RAW–ISI covert war: assassinations, sabotage, and proxy battles across South Asia.
Scene 1 — The Quiet Rooms Where Wars Are Born
Location: RAW Safe House, New Delhi — Midnight
A single desk lamp carved a circle of light in the otherwise dark room. Maps tacked to the wall were threaded with coloured pins and thin red lines. Ramesh Menon sat hunched over a teacup gone cold, reading a cable on the small typewriter. Across from him, an older officer — Colonel Nair, veteran of decades in the service — thumbed through a manila folder.
Colonel Nair: "So the ISI is slipping men across the border again — Baloch recruiters, a few handlers in Karachi. They're funding unrest and buying loyalties. Our informants report arms caches in Sindh too."
Ramesh: "We have assets in the Pakistani bureaucracy who are sympathetic. We can nibble at the edges — expose the money trails, leak false plans, disrupt their procurement channels. But we must be careful. Every move we make becomes a story in the other man's mouth."
Colonel Nair: (sighing) "Careful is what we were told to be in 1965. But careful doesn't win wars in the shadows. We need a message they can't ignore."
They both knew what "a message" meant — deniable operations, sabotage of infrastructure, the occasional targeted elimination of a figure whose presence emboldened proxy campaigns. The line between political theatre and statecraft had never been thinner.
---
Scene 2 — A Night on the Quay
Location: Gwadar Port — Pre-dawn
A low fog hugged the quay. A freighter unloaded crates stamped with innocuous foreign company logos. In the darkness, a local dockworker, Ibrahim, unbolted a crate and found not bearings as expected — but boxes of small arms wrapped in oilskin. His throat tightened. He had been given a job to earn enough rice for his children; he now realized the sweat on his palms would purchase bullets, not bread.
Two men watched from the shadows. One spoke into a radio disguised as a cigarette lighter.
Radio Man: "Cache confirmed. Route to Quetta secure. ISI logistics will pick it up at 0200."
Second Man: "Good. Make sure no one from the port police sees this. We can't afford a scandal."
The shipment was a cog in a larger machine — weapons for insurgents, money for tribal elders, messages for those who would rather not be seen in public. For every crate that landed safely, several plots across the border moved a stage forward.
---
Scene 3 — The Piano That Played Too Loudly
Location: Lahore — Apartment of a Suspected Handler
In a cramped flat above a bakery, a piano played an out-of-tune Chopin. Major Saleem, an ISI handler, and Adeel, a young recruit, reviewed lists.
Saleem: "The Punjabi cell needs money. Secure payment next week, through remittance, not cash. And convince Rana to move the safe-house out of Walled City — too many checkpoints, too many eyes."
Adeel: "Sir, RAW's been active near Amritsar. They leaked photographs of our boys with cash from Dubai. People talk."
Saleem pinched his forehead. "Then we change the narrative. Let them find staged footage of a RAW agent meeting an extremist — a plant. We'll blow up their credibility."
The idea was simple in formulation and dangerous in consequence: turn the truth into a weapon, then use the weapon to feed new versions of truth. The war had become an exercise in making the other man's friends suspicious of him.
---
Scene 4 — Sabotage at Sea
Location: Arabian Sea, Offshore — Night
An Indian patrol boat sliced through the black water. Offshore, a Pakistani cargo tanker idled, its hold empty save for maintenance parts. An operative aboard the patrol boat watched as a diver in a small submersible slipped beneath the tanker, attaching a device near the fuel intake. The device was crude — a timed disruptor to damage propulsion, not to sink — and the plan was explicitly deniable.
At dawn the tanker's engines stuttered and failed, leaving it drifting toward shallow reefs. Damage assessments later blamed "mechanical failure," but dockyard crews found evidence inconsistent with mere breakdown: welds had been cut, bolts loosened from below the waterline.
Senior Officer, Indian Navy (over radio): "We did not sink her. But she will be out of commission for months. That reduces their logistical reach."
Sabotage was surgical — not always lethal, but always expensive. Each disabled ship meant supply delays, missed deliveries, stranded squads. The invisible hand that bent metal in the night became as strategic as maneuvers on a map.
---
Scene 5 — The Double Agent's Evening
Location: Rawalpindi Café — A Silent Table
They called him Shafiq in the file — a quiet man who worked the consular desk at a foreign mission by day and fed loose threads of information to the highest bidder by night. Rawalpindi's bakery left crumbs across his jacket as he met his RAW contact, who offered tea and a cigarette.
RAW Handler: "You said you could get the transfer dates for that shipment to Sindh?"
Shafiq: "I could. But my price has doubled — my landlord is chasing me for overdue rent. I need money up front."
RAW Handler: (smiles thinly) "We pay for verified info. We don't fund gamblers."
Shafiq's hand closed on the cigarette. In the pocket under his jacket, his ISI card burned like a brand. He had been playing both sides for years, a lever between two silent empires. One wrong breath and he would be gone.
---
Scene 6 — The Night of the Professor
Location: Karachi University — Late
Professor Zakir Hussain, an outspoken political scientist, had for weeks been delivering radio lectures critical of the ISI's clandestine operations in Balochistan. His words reached long into the dark, finding ears that listened. One night after class, as rain glossed the sidewalks, two men in raincoats stepped out from the shadows.
First Man: "Professor, you are a dangerous man. Keep your lectures on theory and let real men do the dirty work."
Professor Zakir: (steady) "I speak truth. There is no victory in lying to the people."
They walked him to an unlit lane. No one saw what was said in the rain — only that the professor stopped speaking on the radio afterwards. Some whispered that RAW had a hand in protecting him; others suggested ISI had cut him off at the knees. The truth became a rumor, and rumors were currency.
---
Scene 7 — Crossfire in Kashmir
Location: Hilltop near LoC — Dawn
A unit of irregular fighters, supported covertly by ISI, moved along a ridge. They were young men from the valley, hardened by grief and rumors of atrocities. Their handlers promised training, food, and the chance to strike back. A RAW-backed counter-cell, recruited inside Srinagar, had other plans — ambush where the insurgents least expected it.
The morning attack was swift. Gunfire shattered prayer lines. The locals later said they had been betrayed from within; the handlers said the enemy had infiltrated their ranks. Bodies lay where the gunfire had been hottest. For every life lost, families called for revenge; for every revenge, new recruits filled the valleys.
---
Scene 8 — The Poisoned Ledger
Location: Islamabad — ISI Headquarters, Conference Room
A ledger lay on the long conference table — a book of names, bank accounts, shell corporations. It catalogued political donations paid to media houses, the secret payments to tribal leaders, the front companies that had moved millions. Akhtar Abdur Rahman flipped through it thoughtfully.
Akhtar (to general officers): "This is how influence is bought — newspapers, television channels, religious schools. If we control stories, we control opinion."
A colonel frowned. "And the risks? If this ledger is leaked, it will be catastrophic."
Akhtar tapped the page. "Leaks are part of the game. We leak when it helps; we silence when it doesn't. This ledger is insurance, a map of our leverage."
That night, the ledger was photocopied, microfilmed, and stored in three different vaults. The operations of three years moved forward like a well-oiled machine — but every gear squeaked with danger.
---
Scene 9 — The London Call
Location: MI6 Safehouse, London — Late Evening
A British operative met a Pakistani diplomat in a flat near the Thames. They spoke in measured sentences.
MI6 Officer: "Your country is bleeding the region with these proxy wars. We can help informally — warn the shipping companies, share port surveillance. But we cannot be seen to favour one side openly."
Diplomat: "We need to protect our projects. The Kahuta facility is strategic. Any attack would be disastrous."
MI6 Officer: "We will not help you commit crimes. But if you are attacked yourselves, we will inform you of suspicious flights."
Coalitions were forming and re-forming in quiet rooms; each nation's intelligence service had its own rules and its own red lines. Alliances of convenience meant that friends today might be judges tomorrow.
---
Scene 10 — The City That Forgot the Names
Location: Dhaka — A Crowded Market
In a cramped lane market, a vendor named Rafiq hawked vegetables as he had since before 1971. He had lost relatives in the war; he fed stories of old friends to anyone who would listen. A stranger came to his stall one evening — an operative who paid well for gossip, rumours, and a list of names.
Stranger: "Who hires men to cross the border?"
Rafiq: "Sometimes men hire themselves — no one hires us for free."
He sold the names. Some of those names became targets. Some of those names were protected, bought off with promises of passports and hotels. Cities absorbed these transactions into the noise of life: weddings, funerals, markets. The covert war fed on the ordinary.
---
Scene 11 — The Day of Reckoning (A Failed Operation)
Location: Mountain Valley Crossing — Night
An ISI-organised team planned to ambush a supply convoy bound for insurgents aligned with RAW. They laid an IED, camouflaged the approach and waited. But the convoy never came. The wrong intelligence, perhaps a double agent's whisper, or an intercepted call from the other side — no one would ever know for sure. At dawn, instead of triumphant fighters and captured crates, the team found the twisted wreckage of a civilian bus, dozens dead, students on their way to exams.
Officer Malik: (voice hollow) "We were supposed to strike a convoy, not kids…"
Silence answered him. By evening, apologies were made in hushed tones; by the next morning, propaganda on both sides had turned the tragedy into a fresh motive to recruit more youth. The covert war had misfired on its own hand and, as always, civilians paid the price.
---
Scene 12 — The Long Dinner Where Choices Are Calculated
Location: New Delhi — Home of a Retired General
Ramesh Menon sat across from Colonel Nair one rainy night. They had both aged. The maps on the wall were yellowed.
Ramesh: "We push and poke. They retaliate. We burn a ship here, they expose a fund there. How does it end?"
Colonel Nair: "It doesn't. Not until someone chooses to make a different kind of history — one open, not hidden."
Ramesh: "And if history refuses to listen?"
Colonel Nair: "Then we keep playing as we always have. Because in this region, silence is worse than sabotage. Silence is surrender."
They poured more tea and watched the rain slide down the window. The games would continue tomorrow. The actors would change, tactics would shift, and the ledger of names would grow. But the patterns endured: a whisper in a safe house, a crate unloaded at night, a man who sold his secret for bread. The covert war stitched itself into the fabric of everyday life.