Conjuring sepia visions of comrade Fidel and the CIA bag of tricks of the cold war years, comrades running Kerala are now seriously looking for evidence of the US intelligence agency sponsoring a “media syndicate” in God’s Own Country to drive wedges into the Left, and destroy the VS Achuthanandan government in the state.

This follows the local media cornering the Left and its government almost every other day.

“If what our intelligence reports say on such activity is found serious enough, the Central Government would be informed,” VS Achuthanandan told the Assembly today. He was responding to a submission from opposition MLA K Babu taking off from a question raised on 5 March, seeking to know if the government believed that the CIA was behind the media syndicate in the state.

VS added that he would “neither deny nor confirm” findings about a media syndicate operating in the state. His response today was also a sequel to his remarks in the Assembly last fortnight, when he talked about indications that a section of the media was being controlled by a foreign agency. He had stridently refused to disclose the details claiming that would affect “international relations”. The Kerala Union of Working Journalists had been raising a din, daring VS to come out with the details, but he claimed in the Assembly today that his words had been “misinterpreted”. His government, he maintained, was all for a free press.

Talking to The Indian Express, Additional DGP Jacob Punnoose, who heads the state intelligence department, refused to disclose what his department had found out and reported about the CIA-media links in Kerala, and its extent. “We are Kerala’s intelligence agency, the CIA is the US’s intelligence agency. It is standard practice the world over for intelligence agencies not to disclose what they find out about each other’s activities, which would be a give away,” he claimed.

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