This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
Mr Gohar Ayub Khan has lobbed a ‘bombshell’ across the border. He has revealed that his father, Pakistan’s first military dictator Field Marshal Ayub Khan, pulled off an intelligence coup in before the 1965 war with India, when he purchased the Indian Army’s war plans for a mere Rs 20,000.
He alleges that an Indian brigadier sold away India’s military secrets in order to indulge his wife’s expensive hobby of ‘canning fruits and vegetables’.
The story itself sounds fantastic — but far greater things have been betrayed for far fewer pieces of silver. If this tale is true, far from proving their smarts it shows just how pathetically incompetent the Pakistani military establishment was! From the military commander in Lahore who could not move his forces in time, to the tank commander who got stuck in a river bank, to a major-general who could not repair a bridge in time, the rest of Gohar’s story is simply a long list of excuses.
But the payment of Rs 20,000, Gohar said, at least enabled Pakistani forces to defend the massive Indian attack. [IE]
It is unknown whether the Indian brigadier priced the product knowing how much use his customers could put it to.
According to authentic military records, no Pak troops reached the Beas Bridge because they were stopped short by Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh. He was able to stop Pak troops along a ditch in Khemkaran where the cream of the Pak armoured regiment was destroyed, including two senior commanders. here, a large body of tanks were caught under a moonlit sky in what later earned the place the sobriquet of Patton Nagar, the graveyard of Pak tanks. [IE]
Tailpiece:
Gohar said Ayub Khan issued instructions to his own military command that in future the Pakistan army should not keep its own plans with so much details as Indians had done so that these plans were not leaked to the enemy. [The News]
Perhaps that was why the Lahore military commander was late?
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