In October 1990, Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly registers as lobbyists for the Kashmiri American Council (KAC), beginning a five-year engagement in which the firm receives $700,000 to lobby Congress on behalf of what is later revealed to be a front organization for Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. The contract epitomizes the intelligence-lobbying pipeline that BMSK pioneered: a foreign intelligence service uses a lobbying firm staffed by political operatives with intelligence tradecraft to conduct influence operations on Capitol Hill.
Paul Manafort personally handles the Kashmiri account. The lobbying focuses on securing congressional support for a House resolution by Representative Dan Burton calling for a "peaceful resolution" of the Kashmir dispute -- language that served Pakistan's strategic interests in its territorial conflict with India. The KAC, led by Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, presents itself as a grassroots Kashmiri-American advocacy organization funded by domestic donors. In reality, as the FBI would later establish, the KAC was funded almost entirely by the ISI, which funneled approximately $3.5 million through the organization over two decades.
Internal communications between Fai and his ISI handlers, later obtained by investigators, reveal the tradecraft involved. Fai insisted that to "make it appear" the council was a Kashmiri organization "financed by Americans," the ISI agreed that nobody from the Pakistani Embassy would ever contact Black, Manafort directly. When the ISI grew dissatisfied with the firm's performance, Fai's handler wrote that "we" -- referring to the ISI -- were unsatisfied and advised Fai to terminate the contract. The exchange demonstrates that a foreign intelligence agency was directing a U.S. lobbying campaign through a cutout organization, with a major Washington lobbying firm as the operational instrument.
Manafort was never charged in connection with the case. When Fai was arrested by the FBI on July 19, 2011 for acting as an unregistered foreign agent, prosecutors stated that "what knowledge, if any" Manafort "had of the secret source of money from his client was not part of the Justice Department's investigation." Fai pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison.
The KAC contract illustrates how the lobbying-intelligence pipeline works in practice: a foreign intelligence service (ISI) creates a front organization (KAC), which hires a lobbying firm (BMSK) with political access and influence, which lobbies Congress on behalf of the foreign government's strategic interests -- all while the origin of the funding and the actual client remain concealed. This same pipeline, pioneered by BMSK in the 1980s and 1990s, would become a recurring feature of foreign influence operations in Washington, with the firm's alumni -- particularly Manafort and Stone -- continuing to work at the intersection of foreign governments, intelligence operations, and domestic politics for decades.