New Delhi: The Indian intelligence service purchased Pegasus from Israeli company NSO Group for “dozens of millions of dollars”, a The New York Times journalist involved in the newspaper’s investigation into the use of the surveillance system worldwide has said, reported The Wire.
On January 28, The New York Times had reported that India had purchased the Israeli spyware in 2017 as part of a $2-billion (now around Rs 14.96 thousand crore) defence package. The military-grade spyware and a “missile system” were the “centrepieces” of the package. However, it had not specified how much the spyware cost in particular.
Last July, several media organisations across the world had reported on the use of Pegasus. In India, The Wire had reported that 161 Indians were spied on through Pegasus.
In the interview, The New York Time’s Tel Aviv correspondent Ronen Bergman told The Wire that only top authorities in Israel could handle the sale and installation of Pegasus and such deals usually involved the prime minster and the national security advisor.
He also pointed to the involvement of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, which is “in charge of running secret intelligence and political relationships”, and the NSO engineers, who need to be physically present on-site to install the surveillance system and visit from time to time to maintain it.
“So this is a long comment to your question but basically saying that all the different components of [the] Israeli defence establishment and the Indian highest authority, the Indian intelligence service – have to be involved in the process,” Bergman told The Wire.
The Wire’s founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan, who interviewed Bergman, said that the examination done by his news portal had narrowed down the intelligence agency to the Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing.
“I [am] well, maybe not prepared to [give] those detailed answers,” he said. “I didn’t discuss the possibility of disclosing them because, as you see, the details as specified in our report were going through a very rigorous screening process of fact checking, on one hand, and sources’ security, on the other, so I need to check those details.”
In the interview, Bergman also said the pricing of the spyware depended on the number of licenses sold.
“License is the ability to monitor one phone at the concurrent time,” he told The Wire. “And this is… as far as I know, those [which] were sold to India, were between – I don’t remember what was the exact number – but it’s between 10 and 50. So each one can, it depends on what was decided, can monitor between 10 phones up to 50 phones [simultaneously].”
When asked if NSO had the power to review records of its clients, Bergman said that he has been covering the intelligence company since it was founded and has no proof to support this claim.
“And I would say, even more, the NSO group, the last thing they would want is to know what their clients are doing, meaning it may be good for the product to improve it, but I assume that they would at least have some kind of prediction that some of those Pegasus are going to be used for wrong causes, so the last thing – from their point of view – would like to know about that.”
The New York Times had also reported that ties between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “warmed” because of the $2-billion agreement.
In the interview, the correspondent said this his sources have indicated that there was “a specific interest and specific emphasis from the Indian leadership to the Israeli leadership to obtain that specific license”. Scroll. In
