I first learnt about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International or BCCI, as it was then popularly known -sometime in the end of July 1983. My China Airlines flight from Shanghai had just landed at Hong Kong's then-famous Kai Tak Airport. A friend of mine from my Cambridge days was waiting to receive me at the airport. He was Hashim Khan Hoti, my contemporary at Cambridge during the previous decade. Like me, he was then studying economics. While I was at Queens' College, Hashim was at Selwyn College. We used to invariably meet three or four times a week at the Marshall Library and were also tutorial partners at a weekly supervision on South Asian economics under Dr Tomlinson Ph.D (Cantab) and later professor of economic history at London's School of Oriental and African Studies. After graduation in 1979, I lost touch with Hashim as he went back to his feudal family seat at Hoti Mardan in what was then North West Frontier Province and is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. Thereafter, some years later, I heard through the Cambridge grapevine that Hashim had moved to Hong Kong and was working with a bank. I reconnected with him and he very generously invited me to stay with him in Hong Kong on my way back from China.
Hashim was at the concourse and greeted me very warmly. He told me that we would have to wait for fifteen to twenty minutes as he was also receiving an Afghan friend from Karachi. During our wait, Hashim told me that he now worked for the BCCI in Hong Kong and was wearing a dual hat. Not only did he run the Kowloon branch of the bank but he also headed the protocol department in Hong Kong and had to periodically receive the bank's officers at the airport. We were waiting to receive a guy called Zubair Talakhel (name changed) from BCCI Peshawar. Soon enough, Zubair emerged on the concourse and Hashim greeted him warmly, introducing me too. A swanky Toyota Crown drew up, and we were on our way.
Later that evening I was invited to the rather opulent home of Syed Abid Ali (name changed), Hashim's boss who lived with his Chinese girlfriend Daisy Chen (name changed) in the upmarket area of Stanley. I got the opportunity to briefly chat with Zubair. He said he was a Tajik from Kabul and had crossed over with his family to Pakistan in May 1978, weeks after the communists took power in Afghanistan as a consequence of the Saur Revolution. He joined Edwardes College in Peshawar the same year and obtained his degree in economics from there in 1981. Thereafter, he joined BCCI in Karachi and was looking after the Gokal Brothers-owned and Geneva-based Gulf Shipping Lines account with the bank. Though he had recently been transferred to Peshawar to oversee Gulf Shipping Lines' logistics between NWFP and Karachi, he was on a special assignment to establish operations for Gokal Shipping in Buenaventura, Colombia. As such, he would be flying to Colombia in a couple of days.
I went back to India and got busy with my life. In 1987, owing to my deep friendship with the late journalist Kuldip Nayar's younger son, Rajiv, I was privy to the background events of Kuldip Nayar's legendary interview with Pakistani nuclear scientist Dr A.Q. Khan on 28 January 1987 in Islamabad. The entire episode is described in detail in my book Red Fear: The China Threat.
In 1988, I had my next encounter with BCCI. I used to visit Bombay (now known as Mumbai) quite frequently in connection with my work and had struck up a friendship with Durando Wickremesinghe (name changed), who ran a global publishing business. One day, while talking about the soaring real estate prices in south Bombay, he told me that the BCCI branch at Nariman Point accepted money from a cousin of his who had sold a flat and didn't know what to do with the cash he received from the sale. For a small fee, BCCI had transferred it to an overseas account in the name of the transferor. The cash was given by Wickremesinghe's cousin to the BCCI's Nariman Point branch's boyish-looking manager of operations, Rizwan Sheikh (name changed).
The last decade of the twentieth century just flew, and I found myself in early 2001 negotiating with a shadow part of the first NDA government to shoot a documentary in Afghanistan on Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud's heroic battle against the Taliban. The second half of July 2001 found me in a Northern Alliance Mi-8 helicopter looking down at the landing ground in Khodja Bahauddin in the Takhar Province of northern Afghanistan. As I stepped out of the helicopter, I was almost blown away by the sight of Zubair Talakhel, who was leading the reception committee that was waiting to welcome me.
That evening, over glasses of Stolichnaya on the rocks, sitting in the forecourt of the guest house where Commander Massoud was to be blown up by a terrorist bomb several weeks later, I convinced Zubair to tell me his story. And what a story it turned out to be!
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