KL will always be my home away from home, and to my mind, Anwar Ibrahim will always be part of it.
Back in the early 1980s, this was a sleepier place, much more laid back. Getting agood beer was fairly easy, and the smell of halal food mixed with the nearby savoury smell of sizzling pork. Gossip was cheap and frequently more right than not.
Anwar was the talk of the town when I first arrived, the young up-and-comer who had put aside his revolutionary ways to join Mahathir”s circle, the Islamist radical who liberally quoted Shakespeare and TS Eliot, and, on occasion, Ho Chi Minh. No one doubted his keen mind or his ambition.
Aside from that, no one knew anything about him. But we”d soon learn.
Those of us in the expat community – Brits, Yanks, Aussies, Canadians, the odd German – had a vested interest in learning more about this remarkable fellow. We figured that any business we did here would run through him eventually. The station chiefs for the CIA, MI-6, and KGB also wanted to know where he”d come from and where his allegiances lay. With Umno, with PAS, with the Saudis?
But whatever he”d been before, he was now an Umno man, and he kept his counsel close, and his past as much a mystery as possible.
But I am getting ahead of myself. This is a story of the man without a face, or, if you
Kuala Lumpur, April 2012
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