The Bush Administration has denied that a letter purportedly written by Senator Thomas Graham to a former US envoy in India in 1995 about a 'mole' in the Indian Prime Minister's Office was part of official correspondence and said no judgment could be made about its authenticity.
"One, we can't verify that this correspondence is authentic. Two, the two individuals between [whom] this alleged correspondence took place were at the time working in private non-governmental organisations. They weren't employed by the US government," US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said at a briefing on Thursday.
Bharatiya Janata Party leader Jaswant Singh had claimed that Graham had written a letter to former Ambassador Harry Barnes about a spy in the then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao's office who leaked nuclear secrets to the US. Jaswant also refers to the letter in his book A Call To Honour.
But Barnes, the US envoy to India during 1981-85, told PTI that he did not know any Senator by the name of Thomas Graham.
The letter is now said to have been written by Thomas W Graham, an academic working on non-proliferation matters who was active on issues pertaining to India.
According to McCormack, initial media reports on the letter were very selective in how it was presented.
"I don't see anything nefarious in the copy of the alleged correspondence that I have seen, whatever the case is. This would have been if, in fact, it is an authentic correspondence -- a correspondence between two private individuals not employed by the US government," he said.
