![NYT reporter discloses ‘Indian intelligence service’ bought Pegasus from Israel, coordinated with Mossad NYT reporter discloses ‘Indian intelligence service’ bought Pegasus from Israel, coordinated with Mossad](https://varindia.com/storage/news/uploads/2018/02/61fb9e7913b84.jpg)
The “Indian intelligence service” purchased Pegasus from Israeli company NSO in a deal pegged at “dozens of millions of dollars”, a The New York Times (NYT) reporter involved in the newspaper’s investigation into the use of the surveillance system worldwide has said.
The New York Times said the purchase was finalized during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Israel and cleared by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2017.
Describing the NSO procedure for Pegasus, which is a high-grade cyberweapon on Israel’s export control list, The New York Time’s Tel Aviv-based correspondent Ronen Bergman said the Israeli Ministry of Defence had cleared the contract and that NSO engineers would have had to travel to India to install the system themselves and Israeli intelligence agency Mossad liaised with them. However, neither the NYT nor Bergman specified whether they meant the Intelligence Bureau (IB) or the Research and Analysis wing ((R&AW), or any other agency reporting to the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) under National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval.
Bergman also said that the entity that signed the Pegasus purchase agreement would have had to give three guarantees to the Israeli Ministry of Defence: that it would use it only by itself, that it would get prior written permission to share it with any other entity, and that it would use it Pegasus surveillance against terrorism and organised crime.
“While the ongoing technical maintenance is done by NSO vis-a-vis, in this case, Indian intelligence service, which was the entity that purchased Pegasus – the overall connection is also with the involvement of the agency in Israel that is in charge of running secret intelligence and political relationships, which is the Mossad,” Bergman said in an interview to Indian news portal The Wire, which had taken part in the global investigation by several agencies that found thousands of phones belonging to civilians, including politicians, judges, journalists, activists with no criminal record had been hacked using the Pegasus software. Journalists belonging to The Wire, The Hindu and other Indian agencies were also on the list.
As the programme is on a controlled export list, NSO officials have said all their contracts are cleared by the Israeli government. The NYT story had linked the Pegasus purchase in each of the countries to relations between their leaders and Netanyahu and claimed that those governments had changed their foreign policy, and votes at the United Nations as a result of the relationship.
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