The Government of India has appointed Dineshwar Sharma, special director in the Intelligence Bureau, as the agency’s new chief. He will replace Syed Asif Ibrahim, whose tenure ends on the last day of this year.
He is an IPS officer from 1979 batch from Kerala cadre. Sharma has been working with the agency for the past 23 years and he is having two-year tenure.
The Intelligence Bureau (IB) is India’s internal intelligence agency and reputedly the world’s oldest intelligence agency. It was recast as the Central Intelligence Bureau in 1947 under the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The IB was initially India’s internal and external intelligence agency. Due to lapses on the part of the Intelligence Bureau to predict the Sino-Indian War of 1962, and later on, intelligence failure in the India-Pakistan War in 1965, it was bifurcated in 1968 and entrusted with the task of internal intelligence only. The external intelligence branch was handed to the newly created Research and Analysis Wing.
