How RN Kao and his team created India’s espionage playbook through the Research & Analysis Wing An excerpt from ‘The War That Made R&AW’, by Anusha Nandakumar and Sandeep Saket. RN Kao. The birth of R&AW resembled the completion of a complex puzzle. The core team [Rameshwar Nath] Kao gathered around him had painstakingly helped him bring it together. Sankaran Nair, MBK Nair, IS Hassanwalia and PN Banerjee were some of his frontmen. One of the rules that Kao had insisted upon during the formation of the agency was that nothing be written down. Even the status reports prepared for the prime minister would be typed out based on memory, and the document would be hand-delivered to Gandhi by Kao himself. The rule was implicit – no copies, no rough notes, no trail.