New Delhi, June 27 -- Prime Minister Narendra Modi has appointed Samant Kumar Goel, who played a key role in planning the February air strikes on a terror camp in Pakistan's Balakot, as the next chief of India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), and Arvind Kumar as director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB).
Both are Indian Police Service (IPS) officers of the 1984 batch with Goel belonging to the Punjab cadre and Kumar to the Assam-Meghalaya cadre.
The two officers will take over their new posts at the end of this month, when the extended tenures of IB director Rajiv Jain and R&AW chief Anil K Dhasmana end. Jain and Dhasmana were appointed in December 2016 and were given six-month extensions as India move...