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SECOND INCIDENT : SEX FOR SECRETS

The honey-trapping incidence of RAW's agent K.V. Unnikrishnan in 1980s.

In early 1980s, K.V. Unnikrishnan, a 1962 batch IPS officer, who was posted at R&AW station in Colombo was honeytrapped by CIA. Between 1985-87 when he was deputed as the station chief at Chennai, co-ordinating Sri Lanka operations, he gave away information to his handler on training and arming Tamil groups including LTTE and the Indian government's negotiating positions on the peace accord with Sri Lanka. He was caught by IB counter-intelligence in 1987, spent a year in Tihar jail and was dismissed from IPS cadre.

Prakash Belawadi plays RAW Agent Unnikrishnan in the movie Madras Cafe. Unnikrishnan confessed to high treason; in the movie, he shoots himself

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.

The bare essentials of this honey-pot episode was provided in 1987 by Salamat Ali which brought to the limelight how American operatives trapped Unnikrishnan to suck intelligence' on Eelam Tamil militant groups and passed what they felt relevant to their Colombo clients.

Below we produce the 1987 article Sex for Secrets : An Indian Official is Caught in the Leaking Act by Salamat Alifor Far Eastern Economic Review, Oct. 15, 1987.

Sex for Secrets

An Indian Official is Caught in the Leaking Act

by Salamat Ali in New Delhi

For the second time in three years, the Indian intelligence community has been rocked by a spy scandal. A senior official in the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) - the country's external intelligence agency - has confessed that he passed on sensitive security information to a foreign power.

Although the foreign power has not been officially identified, 47 year-old K.V.Unnikrishnan, a deputy inspector-general of police on secondment to RAW, had allegedly leaked secrets of India's dealings with Sri Lankan Tamil insurgents to a US agent.

Unnikrishnan's activities were revealed shortly before New Delhi and Colombo signed a peace accord on 29 July to end the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka. Since then the RAW leadership has been engaged in changing its secret codes and communications procedures, in addition to reviewing all other aspects of its work which have been compromised.

Before his arrest, Unnikrishnan headed the RAW's operation in Madras and was directly in charge of Indian dealings with Sri Lankan Tamil militants based in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Although he was not part of the decision-making apparatus, as field coordinator of Tamil militants he was privy to most of the details of the secret negotiations involving New Delhi, Colombo and the militant Tamil groups.

Authorities began to suspect a major leak in the RAW set-up when Indian negotiators were repeatedly disconcerted during their talks with Sri Lankan officials, who seemed to know in advance details of New Delhi's discussions with the Madras-based Tamil rebels. New Delhi was also surprised that Colombo had detailed knowledge of clandestine arms shipments received by the insurgents and all the weapons India had confiscated from the Tamil guerrillas.

In mid-1985, when India brought Colombo and the militants together for peace talks in the Bhutanese capital of Thimphu, it discovered that the militants' negotiating strategy and the Indian view of it had been leaked to Sri Lanka. Last year, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi appointed P. Chidambaram, a junior minister, as his special representative for talks with Colombo. Shuttling from New Delhi to Madras and Colombo, Chidambaram began a series of talks. What had transpired between him and the militants in Madras was usually known to the Sri Lankans by the time Chidambaram reached Colombo.

One pointer to the likely source of the leaks was the Tamil militants' complaint that Unnikrishnan was playing a divisive role by carrying tales between their various Madras-based groups, wondering loudly if he was truly acting on New Delhi's policies as they understood them.

Unnerved by the leaks and unsure of their source, the RAW leadership mounted a massive counter-intelligence operation. It placed almost the entire senior strata of the Tamil Nadu police force and other related Madras-based officials, including Unnikrishnan, under surveillance. For months, these officials' offices and homes were bugged, their telephones were tapped and their movements monitored.

The documents, photographs and other material gathered in the counter-espionage operation narrowed the search to Unnikrishnan by mid-year. Ironically, by then his name had been recommended to the Prime Minister's Office for promotion. Earlier, he had turned down an option to join the regular cadre of the RAW, preferring to remain in his parent police service while on deputation to the intelligence outfit. By the mid-1980s, he was the RAW's top field officer in Madras coordinating Sri Lankan affairs.

Confronted with the incriminating evidence, Unnikrishnan is said to have confessed his spying activities. During a tenure in Colombo as the RAW's representative six years ago, he had become friendly with an unnamed US consular official and, together with him, engaged in several extra-marital affairs with unidentified women. Despite these sexual escapades, he was apparently a hen-pecked husband and his alleged American contact knew that Unnikrishnan was mortally afraid of his wife.

After his return to India, he was briefly stationed in New Delhi before moving to Madras. Sometime in 1985, a woman describing herself as a stewardess with Pan American Airways telephoned him from Bombay to say that his American consular friend had told her to contact him if she felt lonely. Unnikrishnan flew from Madras to Bombay and a liaison developed between the two. During 1985-86, she gave him complimentary air tickets to fly to Singapore. During those jaunts in Singapore, compromising photographs of the stewardess and her lover were taken.

Sometime early last year, an American official based in New Delhi flew to Madras and confronted Unnikrishnan with the photographs. The RAW man was trapped and is known to have agreed to cooperate with the American, who later made Madras his own base of operations.

According to the authoritative fortnightly magazine India Today, the American quietly slipped out of India when Unnikrishnan failed to show up for two pre-arranged meetings - after he was arrested in Madras some time in the middle of the year. Although official sources have asserted that Unnikrishnan's controller was an American diplomat, it is not clear to which US agency he belonged. The implication of the revelations so far is that the Americans were passing on Unnikrishnan's information to Colombo for about 18 months preceding his arrest.

As a civil servant, Unnikrishnan could not be sacked or demoted without an open legal hearing. But New Delhi invoked Article 311 of the Indian Constitution to dispense with the legal requirements on the grounds that national security was involved. An open trial would have brought to light more than India is prepared to admit in respect to the insurgency in Sri Lanka. As in the cases of other spies, his trial would be in camera, possibly at the high-security Tihar Jail in the capital. And no details of the trial proceedings are likely to be made public except the sentence passed.

In his book Assignment Colombo, J N Dixit writes the following about Unnikrishnan

( Jyotindra Nath Dixit (January 8, 1936 - January 3, 2005) was an Indian diplomat, who as served as Foreign Secretary (1991-1994), the top bureaucrat in the Ministry of External Affairs. At the time of his death he was the National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and is most remembered for his role as a negotiator in disputes with Pakistan and China. )

"In some of my discussions with Lalith Athulathmudali in the first half of 1986, I felt that he was extraordinarily well informed about the personalities in our intelligence agencies and in the Ministry of External Affairs at headquarters who were dealing with Sri Lankan affairs. I reported these perceptions to Delhi. The general comment which I was conveyed was that the Sri Lankan mission in Delhi and the Sri Lankan Deputy High Commission in Madras seemed to be very effective in gathering information and operational intelligence. In the event, my being impressed by the efficiency of the Sri Lankan diplomatic missions was misplaced. The Sri Lankan source of information was a senior operative of our own intelligence agency, Unnikrishnan, who had been subverted most probably by the Americans through a foreign lady working for Pan-American Airlines. His negative activities were discovered sometime towards the middle of 1986, which was followed by appropriate procedural action against him. The fact that the Sri Lankan Government's advance knowledge about Indian policies and intentions clearly diminished after Unnikrishnan was neutralized proved that he was a major source of information to the Sri Lankans."

J.N. Dixit: Assignment Colombo, Vijitha Yapa Bookshop, Colombo, 1998, p. 61.

Narayan Swamy in his book Tigers of Lanka : From Boys to Guerrillas (1996; 2nd ed.) writes the following on the consequences of Unnikrishnan getting honey-trapped and vital information compromised :

"...The officer who headed the RAW in Tamil Nadu then was K.V.Unnikrishnan, who was arrested in 1987 and jailed on charges of being a CIA agent. [Foot note by author: According to India Today, Sept.30, 1987, Unnikrishnan was a deputy inspector general in charge of the RAW mission in Madras. He was allegedly blackmailed by the CIA into betraying official secrets after being photographed in compromising positions with a Pan American stewardess. Sri Lankan Tamils say Unnikrishnan personally discussed sensitive matters with leaders of all militant groups as well as TULF.] Was it a mere coincidence that the TELO was destroyed when the RAW's Sri Lanka operations were controlled by an alleged CIA agent? Was it just a matter of chance that the pro-India EPRLF also met a similar fate at the hands of the LTTE during this period? EPRLF sources say their former leader, Pathmanabha, also begged RAW to force the LTTE to stop its attacks. Those appeals also evoked no response.

As such the Tamils were confused by Indian policies and actions. While the militants were trained and armed to fight, the TULF was prodded to talk peace to Colombo. When the militant groups looked askance, they were told that the talks were a fake; when the TULF brass made queries, they were informed that peace was the ultimate goal and the militants were only being used to force Jayewardene to make concessions on the negotiating table. The TULF's Amirthalingam played along, in the process angering his own supporters. Eventually he too felt let down by New Delhi and decided to befriend the Tigers. And the LTTE just gunned him down..." [ch.11, pp.328-329]

In the good old days Mata Hari needed to actually look like a femme fatale.

Now she just needs a sexy picture or a little help from Photoshop.

I don't know what Sheeba looks like in her real life. But in Facebookistan our men in uniform must like Sheeba ki jawaani because she has managed to lure not one, but two Indian army officers into her honey trap. The age of The Spy Who Loved Me is over. Welcome to the Facebook times of The Spy Who Liked Me.

Pakistani ISI agent "Sheeba" has apparently entangled a lieutenant colonel from the 82nd armoured regiment, currently posted in Rajasthan, with a little Facebook pokey-pokey. "The officer was just chatting online with the woman on the computer ... there was no physical contact. No laptops have been lost. We are conducting a CoI into the incident," a senior officer told the Times of India. Sheeba was already on India's radar for chatting up a Para Regiment commando in Dhaka last year.

Mata Hari had to dance in a beaded metallic bra and gauzy veils in the salons of Paris, seduce a Russian captain and stretch on a chaise-lounge while a German officer impressed her with stories of German manoeuvres in North Africa. It's unclear if she was really any good as a spy, let alone a double agent, but she was executed nonetheless. Tokyo Rose had to get behind a microphone and shower propaganda on American troops. Iva Toguri, the best known of several Tokyo Roses, was detained for a year by the U.S. military.

How the times have changed. Today's Sheebas just have to log on and be flirty. They can Facebook flirt with a dozen men at the same time, switching from chat window to window like a seasoned item girl. For all we know Sheeba is really a pot-bellied ISI officer with a bristling moustache and a flair for sweet talk. To be fair, in this particular case, there is a woman who met the Para Regiment commando at some party in Dhaka. We have no word on how our man in Rajasthan fell into the same honey trap. Perhaps Sheeba showed up frequently as a suggested friend and finally he could resist no longer.

Facebook is obviously proving a far more tricky a terrain for our officers to navigate than Kargil. It's not just us. In Britain, Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6 was red-faced after his wife broadcast all kinds of personal details on her Facebook page soon after he was appointed to the post. To make it worse, the spy chief's spouse had almost no privacy settings on her account. So anyone and everyone could see where they lived, who they holidayed with, who their friends were, pictures of his parents, as well as learn his new top secret code name, C. "Congrats on the job, already dubbed Sir Uncle C' by nephews in the know" read one congratulatory message on her page.

But too little Facebook is also a dangerous thing for your career in intelligence. MI5, Britain's domestic spy agency, is planning to get rid of some its spooks who aren't Twitter and Facebook-savvy enough. "The old generation of MI5 have to be completely comfortable using computers and the latest technology," Jonathan Evans, the director general told the Daily Mail. "I think some of the staff perhaps aren't quite the ones that we will want for the future." They should take their cues from the ISI and create their own posse of Sheebas.

But this is no joking matter. Who knows how many other ISI hotties there are out there enticing our lonelyhearts in uniform. It's bad enough that some experts are claiming that Facebook is making us depressed. Now it turns out it is not just hazardous to our mental health but also a national security risk. Even worse, the ISI is already deploying it as a deadly weapon while we waste our time plying Abu Jundal with biryani. "The future of Facebook is in India," a headline on Businessweek informed us earlier this year. Thanks to Sheeba, it seems the future of India lies in Facebook.