The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Arif Durrani.md

updated	category	tags	summary
2026-10-15	Arms Dealers & Brokers	Person BCCI CIA	Arif Durrani was a Pakistani arms dealer convicted of illegally providing HAWK antiaircraft missile parts to Iran.

Arif Durrani was a Pakistan arms dealer convicted of illegally providing HAWK antiaircraft missile parts to Iran.¹ He was the son of an army general.²

Arms Dealing and BCCI Connections

Durrani was described as a wealthy arms merchant who traveled the world in luxury.³ He admitted to supplying Iran with arms and stated that he was part of a joint operation conducted by the United States and Israel to release American hostages in the Middle East.⁴ He met with a U.S. official named Oliver North to obtain HAWK parts.⁵ His arrest on October 3, 1986, occurred one month before the U.S. government's secret arms-for-hostages deal with Tehran was revealed.⁶

Durrani had close connections to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, knowing Agha Hasan Abedi personally and having his operations financed by the bank.⁷ He grew up in Karachi with many of the men who became BCCI executives and worked with them from the beginning of his career as an arms dealer.⁸ He stated that BCCI basically funded operations on instructions from the government of Pakistan, including the construction of a Mirage factory.⁹

He outlined BCCI's and Asaf Ali's weapons deals across the globe, from Bulgaria to Nigeria.¹⁰ Durrani also stated that BCCI steered some of his business to First American Bank in New York City, considering BCCI and First American Bank interchangeable for financial transactions.¹¹

Beaty and Gwynne describe Durrani, until his arrest, as the managing director of Merex, a California arms firm that supplied the Israelis.¹²

Christopher Byron reported in December 1991 that Durrani formed a Los Angeles company called Merex Corporation in 1984, and suggested that Durrani chose the name to trade on the reputation of a much larger company of the same name, Merex, Inc., of Alexandria, Virginia and Konigswinter, Germany.¹³ Byron also reported that a court-appointed investigator working on Durrani's case had found 1984 documents and telex traffic of GeoMiliTech Consultants Corp. suggesting negotiations for South Korean explosives, cannon shells and F-4 parts. According to the investigator, one of the F-4 parts, a QK410B oscillator, is a component of certain Hawk surface-to-air missile systems. Durrani claims that the only Hawk systems then in operation anywhere that used that part were those installed in Iran, and that his later efforts to ship an identical part to Iran led to his arrest.¹³

Sentence and Appeal

In May 1987 Chief Judge T.F. Gilroy Daly of the federal court in Connecticut sentenced Durrani to ten years in prison and a fine of 2 million dollars for illegally exporting HAWK missile parts to Iran in 1986, with a concurrent ten years and 1 million dollars for selling arms without registering with the United States Department of State. The judge told him his testimony was riddled with "greed, lies, money, perjury, avarice and conniving" and that "your behavior was bordering on treason."¹⁴ In December 1987 the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected his defense that he had acted on the orders of Oliver North and John Poindexter, the first use of what became known as the "Oliver North defense," and upheld the conviction (United States v. Durrani, 835 F.2d 410). The opinion, written by Judge Irving R. Kaufman, records that Durrani "claims to have been a cog in the wheel turned by Lt. Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter"; Alan Dershowitz argued the appeal for Durrani with Nathan Z. Dershowitz on the brief; the trial judge had excluded the report of the President's Special Review Board (the Tower report) and two memoranda contained in it as hearsay; and the court affirmed the conviction "on all counts."¹⁵ A petition he filed in 2003, his fourth post-conviction attack on the sentence, was denied (Durrani v. United States, 294 F. Supp. 2d 204, D. Conn.).¹⁶¹⁷

He moved for a reduction of sentence under Rule 35 in July 1988, and the motion was denied on May 23, 1989. He filed a pro se petition under 28 U.S.C. 2255 on March 4, 1990, and on August 6, 1991 filed an amended petition with counsel, alleging that the government had withheld exculpatory material and that agents knew private individuals, including Manuel Pires, were procuring weapons for Iran. On October 2, 1991, after in camera review, the district court ordered some documents produced by the Office of Independent Counsel to be disclosed to Durrani. On May 21, 1992 Durrani moved to dismiss the section 2255 petition voluntarily, saying he wanted to resolve his immigration proceedings first, and the court dismissed it without prejudice.¹⁷

On September 9, 1991 the United States Attorney's Office in Bridgeport objected to each of seven requests for production in Durrani's second request for documents. The objection characterizes the claims as a fishing expedition and states that the government had searched for any connection between Pires and the government up to August 1, 1987 without result.¹⁸ It also reports that defense counsel had taken the depositions of Barbara Studley and John Singlaub in Washington in August 1991, and states that neither witness had any knowledge of Durrani's claims and that both had met Pires only within the last two years. The same page states that a deposition of former CIA official George Cave would offer no greater prospect of usefulness than the Studley-Singlaub examinations, citing Cave's relationship with the CIA and exposure to classified information.¹⁸

From prison he told Time (magazine) in 1991 that "Asaf is B.C.C.I.'s man in the weapons business," referring to Asaf Ali.¹⁹

Footnotes

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1. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 9. ↩︎

2. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 321. ↩︎

3. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 304. ↩︎

4. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 305. ↩︎

5. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 305. ↩︎

6. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 305. ↩︎

7. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 305. ↩︎

8. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 305. ↩︎

9. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 306. ↩︎

10. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 306. ↩︎

11. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 306. ↩︎

12. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 305. ↩︎

13. Christopher Byron, "Did Convict Arif Durrani Help Set the Stage for Iran/Contra?," New York, December 16, 1991, pp. 38-44, GeoMiliTech passages on pp. 42-44. https://books.google.com/books?id=6ugCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42 ↩︎

14. "Arms dealer sentenced to 10 years," United Press International, May 13, 1987. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/05/13/Arms-dealer-sentenced-to-10-years/6753547876800/ ↩︎

15. United States v. Durrani, 835 F.2d 410 (2d Cir. Dec. 3, 1987) (Kaufman, Pierce and Miner, JJ.), counsel block and opinion. https://static.case.law/f2d/835/cases/0410-01.json ↩︎

16. "Court rejects arms merchant's use of 'Oliver North defense,'" United Press International, December 4, 1987. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/12/04/Court-rejects-arms-merchants-use-of-Oliver-North-defense/3615565592400 ↩︎

17. Durrani v. United States, 294 F. Supp. 2d 204 (D. Conn. 2003), Background. https://www.ctd.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions/112503.SRU_.Durrani.pdf ↩︎

18. Government's Objection to Arif Durrani's Second Request for Production of Documents, United States v. Arif Durrani, D. Conn., B-90-090 (TFGD) and B-86-59 (TFGD), September 9, 1991, pp. 1-11. CIA CREST document 0001474388. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/0001474388 ↩︎

19. "Scandals: Not Just a Bank," Time, September 2, 1991. https://time.com/archive/6718475/scandals-not-just-a-bank/ ↩︎