Even before ten uneducated, desperate men with deadly weapons sailed on the Arabian Sea towards Mumbai, there had been alarm bells that preparations were underway in Pakistan for such an operation.

For several months before November 2008, the Maharashtra police had received a flurry of alerts from central intelligence agencies about an imminent attack. There were, in fact, eerie similarities between Kargil 1999 and Mumbai 2008.

In both cases, there were credible intelligence inputs, and in both cases, that information was not analysed and acted upon.

In early 2008, intelligence trickled in, primarily from US agencies, that the LeT was planning to attack Mumbai. Unfortunately, this information flowed into a severely contaminated intelligence set-up, where it mixed with unreliable inputs, and often outrageous falsehoods, that were sending Indian agencies on wildgoose chases. The secretive world of intelligence, with almost no external accountability and minimal formal audit of the quality of its information and analysis, believed its own lies and falsehoods, amplified its own biases and justified its own mistakes. Many arms of the state police, meant to tackle organised crime and terrorism, were often mere killer squads, staging encounters based on false claims.

It was not only this internal crisis that led to the Mumbai attacks, though. The US did not convey all the information it had on the preparations for the Mumbai attacks in a bid to protect a key US witness: David Coleman Headley. Even by the standards of international intelligence networks, Headley was an unusual informant, indeed an unusual terrorist. When caught smuggling drugs into the US, he became an informant for the country’s Drug Enforcement Administration and ratted out his suppliers in Pakistan. He then went back to smuggling and graduated to becoming a CIA informant. Headley ended up becoming an important member of the LeT, but secured his own position by tempting the CIA with information on Osama bin Laden.