The full context of the quote: "The engineering help disappeared. Within another year, some engineer in India told us our API access was going to be rescinded." seems to imply that Google had outsourced engineering help to India to save on operating costs. This type of outsourcing [1] was pretty common back in those days.
I implied nothing. This is literally what happened. A woman who knew next to nothing about search strung us along for weeks. She couldn't answer even the simplest questions or provide any insight whatsoever. She made it clear she had no authority. Yet after making request after request to us for sensitive data, she simply shut off our access.
