New Delhi, Aug 29 – R&AW officials who recently went in to see John Abraham play intrepid spy Major Vikram Singh in Madras Cafe, were in for a rude shock. Abraham’s nemesis Bala, superbly essayed by Kannada stage actor Prakash Belawadi, was inspired by a real life R&AW mole. It is a story India’s external agency would prefer to forget. KV Unnikrishnan, the agency’s station chief in Madras in 1987 was honey trapped by the CIA. The US spy service threatened to reveal Unnikrishnan’s compromising photographs with an airhostess (Madras Cafe shows it as a sex tape) to force him to cooperate.
Unnikrishnan, 47, worked for the CIA for nearly two years informing them about what was then an ultra-secret operation: R&AW training and arming Tamil groups including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Indian government’s negotiating positions on the peace accord with Sri Lanka. Unnikrishnan’s sensational uncovering as a CIA mole, shook India’s external intelligence agency. It was the first major high-level penetration of India’s external intelligence agency, then only 19 years old.
“It was a very grevious breach of security,” says a former R&AW chief. A 1962 batch IPS officer on deputation to the spy agency, the suave Kerala-born Unnikrishnan was earlier posted in Colombo and later in Chennai where he had access to sensitive information. He was finally tracked and trapped by the Intelligence Bureau in Mumbai where he had gone to meet his CIA handler.
Retired officials say the film’s premise that he helped the LTTE is untrue. “He had no such intention,” a former official says. “But he did incalculable harm to us by revealing all our plans to his handlers.”
Unnikrishnan’s betrayal was well before Rajiv Gandhi assassination in 1991. He was led into a honey trap when he was posted in Colombo in the early 1980s. But his handlers, in typical intelligence operations protocol, waited until he was important for them. They then revived contact when he was put in charge of LTTE operations in Chennai in 1985-86.
“Unni could have cut off the damage to him and to us had he alerted us. But he hid it from us and his family,” says a former officer familiar with the case. In the 1970s another agent was similarly honey trapped by the East Bloc in Warsaw. He had gone alone for a working lunch with a contact, his drinks were spiked and he was photographed with a woman. That officer behaved according to standing instructions. He took his car to Bonn and phoned R&AW chief RN Kao who told him to fly back to Delhi, assuring him that his family would be flown back to Delhi. “That chap saved himself and us a big problem. Had Unni done that, the humiliation would not have been there. That’s why we always insisted that only married officers are posted outside,” he says. (The only exception was the late B.Raman).
Unnikrishnan confessed to high treason. (In the movie, Bala shoots himself). He was kept under preventive detention at Tihar Jail for a year and then dismissed from service. “We didn’t have any evidence that would stand in a court of law,” a former R&AW chief says. Unnikrishnan is believed to have settled in Chennai and keeps a low profile. Agency officials say ‘he has not surfaced in any manner’. They would prefer it stays that way.
-INDIA TODAY
