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In an incident that reads like the script of a Bollywood spy thriller, the son of a former ISI chief was rescued and sent safely back home by the Indian intelligence establishment.In May 2015, former director general of Pakistan ’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) General Asad Durrani ’s son Osman came to Kochi for work on behalf of a German company. Osman, who has a Pakistani passport but is based in Germany, should have exited the country from the city that he entered from. However, his office booked him from a flight back via Mumbai He was stopped by authorities in Mumbai and what followed were 24 hours of backchannel networking to get him out of India despite the visa violation. Durrani and former secretary of India’s external spy agency Research &Analysis Wing (RAW) A S Dulat discuss this in the upcoming book— The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace — by the two spymasters and journalist Aditya Sinha.“We were in a panic because we did not know what would happen. But even those people (Mumbai special branch) did not say to him, you don’t have a visa for Bombay, what are you doing, pakdo, andar karo (arrest him.) That could have happened, but it didn’t. All this while my wife and I had another concern — what if someone reported that Osman, the son of a former ISI chief, was roaming around Mumbai, which hadn’t forgotten 26/11, without a visa for that city,’’ recalls Durrani.When Durrani heard that Osman had been detained by the Mumbai special branch, he called Dulat for help. Dulat called several people including then RAW chief Rajinder Khanna. The wheels of the Indian intelligence establishment began to turn even as Osman was stonewalled by the local police.Things however worked out, and Osman was able to fly back to Germany after a day from Mumbai. Dulat recalls the most touching part of the incident was that when he called Khanna to thank him for his help, the RAW chief said in reference to Durrani-,’’It’s our duty,’ he said, ‘after all, he’s a colleague.’’