A top journalist narrates an interesting story about one of the highest profile ‘spy’ stories in recent Indian history. Popularly called the “ISRO Spy Story”, the story broke around 1994 and revolved around two Maldivian women who allegedly used their skills as expert spies to build a reliable network of important government officials and personnel including specifically scientists at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) as part of an attempt to steal ISRO’s valuable sensitive secrets. At the centre of the scandal was a brilliant rocket scientist named S. Nambi Narayanan. The top journalist while writing about covering this story mentions in his news report that his examination into a story piqued after a chance encounter with a prominent ISRO scientist while on a flight to Madras. The scientist, who appears again at the end of this piece, mentioned to the journalist during conversation that ISRO is an open organization and that nothing in fact was classified. This set the ball rolling and led to closer examination of the spy story. The story was ultimately found, by reporters, to be one that was full of fabrications and inconsistencies. The reporters called the story out as a frame-up where the chargesheet filed by the Kerala police contained assertions that would stretch even the fluid boundaries of fiction. The CBI too came to the same conclusion, but it was only in 2018 that the Supreme Court directed the Kerala Government to compensate Mr. Nambi Narayanan to the tune of Rs. 50 lakhs for being false implicated as a ‘spy’. The damage though had already been done and a brilliant rocket scientist had to suffer years of ignominy and great personal loss due to a clear instance of police excess and gross negligence.