spent four of them working on the book, published by Random House in South Asia on Thursday.