Bhagat Ram Talwar, one of the greatest spies of the Second World War
SILVER: The spy who fooled the Nazis by Mihir Bose
Spies, by definition, live in a world of grey, but the life of Bhagat Ram Talwar, alias Silver, seems to have been exceptionally shadowy. Born a Hindu Pathan in the North-West Frontier Province of undivided India, of nondescript appearance, armed with broken English but with a limitless talent for deception, Silver ranks with Garbo (Allies), Sorge (Soviet Union) and Cicero (Nazi Germany) in the pantheon of the great spies of the Second World War. Even among them he is unique: he belonged to a colony involved in a freedom struggle of its own; his theatre was not Europe but the tribal badlands through which he would make twelve hazardous journeys between Peshawar and Kabul; and he spied, with varying degrees of loyalty, for five powers – Italy, Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union and Japan – and survived.
Silver had shown a taste for political adventure even before he became a quintuple spy. He was a veteran of British jails, saw his brother hang for revolutionary activity, and flirted with several political movements. His lasting political affiliation was with the communist Kirti Kisan (Workers and Peasants) Party, inspired by the Ghadar movement of revolutionary Indians abroad; to enable fellow party workers to escape through Afghanistan he had familiarized himself with the rugged and violent tribal areas.
In early 1941, he met India’s enigmatic freedom fighter, Subhas Chandra Bose. Unable to overcome the Gandhi–Nehru hold on the freedom struggle and the Congress, and seeking a more radical path to freedom, Bose decided to escape the country, dressed as a deaf-mute Pathan pilgrim and guided by Silver, to the Soviet Union through Afghanistan. This journey of the sedentary politician, on foot and by mule, through the arid stony desert and mountains of treacherous tribal territory, makes for fascinating telling. One wishes that Mihir Bose (no relation of the legendary leader) had resisted the temptation to repeat, with some tweaking, passages from his earlier biography of Subhas Bose.
After weeks of knocking on the doors of the Soviet, German and Italian legations in Kabul, Bose – dressed as an Italian diplomat, Orlando Mazzota – reached Berlin via Moscow. He would go on to meet Hitler and subsequently collaborate with the Japanese, donning a military uniform and raising the Indian National Army from Indian POWs. Such was his hold on the Indian imagination that, though he died in an air crash days after the Japanese surrender, many believed he was alive and sighted, for decades later.
For Silver, this engagement with foreign powers in Kabul was a turning point: he was to be Bose’s link to India, to be contacted through Italian and German channels. Years of feint and counter-feint followed. While fascist money was useful, Silver had little sympathy for his employers; his loyalty, if it lay anywhere, was with communist Moscow. As Subhas Bose parlayed in Berlin and Rome and hatched sabotage plans, the Silver channel buzzed. Information, instructions, equipment, finances went through him; he shared everything with the NKVD – incidentally, the only agency that didn’t pay him – and cut himself off from Subhas’s followers in India. To keep his credibility with his handlers, he relayed plans and narratives of revolutionary ferment in India created in Lahore by a Punjabi fiction writer.
A substantial upgrade followed in the quality of the counter-intelligence supplied by Silver: when the NKVD, in a unique instance of spy-sharing, handed him to British intelligence, his handler in Delhi was Peter Fleming, brother of the creator of James Bond and an established author himself. Fleming crafted the deception material that Silver fed to the Germans and the Japanese including fictitious radio dispatches from the resplendent gardens of Delhi’s Viceregal House to the heart of the German intelligence service on a transmitter given by the Germans themselves.
After the war, Silver vanished along with his Iron Cross given by Germany, with several handlers believing that he had been their man alone. He wrote a doctored autobiography and appeared – elderly, bespectacled, almost professorial – at an international seminar on Subhas Bose in 1973, keen to leave behind an image of an anti-imperialist freedom fighter who had helped Bose. He died before the archives revealed the whole truth, now assiduously researched by Mihir Bose: the unique story of a brilliant beguiler with no deep commitments; a shadowy, slippery figure difficult to sympathize with; a lonely player, serving a tactical purpose, and then vanishing.
https://www.the-tls.com/history/twentieth-century-onwards-history/bhagat-ram-talwar
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