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."
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