Missionaries and Black Markets in the X-2 New Delhi Files
By Harlan Pryce ·
The X-2 branch tracked everything from gambling to Irish priests, yet the most vital secrets—the identities of the moles within their own walls—remain absent from the record.
The China-Burma-India Theater was a landscape of fractured loyalties, where the distinction between a soldier, a smuggler, and a spy dissolved into the jungle heat. In this theater, intelligence was not merely a matter of intercepted cables, but of knowing which priest held the ledger for a black market ring and which secret society controlled the flow of Chinese deserters. For the men operating out of New Delhi, the stakes were not just the defeat of the Japanese, but the control of the wreckage that would remain when the guns finally fell silent.
I am working from an archival scope-and-content description rather than the original, unredacted pages of the files themselves. The record, titled the "New Delhi Operational Files," provides a window into the Counter-Intelligence (X-2) Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS was the wartime intelligence agency of the United States, formed to coordinate espionage and subversion behind enemy lines. Within that organization, X-2 was the most secretive and most feared element. It was the branch tasked with hunting moles and double agents, a unit so autonomous it held the power to veto the operations of all other OSS branches without providing a single reason. Based in New Delhi, the capital of India and the administrative heart of the region, X-2 maintained the files that tracked the rot and the power shifts across the China-Burma-India Theater.
Gambling and God
The files reveal a preoccupation with the fringes of order. The record notes that the files contain information on "smuggling and the black market; Chinese secret societies;" and "gambling." In a theater defined by supply shortages and crumbling colonial authority, these were not mere social vices; they were the primary currencies of influence. The X-2 was not merely watching these activities; they were mapping the architecture of shadow economies to see who held the real levers of power in the region.
This mapping extended to the most unexpected quarters, including the religious. The record specifically cites the "Irish missionary, Father William Keogh," as a subject of the files. When an intelligence service as predatory as X-2 begins keeping files on a missionary, the man is no longer merely a man of the cloth; he is a node in a network. Whether Keogh was a target of surveillance or an unwitting conduit for information through the chaplaincies of the CBI, his inclusion alongside reports on "Japanese intelligence systems" and "Chinese Army deserters" indicates that the X-2 saw the spiritual and the illicit as equally relevant to the security of the theater.
The Red Shadow in Burma
As the war progressed, the focus of the X-2 shifted from the immediate threat of Axis espionage to the looming political realities of the post-war era. The files contain reports on the "Burma Anti-Fascist League," a broad left-wing popular front that would eventually rule Burma between 1947 and 1958. The presence of this group in the X-2 files shows that the counter-intelligence mission was already pivoting toward the preservation of Western interests in the face of rising local nationalism.
This pivot is evidenced by the files' coverage of "attitudes in India." New Delhi, the seat of the British Raj and the hub for OSS operations, was a pressure cooker of anti-colonial sentiment. By documenting these attitudes alongside the activities of the Burma Anti-Fascist League, the X-2 was tracking the intersection of local political movements and the vacuum left by the retreating Japanese. The record establishes that the X-2 was monitoring the specific conditions of the China-Burma-India Theater, but the way these pieces fit together suggests a much more deliberate objective than simple observation.
The Silence of the Raj
There is a glaring absence in these files that any man who has run assets in a foreign capital would recognize immediately. The New Delhi Operational Files document the OSS's activities in the heart of the British Raj, yet they are silent on the fundamental reality of that environment: the pervasive, omnipresent presence of British Intelligence. To operate in New Delhi without a detailed account of the friction, the liaisons, or the inevitable territorial disputes with MI6 is a profound omission.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, it is a file designed to exist in a vacuum. The pattern suggests that the X-2 was intentionally compartmentalizing its data, perhaps to shield its American operations from British oversight, or perhaps to hide the fact that the OSS was operating with a degree of autonomy that bordered on the subversive. The record contains "reports about X-2 agent activities," yet it provides no roadmap of how those agents navigated the most established intelligence network in Asia. This is not a failure of the record; it is a feature of the tradecraft.
A Pattern of Calculated Gaps
The desk's reading is that these files are not a complete history of the New Delhi station, but a curated inventory of external threats. The X-2's mandate was to find moles and double agents, yet the files are a catalog of external actors: Japanese spies, Chinese secret societies, and Burmese political leagues. The internal rot—the specific identities of the agents who were compromised within the New Delhi station itself—is nowhere to be found. If the X-2 was as successful as its history claims, the absence of internal security breaches in the record is not a sign of perfection, but a sign of a successful scrubbing operation.
Furthermore, the files are conspicuously devoid of the financial mechanics of the mission. While the record notes "agent activities" and "specific informants," it contains no corresponding ledgers, no payrolls, and no documentation of the money that fueled these shadow networks. In the business of intelligence, where the black market and smuggling are cited as key topics, the absence of the money trail is a deliberate void.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, it is the residue of a transition. The X-2 was documenting the political and economic conditions of the CBI not just to win a war, but to prepare for the handover of influence. The files omit the criteria for how assets were transferred from the OSS to the nascent CIA at the close of the theater, and they omit the explicit directives used to manipulate Indian nationalist movements for post-war leverage. The desk's reading is that the X-2 used the chaos of the wartime black market and the religious networks of men like Keogh to build a foundation of influence that would survive the end of the war. The files we have are the outward-facing reports of a machine that was, at its core, busy erasing its own fingerprints before the next era began.