END GAME: Bhatt after his arrest (top); with Dawood (below) in Dubai in 1994

Meet Indravadan Bhatt, 50. ISI's recruit. After voluntarily retiring from the Indian Army in 1977, Bhatt had gone to the Gulf to work as a mechanic-cum-driver. Two decades since and a lot of diversions en route after, he's the Gujarat Police and Intelligence Bureau's big catch: the spy who could tell a thing or two about Pakistan's premier episonage agency's recruitment drive.

Bhattbhai to Indians, Samir Ahmed across the border, the episonage agent was apprehended a fortnight ago while making a phone call from Bhavnagar to Lahore to Shahriar, an ISI operative. Subsequently, the Gujarat Police found in his possession a seven-page handwritten account of unit-wise army installations in Punjab and Haryana border areas. That Bhatt had done his homework well was clear from the details he had drafted of army oil depots, which supply fuel to forward posts on the western front, and deployment of artillery guns around them. Using his army identity card, Bhatt had wormed his way into the confidence of jawans at the border areas to extract information on Indian ground defence strategy.

The going was good until his mobile phone gave him away. Bhatt had three international roaming cards with him which were given to him by Tanvir Ahmed, an ISI talent-hunter and a businessmen based in Dubai. The time-consuming conversations on the mobile were driving holes in his wallet. So he had turned to STD booths. When he was arrested, he was passing on some information and complaining about his payment-he was to buy an apartment in Bhavnagar with the money earned from spying.

Bhatt became an easy prey for the ISI-a spendthrift with an obsessive fondness for luxury items and all things risque-when his Dubai-based business (from a mechanic to a dealer in sanitary ware in 1994) went bust. The first casualty was his family: his wife left Dubai to live with their married daughter in Bhavnagar. Bhatt stayed on. He met an Indian maulvi under whose influence he converted to Islam-he also offers namaz. Soon after he underwent two jail terms when his business cheques bounced.

After his release, cash-strapped Bhatt mortgaged his passport to businessman Anwar Pathan for 5,000 dirhams. Then last February, Tanvir Ahmed introduced him to Ali, 35, who had come from Lahore to watch the triangular series cricket match in Dubai. Ali asked Bhatt to accompany him to Pakistan where he would help Bhatt overcome his financial problems. A new passport was arranged from the Pakistan Embassy in Dubai. In April, Bhatt was off to Lahore, where he cut the deal, got training from Shahriar in episonage operations for 15 days and returned to India via Kathmandu in a Bangladesh Airlines flight to go about his job. "Bhatt's is the first case in several years from the western sector which gives a blow-by-blow account of how ISI recruits its agents," says one of the interrogators. Agrees Inspector K.N. Patel, who interrogated Bhatt: "The way Bhatt was trapped by ISI operatives sounds like a perfect plot from a spy movie." Between April and now, the former army jawan had managed to collect a lot of details. "Had he not been arrested now, he would have become a key agent for the ISI," says Anupam Singh Gahlaut, Bhavnagar district sp.

Incidentally, the phone numbers recovered from Bhatt include those of Dawood Ibrahim, two Russian underworld dons he met while in the lockup, innumerable Dubai-based girls, many of them dancers, and the Pakistani operatives. He had met Dawood in 1994 while accompanying an acquaintance to a lunch meeting. Though Dawood's old phone number was recovered from him, investigators believe there were no contacts between them. But as Bhatt begins to sing like a canary, the spy thriller on murky deals, covert operations and fifth columnists might just go beyond assumptions and conjectures.