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Acknowledgements and a Note on Sources and Methods What follows are personal accounts - and, occasionally, the regretful recollections - of rival officers and analysts working to outwit and trap one another in the ground zero of the spy wars. The principals in this book are from India's Research and Analysis Wing (R.A.W.), which is rarely talked about at all, and has been denigrated as a bureaucratic viper's nest, while its enemies, in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.), are spoken about all the time, but mostly portrayed as mysterious, self-serving, and deadly. These are politically tinged tropes, and in the from both secret services appear altogether different, as they describe how they became (and some still are) invisible protagonists, knee- deep in chaos, a few of them becoming militant, some losing traction, others having religious and political epiphanies, some going rogue, a few becoming crazy. Many of the events they participated in are well- known outrages, pages that follow spies but they have redrawn them in the book in intimate, and revelatory ways, shedding new light, providing finger-tip context, and drawing, sometimes, contrary, and shocking, conclusions.ow prefen) to grow as a strategic bufer China, while opening-up its markets to American indestry. Wooed by those it shunned, pandered to by its current probng and partners, the C.LA., as the stories that emerge here ugest, wa 8OFEY