A small number who have never stepped into the sunlight remain committed to hot-metal solutions, impatient with the Some who began as hawks and arch pragmatists have become pacifists, now believing in dialogue over warfare, advocating for negotiation as the path to resolution. On other occasions, their vehemence reflects the hold their outfits still have over them, framing everything they see and do. Their stories are deeply subjective, sometimes confessional, and nearly always partial thanks to operational security that throttled their vision so that often they only saw their own inputs and outputs. Many of the events they participated in are well-known outrages, but they have redrawn them in the book in intimate, and revelatory ways, shedding new light, providing fingertip context, and drawing, sometimes, contrary, and shocking, conclusions.

These are politically tinged tropes, and in the pages that follow spies from both secret services appear altogether different, as they describe how they became (and some still are) invisible protagonists, knee-deep in chaos, a few of them becoming militant, some losing traction, others having religious and political epiphanies, some going rogue, a few becoming crazy. The principals in this book are from India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R.A.W.), which is rarely talked about at all, and has been denigrated as a bureaucratic viper’s nest, while its enemies, in Pakistan’s InterServices Intelligence (I.S.I.), are spoken about all the time, but mostly portrayed as mysterious, self-serving, and deadly. For Z&A “It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends” Viet Thanh Nguyen, The SympathizerĪcknowledgements and a Note on Sources and Methods What follows are personal accounts – and, occasionally, the regretful recollections – of rival officers and analysts working to outwit and trap one another in the ground zero of the spy wars.

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