SRINAGAR: Walking towards the immigration counter at the Indira Gandhi Airport on a cool March day, Usmaan Raheem Ahmad, a plump, pleasant-faced US citizen, had little idea of what awaited him. An Intelligence Bureau team whisked him aside to give him the news: his Indian visa stood cancelled and he was to be put on the next flight to the US.The next few hours at the airport went by in a flurry of calls: from senior politicians in Srinagar to top bureaucrats and journalists in Delhi. One by one they reported back, they could do nothing. The decision to deport Usmaan had been taken at the “highest levels”.It was a sudden fall for a man who since December 2005 had led a charmed life in Kashmir. Usmaan Rahim ran an American NGO, Mercy Corps, in Srinagar. He was a bit of a mystery — an American citizen who claimed Kashmiri ancestry. He was said to be close to chief minister Omar Abdullah and police officials, broke bread with Hurriyat leaders and had a special interest in potato and bee farming.The story of his arrival here had a tinge of romance: a long lost Kashmiri, a graduate of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy , Tufts University, rushed here in the wake of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and then stayed back. What many did not know was that Usmaan’s association with Kashmir was slightly more complex and certainly older.Usmaan first visited Kashmir in 1996, when militancy was at its peak. He was busy surveying old monuments and temples for his graduate course in Kashmiri archaeology. In that time what seems to have impressed Usmaan was the “Kashmiri cause”, so that by the time he graduated in 1999, he became a member of the “Council for Independent Kashmir”, travelling across the US and Europe giving speeches and interviews.“Farooq Abdullah is a puppet of the Indian imperial state, the front man of the Indian loot of Kashmir,” read one interview. By 2001, he had moved on to the JKLF and, at one speaking engagement, was listed as “an executive member of the diplomatic bureau of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front”.When he tried to visit Kashmir again around this time, he was denied a visa — a fact covered in some detail by the New York Times, which profiled him in a report titled, “Kashmir Champion finds pitfalls to peace”. The next few years went by in much the same way, in between completing his graduation in conflict management.Usmaan continued to serve the “Kashmir cause”, chaperoning separatist leaders on their US visits. In an article published in 2005, he reused material from an older piece written in 2003, extolling Maqbool Bhatt as a later day Martin Luther King.All that changed quite suddenly after the earthquake of October 2005. By December, Usmaan was finally able to re-enter Kashmir, this time as founder member of the “Kashmir Earthquake Relief”.The reinvention of Usmaan had begun. Over the next few years, he dabbled in a bewildering array of activities. In 2007, he starred in a documentary by an Israeli, in which he’s described as an American-born Kashmiri “who returned to his homeland and promotes youth culture, sports teams and theatre.” By 2009, he was heading Mercy Corps, an American NGO that specializes in working in conflict areas.But it was the upheaval of 2010 that helped Usmaan ratchet up his profile. Bewildered by the unprecedented mobilization on the streets, the Indian government reached out to anyone who promised to de-radicalize or divert this “Conflict Generation”. Sources say Usmaan was one of those who promised help.By the summer of 2011, Mercy Corps had announced a new flagship scheme, “Youth Entrepreneurship”, to promote economic development and offer economic opportunities to the youth.Hotels across Srinagar were suddenly playing host to groups of American and British “economists and professors” holding classes for stone pelters one day and junior police officials the next.It was here that the first red flag went up in New Delhi. As summer turned to autumn, one of the foreign delegations held negotiation classes for separatist leaders.One eyewitness described the interaction: “The foreign professors pretended to play Indian government negotiators dealing with the separatist leaders to settle the Kashmir issue. It was a no-holds- barred session with a lot of shouting and a point-by-point rebuttal of every position the Hurriyat takes on Kashmir. Bit by bit, the real issues came up: what the Hurriyat would settle for, how much leeway they were willing to give the Indians? Then they were coached on how to maximise their advantages… It struck me as a strange thing for an NGO to do.”The investigations were led from Delhi. “'We thought that some of Usmaan’s contacts in the American embassy were not what they claimed to be. It was a thorough investigation spread over many months. Why do you think the Americans and the NGO are so quiet? They know the truth,” says a top source.Not a single paper in the Valley reported the deportation. Nor did any politician or Mercy Corps publicly raise a voice against it. MHA, too, wasn’t very vocal about the uncovering of an US agent, as it characterizes the case. Perhaps the fact that Usmaan had successfully managed to cultivate top ministry officials is an embarrassing detail it would much rather hide. In an email to this reporter, Usmaan refused to comment on his deportation, promising that he’d be back in Kashmir soon. If he manages to do that, it would be yet another remarkable chapter in what has been a very interesting life.