Gangster-turned-FBI agent set for return to Karachi after losing US citizenship

• Kamran Faridi worked for FBI from 1995 till 2020.
• He was jailed in 2022 for threatening ex-FBI colleagues.
• He played key role in arrest of Jabir Motiwala.

LONDON: The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) former high-profile agent Kamran Faridi has been released from the Florida Prison after spending nearly four years on the condition he will deport himself to Pakistan before August this year.

According to a court order seen by this reporter, South District of New York’s District Judge Cathy Seibel ordered the release of Faridi on a reduced prison sentence of 72 months from the original sentence of 84 months.

The release of the once high-flying spy operator — once a Karachi street gangster — is not the end of his trial and troubles. The US government has not only revoked his citizenship but also his two residence permits facilitated by it in the UAE and Turkiye. There is an agreement that Faridi will leave the soil permanently before the end of August this year, for Karachi.

Now out of jail and living with his wife Kelly in Florida, Faridi told Geo Newshe has been released on several conditions, including his agreement to surrender his citizenship — that he got in the early 1990s after agreeing to work for the FBI in some of the organisation’s most dangerous operations — and undertaking to leave the US for Pakistan and never return to the States.

Faridi was jailed on December 9, 2022, on charges of transmitting threats to three former FBI colleagues — his FBI supervisor, an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) officer, and his former FBI handler, who had recently retired — in New York’s Westchester County where JTTF headquarters is located.

Faridi’s profile and his role in the arrest of Karachi businessman Jabir Motiwala in London on August 16, 2018, was highlighted by this reporter for the first time to shed extensive light on how a Karachi street criminal ended up becoming a valued FBI agent, who was tasked to carry out sensitive counter-terrorism operations in several Muslim countries including Pakistan.

It was Faridi who had led the US law enforcement plot in Karachi and New York between 2009-2013 to trap Motiwala during several meetings — posing as an operative of Russian mafia interested in making big money through arms deals, narcotics smuggling and extortion. It was based on whatever evidence Faridi had gathered on Motiwala that the US decided to arrest Motiwala in London.

Things turned a different turn when Faridi fell out with his FBI handlers and threatened to tell the UK court under oath that Motiwala was an innocent man who never agreed to any kind of narcotics and arms smuggling deal, that there was no such thing as his gathered evidence and that the FBI had asked him to lie about Motiwala in his witness statements.

The downfall of Faridi — who worked for the FBI from 1995 until February 2020 — began on March 2, 2020, when he was arrested at London Heathrow Airport while trying to enter the UK from Miami with his wife Kelley. He had spoken to the London lawyers of Motiwala — who was in Belmarsh prison at the time waiting for extradition to the US — before taking the flight to London, intent on recording a witness statement before the UK High Court to testify about the FBI ordering him to lie about Motiwala’s alleged involvement in the importation of Class-A drugs, extortion, money-laundering and connections to the D-company.

The FBI had learned of Faridi’s intentions after listening to wire-tapped phone conversations between him and Motiwala’s London lawyers. In London, he was arrested on March 3, 2020, before he could come out and rendered back to the US in chains the same evening with an FBI escort. He has come out of the confinement now exactly four years later.

As Faridi prepares to leave the US for the last time after spending nearly 30 years in the country and giving the best of his life to the US intelligence, more uncertainties and complexities await him.

The former Karachi boy returns to the Karachi streets which are no longer recognisable for him, and where he enters into completely uncharted waters.

Rearview

The FBI had learned of Faridi’s intentions after listening to wire-tapped phone conversations between him and Motiwala’s London lawyers. In London, he was arrested on March 3, 2020, before he could come out and rendered back to the US in chains the same evening with an FBI escort. He has come out of the confinement now exactly four years later.

According to court papers signed by an FBI special agent, after clashing with his FBI handlers Faridi had sent out a string of threatening text messages to them on February 17 and February 19, 2020, including threats to kill. He was later accused of also tipping off several former FBI targets to the fact that they were under FBI surveillance.

He was tried at the United States District Court, Southern District of New York where US prosecutors told the court that in February 2020 Faridi had threatened to assault and murder a federal law enforcement officer with the intent to impede, intimidate and interfere with such federal law enforcement officer while he was engaged in the performance of his official duties. They also accused him of sending over one hundred messages during this period containing threats such as “You will pay back for my family's suffering if my friends get hurt”.

Faridi didn’t dispute the evidence and confirmed that he had sent out threatening messages but countered that he had temporarily lost his temper after learning that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intended to conduct an audit — freezing all his bank accounts — after the FBI terminated his employment and refused to reimburse him for approximately $100,000 out-of-pocket expenses.

While Faridi was waiting for his trial and conviction in March 2022 after being taken into custody over federal charges, the US government decided to drop the extradition case against Motiwala in April 2021 after it became clear the main witness against Motiwala had flatly refused to testify the charges. Motiwala flew to Karachi as a free man on 17 April 2021.

Immediately after reaching Karachi, he sued the British authorities for incarcerating him at Wandsworth Prison, London, for 32 months on the basis of trumped-up charges and illegally rendering his primary witness, Faridi, back to the United States to prevent him from giving evidence of the FBI’s illegal misdoings.

Last year March, Jabir Motiwala won his case on several grounds after the UK government conceded that the former Home Secretary Priti Patel acted unlawfully when she cancelled Motiwala’s UK visit visa and detained him at a UK jail after the collapse of his American extradition case at the London High Court. The court awarded him damages for being held unlawfully at the Wandsworth prison for seven days; and agreed to return the legal fees in five figures that Mr Jabir Siddiq had to pay for this Judicial Review; the UK prosecution also separately agreed to return the legal costs in relation to Motiwala’s extradition case; and also restored his UK visit visa.

For Faridi, life remains complex and unpredictable as it always has been. When condemning the valued secret agent Faridi to jail in December 2021, Judge Cathy Seibel of New York’s Southern District Court described it as “perhaps the most difficult sentencing I have ever done.”

The judge commented that the case carried facts, “unlike anything I think most of us have ever seen” and that Faridi had worked a great deal in the US national interest during his career with the FBI.

Faridi’s "career" had started with hustling on the rough streets of Karachi, segued into major crimes, and then swerved towards a life of dangerous undercover operations for the American secret services.

His career in criminality started after he became associated with student politics in Karachi while still in his teens. Faridi was born and grew up in Block 3 of Karachi’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal area. He joined the Peoples Students Federation (PSF) and grew close to PSF’s Najeeb Ahmed, then a well-known student leader.

After a trail of violence, Faridi’s family paid off a human smuggler and arranged for him to travel to Sweden. He travelled to various countries illegally before reaching the US in the early 1990s where in Atlanta, Georgia in 1994 and bought a gas station in a violent neighbourhood called Bankhead Highway. It's here that the FBI saw value in Faridi’s fluent command of Urdu, Punjabi, and Hindi, Spanish and in 1996 recruited him as a full-time informant and agent.

Thanks to his criminal background, Faridi did so well in helping the FBI’s investigations that he was offered assignments with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA), the UK’s MI6, French intelligence, Austrian federal police, Thailand’s Federal Police, and the Malaysian National Police.

He travelled the world for the FBI and did good work for the agency in counterintelligence. However, it was his involvement in the Motiwala entrapment that led to a chain of events nobody anticipated.