There is a question that sits underneath almost every analysis of how a democracy learns to kill its enemies on foreign soil, and it is rarely asked directly. Where did the confidence come from? Targeted killing is not a natural posture for a constitutional state. It demands a particular blend of capability, doctrine, and institutional nerve, and that blend does not assemble itself. Someone has to believe, before the first operation, that a democracy can hunt people beyond its borders without corroding the rule of law at home, without inviting catastrophic blowback, and without collapsing under the weight of its own secrecy. That belief is not a piece of hardware. It cannot be bought. It has to be transferred, demonstrated, and absorbed over years of contact between services that trust each other enough to teach. For the Indian state, the most plausible source of that confidence is a single foreign relationship, and it is one that almost nobody discusses in the same breath as the shadow war it helped make thinkable.

The relationship is the bond between Israel’s Mossad and India’s Research and Analysis Wing. This piece sets out to answer a precise analytical question rather than to recite a list of arms deals. How deep does the Mossad-RAW partnership actually run, and what has it produced? Defense cooperation between Jerusalem and New Delhi is documented in budget lines, signed contracts, and ministerial photo opportunities. Intelligence cooperation is a harder object to study, because it is conducted by two services that share an unusual trait among the world’s major agencies: both operate with minimal parliamentary oversight, neither is compelled to disclose its liaison relationships, and neither has any incentive to describe what it teaches a partner. So the honest approach is to build outward from what is verifiable, mark clearly where the evidence ends and inference begins, and resist the temptation to treat a plausible story as a proven one. The argument that follows is that the partnership is real, consequential, and structured across five distinct domains, and that its single most important export was never a drone or a rifle. It was the idea that a democracy could do this at all.

To make that case, the analysis holds two services in the same frame across each domain and asks what flows in which direction. It treats the partnership as a comparison rather than a celebration, because the most interesting findings sit precisely where the two states are not alike. Israel built its doctrine inside a small country surrounded by contiguous threats and an army that has fought repeated existential wars. The Indian republic built its security posture as a vast, plural democracy facing a nuclear-armed neighbor that sponsors proxies rather than fielding armies. Those are different problems, and a partnership that ignored the difference would be useless. The value of studying Mossad and RAW together is not that they are twins. It is that one of them watched the other solve a version of its problem decades earlier, and decided to learn.

A word is owed, at the outset, about evidence and its limits, because this is a subject on which confident claims are cheap and verifiable claims are scarce. The literature on the Mossad-RAW relationship is unusually polluted. It attracts conspiracy theorists who see the partnership as the hidden hand behind every regional event, and it attracts propagandists on multiple sides who inflate or distort it to serve a political argument. A reader searching for information on this topic will encounter, within minutes, claims that the two services jointly orchestrate assassinations across the Muslim world, claims sourced to nothing and shaped to alarm. This analysis rejects that material entirely. It builds only on what is documented, on contracts, on credible reporting by established outlets, on the published recollections of former officers, and on the reasoned inference that documented facts permit. Where the evidence runs out, the analysis says so. The reader will find, repeatedly, sentences that mark the boundary between the known and the inferred, and that boundary-marking is not hedging. It is the discipline the subject demands. A partnership conducted by two of the world’s most secretive services cannot be known in full from the outside, and an honest account is one that respects the difference between what can be shown and what can only be supposed.

The structure of the analysis follows the five domains directly. It begins with the institutions themselves and the history of how they found each other. It then examines intelligence sharing, technology transfer, operational methodology, training, and diplomatic coordination, in that order, because that order moves from the most concealed domain to the most public. Each domain receives the same treatment: what is documented, what can be inferred, what the limits of the evidence are, and what the domain contributes to the larger argument. The analysis then turns to where the comparison between the two services breaks down, because a comparison that claimed the Indian campaign was simply the Israeli program relocated would be teaching a falsehood. It closes with what the partnership reveals about the spread of counter-terror doctrine generally, which is the reason a non-specialist should care about any of this. The throughline is the claim already stated, that the partnership’s deepest export was a permission structure, and each domain is a test of that claim.

The Two Services and How They Found Each Other

Begin with the institutions themselves, because the partnership cannot be understood without understanding what each side brought to the table. Mossad, formally the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, traces its origin to 1949 and the work of Reuven Shiloah, who persuaded David Ben-Gurion that the young Israeli state needed a single body to coordinate foreign intelligence. Reorganized in 1951, the Israeli service grew into an organization with a dual character that would later prove decisive for its overseas reputation. It collected foreign intelligence, and it also conducted what its own internal vocabulary called special operations, a category broad enough to include the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and the long manhunt that followed the 1972 Munich massacre. That second character, the operational arm willing to act far from home, is the part of the Israeli service that the rest of the world learned to fear and that a generation of foreign spy chiefs came to study.

RAW was younger by nearly two decades. New Delhi created it in 1968 by carving an external-intelligence body out of the Intelligence Bureau, and the timing was not accidental. The Indian state had absorbed two painful lessons in quick succession. The 1962 war with China had exposed how poorly the country read its own neighborhood, and the 1965 conflict with Pakistan had reinforced the point. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi wanted a dedicated foreign service, and she handed its design to Rameshwar Nath Kao, a meticulous and famously discreet officer who would become the founding chief and give the organization its early culture. Kao built the wing as an instrument of external reach, and he was clear-eyed about which foreign models were worth studying. He admired the operational confidence of the Israeli service, and within the small world of intelligence chiefs he was known to value what Jerusalem had achieved with limited resources against larger adversaries.

The moment of the wing’s birth shaped how its founders looked outward. By 1968 the Israeli service already carried a particular mystique within the global intelligence community. Its agents had located and seized Adolf Eichmann in Argentina only eight years earlier, an operation that announced to every foreign service that a small state, properly organized, could reach across the world and take a man off another country’s streets. For an Indian establishment building a new external service almost from nothing, that demonstration was instructive in a way no doctrine manual could match. It set a benchmark for what reach actually meant. Kao and the officers around him did not need to admire Israeli politics in order to study Israeli capability, and capability was precisely what they had been tasked to build. The wing’s founders were professionals assembling a toolkit, and they looked hard at the services that had built the sharpest tools.

The young organization proved its own capacity with remarkable speed, and that proof matters because it explains why the eventual partnership became one between near-equals rather than between a tutor and an empty vessel. In the run-up to the 1971 war that produced the independent state of Bangladesh, the Indian service ran an extensive covert program in support of the Bengali resistance, helping to cultivate, arm, and coordinate an insurgency that contributed to the collapse of the eastern wing of Pakistan within months. That campaign was the wing’s coming of age. It showed that the new Indian organization could conduct sustained, large-scale covert operations with genuine strategic effect, and it left the service with an institutional self-confidence that it carried into every subsequent relationship. When New Delhi later deepened its contact with Jerusalem’s service, it did so as an organization that had already run a shadow campaign and won it. The wing came to learn, but it never came empty-handed, and that fact gave the partnership its two-way character from the start.

Both services were also shaped by their adversaries in ways that made them, for all their differences, recognizable to each other. The Israeli service had been built against an enemy that operated through small clandestine cells, that hid among civilian populations, that struck without warning and dispersed, and that could not be defeated by conventional armies alone. The Indian wing’s principal adversary, the militant infrastructure nurtured on Pakistani soil, fought in much the same idiom, through proxies and cells and deniable operations rather than through uniformed formations. An intelligence service is, in important respects, the mirror image of the threat it was created to counter, and these two services were mirrors of similar threats. That structural resemblance is part of why the partnership worked. When officers of the two organizations sat across a table, they were not strangers comparing alien problems. They were professionals who recognized each other’s adversary, each other’s frustrations, and each other’s instincts, and recognition of that kind is the soil in which durable cooperation grows. It also meant that lessons learned by one service were not abstract curiosities to the other but practical answers to a familiar problem, and answers to a familiar problem are exactly the kind of knowledge that one professional will trust from another.

Early contact between the two countries long predates any formal alliance, and it was conducted in deliberate shadow because Indian foreign policy of the era made open friendship impossible. Israel opened a consulate in Bombay in 1953, a modest foothold that became the channel through which early conversations moved. Jawaharlal Nehru’s government, committed publicly to non-alignment and to solidarity with the Arab states, could not be seen embracing Jerusalem. Yet necessity has a way of overriding doctrine. After the 1962 reverse against China, with the Indian army short of equipment and confidence, the establishment in New Delhi quietly accepted Israeli military assistance, and in January 1963 senior Israeli defense figures were received in the Indian capital for an exchange of views that the public was never meant to see. Through the 1960s and 1970s the contact persisted at low volume, conducted person to person rather than treaty to treaty, and the intelligence dimension grew inside that quiet space. By most credible accounts, including those left by RAW veterans who later wrote about the organization’s history, a working liaison between Kao’s wing and the Israeli service was functioning well before the world had any reason to notice.

That early texture deserves emphasis, because it set a pattern the relationship never fully shed. Cooperation in those decades was personal rather than institutional, carried by individuals who trusted one another rather than by bureaucracies bound to written agreements. A handful of officers on each side held the relationship together, and it survived precisely because it was small enough to be deniable and discreet enough to be invisible. There were no joint committees, no signed memoranda, nothing a hostile parliament or an unfriendly newspaper could seize upon. That mode of operation carried a cost, since a relationship borne by individuals grows fragile when those individuals move on, but it also delivered a durable benefit. It taught both services that the partnership could function in total secrecy, that it required no public scaffolding to be real, and that habit of operating below the visible surface would remain a defining feature of the intelligence dimension long after the defense trade had moved into daylight.

During the 1980s the relationship acquired a shared analytical purpose rather than merely a shared discretion. Both services were watching the same phenomenon mature, the rise of transnational Islamist militancy, and both concluded independently that the threat would define their working lives. For Jerusalem the concern was Palestinian and later Lebanese and Iranian-backed organizations. For New Delhi the concern was the machinery taking shape in Pakistan, the training infrastructure that would later produce the groups responsible for a generation of attacks inside Indian territory. A common adversary is the most durable foundation any intelligence partnership can have, and the two services found one. What they did not yet have was a public framework, and the absence of one capped how much could be done.

That cap lifted in 1992. Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao established full diplomatic relations with Israel in January of that year, a decision made possible by the end of the Cold War, by the cover that the Madrid peace process briefly provided, and by a hard reassessment of where Indian interests actually lay. Formal ties did not create the intelligence relationship. They legitimized it, gave it embassies to work through, and allowed the defense trade that would eventually carry much of the partnership’s substance. From 1992 onward the two countries could sign things, and the things they signed would steadily build the surveillance and weapons backbone that this analysis examines in detail below.

Three later episodes pushed the relationship from a working arrangement toward something closer to a strategic alliance, and each is worth setting out on its own terms. The first was the 1999 Kargil conflict. When Pakistani forces and irregulars seized commanding heights along the Line of Control, the Indian military found itself fighting a difficult high-altitude war and discovered, as armies often do mid-crisis, that it needed supplies faster than its peacetime procurement could deliver them. Israel moved quickly. It provided ammunition, unmanned aircraft for surveillance of the contested ridgelines, and precision-guidance equipment at a moment when other suppliers weighed their diplomatic exposure and hesitated. The material help mattered, but the political memory mattered more. The Indian establishment recorded who had shown up under pressure and who had not, and that ledger shaped the next two decades of procurement and trust. Crises do not create relationships out of nothing, but they reveal which relationships are real, and Kargil revealed this one.

The second episode was the 2008 Mumbai siege. Over four days a small team of attackers, trained and dispatched from Pakistani soil, held one of the world’s largest cities hostage, and among their deliberately chosen targets was a Jewish community center where Israeli citizens were taken and killed. The atrocity fused the two countries’ counter-terror agendas in public and emotional terms that no policy document could have achieved. It also exposed, in front of a watching world, the gaps in the Indian counter-terror posture, above all the slowness of the national response and the absence of forces positioned to intervene in the first crucial hours. Mumbai turned counter-terror cooperation from a discreet professional matter into a visible national priority, and it opened the door to far more open collaboration on training, protective security, and the rebuilding of India’s response architecture.

The third episode was the diplomatic transformation of 2017 and 2018. Narendra Modi became the first sitting Indian prime minister to visit Israel, a journey his predecessors had avoided for fear of the domestic and regional cost, and Benjamin Netanyahu reciprocated within months with a visit to India. That exchange formalized a posture New Delhi had been edging toward for years, the de-hyphenation of its Israel policy from its Palestine policy, the decision to treat the relationship with Jerusalem as a standalone national interest rather than a variable dependent on the Palestinian file. The visits did not create the partnership. They confirmed publicly that it no longer needed to hide, and in doing so they removed the last major political constraint on how openly the two states could cooperate.

Here the analytical caution must be stated plainly. The diplomatic and defense story is documented. The pure intelligence story is not, and it will not be, because neither service publishes it. What can be said responsibly is that the institutional contact is old, that the shared adversary is real, that the legal opening of 1992 removed the ceiling, and that three crises deepened the trust. Everything that follows builds on that foundation, domain by domain, and each domain carries its own confidence level. Some of what comes next is contract and budget. Some of it is reasoned inference. The reader is entitled to know which is which, and the analysis will keep that promise throughout.

Domain One: Intelligence Sharing and the Architecture of Trust

The first domain of cooperation is the exchange of intelligence itself, and it is the hardest to see precisely because it leaves the fewest physical traces. No contract is signed when one service hands another a name, a travel pattern, or a financial trail. The cooperation lives in liaison meetings, encrypted channels, and the slow accumulation of mutual reliability that intelligence professionals call trust and that outsiders rarely appreciate as the scarce resource it is. Trust between services is not goodwill. It is a track record. It is built when one side acts on the other’s information and finds it accurate, when a tip is not poisoned, when a shared secret does not leak, and when a partner declines to exploit a vulnerability it could have exploited. Mossad and RAW have had decades to build that record, and the evidence that they did lies less in any single disclosure than in the durability of the relationship across changes of government in both capitals.

What does the exchange actually contain? On the basis of what the two states have in common and what each can plausibly collect, the traffic almost certainly runs in several streams. There is threat intelligence on transnational militant organizations, the groups whose financing, recruitment, and travel cross the borders that any single service struggles to monitor alone. There is information on the movement of individuals, the high-value figures whose whereabouts are the currency of counter-terror work. There is technical material, the product of signals collection against shared adversaries, an area where Israeli capability is formidable and where a partner with complementary geographic access becomes valuable. And there is analytical exchange, the comparison of assessments, the testing of one service’s read of a situation against another’s. That last stream matters more than amateurs assume. Two services looking at the same problem from different angles catch each other’s blind spots, and a democracy that wants to act on intelligence needs the confidence that its picture has been stress-tested.

The structure of the exchange deserves attention because it explains the partnership’s resilience. Counter-terror cooperation among Western services has long run partly through formalized multilateral channels, and analysts have pointed to encrypted clearing systems that allowed allied agencies to circulate the locations of safe houses, vehicle registrations, and the movements of wanted figures. New Delhi has never been a formal member of those Western clubs. What the bilateral channel with Jerusalem gave it was a functional equivalent on a smaller scale, a trusted node through which a non-aligned democracy could plug into a stream of counter-terror product without surrendering its strategic autonomy. That is a significant thing for a state that guards its independence as jealously as the Indian republic does. The partnership let it borrow the benefits of an alliance without joining one.

The exchange is also shaped by a basic asymmetry of reach, and the asymmetry is what makes the relationship genuinely two-sided rather than a simple case of a junior partner receiving favors. Israeli intelligence has historically extended its collection across the Gulf and deep into the Iranian theater, regions where its operational record speaks for itself. The Indian wing has reach of a different kind. It watches Pakistan-based organizations with an intimacy no foreign service can match, it has cultivated access into Afghanistan over decades, and it can draw on a global Indian diaspora that gives it eyes in places a smaller country cannot easily cover. New Delhi’s developmental and commercial footprint, including its long investment in the Iranian port of Chabahar, has also placed Indian personnel and institutions inside a country of intense interest to Jerusalem. Each service, in other words, can see things the other cannot, and that complementarity is the engine of a durable exchange. A partnership in which the traffic flowed only one way would not have lasted half a century.

This is the point at which the Iranian question must be confronted honestly, because it is the structural complication that any sober account of the partnership has to address. New Delhi maintains a working relationship with Tehran that Jerusalem does not. Iran has been a meaningful energy partner for the Indian economy, a transit route to Afghanistan and Central Asia, and at certain moments a diplomatic convenience on Kashmir. India has consistently presented itself as a state that can hold productive ties with Israel and Iran simultaneously, and it has guarded that balancing act carefully. The complication this creates for the intelligence relationship is obvious. There are limits, presumably firm ones, on what New Delhi will do with or for Jerusalem where Iran is concerned, because the Indian establishment will not torch a relationship it considers a national interest to please a partner, however valued. A responsible analysis notes this rather than waving it away. It means the Mossad-RAW exchange, whatever its depth, is not unconditional. It is bounded by India’s own map of its interests, and that map includes Tehran.

It is worth dwelling on how unusual this bounded character actually is, because most accounts of intelligence partnerships imagine cooperation as a dial that runs from cold to warm. The reality is more like a relationship governed by zones. There are zones where the interests of New Delhi and Jerusalem align almost perfectly, the monitoring of transnational militant financing, the tracking of figures wanted by both states, the technical exploitation of communications used by groups that threaten both, and in those zones the cooperation can be expected to run deep and frictionless. There are other zones where the interests diverge, and Iran is the largest of them, and in those zones the cooperation is presumably thin, hedged, or simply absent. A mature intelligence partnership is not a single temperature. It is a patchwork, warm in some regions of shared concern and cool in others, and the officers who manage it on both sides understand exactly where the warm zones end. The Indian wing does not have to choose between Jerusalem and Tehran because the partnership was never built as a choice. It was built as a set of bounded, issue-specific collaborations, and that design is what has allowed it to survive India’s refusal to pick a side.

There is a further dimension to the sharing relationship that the word exchange tends to obscure, and that is the matter of analytical method. Services do not only trade facts. Over a long liaison they also trade ways of thinking, the habits of assessment, the templates for grading the reliability of a source, the disciplines for distinguishing what is known from what is merely feared. The Israeli service, forged in an environment where an analytical error can cost the country dearly within hours, developed rigorous internal practices for stress-testing its own conclusions. A partner exposed to those practices over decades absorbs some of them, not as a formal transfer but as the natural osmosis of professionals working the same problems side by side. This is the least visible and arguably one of the most valuable products of the sharing relationship. It is not a secret handed across a table. It is a discipline that rubs off, and a counter-terror establishment that has learned to interrogate its own assessments more harshly is a more dangerous and more reliable instrument than one that has not.

The honest verdict on this domain is therefore layered. The intelligence exchange is real, it is old, it is structured around a genuine complementarity of reach, and it is durable enough to have survived every political weather in two volatile democracies. But its precise content is classified, its volume is unknowable from open sources, and its scope is constrained by India’s refusal to subordinate its other regional relationships to it. Anyone who claims to know exactly what crosses the channel is guessing. What can be stated with confidence is the shape of the thing, and the shape is that of a mature liaison between two services that need each other and have proven, over decades, that they can be relied upon. The deeper history of how the Indian service learned to operate against Pakistan-based networks, the adversary at the center of most of this exchange, is set out in the dedicated study of RAW’s operational record inside Pakistan.

Domain Two: Technology Transfer and the Surveillance Backbone

The second domain is the most visible, the most documented, and in some ways the most consequential, because a targeted-killing campaign is impossible without it. Eliminating a specific human being on foreign soil is, before it is anything else, a problem of finding that person, watching that person, and knowing with confidence when and where that person will be in a particular place. That is the discipline professionals call intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and it is built from technology. A campaign of covert eliminations does not begin with a gun. It begins with the persistent ability to see. And on the question of who helped the Indian state build its ability to see, the answer is heavily, though not exclusively, Israeli.

Start with the sky. Israeli unmanned aircraft form a substantial part of the Indian military’s surveillance fleet. The Heron, a medium-altitude long-endurance platform built by Israel Aerospace Industries, and the smaller Searcher have been operated by Indian forces for years, and reporting has consistently noted that variants were adapted for the demanding conditions of high-altitude terrain, the kind of mountainous frontier where line-of-sight collection is otherwise extraordinarily difficult. New Delhi has also acquired Harop loitering munitions, a category of system that blurs the line between a surveillance drone and a weapon, since it can search an area and then strike. The strategic significance of this fleet is not that it can be armed. It is that it provides persistence. A platform that can stay aloft for many hours, day after day, builds the pattern-of-life picture that any precise operation requires, and pattern of life is the true prerequisite of targeting.

Move to orbit, because the satellite dimension is the most analytically interesting and the least discussed. In 2008 an Indian launch vehicle carried an Israeli radar-imaging satellite, TecSAR, into orbit, a service that itself signaled the depth of technical trust between the two space and defense establishments. A country does not hand a foreign partner the job of launching one of its most sensitive surveillance assets unless the relationship has matured well past suspicion. More important for New Delhi’s own capability was what followed. India’s RISAT-2, a synthetic-aperture radar satellite launched in 2009, was built with substantial Israeli input, and its significance lay in a single word: all-weather. Optical satellites are blinded by cloud and darkness. A synthetic-aperture radar satellite is not. It can image the ground through cloud cover and at night, which means it can monitor a target country continuously rather than in fair-weather snatches. For a state that wanted persistent overhead coverage of its western neighbor, acquiring that radar capability years ahead of schedule was a strategic leap, and Israeli technology made the leap possible. Persistent radar imaging from orbit is one of the load-bearing pillars of any modern targeting architecture, and the Indian republic did not build that pillar alone.

The timing of the RISAT-2 acquisition reveals how the partnership functioned under pressure. India had an indigenous radar-satellite program of its own under development, but it was running behind schedule, and the Mumbai siege of 2008 made the gap intolerable. The attack had demonstrated, in the most painful way, that New Delhi needed continuous surveillance of approaches that an indigenous program would not deliver for years. The decision to acquire an Israeli-built radar satellite and fly it ahead of the domestic system was a decision to buy time, to close a capability gap immediately rather than wait for a national solution. That episode is a useful illustration of the partnership’s real value. It was not only that Israel had good technology. It was that Israel could deliver good technology fast, and a state facing an urgent threat values speed as much as quality. A partner who can compress years off a capability timeline is a partner worth keeping.

Then there is the question of precision delivery, where one episode is documented closely enough to serve as a marker. When Indian aircraft struck across the international boundary in February 2019, in the operation that followed the suicide bombing of a paramilitary convoy, the strike package reportedly relied on Israeli-supplied precision-guidance kits, the family of systems that converts an ordinary bomb into a guided weapon capable of hitting a designated point. That episode is worth dwelling on, not because the cross-border airstrike is itself a covert elimination, but because it demonstrates a principle. Israeli precision technology is woven into the Indian state’s ability to deliver force accurately against a chosen point. Whether the delivery platform is an aircraft over a forest camp or, in the analytically distinct world of the shadow war, a far smaller and more deniable instrument, the underlying logic is the same. Precision is a capability, capability is built from components, and a meaningful share of the components are Israeli.

What precision technology changes, at the level of strategy rather than engineering, is the relationship between a state and its own use of force. A government that can strike only with imprecise weapons faces a brutal calculation every time it considers acting, because imprecision means collateral damage and collateral damage means political cost, diplomatic fallout, and the moral weight of unintended deaths. A government that can strike precisely faces a different and easier calculation. Precision lowers the threshold of action by lowering its expected cost. It makes the use of force feel more controllable, more surgical, more defensible after the fact. This is the deeper significance of the precision-guidance relationship, and it connects directly to the question of how a democracy talks itself into a campaign of targeted action. Precision does not merely make operations more accurate. It makes them more thinkable. A state equipped to act with precision is a state more likely to decide that acting is worth it, and the technology that delivers precision therefore shapes doctrine, not just outcomes.

The infantry and ground-force dimension reinforces the pattern. Indian special and conventional units have used rifles of Israeli origin for well over a decade, weapons from the family produced by Israel’s small-arms industry and in several cases manufactured under license inside India. Air defense tells the same story, with Israeli systems and the jointly developed long-range surface-to-air missile programs forming a layer of the Indian shield. None of this is hidden. It sits in defense ministry statements and in the annual reporting on the arms trade. The cumulative point is what matters. Across the air, the ground, orbit, and the missile force, Israeli technology is not a marginal supplement to Indian capability. It is structural.

The most sensitive thread of this domain, and the one that connects technology transfer most directly to the world of covert operations, runs through surveillance software. The Israeli firm NSO Group developed a piece of intrusion software, marketed under the name Pegasus, capable of compromising a mobile phone so thoroughly that it can read encrypted messages, activate the device’s microphone and camera, and harvest its contents, all without the target’s knowledge. In 2021 a consortium of journalists published an investigation, the Pegasus Project, that examined the global spread of the tool and named numerous states among its reported clients, with the Indian establishment prominent in the controversy that followed. Subsequent reporting, including by The New York Times in early 2022, asserted that the sale of the spyware had been bound up with the broader defense package agreed between the two countries in 2017, situating the software alongside missiles and other systems as part of a single strategic transaction rather than a stray commercial deal. The Indian government has declined to confirm or deny acquisition of the tool and has resisted disclosure even before its own judiciary.

One detail, that the spyware reportedly traveled inside the larger 2017 defense package, is worth pausing on, because it says something about how the partnership treats capability of this kind. A phone-intrusion tool is not, in the ordinary sense, a weapon. It does not appear on a conventional arms register. Yet the reporting situated it among missiles and air-defense systems as a component of a single strategic deal, which suggests that both governments understood it as a strategic capability rather than a piece of commercial software. That understanding is correct. In an age when the most valuable intelligence flows through encrypted messaging on personal devices, a tool that defeats the device is a more powerful collection instrument than most things that fire a projectile. The packaging of the software with conventional arms reflects a clear-eyed appreciation, on both sides, that the device the world carries in its pocket has become a primary battlefield of intelligence work.

What gives the surveillance-software thread its analytical weight is not the domestic political controversy, real as that is. It is what intrusion capability of that grade contributes to a covert-elimination architecture. The single hardest problem in finding a person who does not want to be found is communications. A target who exercises discipline, who keeps a low profile and trusts encrypted messaging, is extraordinarily difficult to locate by traditional means. Traditional surveillance requires physical proximity, an informant network, or a lucky intercept, and a careful target can defeat all three for years. A tool that defeats the phone defeats the discipline. It converts the device the target relies on into a beacon and a listening post. It reveals not only the target’s words but the target’s network, the pattern of contacts that maps an entire organization, and the target’s location, updated continuously and silently. A service that can do that to a high-value figure’s handset has solved, in one stroke, the locating problem that everything else in a targeting chain depends upon. This analysis does not assert that any specific elimination was enabled by any specific piece of Israeli software, because the open record does not support such a claim and inventing one would be irresponsible. What it asserts is structural and defensible: the kind of intrusion capability that the Israeli technology sector pioneered and exported is precisely the kind of capability that makes a precise, deniable campaign against individuals feasible, and New Delhi acquired access to that class of tool.

Step back and the shape of the second domain is clear. Across unmanned aircraft, radar satellites, precision guidance, small arms, air defense, and surveillance software, the Israeli contribution to the Indian state’s ability to see, track, and strike is deep, layered, and in most respects documented. The honest qualifier is that hardware is not doctrine and a fleet of drones is not a campaign. Technology is necessary and it is not sufficient. But a state cannot run a shadow war without a surveillance backbone, and a very large part of New Delhi’s backbone was assembled with Jerusalem’s help. For the broader treatment of how the elimination campaign actually operates, the dedicated analysis of the campaign overview and its comparison with other states’ methods carries the operational detail. The point here is narrower and firmer. The eyes came, in significant part, from Israel.

Domain Three: Operational Methodology and the Doctrine Question

The third domain is where analysis must be most careful, because it is where speculation most easily masquerades as insight. The question is whether the partnership transferred not merely hardware and intelligence but methodology, the actual operational logic of how a democracy conducts targeted killing. And nested inside that question is a sharper one, the named disagreement that this analysis exists to adjudicate: does the Israeli service provide operational guidance for the Indian elimination campaign, or is the relationship limited to technology and training? The distinction is not pedantic. It is the difference between a partnership that shares tools and a partnership that shares hands.

Begin with the parallels, because they are striking and they are what fuel the more dramatic theories. The Israeli service spent six decades developing a systematized doctrine for killing enemies abroad, the doctrine that the journalist Ronen Bergman anatomized in his account of the program. Its core principles are recognizable. Targeted killing, conducted with precision, with high intelligence thresholds, with operational discipline, and with managed attribution, is treated as a legitimate instrument of national defense rather than an aberration. The Indian shadow war, as reconstructed from open reporting, displays methodological features that rhyme with that doctrine closely enough to be noticed. It targets specific individuals rather than territory. It favors deniable methods. It produces outcomes that are widely attributed yet officially unacknowledged. It aims to degrade an adversary’s capability by removing the particular humans who constitute that capability, on the theory that organizations are harder to rebuild than buildings. Anyone who has studied the Israeli model and then reads the Indian pattern will feel the resonance. The deeper treatment of the Israeli doctrine itself sits in the analysis of Mossad’s broader program, and the resonance with the Indian campaign is the reason this article exists.

Now apply the discipline. Resonance is not proof of authorship. Two services facing structurally similar problems, the problem of an adversary that hides its capability inside individuals on territory the state cannot openly enter, will tend to converge on similar solutions whether or not one taught the other. The logic of deniability, the preference for precision over mass, the targeting of human capital rather than infrastructure, these are not Israeli inventions so much as the natural grammar of covert counter-terror for any state that has decided to act and cannot afford a war. So the parallels are real, and they are also weaker evidence of operational guidance than they first appear. Convergent evolution is a genuine alternative explanation, and an honest adjudication has to hold it open.

What can be said with more confidence concerns the transfer of conceptual templates, which is a real category and a meaningful one. Decades of contact between the two services, decades of training exchange, decades of Indian officers studying the most operationally aggressive intelligence agency among the world’s democracies, would inevitably transfer something. Not orders. Not operational control. But frameworks. The Israeli experience supplied a worked example of how a constitutional state structures the intelligence threshold before it acts, how it manages the attribution of an operation it will never confirm, how it builds the internal legal and bureaucratic architecture that lets such decisions be made without paralysis, and how it absorbs the diplomatic consequences afterward. Those are templates, and templates travel between services that talk to each other for fifty years. The Indian establishment did not need Israeli officers to pull a trigger in order to have learned, profoundly, from the Israeli example of how the trigger gets authorized.

Consider what those templates actually contain, because the word framework can sound abstract when it is in fact extremely concrete. The hardest part of running a targeted operation is not the operation. It is the chain of decision that precedes it. How much intelligence is enough before a state acts on a name? Who, in the bureaucracy, signs the authorization, and what record is kept? How does a government prepare, in advance, the posture it will adopt when the operation is alleged? How does it decide which operations are worth the diplomatic damage and which are not? Every state that conducts such operations has had to answer these questions, and answering them badly produces either paralysis, where nothing is ever authorized because no one will sign, or recklessness, where operations proceed on thin intelligence and the state pays for it. The Israeli service spent six decades refining its answers, learning from its own failures, building procedures that balanced action against restraint. A partner with sustained access to that body of institutional experience inherits a head start. It does not have to discover, through its own painful errors, where the balance lies. That inheritance is what conceptual transfer means, and it is worth more than any single piece of hardware because it shapes every operation a service will ever run.

The most important thing the partnership transferred in this domain is also the least tangible, and it is worth naming precisely because it is so easy to miss. It is institutional confidence. Before a democracy runs its first covert elimination abroad, someone senior has to believe the country will survive doing it. The fear is not tactical. The fear is that the practice will corrupt the constitutional order, that the secrecy will metastasize, that the blowback will be ruinous, that a free society cannot sustain a permanent program of extraterritorial killing without becoming something other than a free society. Israel is the standing counter-example. Whatever one thinks of the ethics, the Israeli state has run such operations for generations and has remained a functioning democracy with elections, a free press, and a Supreme Court that in 2006 actually adjudicated the legality of targeted killing rather than pretending the practice did not exist. For an Indian establishment weighing whether to cross the same threshold, that example is worth more than any drone. It is a proof of concept. It says the thing can be done. The partnership’s deepest export was not a capability. It was a permission structure.

The phrase permission structure deserves careful handling, because it can be misread as an accusation that Israel encouraged India to kill. That is not the claim. A permission structure is not encouragement. It is the removal of a particular kind of doubt. An Indian decision-maker contemplating the shadow war did not need Jerusalem’s blessing and almost certainly never sought it. What that decision-maker could draw upon, simply by virtue of having watched and worked alongside the Israeli service for decades, was the dissolution of the argument that such a campaign was incompatible with democratic survival. That argument is the single strongest brake on any democracy considering extraterritorial killing, and it is a serious argument, made in good faith by serious people. The Israeli example does not refute it in the abstract, but it complicates it with a living counter-instance, a democracy that has done this and endured. Once that counter-instance exists and a partner state has absorbed it through long contact, the brake is weaker. Not gone, but weaker. And a weaker brake, applied to a state already inclined to act, can be the difference between a campaign that remains a contingency plan and a campaign that becomes a reality.

So adjudicate the named disagreement directly. Does the Israeli service provide operational guidance for the Indian campaign? The available evidence does not support that claim, and analytical integrity requires saying so plainly. There is no credible open-source basis for asserting that Israeli officers plan or direct Indian eliminations, and the Indian establishment, jealous of its autonomy and acutely conscious of the diplomatic radioactivity that foreign operational involvement would carry, has every structural reason to keep its covert work entirely in its own hands. The relationship in this domain is best described as the transfer of technology, training, conceptual templates, and institutional confidence, not the transfer of operational command. That is a deep relationship. It is arguably the most consequential thing one service can give another. But it stops short of guidance, and the responsible verdict respects that line. India’s campaign is India’s. What Israel supplied was the worked example that made the campaign imaginable, and an imagination, once seeded, runs on its own. The fuller picture of how Indian doctrine developed in its own institutional setting is traced in the dedicated study of India’s covert operations doctrine.

It is worth noting why the temptation to claim more than this is so strong, and why resisting it matters. A story in which two famous intelligence services jointly run a campaign of assassinations is dramatic, memorable, and emotionally satisfying to whoever wishes to indict either state. A story in which one service, over fifty years, gradually transferred technology and confidence to another, which then made its own decisions and ran its own campaign, is duller and harder to tell. But the duller story is the one the evidence supports, and the dramatic story is the one the evidence does not. An analyst who reaches for the dramatic version is not being insightful. The analyst is being lazy, substituting a satisfying narrative for a defensible one. The discipline of this entire analysis has been to follow the evidence to its actual endpoint and stop there, even when stopping is less exciting than continuing. The partnership is profound. It is not a joint operation. Holding both of those facts at once, refusing to inflate the first into the second, is the whole of what honest analysis of this subject requires.

Domain Four: Training Programs and the Transfer of Institutional Confidence

The fourth domain is training, and it is the most concrete channel through which methodology actually moves between services, because training is where abstract doctrine becomes muscle memory. A template described in a briefing is forgotten. A skill drilled until it is reflexive is retained. If the partnership transferred operational thinking, the transfer happened in classrooms, on ranges, and in exercises far more than in any meeting of agency directors, and a good deal of that activity is visible enough in the open record to anchor the analysis.

The catalyzing event was the Mumbai siege of 2008. The attack exposed gaps in the Indian counter-terror posture that were impossible to ignore, above all the slow national response to a fast-moving urban assault and the absence of forces positioned to intervene immediately. In the aftermath, New Delhi rebuilt and repositioned its counter-terror response architecture, and Israel was an obvious partner for that work. The Israeli state has unmatched experience in exactly the discipline the Mumbai attack demanded, the protection of civilian space against armed assault and the rapid neutralization of attackers in a dense urban environment. Reporting over the following years documented Indian counter-terror personnel training in Israel, the involvement of Israeli expertise in protective-security planning, and a steady traffic of exchange that ran in both the police and the special-operations channels. Counter-terror commandos who train abroad bring home more than techniques. They bring an operational temperament, an instinct for tempo, a way of thinking about the relationship between intelligence and action.

That same Mumbai siege also clarified, in a way nothing else had, why the partnership’s training dimension mattered beyond marksmanship. The attackers had been able to operate for days because the Indian response was fragmented, slow to mobilize, and uncertain in its command. The Israeli counter-terror model offered a different paradigm, one built around the assumption that an armed assault on civilian space is a near-certainty rather than a remote contingency, and that forces must therefore be pre-positioned, pre-rehearsed, and authorized to act within minutes rather than hours. Adopting that paradigm is not a matter of acquiring equipment. It is a matter of reorganizing institutions and retraining the people inside them, and that is precisely the kind of change that training cooperation delivers. The years after Mumbai saw exactly such a reorganization of the Indian counter-terror response, and Israeli involvement in that reorganization is among the better-documented threads of the whole partnership.

This is the point at which the training domain connects back to the doctrine question, and the connection is the most important analytical observation in this section. Training programs do not only impart skills. They impart confidence, and confidence is the scarce ingredient. When an Indian officer trains alongside a service that conducts aggressive operations as a matter of routine, that officer internalizes something beyond marksmanship or entry technique. The officer absorbs the lived demonstration that such operations are normal professional work, that they can be planned coldly and executed cleanly, that the people who do them are disciplined professionals rather than reckless adventurers, and that a democratic state employs them without apology. That absorption changes a person and, multiplied across a cohort over years, changes an institution. It lowers the psychological barrier to action. A service that has watched a partner operate at that tempo for decades, and has sent its own people to learn beside it, arrives at its own threshold of action with the barrier already worn down.

There is a generational dimension to this that deserves explicit statement. Training cooperation that runs for years does not influence a single cohort of officers. It influences a succession of them, and over time the officers who trained abroad rise through the ranks of their own service and reach positions where they shape doctrine, set priorities, and authorize operations. A junior officer who absorbed a partner’s operational temperament in 2009 is a senior decision-maker fifteen years later. The effect of a sustained training relationship is therefore not a momentary boost in capability. It is the slow reshaping of an institution’s leadership culture, as cohort after cohort carries forward the habits, instincts, and confidence absorbed early in their careers. That is why the duration of the Mossad-RAW training relationship matters as much as its content. A short program transfers techniques. A relationship that runs across decades transfers a worldview, and a worldview, lodged in the officers who eventually run the service, is the most consequential thing any partnership can leave behind.

The protective-security dimension of the training relationship deserves its own note, because it reveals how broad the cooperation runs. Israeli expertise has reportedly informed Indian thinking on the protection of senior figures and high-value sites, the unglamorous but essential discipline of keeping one’s own people alive. That matters to the present analysis for a reason that is easy to overlook. A state engaged in a campaign of eliminations abroad must assume the campaign invites retaliation, and it therefore needs serious defensive tradecraft at home and for its personnel overseas. Offense and defense in this world are not separate competencies. They are two faces of the same expertise, and a partner that can teach both is teaching the whole craft. The Israeli service understands counter-terror as an integrated system, threat collection feeding both protective measures and offensive action, and that systemic understanding is itself part of what crossed the channel.

The honest qualifier for the training domain is the same one that governs the whole analysis. Police and counter-terror training cooperation is documented. The training of intelligence officers in the specific tradecraft of covert elimination is not, and it would not be, because no service advertises such curricula. What the open record supports is a substantial, sustained, multi-channel training relationship covering urban counter-terror response, special operations, and protective security. What the open record permits as reasoned inference is that a relationship of that depth and duration transferred operational temperament and institutional confidence alongside the documented skills. The inference is not certainty. It is the most economical explanation for why an Indian counter-terror establishment, having spent years learning beside the most operationally assertive democratic service in the world, would approach its own decisions about extraterritorial action with notably less hesitation than a state without that mentorship. The longer history of how the Indian wing built its own external operational capability, including the periods when it learned from foreign models, is set out in the study of the wing’s institutional history.

Domain Five: Diplomatic Coordination and the Politics of Cover

The fifth domain is the least operational and the most strategic, and it is the one that converts a working relationship between two services into a genuine alliance between two states. Diplomatic coordination is the practice of two governments aligning their public conduct so that each makes the other’s task easier in the arenas where reputation, legitimacy, and international law are contested. It is the domain of votes, designations, statements, and silences, and it is indispensable, because a covert campaign is not only an operational problem. It is a diplomatic one, and a partner willing to provide political cover is providing a real form of support.

The clearest expression of this domain is the transformation of Indian foreign policy itself. For decades New Delhi conducted its relationship with Israel under a kind of permanent apology, hedging every step with reaffirmations of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, treating the two as a single linked file in which closeness to one demanded distance from the other. The de-hyphenation of those files, completed in the public theater by the leaders’ exchange of visits in 2017 and 2018, was a diplomatic gift to Jerusalem of considerable value. It signaled that a major democracy, a rising power courted by every bloc, no longer regarded partnership with the Jewish state as something to be conducted in shadow. That signal has weight in international forums, where Israel has long contended with isolation, and it is the kind of cover that cannot be bought with a defense contract. It has to be chosen.

Coordination runs in the other direction as well, and this is where it touches the counter-terror agenda most directly. The two states have aligned, broadly and consistently, in the international machinery of counter-terrorism, on the designation of organizations and individuals as terrorist entities, on resolutions, and on the framing of the threat. When New Delhi has pressed for action against Pakistan-based groups in international bodies, a partner that reliably supports that framing is materially useful. When Jerusalem has needed friends in forums where it expects hostility, an Indian voice that no longer hedges is materially useful. Counter-terror diplomacy is partly a numbers game and partly a credibility game, and two states that vote together and frame the threat together amplify each other on both counts.

Subtler than the voting dimension, and arguably more important, is the framing dimension. International counter-terror politics is, in large part, a contest over language, over which organizations are described as terrorist and which as militant, over whether a campaign of violence is called terrorism or insurgency or resistance. These labels are not cosmetic. They determine which bodies will act, which states will cooperate, and which financial and legal instruments can be brought to bear. A state seeking to mobilize the international system against an adversary’s proxies needs other states to adopt its preferred vocabulary, and a partner that consistently does so is providing a form of support that never appears as a line item. When India and Israel describe the threats they face in compatible terms, each lends credibility to the other’s framing, and the cumulative effect is to shift, however slightly, the international consensus on what counts as terrorism. For two states that both believe the world has been too willing to make excuses for violence directed at them, that shared framing is a quiet but genuine strategic asset.

There is also the quieter and more important form of diplomatic cover, the management of accusation. A state running a covert campaign abroad must expect that campaign to be alleged, exposed, and condemned, and when that happens the value of partners is measured by what they do not say. They do not amplify the accusation. They do not join the chorus. They maintain, in public, the studied neutrality or supportive silence that lets the accused state ride out the storm. A partnership that has aligned two governments closely across defense, intelligence, training, and diplomacy produces exactly that kind of restraint as a matter of course, not through any explicit bargain but through the simple logic of aligned interest. Friends do not pile on. In a world where India’s alleged operations have drawn formal accusations and investigative scrutiny, the steadiness of its close partners is itself a quiet asset, and the partnership with Jerusalem is among the steadiest it has.

This form of cover is worth understanding precisely, because it is the least visible and most valuable thing a partner provides to a state in India’s position. When a major democracy is accused of conducting killings on foreign soil, the diplomatic damage is not done by the accusation alone. It is done by the pile-on, the cascade of other states and institutions that take the accusation as license to express their own disapproval, to summon ambassadors, to launch inquiries, to make the accused state a temporary pariah. The cascade is what converts a single accusation into a genuine crisis. A close partner breaks the cascade simply by declining to join it. Its silence signals to others that the accusation has not isolated the accused, that a serious state still stands beside it, and that calculation alone makes other governments think twice before adding their voices. Israel, having faced decades of exactly this kind of cascade and having developed a hard skin against it, understands the dynamic better than almost any state, and a partner that understands the dynamic is a partner whose silence is informed rather than accidental. The fuller treatment of how the international community has actually responded to such accusations, and how uneven that response has been, is developed in the analysis of the legal debate over targeted killing.

The Iranian complication returns here, and it returns as a genuine limit rather than a footnote. Diplomatic coordination between New Delhi and Jerusalem is real and it is bounded, because the Indian establishment will not coordinate its way out of its own relationship with Tehran. There will be forums and files where the Indian republic declines to align with Israel because alignment would cost it something it values more. A mature reading of the fifth domain holds both truths at once. The coordination is substantial, it has transformed Indian foreign policy and delivered real mutual cover, and it is not total, because India’s diplomacy serves India’s full map of interests and that map is wider than any single partnership. The broader study of how the international community has actually responded to allegations of Indian operations, and how selective that response has been, is developed in the analysis of the international response to the killings and the legal debate surrounding them.

Where the Comparison Breaks Down

Every comparative analysis owes its reader an account of its own limits, and the Mossad-RAW comparison has real ones. The two services are partners and in some respects pupils and teacher, but they are not equivalents, and the points where the comparison fails are as instructive as the points where it holds. A reader who came away believing the Indian campaign is simply the Israeli program relocated would have learned the wrong lesson.

The first and deepest divergence is the structure of the threat itself. The Israeli state confronts adversaries that are, in the main, contiguous or near-contiguous, organizations operating from territory along or near its own borders, and it has fought repeated conventional wars against neighboring states. Its counter-terror doctrine grew inside a posture of existential proximity, where the enemy is close, the warning time is short, and the line between counter-terror and national survival is genuinely thin. The Indian republic faces a different geometry. Its principal adversary is a nuclear-armed state that sponsors proxies rather than confronting it directly, the threat is cross-border but routed through a sovereign nuclear power, and the Indian landmass and population dwarf anything in the Israeli strategic imagination. A doctrine calibrated for a small country surrounded by close enemies does not transfer cleanly to a large country managing a nuclear neighbor’s proxies. The Indian establishment had to adapt whatever it learned, and adaptation under those conditions is not imitation.

The second divergence is legal architecture, and it is stark. Israel, for all the controversy its operations attract, conducts targeted killing inside a domestic legal framework that has been tested in public. Its Supreme Court ruled on the legality of the practice in 2006, its operations are debated within its political system, and its own journalists have documented the program in detail. The practice is contested, but it is contested in the open, and that openness is a form of accountability however imperfect. The Indian campaign has no equivalent. There is no Indian judicial ruling defining the limits of extraterritorial elimination, no public legal framework, no parliamentary debate on the doctrine, and the official posture is comprehensive denial that any such campaign exists. This is the single most important asymmetry the comparison reveals. India did not borrow the Israeli accountability model. It borrowed the operational logic and discarded the legal scaffolding, and the result is a campaign with even less public oversight than the program it learned from. A direct study of that divergence sits in the comparison of the two democracies’ covert doctrines.

Third comes the divergence in attribution policy. The Israeli state has cultivated a posture of strategic ambiguity, an unconfirmed but unmistakable association with its operations, a silence that everyone is meant to understand. New Delhi practices something closer to flat denial, a posture in which the official position is not ambiguity but the assertion that nothing is happening at all. Those are different doctrines of secrecy with different costs and benefits. Ambiguity deters while preserving deniability. Denial preserves deniability more completely but forfeits the deterrent value of a reputation, since a campaign the state will not even hint at cannot be brandished. The choice between them reflects each state’s distinct calculation, and the divergence shows that India did not simply copy. It chose.

Fourth comes the Iranian constraint, examined twice already and decisive enough to bear a third mention as a structural limit on the comparison. Israel’s strategic posture treats Iran as the central adversary of its generation. India’s treats Iran as a partner it will not discard. Two services cannot be fully aligned when their governments rank the same major regional power at opposite ends of the friend-enemy spectrum. This is not a detail. It is a permanent ceiling on how deep the alliance can run, and it means the partnership, however valuable, will always be partial. The Indian wing serves an Indian foreign policy that includes Tehran, and no amount of shared adversary against Pakistan-based militancy erases that fact.

A fifth divergence is less often noticed but matters for any comparison that hopes to predict rather than merely describe, and it concerns the question of permanence and exit. The Israeli program, for all its controversy, has at least been the subject of internal Israeli debate about whether it works, whether it should continue, and what its endpoint might be. That debate is itself a kind of check, an acknowledgment within the system that the campaign is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The Indian campaign, conducted under a posture of total denial, cannot host such a debate, because a state cannot deliberate in public about the purpose and endpoint of an operation it refuses to admit exists. The danger this creates is specific. A campaign that cannot be debated cannot be concluded, because concluding it would require first acknowledging it. The Israeli model, whatever its faults, contains at least the possibility of a decision to stop. The Indian model, by the logic of its own secrecy, may not. That difference is invisible in any snapshot comparison of methods, but it is the difference that matters most for where each campaign is headed.

The honest synthesis is that the comparison is productive in the domains of capability, methodology, and institutional learning, and unproductive as a claim of equivalence. Israel supplied the worked example, the technology, the training, and the confidence. India supplied the adaptation, operating at a different scale, against a different adversary geometry, inside a different and notably thinner legal architecture, with a different attribution doctrine and a structural relationship with Iran that Jerusalem does not share. The partnership is a transfer, not a replication, and the places where the comparison breaks down are precisely the places where the Indian campaign is most distinctly, and most accountably or unaccountably, its own. A reader who holds both the resemblance and the divergence in mind at once has understood the relationship correctly. The resemblance is real and it explains where Indian capability came from. The divergence is also real and it explains why the Indian campaign cannot be predicted simply by studying the Israeli one. Two services, bound by half a century of cooperation, can be close partners and still be running fundamentally different campaigns, and the Mossad-RAW relationship is the proof of exactly that.

What the Alliance Teaches About Counter-Terror Doctrine

What, finally, does this comparison teach anyone who is not a specialist in either service? The Mossad-RAW partnership is worth a general reader’s attention because it illuminates something larger than itself, the way counter-terror doctrine actually spreads between states, and that mechanism is widely misunderstood.

The first lesson is that the most consequential thing one intelligence service gives another is rarely the thing that appears on an invoice. Drones, radar satellites, precision-guidance kits, and surveillance software are real and they matter, and this analysis has given the hardware its due. But hardware is the visible tip of the transfer. The deeper export is conceptual and psychological, the worked example of how a democracy structures the decision to kill abroad, manages the secrecy, absorbs the consequences, and survives as a democracy while doing it. That export does not show up in trade statistics. It shows up years later in the confidence with which a partner state crosses its own threshold. Studying the partnership through its contracts alone would miss its actual significance, which is that Jerusalem handed New Delhi a proof of concept and a permission structure, and those are worth more than any platform.

This lesson generalizes in a way that should trouble anyone who tracks the spread of military and intelligence capability, because it means the standard tools for measuring such spread are looking in the wrong place. Arms registers, defense-trade statistics, and procurement disclosures capture the hardware, and analysts lean on them because they are concrete and countable. But if the most consequential transfer in a partnership is a permission structure, an idea, a dissolved doubt, a worked example of institutional survival, then the standard tools cannot see the most important thing that moved. There is no register of confidence transferred. There is no line item for a doctrine absorbed through fifty years of liaison. The implication is sobering. The very transfers that most shape what a state will do, the ones that determine whether a campaign of extraterritorial killing remains unthinkable or becomes routine, are precisely the transfers that escape measurement. Anyone trying to understand or restrain the global spread of these practices by counting hardware is counting the wrong things, and the Mossad-RAW partnership is the clearest available demonstration of why.

The second lesson is that counter-terror capability now globalizes the way commercial technology does, through partnership networks rather than through isolated national invention. No state in the modern era builds a full targeted-killing architecture from scratch. It assembles one from a web of relationships, buying surveillance technology here, absorbing doctrine there, training with one partner, sharing intelligence with another. The Indian campaign is a node in such a web, and the Israeli relationship is the most important strand in it, but it is a strand and not the whole cloth. This matters for how the spread of these capabilities should be understood. The relevant unit of analysis is not the lone state deciding to act. It is the partnership network through which the means and the confidence to act circulate, and that network is largely invisible to public scrutiny because its most important transfers are precisely the ones that leave no paper.

The network character of the spread has a further implication that is rarely drawn out. If capability travels through a web of partnerships rather than through isolated invention, then the capability cannot be contained by acting on any single node. A state that wished to slow the global spread of targeted-killing capability could not do so by pressuring one supplier or one recipient, because the web routes around any single point of pressure. Surveillance technology that one country declines to sell, another will. Doctrine that one service declines to teach, a cohort of officers will absorb by other means. The web is resilient precisely because it is distributed, and that resilience is why the normalization of targeted killing among democratic states has proven so difficult to arrest. The Mossad-RAW partnership is one visible strand of a web that has many strands, most of them less visible, and the web as a whole is the actual mechanism by which a once-exceptional practice has become an ordinary instrument of statecraft.

Third comes the uncomfortable lesson, and it concerns accountability. The comparison’s sharpest finding is that India absorbed the Israeli operational model while declining to absorb the Israeli accountability model, thin as even that model is. It took the doctrine and left the Supreme Court ruling, took the methodology and left the public debate, took the capability and left the legal framework. The result is a campaign that operates with less oversight than its template. This is not an argument that the Israeli model is admirable and should have been copied wholesale. It is a narrower and more troubling observation. When counter-terror doctrine spreads through partnership networks, the operational components travel easily, because they are useful and concrete and a partner is glad to share them. The accountability components travel poorly, because they are inconvenient, because no service exports its own constraints with enthusiasm, and because the receiving state has every short-term incentive to leave them behind. A capability migrates faster than the checks on it.

Why the checks travel so poorly is worth stating directly, because it is not an accident and it is not a failure of effort. Operational capability is attractive. A drone, a radar satellite, an intrusion tool, a training program, a worked doctrine, these are things a security establishment wants, things it will pay for and press for and be grateful to receive. Accountability is not attractive in the same way. A judicial ruling that constrains operations, a parliamentary committee that demands answers, a public debate that exposes the campaign to criticism, these are things a security establishment experiences as obstacles, not gifts. No service has ever lobbied a foreign partner to please impose more oversight on it. The asymmetry is built into the psychology of the institutions involved. The capability is the thing they want and the accountability is the thing they tolerate at best, and a transfer mechanism driven by what institutions want will therefore always carry the capability faster and further than the constraint. That is not a flaw in the Mossad-RAW partnership specifically. It is a structural feature of how security cooperation works everywhere, and the partnership simply makes it unusually visible.

That asymmetry is the real teaching of the Mossad-RAW partnership, and it is a warning that applies far beyond these two services. As targeted killing becomes a normalized instrument of more and more democratic states, the doctrine will keep spreading through quiet alliances, and the accountability will keep failing to spread with it, unless someone decides to make the constraints as exportable as the capabilities. On current evidence, no one has. The comparison of how different states have handled the legality of the practice, traced in the study of the intelligence war between India and Pakistan and in the dedicated histories of Mossad’s founding campaign and the Iran operations and RAW’s own operational record inside Pakistan, shows the same pattern from every angle. The means are shared generously. The limits are not. And until a state, or a coalition of states, decides that exporting restraint is as much a part of responsible partnership as exporting capability, the imbalance documented here will keep repeating itself, partnership by partnership, until the practice it enables is no longer remarkable anywhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do Mossad and RAW cooperate?

The two services cooperate across several distinct channels rather than through a single arrangement. They exchange intelligence on shared adversaries, principally transnational militant organizations, through liaison relationships and secure channels. They are connected through a substantial defense-technology relationship that supplies the Indian state with surveillance and precision systems. They conduct training cooperation, especially in counter-terror response and protective security. And they coordinate diplomatically in international forums on counter-terrorism. The exact volume and content of the pure intelligence exchange is classified and unknowable from open sources, but the structure of the relationship, old, multi-channel, and durable across changes of government in both capitals, is well established.

When did the intelligence relationship between Israel and India begin?

Contact predates formal diplomatic relations by decades. Israel opened a consulate in Bombay in 1953, and quiet military and intelligence contact followed, intensifying after India’s 1962 war with China when New Delhi accepted Israeli assistance despite a public foreign policy that made open friendship impossible. A working liaison between the two services functioned through the 1960s and 1970s. The shared analytical focus on Islamist militancy deepened the relationship through the 1980s. Full diplomatic relations, established in 1992, removed the ceiling and allowed the defense trade that now carries much of the partnership’s substance.

What intelligence does Israel share with India?

The precise content is classified, but on the basis of each service’s known reach the exchange plausibly includes threat intelligence on transnational militant networks, information on the movement of high-value individuals, technical material from signals collection against shared adversaries, and analytical assessments. The relationship is genuinely two-sided because each service has reach the other lacks. Israeli intelligence has historically extended across the Gulf and into Iran, while the Indian wing watches Pakistan-based organizations with unmatched intimacy, has cultivated access in Afghanistan, and can draw on a global diaspora. That complementarity is what makes the exchange durable.

Does Israel provide India with surveillance technology?

Yes, extensively, and this is the most documented domain of the partnership. The Indian military operates Israeli unmanned aircraft including the Heron and Searcher, adapted in some variants for high-altitude terrain. India’s RISAT-2 radar-imaging satellite, which provides all-weather surveillance, was built with substantial Israeli input. Israeli precision-guidance technology has equipped Indian strike packages. And the controversy over the NSO Group’s Pegasus intrusion software, reportedly bound up with the 2017 defense package, concerns exactly the kind of phone-compromising capability that solves the hardest problem in tracking an individual.

Did Mossad help develop India’s shadow war doctrine?

The honest answer is layered. There is no credible open-source evidence that the Israeli service plans or directs Indian operations, and the Indian establishment, protective of its autonomy and conscious of the diplomatic danger of foreign operational involvement, has every reason to keep its covert work entirely in its own hands. What the relationship plausibly transferred is different and arguably deeper, the conceptual templates for how a democracy structures such decisions and, most importantly, the institutional confidence that a constitutional state can conduct extraterritorial elimination without ceasing to be a democracy. Israel supplied the worked example. India built its own campaign.

What does India provide Israel in the intelligence partnership?

The relationship is not a one-way transfer. India offers Jerusalem intelligence reach into theaters where the Indian state has unusual access, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, and, through its developmental and commercial footprint, Iran. It offers a vast defense market that has helped sustain the Israeli defense industry. And it offers diplomatic value of considerable weight, the de-hyphenation of Indian foreign policy from the Palestinian file, which ended decades of Indian distance and gave Israel a major democratic partner willing to be seen as one. For a state that has long contended with international isolation, an unhedged Indian friendship is a strategic asset.

Is the Mossad-RAW relationship publicly acknowledged?

Partially. The defense and diplomatic dimensions are openly documented in contracts, ministerial statements, and the reciprocal leadership visits of 2017 and 2018. The pure intelligence relationship is not officially detailed by either government, which is normal practice, since intelligence services rarely describe their liaison relationships. Both Mossad and the Indian wing operate with minimal parliamentary oversight, which means neither is compelled to disclose what it shares or teaches. The relationship has therefore moved from total secrecy toward semi-openness on defense while the operational intelligence dimension remains deliberately unlit.

How does the intelligence partnership affect India’s counter-terror capability?

Substantially, across several layers. It contributed a large part of the surveillance backbone, the unmanned aircraft, radar satellites, and precision systems, that any modern counter-terror posture requires. It supplied training that rebuilt and sharpened Indian counter-terror response after the 2008 Mumbai siege. It transferred conceptual frameworks for high-stakes operational decision-making. And it provided diplomatic cover in international forums. The cumulative effect was to accelerate the maturation of Indian counter-terror capability by years and to lower the institutional barriers to assertive action.

Why do both India and Israel keep the intelligence side of the partnership quiet?

Each has its own reasons, and they reinforce each other. For India, openly detailed intelligence cooperation with Israel would complicate its relationships with Iran and with Arab states, and would expose its covert posture to scrutiny it prefers to avoid. For Israel, discretion about liaison relationships is standard tradecraft and protects partners who value deniability. Both services also benefit operationally from secrecy, since an adversary that does not know the precise shape of a partnership cannot fully counter it. The quiet is not evidence of something sinister. It is the normal condition of intelligence cooperation everywhere.

How does India’s relationship with Iran affect its partnership with Israel?

It functions as a permanent structural limit. New Delhi maintains a working relationship with Tehran that it treats as a national interest, covering energy, transit access to Afghanistan and Central Asia through the Chabahar port, and diplomatic balance. Israel regards Iran as its central adversary. Two governments that rank the same major regional power at opposite ends of the friend-enemy spectrum cannot be fully aligned, which means the Mossad-RAW partnership, whatever its depth, is bounded. There are files and forums where India will decline to coordinate with Israel, and a realistic account of the alliance has to treat that ceiling as genuine.

What role did the 2008 Mumbai attacks play in the partnership?

A catalyzing one. The Mumbai siege deliberately targeted a Jewish community center and killed Israeli citizens, which fused the two countries’ counter-terror agendas in public and emotional terms. It also exposed serious gaps in the Indian counter-terror posture, particularly the slow national response to a fast urban assault. In the aftermath, New Delhi rebuilt its counter-terror response architecture, and Israel, with unmatched experience in protecting civilian space against armed assault, became an obvious training partner. The attack moved counter-terror cooperation from the shadows into the open.

Is Israeli technology used in India’s targeted killing operations?

No specific operation can be tied to a specific piece of Israeli technology on the basis of the open record, and any such claim would be irresponsible speculation. What can be stated structurally is that the categories of capability the partnership supplied, persistent aerial surveillance, all-weather radar imaging from orbit, precision delivery, and phone-intrusion software, are precisely the categories any campaign of covert eliminations requires. Technology is necessary for such a campaign without being sufficient for it. A surveillance backbone built substantially with Israeli help underpins Indian capability, but capability is not the same as a documented operational link.

What is the difference between technology transfer and operational guidance?

It is the central distinction of any serious analysis of the partnership. Technology transfer means supplying tools, drones, satellites, software, weapons, and the training to use them. Operational guidance would mean Israeli officers helping to plan, direct, or run Indian operations. The evidence supports the first and not the second. A partnership can be extremely deep, can share doctrine and confidence and decades of training, and still stop firmly short of one service taking part in another’s operations. Conflating the two produces a dramatic story that the available evidence does not support.

How does the Israel-India partnership compare to other intelligence alliances?

It is distinctive in being consequential while remaining largely undiscussed. The Western intelligence-sharing arrangements are formalized and widely analyzed. The Mossad-RAW relationship achieves comparable strategic effect through a bilateral channel, without a treaty framework, allowing a non-aligned democracy to plug into a stream of counter-terror product without joining any bloc or surrendering its autonomy. That combination, deep effect with low visibility and no formal alliance structure, makes it one of the more analytically interesting counter-terror relationships in the contemporary world.

Did India copy Israel’s targeted killing model?

Not wholesale. India absorbed the operational logic, the targeting of individuals, the preference for deniable methods, and the treatment of elimination as a legitimate defensive instrument. But it adapted that logic to a different scale, a different adversary geometry involving a nuclear neighbor’s proxies, a different attribution doctrine of flat denial rather than strategic ambiguity, and, most consequentially, a far thinner legal architecture. Israel conducts the practice inside a tested domestic legal framework. India has no equivalent judicial ruling, public framework, or parliamentary debate. India borrowed the capability and largely declined the accountability.

Does Israel have intelligence access to Pakistan through India?

This is plausible as a feature of the relationship’s complementarity but cannot be confirmed from open sources. The logic of the partnership is that each service offers reach the other lacks, and the Indian wing’s intimacy with Pakistan-based networks is among the most valuable things it could contribute to an exchange. Whether and how much of that product reaches Jerusalem is classified. The responsible position is that the structure of the relationship makes such sharing logical without the open record establishing its extent.

What does the partnership reveal about how counter-terror doctrine spreads?

It reveals that doctrine spreads through partnership networks rather than isolated national invention, and that the spread is uneven. Operational components, technology, methodology, and training, travel easily because they are concrete and useful and partners are glad to share them. Accountability components, legal frameworks, judicial oversight, and public debate, travel poorly because they are inconvenient and no service exports its own constraints with enthusiasm. The result is that capability migrates faster than the checks on it. That asymmetry is the partnership’s most important and most troubling lesson.

Is the Mossad-RAW partnership the world’s most important counter-terror alliance?

It is among the most consequential and is unusual in how little public attention it receives, which is the framing this analysis has emphasized. Whether it is the single most important depends on the metric. Measured by formal scale and analytical visibility, the Western sharing arrangements are larger. Measured by the depth of transformation it produced in a single rising power’s counter-terror posture, the case for the Mossad-RAW relationship is strong. What is not in dispute is that it shaped the capability, the doctrine, and the institutional confidence behind one of the most significant counter-terror campaigns of the era, and that it did so almost entirely outside public scrutiny.