The Obama administration’s “Asia Pivot” is playing out in earnest in joint U.S.-Indian-Israeli intelligence operations in the Himalayan region. The actions by the three cooperative nations’ intelligence agencies are aimed at limiting Chinese influence here. The strategy in the mountainous area of the Sino-Indian border complements other U.S. strategies now being played out in the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea, the South China Sea, the South Pacific, and the Indian Ocean to box in China and prevent it from challenging America’s military presence in the Asia-Pacific region . . .
The most recent covert operation in the encirclement of China played out in the recent election in the Buddhist Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. Under its previous government, led by the first democratically-elected Prime Minister, Jigmi Y. Thinley, Bhutan championed the concept of “Gross National Happiness,” which measured the progress of a nation based on the happiness and well-being of its people rather than by cold economic figures and statistics. Thinley traveled to the UN General Assembly in 2012 to urge the world’s nations to adopt Gross National Happiness as a principal in running their economies.
Such a notion of Gross National Happiness is anathema to the globalist economists and bankers that infest the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and worldwide central banks, and these institutions took note of Thinley’s proposal for a New Bretton Woods system to replace the current domination of the world economy by the World Bank and IMF. However, it was primarily Bhutan’s alteration of its traditional Indian-directed foreign policy that spelled ultimate doom for Thinley.
Thinley committed an unforgivable sin in New Delhi’s eyes by exerting a degree of foreign policy independence from India by opening up direct talks with China and considering establishing diplomatic relations with Russia and other nations. Thinley had already established diplomatic ties with 32 nations, a move that caused distress in New Delhi. Bhutan’s foreign policy independence was a bridge too far for the intelligence alliance of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Israel’s Mossad. Plans were put into motion to dump Thinley in the scheduled Bhutanese election and replace him with someone with more pro-India and anti-China credentials.
In 1975, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi a “wink and a nod” when RAW staged phony protests against the Chogyal (King) of Sikkim, a semi-independent nation to the west of Bhutan that was attempting to exercise more independence from New Delhi. Sikkim’s Gyalmo (Queen) was American-born Hope Cooke, a New York debutant who married Sikkim’s King. The King of Sikkim, who was related to the Bhutanese royal family, had attempted to follow Bhutan into the United Nations as a member state. India staged anti-royal and anti-Buddhist demonstrations by Hindi Nepali residents of Sikkim and eventually sent in the Indian army to not only “restore order” but overthrow the King and declare Sikkim to be an integral state of India. Ever since the absorption of Sikkim into India, CIA station chiefs in New Delhi have kept track of attempts by Sikkimese, especially Bhutia and Lepcha Buddhists, former royalists, and some anti-India local politicians, to reassert the occupied nation’s independence from India.
Thanks to the revelations of National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, independence-minded political leaders in Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal are now aware that a system code-named XKEYSCORE, which operates from a CIA/NSA Special Collection Service operations center at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, intercepts satellite and Internet traffic transmitted to and from the Indian subcontinent, including the countries and territories of the Himalayan region. The presence of XKEYSCORE in New Delhi is primarily aimed at the strategically-important Himalayan region, as well as China to the north. Based on the close links between the CIA and RAW and NSA’s use of Israeli-developed interception technology, the intelligence services of India, the U.S., and Israel have virtually unimpeded access to all the communications of the Himalayan region. Therefore, Thinley and his government in Bhutan, advocates of Gross National Happiness, were up against Gross International Surveillance.
Undoubtedly, the NSA/CIA XKEYSCORE operation at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia was surged against the delegations of Thinley and Chinese Prime Minster Wen Jiabao before and after they met last year in Rio de Janeiro at the Rio plus 20 Summit. The two leaders agreed to begin negotiations on establishing diplomatic relations between Beijing and Thimphu, agreed to demarcate their common border, and to have China push for Bhutan as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. All of these notions were non-starters for New Delhi and its American and Israeli allies.
The United States, which has refined the art of interfering with elections to a science, thanks to the global use of agents agitateurs financed by George Soros on behalf of the CIA, and India, which successfully interfered with elections in Sikkim prior to and after the Indian invasion, pooled their resources to guarantee a reversal of course in Bhutan. The pro-Indian candidate for prime minister, Tshering Tobgay of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), trounced Thinley’s Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT) party in the election, winning 32 of 47 parliamentary seats . Tobgay’s first action was to stop Bhutan’s outreach to other countries like China and Russia, and pledge total loyalty to India. That course also pleased Washington, which could devote its resources to other flashpoints on China’s borders and not worry about Bhutan.
Israel’s interests in the Himalayan region are murky. Several thousands of ethnic Mizo, Kuki, and Chins peoples in India’s northeast claim to be Jews, the Bnei Menashe, descendant from one of the so-called “Lost Tribes” of Old Testament folklore. In fact, Jewish proselytizers appeared in the region in the 1980s and began poaching Christian Mizos, Kukis, and Chins for conversion to Judaism in order to extend Israel’s political influence in the region and recruit new settlers to occupy Israel’s ill-gotten territories in the Middle East.
The claims of the Bnei Menashe are, therefore, specious. However, many thousands have emigrated to Israel after being declared “Jewish” by some rabbinical authorities and they are being moved into West Bank settlements to supplant Palestinians. Other Bnei Menashe remain in northeast India, where they give religious cover to many thousands of Israeli Mossad and Israel Defense Force personnel, most said to be former or reserve lDF members, who have become more and more active in the entire Himalayan region, particularly around the Tibetan government-in-exile community in Dharamsala, India. Kibbutzes and Chabad facilities are springing up all over northeastern India, all run by Israeli nationals, many with ties to Israeli intelligence and military branches. Israel has helped establish in Mizoram a political party, the Ephraim Union, which advocates conversion of all Mizos to Judaism and the establishment of a Jewish independent state in Mizoram. It claims India’s sovereignty over Mizoram was only to continue for ten years after India’s independence from Britain in 1947. In the 2008 election for the Indian Lok Sabha lower house of parliament, the party received a mere 1.87 percent of the vote.
Israel has obvious designs on other parts of the region. A Hindu political party, Panun Kashmir, which demands a separate Hindu state among the majority of Muslims in the Valley of Kashmir, suspiciously uses a white Star of David on its orange flag.
It is also no coincidence that Israel is now India’s second largest supplier of weapons. Mizoram, the location of many Bnei Menashe, is also the location of the Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School (CIJW) in Vairengte where Indian, American, Israeli, Bhutanese, Nepali, and other allied special operations personnel jointly train in military operations.
RAW, the CIA, and Mossad are equally active in increasingly fragmented Nepal, where the priority has been to limit the political power of the Maoist political party. From primarily Buddhist Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan’s far north to Buddhist Ladakh in Kashmir, to Sikkim and Bhutan, and further east into Myanmar, there is a grab for influence between various parties that have committed to either side in a forthcoming Asia-wide conflict between the West and China.
This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
