This was a 'requested' blogpost, because of the release of documents on Martin Luther King Jr, and the reversals suffered by the US intelligence community in the process, for even espionage activities of the 1960s (in Mexico) implied certain understanding of the KGB and what Kolkata was doing with it.
In other words, what did the Agency know of Kolkata of the 1960s and RMS Titanic?
"It was understood within the global intelligence community that someone/a group had requested The Hat to 'own' certain anecdotes and allusions as part of her intelligence desk. To that purpose, The Hat would be pulling such tricks and getting the anecdotes posted on the blog, before she altogether shut down the blog."
So here went those anecdotes that had to be 'owned'.
i. For purposes of disclosure, NS Road did own a gun. Antara had seen it in her childhood, in the 1980s, she was too scared of NS Road to ask its make. It was dark in colour, long-barreled, it was occasionally shown around when relatives gathered.
It was kept disassembled, "given Bimal Sarkar's fury, he couldn't be trusted with a loaded gun in the house," Anjali would say. The cartridges were kept in a box, surely the box they came in, Antara had never seen them.
Bimal annually renewed the gun license. When he passed away, his sons apparently surrendered the gun, what would they do with it? Were they not trained in using weapons? Bimal had practised since his childhood, in their ancestral village, initially with an air gun.
In case the NS Road gun represented WWI blackmails, were Bimal's sons not capable of managing these blackmails or had the blackmailing points been made so they no longer needed to take the trouble? These would be blackmails against American tycoons and US military generals through WWI, a consequence of the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
In any case, any display of weaponry was immediately becoming an attack on Antara. Because of her lack of privacy, Antara avoided extensive research on Austria-Hungary but she was aware it had advanced weaponry (for those times). Did The Hat want information on such weaponry? Did it think there were better Austrian weaponry that were held back through WWI?
Would a discussion of hidden Austrian weaponry over the next few years evade what happened in HT between 2010 and 2012? What if there was a govt agency that could disrupt salary, what was probably used against Antara both at HT and Swarajya? Why didn't that govt agency publish the reasons why Antara's salary could be stopped anytime it pleased?
Did it owe no answers to the electorate?
ii. For further purposes of disclosure, the Fort William base of the Indian military in Kolkata had displayed certain confiscated weaponry and ammunition back in 2006-07, it was a press conference and was meant for publicity.
Antara used to work as a news reporter in Kolkata in those years, it was a regular story on weapons smuggling and terrorism. (This was another anecdote/allusion that needed to be 'owned'.)
The spouse had mentioned it to his mother, "Antara went to Fort William for a news story, did you see it on TV?" The spouse's mother had indeed seen the press conference on TV but that Antara had been present there made her extremely upset.
"Antara was allowed into Fort William?" was her reaction. Why not, there was no Aadhaar back then?
After the above incident, not a single news story submitted by Antara to her newspaper was published over the next several weeks. It was one of the most severe crisis in Antara's journalistic career. She was supposed to submit several stories a day, given Kolkata was an outstation news bureau, and if they were not published at all, then 30-35 news stories had gone missing, without any explanation.
Given Fort William had a mural of the 1971 Pakistani surrender to India on its outer walls, if stories unpublished meant the Treasury (the Treasury never discussed Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination), what point was Pakistan trying to make to the Treasury, using NS Road?
iii. It was known in Bengal that Bangladesh had a tendency to use just about any US Marine Corps personnel for information, whether that person was important enough to know anything or not, whether it had the clout of the Mayaguez incident of the 1970s.
The 1957 lease might as well be about Pakistan and Bangladesh's rise in the world, above other nations.
Pakistan and Bangladesh were apparently interested in Guadalcanal, and what the US Marine Corps thought of Lord Curzon, especially in relation to Charles Tegart.
July 22, 2025.
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