[citation needed] In a 1971 face-to-face meeting in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Zhou directly asked Henry Kissinger about US involvement, whose response included the line "As I told the Prime Minister the last time, he vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA.
[5] Journalist, conspiracy theorist,[6][7] and holocaust denier[8] Gregory Douglas claimed to have conducted a series of interviews with CIA officer Robert Crowley in 1993.
[9] Douglas wrote that Crowley said that a bomb in the cargo section of the plane exploded mid-air, bringing down the commercial Boeing 707 airliner in Alps with few traces, claiming he described it as "an unfortunate accident".
Much of the liaison was essentially political in character — what is today known as 'back channel diplomacy' — but R&AW's special operations and SIGINT/IMINT unit, the Aviation Research Centre, received technical assistance from the U.S. in return for information on China.
[5] This Top Secret Codeword item in the Central Intelligence Bulletin relays press reporting and public statements by officials of other governments, including Pakistan, and contains analysts assessments of the implications for China.
[14] In 1985, according to Frontline magazine, R&AW counter-intelligence obtained a confession, from a field officer in Chennai to admit that he had passed on sensitive information to the CIA and Sri Lankan intelligence.
In 1992, the US State Department threatened to impose economic sanctions on India after it refused permission for US sleuths to go on an aerial-photography mission along the Sino-Indian border.
New Delhi views the development, not just the possession, of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles as the symbols of a world power and an important component of self-reliance.
[18][citation needed] Brajesh Mishra, former Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, is known to have had direct contact with the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence as well.
[19] There is little oversight of this process, which has had the unexpected consequence that "hundreds of Indian agents have been exposed, the term professionals use to describe individuals whose real jobs are known to foreign intelligence organisations.
Rabinder Singh has been described, in Indian media, as a CIA asset inside the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), the national intelligence service.
that he had acted as a conduit or cutout for a number of highly placed US 'assets' operating deep within the Indian intelligence community, the military and scientific centres working on nuclear and missile development, and others[by whom?]
[22] He came to R&AW as an Indian Army major, who had "served with distinction in Amritsar during Operation Bluestar, the counter-terrorist assault on the Golden Temple in 1984.
"Rabinder Singh's source seems to have been one of his relatives, a U.S. citizen who has worked for over two decades with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).