‘Pink tape spies’ a humdrum lot

Press, 8 February 1985, Page 6

‘Pink tape spies’ a humdrum lot

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BRIAN WILLIAMS,

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Reuter (through NZPA) New Delhi India’s biggest spy ring ran mainly on an “old boy” network of junior clerks who for 25 years slipped secret documents out of cardboard files for a pittance. Dubbed the “pink tape spies” after the distinctive ribbon used to tie official files in India, they gathered regularly for whisky-drink-ing parties, introducing new members as the years rolled on. Details of their activities have been revealed over the last week as most of the 16 officials arrested made statements of guilt to New Delhi courts. The picture that emerges is of an ordinary group of men far removed from the glamorous James Bond image of a spy. The wife of Coomar Narayan, the 57-year-old man named by newspapers as the head of the ring, told reporters that her husband liked whisky but not women. “He wouldn’t hurt a lizard,” she said. The court statements showed that Narayan had started his career in espionage when he was a stenographer at the Finance Ministry in 1959. He dabbled first in mainly economic reports about agricultural estimates and other financial data.

Some contacts he made during this period in other Ministries later moved on to positions as personal assistants and clerks in the offices of the Prime Minister and the President of India.

In 1960 Narayan left the Finance Ministry to work for S.L.M. Maneklal, a Bombay firm that developed business links with several countries including France, Poland, Bulgaria, Japan, Bangladesh, Czechoslovakia, and West Germany, mainly in manufacturing. Narayan has' said in a court statement that the company made hundreds of thousands of dollars from the information he supplied. Yogesh Maneklal, head of the firm, was arrested on Tuesday. Earlier he rejected Narayan’s statement, saying, “Whatever commercial information I used to get from him only pertained to my business.” Indians have been stunned by the trifling sums Narayan paid his contacts for the country’s most sensitive secrets. Photocopies of documents were passed on for as little as ?US4 a page plus a bottle of imported whisky. Lavish parties, reported in some newspapers, were as simple as a group of ageing men sitting down in Narayan’s office around a bottle of Scotch.