How a real-life CIA honey trap inspired John Abraham's Madras Cafe nemesis



R&AW officials who recently went in to see John Abraham play an intrepid spy Major Vikram Singh in Madras Café 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 - and it is a story India's external agency would prefer to forget.



K.V. Unnikrishnan, the agency's station chief in Madras in 1987, was honey-trapped by the CIA. The US spy agency threatened to reveal Unnikrishnan's compromising photographs with a Panam air hostess (Madras Café shows it as a sex tape) to force him to cooperate.



Shoot-out: A still from John Abraham-starrer Madras Café

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.



Inspired by real life: Prakash Belawadi plays the R&AW agent in the film

Unnikrishnan's sensational exposure as a CIA mole, the first high-level penetration of India's 19-year-old external intelligence agency, shook the agency.



"It was a very grievous 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 finally tracked and trapped by the Intelligence Bureau in Mumbai where he had gone to meet his CIA handler.



"He was honey-trapped while posted in Colombo in the early 1980s when he lived away from his wife (against agency protocol). His handlers waited until he was important for them, then revived the contact when he was put in charge of LTTE coverage from Chennai in 1985-86," says a former agent.



Unnikrishnan confessed to his crime when he was cornered. (In the movie, Bala shoots himself). He was detained in 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.