India's Intelligence Bureau may be the oldest spy agency still operating
In 1887 the British rulers of India, uneasy about a new political party called the Indian National Congress, set up a secret branch to watch political, social and religious movements. Modelled on the Tsar's secret police and run on a shoestring, it survives today as India's Intelligence Bureau, often called the world's oldest intelligence organisation.
The Central Special Branch was created on 23 December 1887. Earlier that year, in a secret dispatch dated 25 March, the Secretary of State for India, R. A. Cross, approved a plan from the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, to gather secret political intelligence across the country. Dufferin wanted police and political officers in the princely states to report on movements of every kind, with special agencies at both central and provincial level feeding information upward. The Congress, founded in 1885, was a key reason for the worry.
Dufferin took his model from the Third Section, the political police of Imperial Russia. To save money the new branch borrowed staff and offices from the Thuggee and Dacoity Department in Shimla, with a proposed yearly budget of 46,800 rupees. Its first head was Donald McCracken, a Punjab police officer working under Colonel P. D. Henderson.
Reorganisations followed. After a police commission chaired by Andrew Fraser, the branch was folded in 1904 into a new Department of Criminal Intelligence, and the old Thuggee department was abolished. That body took the name Intelligence Bureau in 1920, reflecting the Government of India Act 1919, which charged it with keeping the government informed about imperial security. Through the 1920s it mostly passed material to the Indian Political Intelligence office in London, and from 1937 it placed Central Intelligence Officers in the newly autonomous provinces.
After independence in 1947 the bureau answered to the Home Ministry, and T. G. Sanjeevi Pillai became the first Indian to lead it. It handled foreign as well as domestic intelligence until failures to anticipate Chinese moves before the 1962 war prompted India to hand work abroad to a separate agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, in 1968. Since then the IB has concentrated on internal security and counterintelligence. The government describes it as a civilian body without police powers.
Source: Intelligence Bureau (India)
