james bond and the 1965 india-pakistan war

Most people believe that James Bond's first encounter with Desh came in Octopussy (1983). And while it is true that Mr Bond did not arrive in India until 1983, I assure you that long before that he was already playing a part in shaping the history of Desh.

I refer to the 1965 war between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Pakistan, perhaps sensing their enemy's weakness after a battering by China in 1962, or maybe desiring a war for their own internal reasons, started the war in an attempt to wrest Kashmir from Indian hands.

The Pakistani plan for achieving this consisted of two parts. The first part was to secretly infiltrate the Kashmir valley with agents provocateurs who would encourage and lead the local population into a violent and mass uprising from within against the Indian occupiers. The second part was to be a clinical military incursion into Indian territory to cut off a vital transport link between Kashmir and India. The first mission was known as Operation Gibraltar, and the second as Operation Grandslam.

James Bond's Goldfinger had come out only the year before, in 1964. In the film, the villain Auric Goldfinger plans a clinical incursion into Fort Knox to contaminate the US gold reserves for decades. You see, Goldfinger could not steal the gold - there was far too much of it and it was too heavy, and he would only have hours before the superior forces of the US military moved in. So his plan was to gain a few hours time to access the gold reserves, render the gold worthless by making it radioactive, and the diminution in supply would raise the value of his own stocks. And what was this plan called? Operation Grandslam.

Clearly somebody in Pakistan (my money is on Zulfikar Bhutto, then foreign minister) was watching and being inspired by the latest James Bond movies in 1964. And when the time came to launch their own fiendishly improbable, ambitious and brilliant plan, it was decided, with a wonderful touch of humour, to name it after a villainous operation in a James Bond movie.

But Mr Bhutto (if it was indeed him) should have studied his James Bond films more carefully. For ingenious plots by villains never succeed - something always goes wrong at the last minute. It's true that India had no James Bond type superhero to turn to. But instead they simply invaded Pakistan on a second front and spoiled all the Pakistani calculations. And for all the genius of the two Operation Grandslams, in both film and reality they ended the same way - in failure.

Which wraps up things nicely, except for one thing. What was the original Operation Gibraltar?