B.C.C.I.S DEADLY SECRETS

Dispatches

The strange and terrifying odyssey of Masihur Rahman, the first B.C.C.I. insider to spill the beans to the U.S. Senate

ALAN FRIEDMAN

0 less than a month after the world's leading regulators shut down the scandal-ridden, $20 billion Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.) in July, a bespectacled and diminutive Bengali banker nervously boarded an Air India 747 jumbo at London's Heathrow Airport and took his seat at the very rear of the jet. Masihur Rahman, the fifty-seven-year-old Calcutta-bom former chief financial officer of B.C.C.I., was in a state of high anxiety as he waited for the packed aircraft to be cleared for takeoff on its journey to New York.

Rahman—"Masi" to his friends and family—had good reason to be scared. He knew too many secrets about the worldwide scandal that had engulfed the institution that was nicknamed "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals." Rahman had traveled on B.C.C.I.-sponsored trips with former president Jimmy Carter and had been privy to the bank's relations with a colorful roster of other world leaders and personalities, including Manuel Noriega, Adnan Khashoggi, Muhammad Ali, former British prime minister Lord Callaghan, former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, and the late Pakistani dictator General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq.

Rahman was flying to the U.S. to become a star witness for American prosecutors, one of the few B.C.C.I. insiders able to nail his former bosses with documents and information. But he was also fleeing the terror of the previous few months in London, where he had received death threats, where his wife had picked up the phone to hear anonymous callers tell her that "your husband has been in a serious car accident" or that "your son is not in school." Mysterious cars had crept into his driveway in suburban Surrey in the middle of the night— turning their lights and engines off. Gunshots had been fired through the bedroom window of a close friend from B.C.C.I. As a result, Rahman had bundled his wife and two small children out of the country and had himself been living a paranoid and peripatetic existence, checking into and out of a series of cheap hotel rooms, moving almost every night. He was even considering an offer of plastic surgery from the F.B.I. under the federal witness-protection program. Britain's High Court had placed a gag order on him, enjoining him from speaking to the press or public. Fleet Street editors had dispatched their bloodhounds to track down Rahman, who was dubbed "the Squealer" when it was learned he was the first insider to start detailing the spectacular fraud at B.C.C.I. to U.S. and British authorities. And Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat leading a congressional investigation of B.C.C.I., had been pleading with Rahman's American wife to get the B.C.C.I. executive to come to Washington and testify before the Senate.

The last telephone call Rahman received in London was from a former B.C.C.I. colleague in Dubai, who warned him to leave London, and told him, "Your life is not worth a penny." The ominous call conjured up a dark vision of Roberto Calvi, the Banco Ambrosiano chairman who died mysteriously in London ten years ago. "I thought I would just disappear, like Calvi, and be killed," Rahman recalls. ''I was just a Bengali, after all, and I knew there were B.C.C.I. people and even intelligence people who could dispose of me in a very sophisticated way."

One top investigator sums up the situation bluntly: "We had to get Rahman's ass out of London, and quickly."

After testifying to the Serious Fraud Office in London, he borrowed the money for an economy ticket to New York, getting the last seat available on the flight. He threw a few clothes into a suitcase and was driven to Heathrow at eight in the morning in a friend's battered old Ford Escort. ''All the time, I kept looking and thinking someone would stop me. The press had planted people in front of my Surrey home, but I never went back there.

The D.A.'s office in New York told me it was getting too hot to stay in London. So I just left. I didn't eveh tell my lawyer."

As the Air India flight thundered toward Kennedy Airport, Senator Kerry was on the phone to Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, demanding federal protection for Rahman. ''We were worried about his safety, and I had been getting ready to go to London myself," says Kerry, adding that he called Eagleburger "the minute I heard Rahman was on that plane because we were concerned about an interception."

Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, the trailblazing prosecutor on B.C.C.I., was equally concerned as he coordinated the welcoming operation with Kerry's staff, U.S. Customs agents, and the New York Federal Reserve. "Rahman was very significant," says the seventy-two-year-old Morgenthau, sipping a Diet Pepsi in a paper-strewn Manhattan office that looks like a gangbuster's office straight out of a 1940s thriller. "He was one of the key witnesses being harassed in London. A lot of lives were destroyed by the B.C.C.I. affair, and his was certainly one of them."

One of Morgenthau's top investigators sums up the situation more bluntly: "We had to get Rahman's ass out of London, and quickly."

Once he was airborne, Rahman, a man with small, intense brown eyes and brindled hair, felt "a sense of tremendous depression." He wondered what price he would pay for having decided to talk. But most of all he felt sorry for himself. "I knew I was a whistle-blower. They called me a squealer. I thought maybe I had made a mistake. Had I told the truth or was it just an ego trip? Why did I talk? Why did I do it? I wondered if God had put me there, near the toilet, if I was somehow being punished, if my life had gone from all to nothing."

At Kennedy, Rahman was hustled through Immigration by three federal officials and soon reunited with his wife and two children, a six-year-old boy and four-year-old girl. But his depression continued when Morgenthau's men parked the entire Rahman family in a Manhattan safe house, a tiny apartment rented by the D.A.'s office. "It was selected because the buildings are so close together that no one could take potshots," explains Rahman's wife, Elyn. "But it was so dark we needed the lights on all the time." Now resettled into a comfortably discreet suburban split-level—owned by a former Drexel Burnham Lambert executive who is short of cash—with his monthly rent paid by Morgenthau's office, Rahman says he feels isolated and disoriented. He watches American sitcoms with his children and accompanies his wife on visits to nearby shopping malls. His days are spent sifting through financial records, appearing before grand juries, and submitting to endless debriefings by B.C.C.I. investigators from the Manhattan D.A.'s office, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Justice, and the British government's independent counsel, Lord Bingham. He is also preparing to write his memoirs, which he promises will be the first and only inside account of B.C.C.I.

In several days of meetings over a period of more than three weeks Rahman described to me his remarkable odyssey from a childhood in India under the Raj to his current circumstances as a key witness for U.S. prosecutors. He talked openly of the early, idealistic hopes of creating a Third World bank, of the almost voodoo culture inside B.C.C.I., and of the millions of dollars in alleged bribes paid to politicians around the world.

One U.S. investigator told me Rahman was "a moron" for allowing me to enter his hideaway. But Masi Rahman is a man who needs to tell his story, almost obsessively so. When he talks, it is a gushing stream-of-consciousness catharsis, his eyes dancing behind his glasses, his right eyebrow arching higher and higher. He speaks in a subcontinental accent reminiscent of the Indian doctor in the film version of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. And there is Forsterian pathos in his story—a British-educated former colonial who has overheard some of the Western world's dirtiest secrets. Jonathan Winer, Senator Kerry's chief B.C.C.I. staffer, says Rahman strikes him mostly "as a gentle and very nice family man who has been scared to death."

Masihur Rahman was bom in Calcutta in 1934 to a life of considerable pomp and splendor as the fifth of nine children of the British-appointed chief justice of the High Court of India. This was India more than a decade before the subcontinent was partitioned, and Rahman's father was the first Muslim to achieve the title of Indian civil servant, which was rather a big deal in those last years of the Raj. Old photographs from the 1940s show the proud family, although not its army of servants, cooks, and guards.

At the age of thirteen, however, with his father dead and the British gone, Rahman became a refugee, one of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who fled the violence of Hindu-dominated Calcutta. He still has vivid memories of his mother and brothers and sisters boarding a train "swarming with people, inside and on the roof" for the forty-five-hour journey away from his home. "All of our trunks of clothes and even our pet monkey was left behind, sold for a few rupees at the station because we could not take anything with us. The experience gave me a profound survival instinct that I have never lost."

Rahman and his family went to live with a poor uncle who ran the tiny railway station in Chittagong, in what was then called East Pakistan and is today Bangladesh. It was an immediate plunge from riches to rags, the whole family crammed into a one-room tin hut with walls of bamboo matting and a floor of mud. There, without electricity or running water, the young Masi Rahman and his siblings slept on the floor in shifts because of the lack of space. The adults would sit up at night, talking behind a bamboo partition as the children curled up on the floor, and to this day Rahman says he maintains a habit he developed at the time to shut out the light and noise—he always sleeps with his right arm covering his eyes and ears.

B.C.C.I. minions would scour Lahore brothels for beautiful young girls as gifts to Sheikh Zayed's entourage.

As a youth, Rahman received little in the way of formal education, learning to read at home by kerosene lamp and earning food and clothing by tutoring others in math and English. In 1956 he traveled to England aboard a cargo ship and followed an elder brother into the study of accounting. Working in London restaurants to pay his way through college, Rahman eventually qualified as a fellow of the prestigious Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales. In 1961 he returned to his family.

The scarcity of trained managers in underdeveloped East Pakistan meant that a British-educated accountant was in great demand. Rahman's first job, at the age of twenty-seven, was as finance controller of the newly established East Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation, a state agency responsible for building refineries, petrochemical plants, and other heavy-industry complexes. For a young man this was a heady opportunity; he was soon dealing with World Bank and International Monetary Fund officials and was able to afford not only his daily attire of freshly pressed white trousers and white shirts but also decent lodgings and a little black Austin.

The job also led to a fateful contact— Rahman's first meeting, in 1965, with two men who would later become the chief villains of the B.C.C.I. affair. They were Agha Hasan Abedi, the charming Pakistani founder and chairman of B.C.C.I., whose eyes, says Rahman, "betray both God and the Devil,'' and Swaleh Naqvi, Abedi's sidekick, who later became chief executive of B.C.C.I.

Plenty of bankers would come to see Rahman, trying to drum up loan business from the Pakistan development agency, and Abedi and Naqvi—then top officials at Pakistan's United Bank —were among those who courted him. In 1966, to Rahman's surprise, Abedi offered him a job as executive vice president of United Bank, "even though I had never worked in a bank before.'' In fact, Rahman was so inexperienced that he had a junior member of the bank tutor him at home on the basic principles of banking.

Abedi, who would eventually be called "the Rasputin of the Middle East," was then a high-living wheeler-dealer in Karachi, where Rahman moved when he took the United Bank position. Although he admits having heard, even then, in the 1960s, stories about Abedi cutting corners, Rahman loved the glory of his new position, which included a house, a guard, two drivers, and spanking-new Dodge Dart and Nissan cars, plus a cook, gardener, and nanny to look after the children of his first wife. His earnings quickly soared from 30,000 to 100,000 rupees a year. At the age of thirty-two, he had finally regained the privileged life-style of his childhood.

Abedi was always a bon vivant, says Rahman, recalling the boss's love of handmade silk shirts, Savile Row tailored suits, and expensive Islamic artworks, and his luxurious twenty-five-byforty-foot office on the seventh floor of the American Life building in downtown Karachi. The furnishings were of carved mahogany, and Abedi's aesthetic taste ran to a blinding decor of snow-white carpets, walls, and curtains: "It was white everywhere," reports Rahman.

As far back as 1969, he says, Abedi seemed to have "a sixth sense" that President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto planned to nationalize the Pakistani banking system. Abedi began courting sheikhs, traveling to Abu Dhabi, and nurturing a relationship that would eventually, yield billions for B.C.C.I.—with Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the leader of the United Arab Emirates. And when the sheikh came to northern Pakistan to go falcon hunting, Abedi's minions would scour the brothels of nearby Lahore for beautiful young girls as gifts to the sheikh's entourage.

Even then, Rahman says, the charismatic Abedi was developing a cultlike hold on his followers. "I and six other top aides were all given a brown envelope containing a book. We were told to read the book and to meditate about it." The book was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and when Rahman finished reading it he was told by Abedi "that he would take us on magical voyages to places we had never been, that he would show us things we had never seen." Two months later, on New Year's Day 1972, Bhutto announced the bank nationalizations, hired Rahman as an adviser on banking, and placed Abedi under house arrest, accused of corruption. Later that year, still confined to his Karachi mansion, Abedi summoned Rahman. "He told me he could not sleep anymore, because people like me had walked out of his life. It sounds funny now, but I was touched. He talked to me about my family, my cat, and my dog. And I asked him, 'How do you feel about all of this? They say you are a crook.' He said, 'People like you and I will always build.' And then he took me to his study and showed me his handwritten notes—these were his first plans for the bank that would become B.C.C.I. He said, 'There are no Third World banks. Let us start one.' I said to him, 'Mr. Abedi, you are unbelievable.' He said, 'Rahman, in ten years' time you'll see, we will all be millionaires.' I was so excited. I told him that when he# was free I would serve him again."

Abedi was eventually freed, and in late 1972 he and Naqvi persuaded Sheikh Zayed and the Bank of America to put up a mere $2.5 million to start the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The bank was based in Abu Dhabi, which is where Rahman headed two years later. "When I arrived in Abu Dhabi, I was received in grand style," he remembers. "They even put me in the Hilton for a few nights, but I moved out because I thought it was costing the bank too much.

"I wondered at first how on God's earth we were going to make a bank work in Abu Dhabi, in the dirt and the desert," Rahman says. But then the OPEC oil embargo and quadrupled crude prices shook the world. For Abu Dhabi, B.C.C.I., and Rahman himself, money was no longer a problem.

Rahman's title—from 1974 until his dramatic departure in the summer of 1990—was chief financial officer of B.C.C.I. He was not only a founding executive, but also a member of its five-man central executive committee. In 1976, he moved from Abu Dhabi to the bank's new management headquarters, in London—a few steps away from the Bank of England—to help coordinate B.C.C.I.'s operations, which mushroomed to 430 branches in. seventy-three countries.

If life had been good on 100,000 rupees a year in Karachi, Rahman found his new life in England—with a salary of $200,000 a year, a further $100,000 a year for expenses, a chauffeured Mercedes, a five-bedroom country house with swimming pool and servants, and a luxury pied-a-terre in London—was really swell. "The bank took care of everything for us," says Rahman. "We never wanted. It was limousines and jet planes everywhere, first class all the time at B.C.C.I."

Inside B.C.C.I. headquarters, Abedi maintained "his own secret police in the form of spies among the executives."

Abedi, however, was aiming at more than just comfort. He was busy constructing a financial colossus that would soon have dealings with an international rogues' gallery of Third World despots, Middle Eastern arms dealers and terrorists, South American drug lords, C.I.A. covert operatives, and money-launderers of almost every nationality. Rahman sat on all the senior-management committees except for the crucial credit committee—which investigators say Abedi used to rubber-stamp his dirtiest deals.

As a result, Rahman claims, he was kept in the dark about the bank's global fraud. Given the immunity he has received,

U.S. prosecutors appear to agree, concluding that Rahman's lot should be that of a witness rather than a defendant.

B.C.C.I. has also been accused of running a Karachi-based "black network" of arms dealers and intelligence operatives who not only cooperated with the C.I.A. and other intelligence services but also engaged in drug dealing, arms dealing, extortion, kidnapping, and murder. Rahman reveals that even inside the bank's London headquarters Abedi maintained "his own secret police in the form of spies among the executives." One top executive, now charged with fraud and money-laundering, kept a little black book filled with compromising information on fellow bank officers that Rahman says "was used to destroy people who stepped out of line."

Abedi's gestapo-like tactics went hand in hand with his self-proclaimed religious fervor. "Abedi would often speak to me about what he called a moral balance sheet. He said it was not enough to keep a bank's records as a material balance sheet. He talked of how God would judge us if we were not moral," recounts Rahman. Abedi, who set aside specially designated "prayer rooms" at the bank, often described B.C.C.I. as a Muslim institution that would not only further the fortunes of the Third World but would also combat the "evil" of world Zionism. "Abedi always brought the Almighty into the picture," says Rahman. "I remember that he was once twenty minutes late for a meeting. When he came in he said, 'I'm sorry, but I'm late for a very good reason. As I came out of my office, I met God in the corridor and I had to talk with him.' There were 110 people at that meeting and they all listened in silence. Not a single person spoke, giggled, or dared to say anything."

Abedi, says Rahman, demanded absolute loyalty. "He was totally powerhungry and he mesmerized everyone. It became like a banking cult. You didn't question him. You lived rigidly to his standards by constantly talking of humility and ego. They made sure you didn't step out of line. Effectively, what happened is that you stopped questioning anything Mr. Abedi told you to do. And Mr. Abedi had a knack for making people feel inferior. He would call you to his desk and pretend to be writing something and because it was an openplan office everyone would see you standing there and know you were being humiliated.

"He had other techniques of embarrassing you. When he was angry his face would get at least two shades darker. He never shouted, never raised his voice, but his bitterness showed. He would ridicule one person in a staff meeting, pick the person out and ostracize him in front of the others, until you felt you were in a hot hell. It was such an effective technique that people dreaded whose turn it would be at the next meeting.

"I think he had equal components of good and evil, though he certainly had a great deal of concentrated evil in him. He was capable of vicious things, of playing with people's lives, of humiliating and manipulating people—of sucking the juice out of people. But then, he was also a strange paternal figure." He asked about the families of his executives, handed out compensation packages for school fees and housing, and assured his employees of cradle-to-grave security. "He would never fire anyone. He would just leave you in a state of suspended animation if he was displeased. You would continue drawing your salary and yet have nothing to do. It was really like a kind of brotherhood."

This cultlike fraternity extended to exaggerated nepotism (Swaleh Naqvi is said to have hired more than thirty relatives) and to the choosing of wives for some of its top executives. Abedi was none too pleased with Elyn, Rahman's second wife. Bom in the Bronx and educated as a businesswoman and fashion consultant, Elyn Rahman met Masi at a cocktail party in New York in 1983. An attractive thirty-seven-year-old of Italian and Irish parentage, Elyn Rahman says she was always scorned by Abedi. "He did not accept me because I was Catholic and because he had already picked out a Pakistani woman for Masi. To marry a New Yorker from the fashion industry was the worst mistake. Abedi never even spoke to me. He would just acknowledge me from across the room, with a nod."

Staring out at the backyard of her latest temporary safe house, Elyn Rahman suddenly becomes quite agitated about Abedi. "Let me tell you something. He treated people like garbage. He used people and then he trashed them."

It was in 1984, at about the time of Rahman's marriage to Elyn, that the chief financial officer first became suspicious about the multimillion-dollar payments Abedi kept asking him to arrange for a variety of governments.

The top officials at B.C.C.I. were on exceptionally close terms with General Zia of Pakistan. But then, so was the C.I.A. Pakistan's finance minister admitted last summer that branches of B.C.C.I. may have been used to funnel money to Afghan rebels as part of a C.I.A. covert operation. (The C.I.A. has, predictably, declined to comment on any particulars of its relationship with the bank, except to say it both used the bank for fund transfers and filed several hundred reports on criminal activities at the bank.)

But relations between B.C.C.I. and Zia's government went far beyond helping the C.I.A. to help Afghan rebels. In early 1984, Rahman was in B.C.C.I.'s London headquarters when he received a long-distance telephone call from Abedi. "He told me that Pakistan wanted more money from us. We had been giving what I was told were charity payments, but they already totaled $20 million that year. Twenty million dollars is a lot of charity for Pakistan, from one bank. And Abedi said I had to find some more. I told him that we had already closed the books for the year, that we could not change the accounts. But he insisted."

Abedi "was totally power-hungry and he mesmerized everyone. It became like a banking cult"

Some of the money may indeed have gone to philanthropic causes, but Rahman agrees with Abdur Sakhia, another former top B.C.C.I. official, that B.C.C.I. made payments to relatives of General Zia. The payments, however, took many forms, such as cash, the hiring of relatives, subsidized loans, or other means of buying influence. The same was true of B.C.C.I. payments to the family of the late Indira Gandhi, who received $100,000 herself as one of the first recipients of B.C.C.I.'s annual Third World prize. Other recipients of $100,000 each, says Rahman, included Willy Brandt, the former West German chancellor, and Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania.

When Rahman refused to reopen B.C.C.I.'s accounts, Abedi demanded to speak with Swaleh Naqvi. Rahman handed over the telephone. ''I heard Naqvi telling Abedi, 'Yes, sir, I am sure something can be done, oh yes, Mr. Rahman can do it,' and I became furious. I told Naqvi that the auditors would find out, that the books were closed. He told me he had promised Mr. Abedi it would be done. We eventually found another $2 million for Pakistan."

Rahman says this was not the only instance in which he was asked by Abedi to do things that struck him as irregular. ''Mr. Abedi needed me, but he hated my being a conscience to him," says Rahman. "He'd tell me, 'Masi, you shouldn't wait for a heated swimming pool to learn how to swim. It's not a perfect world. Just jump into the dirty pond.' "

Zia's blessing was essential for a number of questionable B.C.C.I. operations that were run from Pakistan. In the case of Panama, it was more a question of the bank's offering itself to Manuel Noriega as a truly full-service bank. B.C.C.I. officials and Noriega stand accused of laundering more than $20 million in alleged drug profits out of Panama.

The full-service bankers of B.C.C.I. certainly didn't sit around in their offices waiting for business to fall into their laps. They courted it actively, and frequently by chumming up to Third World dictators. Rahman remembers one B.C.C.I. colleague who ''walked around with bags of money and would buy television sets and VCRs and give them to politicians and clients in Nigeria, Spain, and Panama." In Panama, according to Rahman, B.C.C.I.'s branch manager became so close to the government that he would go jogging each morning with Noriega. (Which was almost a tradition: the B.C.C.I. man had also jogged alongside Noriega's predecessor, General Omar Torrijos.)

"Abedi's philosophy was to cultivate everyone because there was always a payback," says Rahman. "And in the case of Noriega, let's face it—if you are jogging with the president of a country, then you are one up on other bankers in the country. We were not present in Panama to set moral standards for Noriega, but to win his business."

One man of genuine moral standards who was sucked into the B.C.C.I. machine was former president Jimmy Carter. It is no secret that Carter accepted millions of dollars in donations from the bank to his Global 2000 healthand-education foundation and a $500,000 contribution to the Carter Center, which houses his presidential library. What is less well known is the frequent use Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, made of B.C.C.I.'s slick corporate jet. The Carters trotted the globe with Abedi, from Zimbabwe to China, from Kenya to Britain. And when Abedi could not be there, he sent Naqvi or Rahman in his place.

Rahman's most vivid recollection of what it was like to travel with the Carters was a trip from Kenya to Ghana in 1988. The occasion was a World Health Organization seminar on how to eradicate the guinea worm. It was held in Accra, the capital of Ghana, which gave Rahman the chance to meet Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, the strongman of Ghana, who also wangled hundreds of thousands of dollars in charitable contributions out of B.C.C.I., according to Rahman. The bank's corporate jet may not have rivaled Air Force One, but for Jimmy Carter and other occasional passengers—including former British prime minister Lord Callaghan and U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar— it certainly came in a close second. A converted Boeing 727, the heavily staffed aircraft had a sumptuous office section at the rear, complete with a wood-paneled library, desks, and sofas. The middle of the cabin featured a master bedroom with king-size bed and adjoining bathroom, en suite. The front of the plane was made into an elaborate drawing room, with swivel chairs, tables, and couches. There was also a large map of the world on one wall, with blinking red lights indicating each of the 430 B.C.C.I. branches. "It was always lit up like a Christmas tree so guests could see that B.C.C.I. spanned the world."

Carter, says Rahman, was effusive in his praise of Abedi, and he made a point of speaking of the bank "wherever he went." In Ghana, for example, Rahman remembers Carter praising B.C.C.I. during a TV broadcast, in the presence of officials from the U.N., the World Bank, and the government of Ghana. "It was a wonderful endorsement and it certainly helped us to get more business."

Rahman swears, however, that unlike many other beneficiaries of B.C.C.I., Carter never behaved improperly. And one of his most compelling memories is of Carter visiting a child who was being treated for guinea worm. "The guinea worm can be quite long, many inches, and it comes out of the patient's body alive in a process that takes up to seven days. To see this huge worm coming slowly out of a body is almost biblical. It was so horrible to watch that I had to turn away. But President Carter kneeled down and touched the arm of the child, comforting this victim as the worm came out of her body."

Lord Callaghan, known as "Sunny Jim" during his years as the British prime minister (1976-79), did not watch worms coming out of African children. Paid briefly as a consultant, he was one of several British politicians targeted by B.C.C.I. as a man of influence who could be useful to the bank, which at its peak had forty-seven offices in Britain. "He never did anything wrong," says Rahman, "but Lord Callaghan would take us to lunch to meet members of Parliament."

Carter and Callaghan may have been the biggest catches, but many other prominent politicians, royals, and even sportsmen and entertainers passed by Rahman's desk on the fourth floor of B.C.C.I.'s London offices on their way to lunch with Abedi. "I remember Muhammad Ali coming to B.C.C.I. and telling me he was proud of the bank's work in the Third World. He was such a powerful and tall personality that we all looked up to him, quite literally."

A fellow senior executive told Rahman, "I have personally shot two people. I will have no hesitation shooting you if you open your mouth."

Rahman also has recollections about B.C.C.I.'s secret control of the Washington-based First American Bankshares, the bank that was run until August 1991 by former presidential adviser Clark Clifford and his law partner Robert Altman (whose main claim to fame before the B.C.C.I. scandal broke was that he is the husband of Wonder Woman Lynda Carter). "I met Altman several times at B.C.C.I. annual conferences," says Rahman. "I had lunches and drinks with him in Vienna, Athens, and Luxembourg. I never thought it was illegal; it was generally understood inside the bank that First American was owned by B.C.C.I. Mr. Abedi would always refer to First American as 'our cousins from America.' Altman would tell us how they were proceeding at First American. I personally believe that from the day Abedi locked into Altman and Clifford, he put his cards on the table. I definitely think Altman knew that B.C.C.I. controlled First American." (Clifford and Altman, who are currently under investigation, have vociferously denied knowing about B.C.C.I.'s control.)

In March 1985, B.C.C.I. even went Hollywood, bringing the King and Queen of Thailand to a gala evening in L.A. at which Abedi played the improbable role of master of ceremonies to an audience of B.C.C.I. executives and luminaries that included Henry Kissinger, Yul Brynner, L.A. mayor Tom Bradley, and Javier Perez de Cuellar.

For B.C.C.I., the 1980s were the good old days. In March 1990, a partner in Price Waterhouse, the bank's auditing firm, telephoned Rahman at home and said they needed an urgent meeting. "I had a sense this was the beginning of the end," remembers Rahman.

The next day, the auditors informed Rahman they'd found a series of spectacularly irregular transactions that could cost the bank as much as $500 million in losses. ''Price Waterhouse said we should go to the regulators, but first it was decided to set up an internal task force to investigate." Rahman, as chief financial officer, was appointed chairman of the task force. A month later, at a special meeting of the B.C.C.I. board, he broke the bad news about the massive fraud. ''I remember that Naqvi had tears in his eyes."

(Rahman has charged that Price Waterhouse was negligent in its auditing practices and should have discovered the prodigious fraud years before it did. Price Waterhouse emphatically denies this and has even counterattacked Rahman, saying that his position meant that he ''shares management responsibility for internal financial controls." Rahman's riposte: ''I'd look forward to meeting them in court.")

Rahman claims that he tried to get his bosses to take action, but that they were more interested in covering up and getting Sheikh Zayed to simply bail them out (which he eventually did, to the tune of almost $1 billion). ''When we discovered the true situation, I named fifteen executives who should be fired immediately—but they were kept on instead. They are all now in jail in Abu Dhabi," says Rahman with grim satisfaction.

In June 1990, Rahman says, he had a showdown with Naqvi and other B.C.C.I. executives (Abedi by now was seriously ill back in Pakistan, having suffered the second of two heart attacks). ''I told them they still had crooks working for them, that they had dismissed the wrong people. They told me it was not my affair. I said that I might even go to court to help defend the honest men they had fired. That was a mistake," says Rahman, glancing quickly out the window at his backyard, where his children are filling bright pumpkincolored plastic bags with autumn leaves.

It was at that moment in the summer of 1990 that he felt he had made himself a target. He says this impression was reinforced when a fellow senior executive told him, "Masi, let me warn you. I come from a family in Punjab and I have personally shot two people. I will have no hesitation shooting you if you open your mouth."

Rahman says he was offered $40,000 to leave the bank and keep quiet. "That was ridiculous," he says. "My secretary got $30,000 in severance when she left." Instead, he threatened to sue for wrongful dismissal and asked for $3 million. He was to have been joined in his suit by other ex-B.C.C.I. executives, and the legal wrangling was still under way when the bank was shut down in July 1991.

Rahman's Christmas present a year ago was a warning from a B.C.C.I. colleague that he had become "a marked man." The mysterious phone calls and death threats escalated last spring as Rahman made plans to testify before grand juries in New York and Washington. Elyn Rahman says the situation became unbearable; she was hospitalized recently for stress and is now under the care of a therapist. The Rahmans' sixyear-old son did not understand what was happening, but he became so nervous that he took to wetting his bed and was treated by a psychologist.

As for Masihur Rahman, he sits in a little study in his suburban purgatory which he has fashioned into a replica of his bank office in London. "I have tried to preserve the decor and the dignity of my London office," explains Rahman. "I was with that bank for seventeen years and it is hard to find myself in the middle of nowhere." Though he is determined to testify against his former employers in court, he admits to bouts of depression. "This experience has made me very fatalistic," he says, removing his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. "It has made me doubt everything. A lot of people are hoping I will just go away. I have no social life. I have no friends here. I am living in the backwoods. It gives me peace, but not much else. So I lock myself in this room and I reread my B.C.C.I. papers. This will never happen again, that a $20 billion bank will just vanish. It is a shattered dream."

And then, picking up a color snapshot of six B.C.C.I. executives, he touches the photograph, as though it might come alive. "Look at this. There I am. In the picture. I am one of the six people named in 1989 to remake the bank, and now I am the only one of these left who is not indicted or in jail."