Revision as of 21:13, 8 November 2014

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Chidanand Rajghatta Pro-Pak ex-US diplomat under lens for spying The Times of India Washington Nov 08 2014

Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, F.B.I. Is Investigating Retired U.S. Diplomat, a Pakistan Expert, Officials Say The New York Times, NOV. 7, 2014

Suhasini Haidar, Robin Raphel, the ‘obstacle’ in India-U.S. ties The Hindu

Anne Gearan and Adam Goldman U.S. diplomat and longtime Pakistan expert is under federal investigation The Washington Post

Harinder Baweja Clearing the air/ Future of Indo-US bilateral relations depends on resolving Kashmir and F-16 sales to Pak India Today April 15, 1994 |

Ashis Ray, RAW tapped senior US official's phone, 'heard’ US-Pak move on J&K, The Times of India TNN | Sep 17, 2012

M K Bhadrakumar, FBI swoops down on an American robin, November 7, 2014

Personal details

Born 1947

Marital status: Her first husband, Raphel (whom she had divorced by then), was so close to the Pakistani military establishment that he died with General Zia-ul-Haq, who had become the President of Pakistan through a military coup.

Ms Raphel later married Mr Leonard A. Ashton

Friends: (Pak Observer adds what many speak of only privately: ‘Robin Raphel made no secret of her love for Pakistan and her friendship with prominent Pakistanis (including the legendary Shafqat Kakakhel).’)

Education

1969: Graduated with B.A. in history and economics from the University of Washington in (including a year at the University of London)

1969-70: One year at Cambridge University

After 1972: master's degree in economics from the University of Maryland

Career as teacher

1970-72: Taught history at Damavand College for women, Teheran, Iran

2000- 2003: Senior Vice President at the National Defense University, Washington

Languages spoken

English, French, Urdu.

Career with CIA

After her master's from Maryland, Robin Raphel joined the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) as an analyst.

A spy?

Robin Raphel, a former State Department official and lobbyist who tormented New Delhi in the 1990s with provocative remarks on Jammu and Kashmir's accession to India and was seen as a brazenly pro-Pakistan partisan in Washington, has, since Oct 2014, been under FBI investigation for possible espionage.

'Two U.S. officials described the investigation as a counterintelligence matter, which typically involves allegations of spying on behalf of foreign governments,' The Washington Post reported.

Early links with South Asia

She was serving as a political counsellor in New Delhi (1991-1993) after an early stint as a CIA analyst.

In 1993 she was pitchforked into the job of assistant secretary of state in Washington DC in the newly created “South Asia“ bureau (the post later included Central Asia) by President Bill Clinton, with whom she was reported to be friends going back to their Oxbridge days.

The “South Asia“ coinage itself was received skeptically by New Delhi, which saw it as an effort to dilute the cachet that “Indian subcontinent“ had.

It was in her capacity as assistant secretary of state (South Asia) that Raphel started tormenting India.

During her Delhi stint, The Hindu reports, she ‘had already made ripples with frequent visits to Srinagar and expressing strong views on Kashmir at diplomatic events.’

Pathological hatred of India

The reason for Raphel's animosity towards India has never been fully explained or understood.

Had it been limited to Kashmir or Pakistan it could have been called a point of view. However, she wanted nothing less than the break up of India into pieces. Raphel also supported Khalistani separatists and persuaded Clinton to support them.

She was the first U.S. diplomat to call Kashmir a "disputed territory."

Some put her hatred to her New Delhi posting in 1991, when she was posted as Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, a city in whichwhen she reportedly suffered a traumatic accident that needed hospitalization which left her unhappy.

Others attributed it to her fondness for Pakistan from earlier links (her former husband Arnold L. Raphel was the US ambassador there [and was so close to the Pakistani top brass that] in 1988 he died in the aircrash that also killed Gen Zia-ul Haq).

Be as it may, Raphel soon proceeded to create havoc as the pointperson for “South Asia“, raising the hackles of the Narasimha Rao government in New Delhi with incendiary pronouncements on the Kashmir issue, particularly at a time New Delhi was already dealing with a tense situation in the state arising from the Hazratbal episode.

In one background briefing she suggested that Washington did not recognize the instrument of accession that made Kashmir a part of India and effectively questioned the validity of the India Independence Act.

She was also dismissive of the Shimla Agreement saying it was ineffective and outdated. Each of this positions validated Pakistan's viewpoint.

The ‘obstacle’ in India-U.S. ties

The Hindu adds: When she made her controversial comments on the Kashmir dispute and the suggestion of a referendum, the Indian government saw her as a formidable, antagonistic voice to contend with. “The U.S. was seen as pro-Pakistan at the time,” describes diplomat Satinder Lambah, who was India’s High Commissioner in Islamabad then, “And Ms. Raphel was a real obstacle in bettering ties between the US and India. They improved dramatically, later, but it was in spite of her.”

The Narasimha Rao government issued demarches, both in New Delhi and Washington, expressing unhappiness over the comments. While Ms. Raphel remained in the position for several years, the Clintons changed their public positions on Kashmir soon after. President Bill Clinton, who had even raised concerns over “human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir” at a White house function in 1994, no longer brought those up, even as a visit by Hillary Clinton in April 1995 to New Delhi paved the way for better relations.

Controversial policies

“Eventually, we have been vindicated by this investigation,” said an official who preferred not to be named, speaking about the just-announced U.S. federal probe against Ms. Raphel, “We repeatedly told the U.S. that Ms. Raphel’s position was anti-India, but it was also not in the U.S.’s interests.” As a diplomat Ms. Raphel was responsible for two other controversial policies: that of suggesting support for the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in 1996, as a means of securing the U.S. company Unocal consortium’s pipeline plan in the region, as well as advocating dropping parts of the U.S.’s Pressler amendment that put strict oversight over aid to Pakistan. After she retired, Ms. Raphel joined consultancy group Cassidy & Associates and landed a massive $1.2 million contract from the Pakistan government under President Musharraf, to “improve Pakistan’s image” in the U.S. in 2007.

Protector of Pakistan’s state sponsored terrorism

Raphel’s remarks outraged New Delhi, but it got worse when she was seen as brazenly working to protect Pakistan from being declared a state sponsor of terrorism following the terrorist attack on Mumbai in 1993 -in the face of evidence provided by India, including detonators used in the serial blasts that mysteriously disappeared when they were sent to Washington for forensic evaluation.

The late Indian spymaster Bahukutumbi Raman referred in his memoirs to this “ack-thoo“ moment in US-India relations, saying, “I felt like vomiting and spitting at the state department officials. I might have done so had they been there.“ The principal subject of his ire was Raphel, who had enraged him by threatening to put both Pakistan and India on the same terrorism list.

“The state department officer, who had previously served in the US Embassy in New Delhi, asked the Ambassador to tell New Delhi that if the R&AW did not stop what the state department described as its covert actions in Pakistan, the US might be constrained to act against Pakistan and India for indulging in acts of terrorism against each other,“ Raman wrote in a thinly-disguised reference to Raphel and her machinations. According to the message, Raphel had said: “You have been asking us for many years to declare Pakistan as a state-sponsor of terrorism. Yes, we will do so. But we will simultaneously act against India too if it did not stop meddling in Pakistan.“

Raman thought Raphel was being disingenuous in equating India with Pakistan, which was effectively carrying out a war inside India using disaffected Indians (such as Dawood Ibrahim) and jihadis, and moreover had tried to undermine India by sponsoring the Khalistani separatism in Punjab.

He took the matter to Narasimha Rao, who after determining that Indian intelligence was not sponsoring any terrorist violence in Pakistan (aside from keeping political contacts with Pakistan leaders who were not inimical to India), took a strong stand against Raphel and her incendiary positions.

In one of the more trenchant statements, Rao's home minister S B Chavan virtually accused Washington of turning a blind eye to terrorism against India, if not actively supporting it. “We have no evidence,“ Chavan told journalists, “but there is no doubt that the US is helping Pakistan in aiding and abetting terrorist and anti-social activities in India.“

The mild-mannered Rao himself took up the matter with visiting US Senators Thad Cochran, Larry Pressler and Hank Brown, telling them that Raphel's statements did not help the promotion of Indo-US relations. These were among the reasons why she was sent on a 4-day tour of India in 1994.

1994: Raphel’s visit to India

By 1994 Raphel was easily the woman India hated the most. At the time India’s international clout was not what it would later become on the strength of several years of continued economic success. Yet, the USA realised that things had gone too far from their side.

American had been having a rough time in Asia: North Korea had refused to let its nuclear sites be inspected; Japan had not accommodated the USA on the then controversial Super 301 issue; and China had snubbed the USA on trying to link China’s human rights record with trade.

America’s relations with India were at their worst since December 1971 when, during the Bangladesh Liberation War, the USA had deployed US Task Force 74, a US Navy task force of the United States Seventh Fleet, and the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, in the Bay of Bengal as a show of strength against India and in support of Pakistan. (Such US actions gave India no choice but to abandon its non-alignment. A Soviet Navy submarine started following the US task force. A US-USSR standoff was prevented when the American fleet slinked away towards South East Asia, away from the Bay of Bengal.)

Back to 1994: The then ‘US Charge d'Affaires Kenneth Brill, had conveyed to the Government of India that Raphel was keen to smoothen out 'Raphel-ed' feathers. In return, the invitation to [Prime Minister] Rao to visit the US in May [1994] was used to smoothen Raphel's passage to India. The US want[ed] to put Indo-US relations back on the rails,’ India Today reported in 1994.

In Pakistan, Raphel would meet the President directly. After all, her husband lived and died with the Pakistani president. Top Pakistani officials would fawn on her. The view in India was that she was a mere Joint-, at best Additional-, Secretary in the US government. Therefore, the Indian establishment felt that her visit should be confined to JS—at best AS—level officers. Home Minister Mr Chavan had publicly called Raphel a 'junior US official.'

‘The controversy over whether Raphel should be given the red carpet treatment or that she meet only her Indian counterpart, Hardip Puri, joint secretary (America), was soon settled,’ India Today reported at the time. ‘Brill - in the forefront of all the anger and fury - set the pace for the arrival of a conciliatory Raphel. The American Embassy went out of its way to keep the foot-in-the-mouth Raphel at arm's length from the media, and the [Congress] Government reciprocated by asking its party's youth wing to keep off the streets./ While bureaucrats from the Home Ministry and Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) were given the go-ahead for attending functions, as were Congress(I) MPs, Youth Congress(I) chief Maninderjit Singh Bitta [a victim of terrorist violence himself], famous for his skills at sabre-rattling, was asked to put off his protest rally. The few BJP activists who did raise slogans and burn effigies were, as a US Embassy member said, "noises we could live with".’

In the event Home Minister Chavan agreed to give Raphel an audience.

On Kashmir, Raphel was somewhat conciliatory. While agreeing that it should be settled within the parameters of the Shimla agreement (words that soothed the Indian side somewhat), she added that the US was willing to mediate a deal between India and Pakistan (this part delighted the Pakistanis and irritated India, which is sworn to bilateral talks with Pakistan). She also tried to explain that her statement questioning the Instrument of Accession had been misunderstood.

At the time relations between India and the USA had also been rocked by the USA’s plans to sell between 38 and 71 deep-penetration F-16 eroplanes to Pakistan. India was worried because, as the expert US lawmaker Senator Larry Pressler had pointed out, the F-16 was "the one that can deliver a nuclear bomb to another country". Everyone knew that Pakistan had secretly made nuclear weapons (with the knowledge of US officials), though overt testing of nuclear weapons by Pakistan was still a few years away.

The Pressler Amendment expressly forbade the sale of such defence equipment to Pakistan. It banned most economic and military assistance to Pakistan unless the President of the USA certified every year that "Pakistan does not possess a nuclear explosive device and that the proposed United States assistance program will reduce significantly the risk that Pakistan will possess a nuclear explosive device."

Indian PM Mr Narasimha Rao had gone on record as saying that any dilution of the Pressler Amendment "will force India to review its defence policy."

However, Raphel, acting on the brief give to her by her government, justified this sale as a "one-time exception.

Raphel’s four-day visit to India 1994 had stirred deep rooted anger in India—against her and, thus, against the country she represented. India Today had noted at the time, ‘To judge from all the hype and hysteria generated in Parliament and the media, Robin Raphel could have been the visiting head of an invading army and not, as her title suggests, the US assistant secretary of state.

‘At the end of an exhaustive round of ministerial talks and through several lunches, teas and dinners which marked her four-day visit, the controversial Raphel had the satisfaction of having achieved exactly what she had come for - to reiterate what she had been saying in the past weeks from Washington on the contentious issues of Kashmir, human rights and nuclear non-proliferation.

‘Only, this time, the tone was different and as former foreign secretary J.N. Dixit says: "She behaved like a professional."

‘Professional maturity is what marked the Indian attitude as well. In keeping with his calibrated style of functioning, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao decided not to match churlishness with churlishness.’ India Today

With hindsight it is now clear that while the US government of the time agreed with the substance of what Raphel had been saying, it was alarmed by her vicious style. Therefore, the US State Department sent Raphel to India to lower the temperature—but not to soften the US stand on anything concerning Pakistan.

Indeed, in April 8 1994, a few days after Raphel’s visit to India, Strobe Talbott and she went to Islamabad, to show concern for Pakistan's position that India's conventional arms superiority vis-à-vis Pakistan was so great that Pakistan simply had to have the F-16s.

1994: Raphel’s stratagems continue

In 1994, Jammu and Kashmir was under President’s Rule—the elected government having resigned in January 1990.

In September 1994 Pakistan provisionally introduced a draft resolution against India on Kashmir at the United Nations general assembly's first committee. Given the virulence of Robin Raphel’s statements, India was worried about whether the USA would actually vote for the resolution, and against India. Raphel’s posture suggested that she was trying to make the USA vote against India.

In any case, a wide section of the Indian establishment, led by the then Prime Minister of India P V Narasimha Rao, and backed by the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Gen KV Krishna Rao, wanted an elected government in the state, wanted to release all Kashmiri dissidents not wanted for any actual killing [this was done], and wanted a return of the ICRC (Red Cross) to the state. (The elections were held in 1996)

India’s foreign secretary Kris Srinivasan, met his counterpart in the US administration Peter Tarnoff, and argued that "a negative vote [by the USA] against India at the UN would only stimulate militant activity and render futile the democratic steps the Indian government was trying to take".

In his memoirs 'Diplomatic Channels', Mr Kris Srinivasan revealed that India's external intelligence agency, RAW, snooped on a telephone conversation between Robin Raphel, and the then US ambassador in Islamabad, which confirmed that the US would not back the move by Pakistan, and therefore the resolution would fail to proceed any further.

India soon came to know of the frustration of Raphel — "which we came to hear from a phone intercept," says Srinivasan. She informed her colleague, the US ambassador, that she had pressed for an affirmative vote for the Pakistan resolution, but had been blocked by the "higher-ups".

RAW had successfully tapped Raphel's call, despite this being from Washington to Islamabad

Officially: a lobbyist for Pakistan

After retiring from the the Foreign Service in 2005 and before she returned to Foggy Bottom as a consultant on Pakistan, Raphel became a lobbyist for Pakistan, working on the account for Cassidy and Associates, which had previously won a $1.2 million contract to promote the country as an “important strategic partner of the US.“

She told the Hill newspaper at that time that “there is less than perfect understanding of Pakistan here,“ and her job will be to make sure “all relevant parties have the facts.“

The New York Times added: ‘In 2009, the American Embassy in Pakistan hired her to help administer billions of dollars of development aid to the country. She returned to Washington in 2011 as a senior adviser on Pakistan issues for the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.’

Nov 2014: the cover is blown

Raphel was suspected of taking classified information home from the State Department. ‘F.B.I. was trying to determine why Ms. Raphel apparently brought classified information home, and whether she had passed, or was planning to pass, the information to a foreign government,’ The New York Times reported. ‘It is extremely rare for the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into such a prominent Washington figure.

Washington Post added: In Oct 2014 the FBI reportedly searched Raphel's Washington DC home and examined and sealed her office at the State Department, where she was till recently before the raids serving as an adviser on Pakistan-related issues.

U.S. officials acknowledged that the FBI conducted a search at Raphel’s home Oct. 21 but would not provide details of the search. Agents removed bags and boxes from the home, but it is not clear what was seized there or at her office.

At the time of the raid, Raphel was a senior adviser on Pakistan for the office of the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan. In that job, she was chiefly responsible for administering nonmilitary aid such as U.S. economic grants and incentives.

After the F.B.I. searches she was placed on administrative leave in Oct 2014, , and her contract with the State Department allowed to expire in Nov 2014, the Washington Post, which first reported the story, said.

Two US officials described the investigation as a counterintelligence matter, which typically involves allegations of spying on behalf of foreign governments, the paper added. The state department, Robin Raphel's parent body till she retired in 2005, reacted discreetly to the development that churned up analysts who worked on the subcontinent, where Raphel was both a colourful and divisive personality. The department is aware of the matter and has been cooperating with law enforcement, a spokesperson said, confirming that Raphel is no longer employed by it.

Career (other than as Pakistani ‘lobbyist’)

i) Ambassador to Tunisia;

ii) Assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs in the Clinton administration.

iii) ‘The 9/11 Commission interviewed Ms. Raphel about her experiences dealing with Pakistan’s government and about her official meetings with the Afghan Taliban.’ The New York Times adds, ‘According to the commission’s report, Ms. Raphel “noted how Washington used one ideology, radical Islam, to defeat another, communism, in Afghanistan.”’ “This, she cautioned, while successful in the short run, came back to haunt the U.S.,” the report said. “As a result, policy makers should consider the dangers when working with highly ideological movements.”

Ms Raphel neglected to mention how she backed violence and militant ‘moderate Islam’ in her determination to prise Kashmir away from India, and into the fold of Pakistan.

In 1988, Ms. Raphel’s former husband, Arnold L. Raphel, then the American ambassador to Pakistan, was killed in a mysterious plane crash with Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the president of Pakistan. There are numerous theories about the cause of the crash, including that it was an assassination and that nerve gas in a canister hidden in a crate of mangoes was dispersed in the plane’s air-conditioning system.

News of the investigation into Ms. Raphel was greeted with apprehension in Islamabad, where she is viewed by many as one of the few American officials sympathetic toward Pakistan’s government, which has had a turbulent relationship with Washington since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Najam Sethi, a political analyst and talk-show host on GEO TV, said Ms. Raphel “was friendly toward Pakistan, a reason she was disliked in India.”

“This is not a good development for Pakistan,” he said. Correction: November 7, 2014

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article stated incorrectly the title of Mohammed Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan who was killed in a mysterious plane crash. He was the president, not the prime minister.

Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington.