Black Tiger: The RAW Spy Who Became a Pakistani Major

0:00 Welcome back everyone, and today we're going to be taking a journey to a different part of the world in the world of espionage. We're going to go to India. We've covered a lot in England and some in France, and of course a lot in the US. But we're not the only countries with spies, so I thought it might be interesting to see other spy stories from around the world. Today we're looking at the Black Tiger, the raw spy who became a Pakistani major. Ravandra Koshik was born on April eleven, nineteen fifty two, in Rajasthan, a town that sits near the border. His father served in the Indian Air Force. The Wars of sixty five and seventy one were not distant history for him. There were the background noise of childhood. In college, he studied commerce,

0:40 but what stood out was his stage presence. He liked to act and he liked to debate, something that intelligence officers noticed. In nineteen seventy three of twenty one, he told his family he was taking a job in Delhi. Stead he entered two years of training with the Research and Analysis Wing. They taught him Urdu. They taught him the rhythms of Pakistani life. He underwent circumcision. Every official Indian record of his existence was eventually erased, and in nineteen seventy five he crossed into Pakistan as Nabi Ahmen Shakhir.

1:11 He enrolled at Karachi University and completed a law degree. Then he entered the Pakistan Army, not as a frontline officer, but as a clerk in the military accounts department. Over time he rose to the rank of major. From nineteen seventy five to nineteen eighty three, he lived the life completely. He was married, they had a son. To his wife and colleagues, he was a Pakistani Muslim working inside the military system. To raw he was a pipeline the intelligence.

1:38 He passed troop movements, logistical details, a kind of persistent in reporting that shapes decisions. Earned him the informal title Black Tiger from Indira Gandhi. For nearly eight years, the cover held as part of the story that still feels almost unreal, total immersion, day after day, year after year, while knowing a single slip could end everything. In September of nineteen eighty three, the end came through another agent.

2:05 Ross sent a low level operative named yat Masi to re establish contact with Koshuk. Pakistani counterintelligence caught Masi. Under pressure, he gave up the identity of the man he was supposed to meet. Issi arranged a meeting in a park. When Kashak arrived, they arrested him. What followed was not pleasant interrogation and torture. In Salkot, accounts described two years of sustained pressure. He never broken the sense of turning against India. In nineteen eighty five, at Pakistani court, suddenced him to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

2:38 He spent the next sixteen years moving between prisons. At this stage he was in nineteen he was thirty two. He was being moved from Salkot to kot law Pot to finally Central Jail in my own wally. From inside, he managed to smuggle letters to his family in India. The tone is not heroic. It is exhausted and bitter, and one he had asked in essence whether this was but people who sacrifice for a large country like India receive.

3:05 In another written near the end, he said that if he had an American agent, he would have been out in three days. His health collapsed under the conditions. Pulmonary toberculosis and heart disease finished him. He died in two thousand and one at the age of forty nine. His family learned of the death through unofficial channels. His father, the former Air Force officer, reportedly suffered a heart attack shortly after receiving the notice. The Indian government never publicly acknowledged Kaushik as one of its own during his lifetime or even immediately after. There was no diplomatic campaign ever for his release, no state recognition. While he was alive, the family received modest monthly support than silence for them.

3:48 The silence was the second betrayal. There are complications in the record, some details of exact rank, the precise value of the intelligency delivered in the full extent of his life, family life undercover very across accounts Indian reporting agree on the core timeline. Recruitment in the seventies, insertion in seventy five, exposure in eighty three, death in two thousand and one.

4:10 Bollywood has circled the story ek the Taiga Romeo Akbar Walter without fully owning it. His family has claimed the films drew from his life filmmakers have denied it. The result is a strange half life. The story is known enough to be referenced, but not enough to be settled, but makes Kashik's case lingers the completeness of the erasure.

4:30 Most spies retain some thread back to their real identity, some safe house, some periodic extraction plan. He lived as Nabir Shakir for years, built the family, wore the uniform, and still fed information home. When the cover collapsed, there was no extraction. There was only the long decline inside the prison. The letters he sent are the closest thing we have to his final voice. They don't ask for metals.

4:54 They ask a harder question about the reciprocity between the individual who disappears for the state and the state that prefers the disappearance to remain complete. And that question is not unique to India or to the nineteen eighties. In that fact, Ravenda Kashik' story is clean in its outline and messy in its aftermath. A young man recruited for theater and nerve two years of training that rewrote him.

5:15 Eight years inside the target military, sixteen years of imprisonment, death of a disease in a Pakistani jail, a title Black Tiger that floated for decades without an official owner. I think we'll leave it there tonight