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'Group Captain, give me your Swiss bank account number,' the vice president of a Fortune 40 company asks Sajad Haider, Pakistan's air attaché at Washington DC in the 70s. 'Get out of my office,' Sajad tells the American. 'I'll have your company black-listed.' Sajad kicks up such a ruckus that the president of that company comes running on bended knees. He fires his VP for offering the bribe.

The sacked man gangs up with touts...Pakistanis, Iranians and Americans wanting to make a quick buck from salacious defence deals being offered to Pakistan Air Force. The ticking time bomb against Sajad goes off. Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, the ambassador, tells his air attaché 'the Shah of Iran wants you to be court marshaled!' He has personally complained to Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (ZAB) when they met at Izmir. 'Remove him immediately and punish him severely for his seditious remarks against me,' the Shah orders ZAB. Shah's son-in-law Ardeshir Zahedi, the Iranian ambassador in Washington is stunned. He's a good friend of Sajad's. It's later discovered that a Savak operative from Zahedi's embassy with a hotline to the Shah has made up this horrendous lie.

Sajad Haider misses the firing squad narrowly. He had faced it before when his own chief framed him, threw him in solitary confinement, in a conspiracy to overthrow ZAB. 'I was charged with treason and inciting mutiny,' says the exonerated war hero who lives and love dangerously. Imagine having someone called Mercedes Miranda as his fiancé! He discovers the conduit for kick-backs from Japan paid to the family of holier than thou dictator Zia. At a meeting our decorated hero stands up and castigates Zia for his brutality against the press and PPP. 'I tell the dictator on his face that I don't feel pride in my uniform anymore after being in PAF for 28 years.' Zia has him sacked!

Air Commodore (R) Sajad Haider, 76, has now come out with a book spilling the names of 'heroes & villains' of Pakistan. Flight of the Falcon is a racy narrative dripping with events and names we all recognise. 'The sequence of events unfolded as I researched deeper into soiled pages of history, darkened by untruth, superimposed by those who wielded power during their epoch.' Refusing to shrink away from the hardest truth, the book paints broad strokes of negativity against Ayub Khan, ZAB, Aziz Ahmad, Gohar Ayub and their collaborators .'Mine is an incisive and no holds barred analysis of the strategic and tactical blunders of 1965 and 1971 military operations. I've sifted myths from truth. I have dismantled 'spectacular successes and acts of valour' claimed by those who are liars. Because there is no book informing the young generation who the real heroes and the villains are, I have candidly and without fear of contradiction or retribution chronicled the history as I witnessed it unfold.'

Flight of the Falcon will soon hit the bookstalls and the author is sure to get hit on the head by those whom he has exposed. He's ready for the implosion. Earlier, a well-known publisher returned his manuscript saying that 'there was too much truth, too harshly told, and it spared no one whether it was a field marshal, general, air marshal, admiral or political czar. This was too much for them to risk as their sales would be affected,' Sajad tells me. He defends his first-person narrative by saying he interviewed Air Chief Marshals Asghar Khan, Nur Khan, Rahim Khan (while he was alive) and Abbas Khattak. 'Plus a dozen younger ones to establish the truth or to demolish myths with total consensus. All the former chiefs were upfront in accepting their faults and errors and said I could say what I felt was correct in retrospect from analysis carried out.' Opinions have only been made in generalities about Pakistan's descent into oblivion, he continues. 'I have lot more evidence on what can be controversial and if challenged, my detractors will have to be prepared for more exposure. Discretion and caution will then have to be cast away by me.'

His journey begins with Jinnah's speech in Quetta on defending Pakistan. 'He was my real hero.' The scrawny, gaunt kid watching Polish pilots' dogfights over Quetta during World War 2nd was so 'smitten by those pilots in their Spitfires' that he vowed to become one. His physician father laughed it off. 'I was the first to become a fighter pilot from Balochistan.' Asghar Khan and Nur Khan were his heroes. 'There was no nepotism, no corruption, no coercion,' he says, 'performance in the air was all that was required for your progress.' But sadly the Americans coerced President Ayub Khan to facilitate the establishment of a spy base at Bedaber in Peshawar with U2 fighter planes operating out of there.' That to Sajad is the beginning of the American dictation. 'We traded our sovereignty for preservation of a dictator and we've never looked back.' The Americans have always let down Pakistan.

The problems as we see in the fractured and tormented Pakistan today has its rudiments laid in those days and weeks after Quaid's death. 'Ostensibly, with the advice of a radical Maudoodi disciple Chaudhary Mohammad Ali, Liaquat Ali Khan instead of giving the nation a visionary constitution based on the Quaid's 11th August exhortations, opted to appease the radical Muslims. By default the real beneficiaries became the Quaid haters, in particular the Islamist from Maudoodi's Wahabi cabal, the Ahrars, Khaksar and all other bigots of religiosity,' says Sajad ' and you have the results before you today.'

 Will someone come forward to challenge Sajad Haider's Flight of the Falcon? There's enough fodder for a duel from those who disagree with the author. Truth can set us free.