My interest in writing this book was triggered, in part, by an event that took

place in the house on the hill.

In the late 1990s, when terrorist violence in Jammu and Kashmir was at its
peak, an elderly post office clerk showed up at the house, asking to meet with a
n
officer who held some savings in the post office. It emerged that the clerk had
no real interest in the officer or in the matter of his savings. In the mid-1950
s,
the clerk said he had been assigned to a remote post office near the Banihal Pas
s,
the high Himalayan passage that was then the sole land route from the Indian
plains into the Kashmir valley. One brutal winter evening, a message arrived
informing him that a man who would soon make his way across the snow was to
be given immediate access to a telephone upon his arrival. Despite the blizzard
raging outside, the man did indeed arrive. He exchanged a few terse words with
whoever was at the other end of the telephone line, and then asked for a persona
l
favour
that his servant be asked to ready his home for his arrival and prepare
water for a hot bath.
With little else to do, the clerk made a few inquiries over the next few days.
It turned out that the man on the other end of the line had been Jammu and
Kashmir s second Prime Minister, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad. The man who
had appeared through the snow was Colonel Hasan Walia, the first official
inhabitant of the house on the hill. Ever since then, the clerk had wished to se
e
the inside of the home.
True or otherwise, the story of the postal clerk piqued my curiosity. India s
first spymaster in Jammu and Kashmir a confidant of both India s first Prime
Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru and its first Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai
Patel Hasan Walia is little remembered today. To his contemporaries in Jammu
and Kashmir, though, he was a central presence. Sheikh Abdullah saw the
spymaster as an emblem of what he believed were New Delhi s intrigues and
machinations in Kashmir, and a driving force behind his alienation from Nehru.7
Abdullah s strenuous efforts to have Hasan Walia removed from Jammu and
Kashmir, however, yielded nothing. Hasan Walia s professional skills may have
won the argument, for India s covert services secured considerable successes in
their battle against their Pakistani counterparts through the 1950s. At the outs
et
of my research, I had hoped to excavate the course of Hasan Walia s war and
the political battle that had raged around it. In this enterprise, I had little
success.
My search for material on the early phases of India Pakistan covert warfare
in Jammu and Kashmir did, however, lead me in the direction of a considerable
volume of material, much of it classified, that had been generated during the
long jihad. Notable among this collection were two large volumes of investigatio
n
records authored by the head of Jammu and Kashmir s own counter-espionage
service, Surendra Nath, a police officer who played a key role in Indian counter
terrorist
policy-making and execution until his death in an air crash in 1993. In
addition, I succeeded in exhuming some diaries maintained by participants, as