ProPublica has published a long investigative report on U.S. Muslim Brotherhood activist Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, accused by the FBI of acting as an agent for the Pakistani intelligence service involved in secret lobbying efforts inside the U.S. The report begins:
The night should have been a coup for Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai. Once a poor villager from halfway around the world, Fai had become the go-to man in Washington, D.C., for his cause, Kashmir, the Himalayan region long caught in a tug of war between Pakistan and India. And there he was on March 4, 2010, hosting a fundraiser for Rep. Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who had been the chief supporter in Congress of Fai’s Kashmiri American Council for 20 years. In some ways, the event inside Fai’s home in Fairfax, Va., symbolized everything that Fai had become, featuring speeches in the living room and kebabs and curries in the basement. But it barely camouflaged how Fai’s carefully built world was collapsing. The FBI was monitoring almost every move Fai made, every email he sent, every call he received. Investigators believed Fai’s main donors were not well-meaning idealists but members of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, the most powerful of Pakistan’s spy agencies. Within weeks, the Justice Department would send Fai a letter of warning. Within months, he would be pulled over by New York police with $35,000 in cash in his car. And by the next year, Fai would be arrested, the unlikely central character in a scheme by a foreign government to pay more than $4 million to sway U.S. politicians and policy on Kashmir, the Justice Department says. Fai’s tale of rags to riches to arrest this summer is a lesson in how easy it is to win influence in Washington.
Read the rest of here.
According to an online profile of Dr. Fai:
Dr. Fai is the founding chairman of the California-based World Peace Forum. He is the Chairman of the International Institute of Kashmir Studies. He is also the Chairman of the Kashmiri American Foundation & the London-based Justice Foundation. Dr. Fai is also the Member of the Board of Director of Istanbul-based the Union of the NGOs of the Islamic World. Dr. Fai holds a Ph.D. in mass communications from Temple University, Pennsylvania, and an M.A. from the Aligarh University in India. As a student leader, he represented the International Federation of Student Organizations at many international conferences. In 1986, he addressed the United Nations Conference in New York on Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries. At Temple University, he was elected as the President of the International Students Association and Director of Temple University, Graduate Students Council. He was also a member of the Temple University President’s Students Advisory Council. He was also elected as the General Secretary of the Temple University Space & Funding Committee. Dr. Fai was elected as the “President of the Muslim Students Association of the United States & Canada” between 1984-1988, whose membership exceeded 73,000 in 1988.
During his studies at Temple University, Dr. Fai was associated with Ismail Faruqi, one of the early leaders of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood and who was instrumental in the idea for establishing the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), an important part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Both the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and the International Federation of Student Organizations (IIFSO) were critical components of the US and Global Muslim Brotherhood during the time Dr. Fai was active. According to a recent report on the first Gaza flotilla by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), the Union of the NGOs of the Islamic World is a key part of the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood network that was instrumental in developing and executing that flotilla. In addition, Dr. Fai has been a regular speaker at a number of conferences of the Islamic Society of North America, another part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.
An earlier post discussed the arrest of Dr. Fai.