In 1974, India successfully tested a nuclear bomb. Furious over the test, Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto vowed that Pakistan would "eat grass" if it had to, but it would build a nuclear bomb of its own no matter what. In 1976, Pakistan set up the A.Q. Khan Research Laboratories, and with Abdul Qadeer Khan leading the charge, nuclear weapons testing kicked into high gear.
Meanwhile in India, in 1975, Indira Gandhi felt her grip on power slipping, so she declared a state of Emergency. She told the Indian public it was necessary because the country's internal situation had become unstable. Under the cover of that Emergency, Indira Gandhi threw opposition leaders in jail — and not just them. Anyone who spoke out against her or even questioned her was locked up.
The Emergency left the entire opposition furious, and they wanted payback. So when the Emergency finally ended, Indira Gandhi was voted out, and in 1977, Morarji Desai became prime minister.
Morarji Desai despised Indira Gandhi — not just her personally, but virtually every decision she'd ever made.
So the moment he took office, Desai decided to pursue friendship with Pakistan instead. He declared there was no need for conflict anymore. If both countries respected each other's needs and traded in good faith, he said, there'd be no reason to fight. "I don't just talk," he said. "I follow through."
Around the same time, Israel and North Korea were locked in bitter hostility. Kim Jong Un's grandfather, Kim Il Sung, despised Israel because during the Cold War, Israel had sided with the United States while North Korea stood firmly against it. Kim Il Sung called Israel nothing but an American puppet — and that same hostility carries on with Kim Jong Un today. Naturally, Israel had no interest in seeing its adversary North Korea become a nuclear power.
Around that time, in 1976, when Pakistan opened the A.Q. Khan Research Laboratories, Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, started keeping close tabs on A.Q. Khan.
In 1977, Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was overthrown in a coup led by Zia-ul-Haq, who then made himself the country's leader. Zia later traveled to North Korea, and upon his return, work at the A.Q. Khan Research Laboratories accelerated dramatically. Mossad's suspicions were quickly turning into certainty.
Eventually, Mossad discovered that A.Q. Khan had stolen the P1 centrifuge technology — a key piece of nuclear bomb-making technology — from Germany and smuggled it into Pakistan.
Back in India, one of Morarji Desai's first moves was to slash the budget of India's intelligence agency, RAW, by 40%. He told the public that RAW agents had essentially been Indira Gandhi's personal Praetorian Guard. Whenever R.N. Kao, the agency's chief, visited the Prime Minister's office, people would call him a murderer to his face. Fed up, Kao told Desai plainly: if you don't value what we do, then we can't keep doing this work — and he resigned on the spot.
R.N. Kao resigned in 1977. Around that same time, intelligence was coming in from Pakistan suggesting the country was on the verge of building a nuclear bomb at Kahuta — possibly just months away. But there was no way to be completely sure that's what was actually happening there.
China, meanwhile, was reportedly preparing to hand Pakistan a blueprint for building a nuclear weapon.
By this point, Mossad strongly suspected Pakistan was building a bomb, but they still lacked full confirmation. So Mossad shared their intelligence with RAW and made an offer: if RAW could confirm it, Israel was prepared to launch a strike that would take out Pakistan's Kahuta nuclear enrichment plant entirely.
RAW tried repeatedly to get an agent inside the lab, but security was airtight. Eventually, an agent noticed that all the scientists visited the same barbershop. Knowing that anyone working around uranium would carry trace particles in their hair or clothing, the agent arranged to collect hair clippings from the scientists after their haircuts. Lab tests confirmed it — the hair samples did contain uranium.
RAW also managed to recruit one of the scientists directly, who agreed to hand over blueprints from A.Q. Khan's lab for $10,000. With this confirmation in hand, RAW relayed everything to Mossad. But there was a logistical problem: Israeli fighter jets couldn't strike Kahuta directly from Israel — they'd need to refuel at Jamnagar Airbase in India along the way. So Mossad asked RAW to secure permission from India's prime minister for the refueling stop.
The RAW agent called Morarji Desai and laid out the entire plan. But Desai flatly refused. He said conflict of that kind would damage relations with a neighboring country, and he wasn't willing to authorize it. He told the agent not to call him again. Desai denied permission — but then Zia-ul-Haq called him directly.
Zia-ul-Haq needled him, asking about comments Desai had made in the media about drinking his own urine — how and when he did it. Desai shot back, telling Zia not to get too comfortable, because he knew exactly what was going on at Kahuta. He warned him it wasn't a good look.
Zia-ul-Haq was rattled. He immediately called an emergency meeting and told his officials that the Indians clearly knew everything about their nuclear program — yet everyone in the room was staying quiet about how the information was leaking. He demanded to know who was feeding this information from Pakistan to India.
What followed was a manhunt. Pakistan's police and military began systematically hunting down and eliminating RAW agents operating in the country.
Ravindra Kaushik was among the RAW agents in Pakistan at the time. A fellow agent named Inayat Masiha was sent to help extract him, but Masiha was captured and brutally tortured for days. Eventually, he gave up Kaushik's location. Ravindra Kaushik was arrested in 1983. In 1985, a Pakistani court sentenced him to death, though the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
He was held in Sialkot Jail, where he endured horrific torture — his nails were pulled out, his fingers cut off one by one over successive days, his hair torn out, and eventually his hands and feet were amputated. Through it all, Kaushik never revealed anything.
In 2001, Ravindra Kaushik died in Mianwali Central Jail from tuberculosis and heart disease. To this day, India has never officially acknowledged him as one of its agents.
His mother, Amla Devi, said her family received a modest monthly stipend of between 500 and 2,000 rupees. She once wrote a letter to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, pointing out that if Ravindra Kaushik were alive today, he would have risen to a senior position in the Pakistani Army and could have continued providing invaluable intelligence to India.
Kaushik's brother, R.N. Kaushik, also appealed to Vajpayee — not for money, he said, but simply for recognition of what Ravindra had done. During his time undercover, Kaushik had helped save the lives of roughly 20,000 Indian soldiers in Rajasthan, and had he lived, he likely would have continued to do so.
It's a hard truth: India's intelligence agency, RAW, has quietly prevented who knows how many attacks and military disasters over the years — yet its agents receive no benefits, no recognition, nothing. No country can openly honor these agents, because every nation keeps a watchful eye on the others. If it ever became known that India was conducting surveillance on another country, that country would cut off trade and diplomatic ties immediately. That's exactly why so few people can do this kind of work. It's a life lived in total anonymity — where even your own family has no idea what you're really doing.