Few things are more disturbing than a spy giving you the once over. It’s that look in his eyes that makes you feel slightly less than human—more like a locked box he’s carefully assessing with the intent of cracking open—and the cold, cruel precision of it all. This particular spy, the one who enters a house in a nondescript part of central Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Taliban-plagued North-West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, really looks nothing like a spy. But that’s the thing about spooks: a good one never fits the bill, which is why James Bond would make such a terrible spy in the real world. “The trick is to disappear,” says the portly middle-aged man (for simplicity’s sake, let’s call him Farouk), a mid-level agent in Pakistan’s infamous Inter-Services Intelligence agency. “Whether you’re walking around in a market, or undercover inside a militant group, you have to look like everyone else. Otherwise you’re a dead man.”
In Pakistan, spies take their jobs very seriously, but that’s the nature of the espionage business in these unruly parts. It is a game of life and death, much like it was in the old days of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. That era is long gone, but another cold war, between archrivals India and Pakistan, rages on, with potentially dangerous consequences to the world that have been largely ignored. Like the U.S. and the Soviets, both India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed nations; one is secular and the other religious, an echo of the capitalist-Communist divide that was at the heart of the Cold War. But while the U.S. and the Soviets never went to war, Pakistan and India have fought three, and very nearly a fourth.
Shortly after that standoff in 1999, Pakistan’s dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf admitted that he would not hesitate to use the nuclear arsenal at his disposal if Pakistan’s defeat was imminent. Since then, the potential for chaos has grown as parts of Pakistan have steadily devolved into anarchy, while the country’s economy has been reduced to a beggar’s state. India, meanwhile, has rocketed to near developed-world status. “Pakistan defines itself in opposition to India,” says John Pike, founder of globalsecurity.org, a leading online source for security and intelligence information and a long-time observer of the Pakistani and Indian intelligence communities, “and over time India’s advantages just keep getting greater, so Pakistan is playing a losing hand.”
Against that backdrop, Pakistani intelligence agents are convinced that Indian spies are hard at work to destabilize their country. “There are tens of thousands of RAW agents in Pakistan,” claims Farouk, referring to the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s spy service. “But you’ll never see them. The guys that get caught are two or three steps removed from the agency men. They don’t even know who the agency men are. That’s the way things are done.”
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