A.S. Dulat served as the head of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India’s external intelligence agency, and upon retirement joined Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee’s Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), where his job was to ‘monitor, manage and direct’ the Indian government’s peace initiative in Kashmir.
Dulat joined the Indian Police Service in 1965, and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) in 1969, where he served for almost thirty years. At the IB, he headed the Kashmir Group during the turbulent 1990s until he joined and headed R&AW. His first book, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years, was published in 2015. He co-authored two books with former Pakistan intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani – The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace (with Aditya Sinha) in 2018, and Covert: The Psychology of War and Peace (with Neil K. Aggarwal) in 2024. Dulat’s memoir, A Life in the Shadows, was published to acclaim in 2022, and a book on his relationship with Farooq Abdullah, The Chief Minister and the Spy, was published in 2025.
