At 4.15am on the morning of Wednesday the 12th January 1966, the Lubyanka Metro station, in the heart of Moscow, had already begun to fill up as commuters, bundled up in heavy coats and astrakhans began streaming down the stairs and onto the platforms below.

As in any totalitarian system, faces were grim, staring straight ahead, trying not to make eye contact. They were occupied, trying to survive the system, unaware and unconcerned that the Indian Prime Minister had passed away just a day prior in Tashkent.

Situated at the edge of Lubyanka Square, at the junction of the red Sokolnicheskaya Line and the purple Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya Line, the Lubyanka Metro is an imposing underground structure that teems with commuters, until train services stop at 11:30pm and restart around 4am. All along the walls, at regular intervals, is emblazoned in bright red, the word  Лубянка, meaning Lubyanka, for commuters to be able to discern the name of the station clearly from a moving train.

After the first screams were heard, it took a while for the Moscow Metro Militia to arrive and during that period, the curious among the crowds strained over each other’s shoulders to catch a glimpse of the blood-spattered body on the tracks.

Homicide would not have been suspected had it not been for the fact that the man had no winter clothing on, not even a sweater that would have been necessary even in the relative warmth of the metro station. The corpse was in a uniform, that of an Intourist head steward’s white livery, bristling with ornate buttons and epaulets.

There was another thing that made an accidental slip and fall onto the tracks an impossibility – the head steward’s head was missing.

In so far as the Soviet system permitted persistence, a persistent Militia investigator might have found the head – in a cell, a few stories above the very same metro, inside the heart of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which was also home to a sprawling complex that is instantly recognizable the world over as the deadliest prison on the planet – the Lubyanka.

It was the KGB’s way of tying up loose ends.

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Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had suddenly died after a banquet in Moscow a day prior, had little in common with his predecessor, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Although Shastri had been a cabinet minister for many years before he became Prime Minister, he never ever leveraged his position of power for his interests. As far as is known, he had no personal interests, other than just one. He had made serving the Indian people his sole personal interest. He was a founder member of Servants of India society – which included Mahatma Gandhi, Lala Lajpat Rai and Gopal Krishna Gokhale – which asked all its members to shun accumulation of private property and remain in public life as servants of people.

In today’s world, the Servants of India Society would sound like a bunch of aliens on a distant planet.

Lal Bahadur Shastri had died a poor man. All that he owned at the end was an old second-hand government-owned car, one of many that the Indian government sold after extensive use. He had purchased it in installments and he still owed money on it when he died.

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The renowned Indian journalist, Kuldip Nayyar, who was at that time the Indian PM’s media adviser, has recorded what happened in the immediate aftermath of Shastri’s death….

…..That night I had a premonition. I got up abruptly to a knock on my door. A Russian official, a woman, was standing there. 

“Your prime minister is dying,” she started to say. Without waiting for her to complete her sentence, I hurriedly dressed and drove with an Indian embassy official to Shastri’s dacha which was some distance away. 

The Soviet Premier, Alexei Kosygin, standing in the verandah when we arrived. He raised his hands to indicate that Shastri was no more. Behind the verandah was the dining room where a team of doctors was sitting at an oblong table, quizzing Dr R.N. Chugh who had accompanied the PM. 

Next to it was the Shastri’s room. It was extraordinarily large. On the huge bed, his body looked like a dot on a drawing board. His slippers were neatly placed on the carpeted floor. He had not used them. In a corner of the room, on a dressing table, there was an overturned thermos flask. It appeared that maybe Shastri had struggled to open it. There was no buzzer in his room, the point on which the government lied when attacked in Parliament on its failure to save the his life….. 

Ayub Khan was genuinely grieved by Shastri’s death. He came the dacha at 4 am and said, looking towards me: “Here is a man of peace who gave his life for amity between India and Pakistan.” 

Later, he told the Pakistani journalists who had assembled for a briefing that Shastri was one person with whom he had hit it off well. “Pakistan and India might have resolved their differences had he lived,” Ayub Khan said. 

Aziz Ahmad, Pakistan’s foreign secretary, rang up Bhutto to inform him about Shastri’s death. Bhutto was half asleep and had apparently heard only the word “died”, because he asked, “Which one of the two bastards?”

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If the CIA listening post at Badaber, outside Peshawar in northern Pakistan, had the technology in 1966 to listen in to telephone conversations or if Lt. Chuck Shriver, the man who was monitoring Soviet radio traffic that night had been listening in, he would have heard a cryptic conversation that lasted just ten seconds. It was an exchange that traveled between the Kremlin and the heavily guarded Massandra Palace outside Yalta, in Crimea, the winter retreat of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

“We got the wrong guy,” the voice from Kremlin said. The voice went on to explain what had happened. The man responsible for the ‘foul-up’ had been taken care of, he said.

Nothing unsettled the strongman and yet, he paused before saying,” This is a tragedy. We have to correct this. Ask Semichastny to call me.” He was referring to Vladimir Semichastny – Head of KGB.

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As for Ayub Khan, he relinquished power to an army crony and whiled away his days lolling around on a deck chair by the pool, receiving well wishers at the posh Islamabad Club by the Rawal Lake. The club was (and still remains) an exclusive establishment for only the Pakistani elite – army brass, high-level politicians and bureaucrats, members of the diplomatic community and well-heeled businessmen.

One day in New York, at a luncheon during the UN General Assembly in the spring of 1967, the charge d’affaires of the Soviet Embassy in Washington sought out the Pakistani Ambassador to the UN and handed him an envelope addressed to the Field Marshal himself, eyes only. It was promptly carried in the diplomatic pouch to Islamabad and handed over unopened, to Ayub Khan by a Major in the ISI, just as the waiter was setting down his third scotch on the rocks.

The note quoted an excerpt from Chapter-4 of the Holy Quran and as he read it, the Field Marshal stiffened. It read…..

“Wheresoever ye shall be, doom shall overtake you,

Even though you be perched in lofty towers”

Those prophetic words came true on a clear day in April 1974, a waiter at the Islamabad Club reported having seen a ruddy white man sit down at the Field Marshal’s table and speak with him briefly. The visitor’s voice had been carefully disguised to sound like that of someone from America’s deep south. He seemed solicitous, insisting on preparing Khan’s cup of tea by his own hands as a mark of respect.

A few hours after he met the man, Ayub Khan collapsed and died of a fatal heart attack. The foreigner by then was nowhere to be seen. He wouldn’t be. Within two hours of the meeting, the man had boarded a Pan Am flight from Islamabad to the Indian capital, New Delhi. From there he planned to connect to Moscow on an Aeroflot TU-104B that was being held specially for him, it’s twin Mikulin-500 turbojets turning over idly. No worries about the delay – most of the passengers were Russians and they knew that complaining about anything meant a brief stint in a gulag.

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The killing of the Indian Prime Minister was unfortunate and unintended, but the new KGB poison that had been allotted an interim code name ‘C2’ and was virtually untraceable to forensic science, was  deemed an unmitigated success.

Col. Yuri Ivanovich Modin, head of the Aktivnyye Meropriyatiya  – the ‘Active Measures’ section of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which had been responsible for the development of C2 – was immediately given two simultaneous promotions to General, receiving a chauffeur-driven Zil and a dacha outside town.

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In everything, there is always a winner.

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Epilogue:

The Soviets, in remorse for killing “the wrong guy”, must have coerced his successor, Indira Gandhi, into letting it go. In exchange for her acquiescence, they stepped the massive free deals in heavy engineering projects and military cooperation that led to the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation.

India benefited hugely from the treaty, in terms of industrial and military aid. The cash and technological aid came with no repayment schedule. Some say that it helped India prevail in the 1971 war with Pakistan.

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In every unfortunate event, there is always a silver lining.

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