The first look teaser (47 seconds) of Vishal Bhwardaj directed ‘KHUFIYA’ releasing soon on Netflix, stars Ali Fazal, Ashish Vidyarthi, Tabu, and Wamiqa Gabbi among others. The story is based on the espionage novel ‘Escape to Nowhere’ by Amar Bhushan.
Produced by Vishal Bhardwaj Films and directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, Khufiya is a story about Krishna Mehra, a RAW operative who is assigned to track down the mole selling India’s defence secrets. All along, grappling with her dual identity of a spy and a lover.
An IANS story in HT ( Jul 16, 2012) gives the plot and comment on ‘Escape to Nowhere’ as follows: “In May 2004 a tsunami hit the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s external intelligence agency. Rabinder Singh, a joint secretary, disappeared from Delhi though he was under 24-hour surveillance. The former Indian Army officer’s disappearing act was as dramatic as was his spying career. But even as he made a safe getaway, a couple of eleventh hour mistakes he and his handler made helped the Indians to realize that the man had flown to the US under the protection of the CIA, whose agent he was.
The book under review is meant to be fiction; but it is clearly THE story of the traitor, his spying career, how he came to be suspected, how RAW’s counter-espionage unit mounted major surveillance on him, how the civilian brass at the highest level wanted the surveillance ended because they did not want anything to spike India-US ties, how the committed ones in RAW continued to keep a watch on the spy, and how, sadly, he got away via Nepal.”
No doubt, this movie will reveal the sensational incidents that hit the Indian spy agency, RAW. The CIA spy, Rabinder Singh was a joint secretary in the RAW and changed his name to Rajpal Prasad Sharma and escaped in 2014. In that year India’s Prime Minister was BJP’s Atal Behari Vajpayee. The spy is reported to have died in a road accident in the United States in late 2016, but this has not been confirmed.