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B.C.C.I. did more than finance or broker arms deals between nations that couldn't risk exposure of politically embarrassing relationships. Arms dealers from Europe and the Middle East, as well as a high-level operative from B.C.C.I.'s Karachi-based black network, have separately provided TIME with nearly identical descriptions of some of B.C.C.I.'s elaborate services for the sale of conventional weapons. "They could handle everything," says one of those sources. "Brokering, financing, letters of credit, false end-user certificates, shopping, spare parts, training and even personnel. You could order a bomb, a plane to deliver it and somebody to drop it."
With that kind of muscle, B.C.C.I. was able to secure substantial business from one of the world's pre-eminent makers of military aircraft, Dassault Aviation, the French company that produces the Mirage jet fighter. According to Arif Durrani, a B.C.C.I.-financed Pakistani arms dealer now doing time in a U.S. federal prison for illegally providing Hawk antiaircraft missile parts to Iran during the Iran-contra era, one of the biggest Mirage dealers in the world is a Pakistani multimillionaire named Asaf Ali. "Just as Ghaith Pharaon fronts for B.C.C.I. to purchase banks and businesses, Asaf is B.C.C.I.'s man in the weapons business," says Durrani, who financed many of his weapons deals through B.C.C.I. offices in London and New York City. While Durrani has made a number of other claims that have been contested by the Justice Department, another well-placed source confirms that Asaf Ali is backed financially by B.C.C.I. in his worldwide deals and that he brokers Mirages, including some top-of-the-line Mirage 2000s that were sold to Iraq, Libya and Abu Dhabi, among other countries.
In a recent deal, Asaf, displaying the political dexterity of a superpower, brokered the sale of 49 Mirage 2000s to India and then, to maintain parity, provided Pakistan with a similar number of new and used Mirages. To fill the Pakistani order, investigators looking at the deal say, he rerouted nearly two dozen Mirages, yet to be paid for, originally brokered through B.C.C.I. to Peru. A political scandal enveloping B.C.C.I. in Peru focuses in part on the financial transactions in the on-again-off-again Mirage deal. But last week a Dassault spokesman, Francois Prigent, briskly dismissed any responsibility. "The shipment to Peru is the business of Peru; what happens to planes after we make a delivery is up to them." The firm also denied connections to B.C.C.I. ("Banks are chosen by clients, not by us") and to Asaf Ali ("We don't know that man").
But arms merchants interviewed in several countries say otherwise. "Asaf Ali has been an important Dassault agent for years, and everyone knows that," says a French businessman who has worked on arms deals in Pakistan.