The CIA, the T-72, and the Delhi Gymkhana Club - a Cold War tale
How the Delhi Gymkhana Club was the stage for a CIA intelligence coup involving the Indian Army's Soviet-built tank fleet.
By the 1970s, India had become the biggest buyer of Soviet hardware— tanks to fighter jets and submarines.
The club with its manicured lawns, two dozen tennis courts, a swimming pool, a wooden-floored ballroom, and multiple bars, serves Delhi’s elite.
New Delhi’s 113-year old Delhi Gymkhana club has been asked to vacate its premises by June 5, 2026.
The eviction notice from the central government cites ‘national security, defense infrastructure’ and ‘urgent public interest’ in taking over the 27-acre club, located a stone’s throw away from the Prime Minister’s residence on 7 Lok Kalyan Marg.
The club with its manicured lawns, two dozen tennis courts, a swimming pool, a wooden-floored ballroom, and multiple bars, serves Delhi’s elite.
Nearly fifty years ago, the club was also a drop site for the egregious leak of Indian military secrets. This incident was detailed in granular detail in ‘See No Evil’, the 2002 autobiography of a former CIA agent Robert Baer.
The Gymkhana Club then was one of the places where spies disguised as diplomats could mingle with Indian officials, bypassing government rules forbidding contact with foreign nationals.
Spies could also enter the club and shake off determined ‘tails’ from India’s Intelligence Bureau.
The story began in the late 1970s with the arrival of Baer, a freshly minted CIA agent to the US Embassy.
The Cold War was then at its peak.
NATO and Warsaw Pact armies stood ranged against each other, on hair-trigger alert, across Europe. Among the growing mass of military hardware were some cutting edge Soviet platforms that caused the West serious worry.
If the Cold War burst into a hot war, titanium-hulled Alfa class interceptor submarines would barrel down the Atlantic Ocean to hunt NATO warships, stratosphere-skimming MiG-25 ’Foxbats’ would shoot down US bombers, and on the ground, a new battle tank, the T-72 would lead Soviet armoured spearheads across the Fulda Gap into West Germany.
The Pentagon and the CIA pursued these advancement in Soviet hardware with relentless zeal— to understand their capabilities, detect their vulnerabilities and field countermeasures.
The T-72 was of great interest to the Pentagon.
A 41-tonne medium tank that was a generational leap over the older T-55s and T-62s, it was armed with a new 125 smoothbore gun that fired kinetic energy rounds at 1,800 meters per second, several hundred meters per second more than Western tanks. Its glacis— the sloped frontal part of the tank— was protected by ceramic/steel laminate armour,
... it had a laser rangefinder, an auto-loader which eliminated the need for a fourth crew member.
The tank reached full scale production in 1979, when the USSR produced 2,000 T-72s that year.
The West relied on intelligence coups like the defection of Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko who flew his MiG-25 into Japan in 1976. Western engineers took the jet apart to understand the secrets behind the world’s fastest jet. But such coups were rare. It was difficult to persuade someone to not just betray his country but also take a piece of sensitive military technology while doing so.
So, the next best thing was to rely on what the CIA called SOVMAT— Soviet military manuals, which minutely detailed the capabilities of the hardware.
The CIA efforts to vacuum SOVMAT extended into the Warsaw Pact countries and interestingly, India.
‘Since the Soviets typically would sell India their most advanced weapons, it had also become the most important country in the world for vacuuming up information on the Soviet military,’ Baer writes.
In 1978 the Indian Indian Army directly imported the first batch of 500 T-72, T-72M and the T-72M1 tanks from the Soviet Union.
The CIA station in New Delhi intensified its efforts to obtain information on the Indian Army’s newest acquisition.
Baer claims these efforts ranged from trying to get an Indian military contact to do a ‘Belenko’— drive a T-72 tank across the border into Pakistan to bribing a contact in a tank depot to drill a core sample into a T-72 hull to understand its armour composition. These efforts came to nought.
There was also the constant threat of surveillance by India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), an agency which Baer calls ‘focused, disciplined and tough’. The IB could field thousands and thousands of surveillants on foot and in cars. Their job was to keep a watch on foreign diplomats, particularly spies. A few years before Baer was posted in Delhi, the IB caught a CIA case officer with several sub-sources.
The case officer and the station chief in Delhi were sent home and Indian operations were shut down for almost two years. The IB was one reason Baer says ‘India was one of the toughest operating environments in the world.’
Sometime in late August, Baer hit an intelligence jackpot. One of his Indian agents brought him a duffel bag filled with T-72 tank manuals.
(India Today)
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