R&AW's Special Group in Operation Bluestar

The league of shadows

Operation Bluestar: The league of shadows

Sandeep Unnithan  January 31, 2014 | UPDATED 00:23 IST

In early 1983, six army officers from a classified unit called the Special Group (SG) were flown to a secret base of Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli commando force that led the 1977 rescue of hostages from Entebbe airport in Uganda. The mission, coordinated by RAW with Mossad, was classified because India didn't have diplomatic ties with Israel and it did not want to anger its Arab friends. The officers trained in counter-terror-in carefully recreated landscapes of streets, buildings and vehicles-at the base near Tel Aviv for 22 days. The experience, an SG officer, now retired, recalls, was a culture shock for the Indians, coming as they did from a steeply hierarchical army: They were bemused to see women guarding Israeli Defense Forces headquarters and soldiers high-five their officers.

Special group commandos train at their base in Sarsawa

The newly trained officers would soon come in handy. New Delhi was hosting two summits in 1983 that would burnish Indira Gandhi's standing as a global leader-the Non-Aligned Summit in March and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in November-and it was keen to prevent terrorist attacks of the sort that had bedevilled the West through the 1960s and 1970s. The summits passed without event under SG's watchful eye.

Special group commandos train at their base in Sarsawa, Uttar Pradesh,in 1984

SG was created in 1981. Till then, the Army had shown little interest in raising a specialised anti-terrorist force. So the government turned to the Directorate General Security, a covert unit set up by the Jawaharlal Nehru government with CIA's assistance after the 1962 war with China. The directorate, which had its own air wing, the Aviation Research Centre, and a paramilitary comprising Tibetans, the Special Frontier Force (SFF), was subsumed within raw when the external intelligence agency was created in 1968. In 1982, the directorate launched Project Sunray: It tasked a colonel of the Army's 10th Para/Special Forces to set up a unit of 250 officers and men, all Indians unlike SFF, in commando companies 55, 56 and 57.

The unit, housed in tents at the Sarsawa Indian Air Force base near Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh and christened Special Group, operated under the RAW chief. raw wanted to train the unit's officers with SAS--SG officers had recommended it after a tour of the British agency's training facility at Hereford-but the government turned down the proposal, apparently due to the high training cost of £5,000 per trooper. SG improvised its own training regimen; being directly under the Prime Minister's Cabinet Secretariat helped. "We just had to ask for equipment and it would be given," recalls a former SG officer. A request for over 100 bulletproof vests and tactical helmets was met almost overnight and the gear flown in from Israel.

Two special group officers at the Golden Temple during Bluestar

SG was then prepared for Operation Sundown and, after it was aborted, for Bluestar. Following Indira's assassination, SG men protected Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his family until the government raised the Special Protection Group in 1985. Soon after, nearly 200 SG personnel were deputed to a new anti-terrorist force under the Union home ministry, the National Security Guard. The Special Group remains RAW's ultra-secret military unit for clandestine intelligence missions, the equivalent of CIA's Special Activities Division.

Follow the writer on Twitter @SandeepUnnithan

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/operation-bluestar-indira-gandhi-singh-bhindranwale-army-raw-paramilitary-unit/1/340986.html