US Busts Kashmir Racket: Fai Is Foul And Foul Is Fai

WASHINGTON: In a city where lobbyists represent scores of interests, issues, and causes from across the world, Ghulam Nabi Fai was a familiar figure on Capitol Hill as the principal representative of the Kashmiri separatist movement. A stocky man 62-year old man with a scraggly beard sans mustache, he spoke the language of engagement and claimed to seek a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute.

But Kashmiris, of whom he claimed to be one, were not who he was serving. An FBI affidavit charging him with "conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign principle," shows that Fai was a frontman for Pakistani – and not Kashmiri – interests in the US. He took dictation from his masters in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and according to the FBI count, was funded to the tune of at least $4 million to manipulate the debate about Kashmir. The FBI recorded 4000 email and telephone exchanges with his Pakistan handlers.

Fai's career as a Pakistani ISI bagman began as far back as 1989, according to a Confidential Witness (identified as CW-2 in the FBI affidavit) who turned US informant. The ISI, CW-2 says, "created the KAC to propagandize on behalf of the government of Pakistan" and selected Fai "because he had no overt ties to Pakistan."

Indeed, Fai did come originally from India. According to community sources, Fai hails from the Kashmir Valley and came to the US in the 1980s after an MA degree from Aligarh Muslim University. He earned a PhD in mass communication from Temple University in Pennsylvania and began working as a Kashmiri and Muslim activist in the late 1980s before the ISI ensnared him.

Soon he was singing the Pakistani tune churning out exaggerated accounts of Indian atrocities in J&K and organizing conferences and seminars bankrolled by the Pakistani government through ISI. Almost contemptuously, CW-s is quoted in the FBI affidavit as saying, "of the statements Fai makes, 80 per cent are provided by the ISI for Fai to repeat and disseminate verbatim. The other 20 per cent of the KAC's messaging consists of Fai's own ideas, which have been pre-approved by the ISI."

Fai was at once clever and stupid in his service to the Pakistani agenda, the affidavit shows. For instance, early in his lobbying stint, one of his backers who turned informant for the FBI said he gave him thousands of dollars in cash from his business in the form of $50 and $100 bills in a brown paper bag. Fai told him that he preferred checks to cash because checks appeared more "legitimate" and "safe."

But Fai also left a massive paper and electronic trail that the FBI diligently collected and intercepted under court-sanctioned surveillance (the FBI had been on to him for many years, the affidavit shows). He made massive cash collections. He was stopped by the police in New York once and found to have $ 35,000 in cash which he tried to explain away as donations for the Kashmir cause from a Brooklyn mosque, but which the FBI determined was slush money from a straw donor in the US. The unnamed straw donor, one of several cited in the FBI affidavit, would eventually be reimbursed by the ISI in Pakistan in what was a state-sponsored hawala transaction.

It wasn't always good going among the pro-Pakistani crowd; they argued, they fell out, and filched money for their personal use. Fai himself used some of the money from straw donors to pay his personal home mortgage. He had regular budgetary and accounting dust-ups with his handlers although they bankrolled him lately to the tune of more than $ 500,000 every year.

Another time, one of his ISI handlers demanded he get a laptop bag and adaptor for his boss. The wrangles finally got to one of his associates, identified as "John" in the FBI affidavit. John had a problem with Nazir Shawl, Fai's counterpart in UK as the ISI bagman, and he threatened to expose "everything and everybody."

"He ended by saying he was prepared to go to the Indian Embassy to beg forgiveness for his previous activities, even of doing so displeased his Pakistani bosses," the FBI affidavit records