Pamella Bordes' sexual escapades with high and mighty rock British establishment

For Britain's lurid, sensation-soaked tabloid press, it was a case of 'wham, bam, thank you Pam'. Starved of juicy scandals or gory murders in a month when the biggest news was the Tory Government's annual budget, the Pamella affair came like, well, a bolt from the blue.

Pamella who? Bordes, Chaudhury, Singh. Take your pick. It really didn't matter. Once the tabloids got scent of what promised to be a snowballing sex scandal, the India-born Pamella Bordes (nee Chaudhury) was transformed into a cross between Mata Hari and Linda Lovelace.

Overnight, the stunning, raven-haired Indian beauty found herself splashed across the front pages of British newspapers as lurid details of her boudoir romps mated with salacious gossip to project the 27-year-old former Miss India as a high-society call girl having links with several prominent members of the British establishment.

What set the seal on the scandal were her parallel links with Libyan intelligence officials. More than two decades after the Christine Keeler sex scandal ensured the collapse of Harold Macmillan's government, Pamella signalled a similar threat from hiding and set the establishment's stiffest upper lip aquiver.

Quite suddenly, bursting into the staid scenario of British politics, brushing aside news of beleaguered author Salman Rushdie, was an unknown Indian whose meteoric rise to fame and influence was as mysterious as it was sensational. The first whiff of the Pamella affair was aired when a tabloid revealed that she doubled up as a research assistant for a ruling Tory party MP and a call girl whose bedroom exploits were of scandalous proportions.

There were worrying security implications as well. It wasn't just Tory MPs who were involved - her male friends included two powerful editors, an internationally-known arms dealer, an unnamed cabinet minister and a prominent Libyan intelligence officer. Of serious concern was her position as a House of Commons researcher which gave her free access to Parliament.

In the weeks that followed the first sensational disclosure - one tabloid claimed Pamella offered to have sex with its reporter for Euro 500 (Rs 13,500) or Euro 2000 (Rs 54,000) for the weekend - the scandal degenerated into a soft-porn blitz typical of London's notorious tabloid press. Like Rushdie, though for different reasons, Pamella deserted the comforts of a Euro 750,000 London penthouse to slip into hiding.

Fiends say Pam loved to shock people and stretch the rules by being daring and provocative.

The matter should have died there. But from her country hide-out Pamella kicked off the lid herself. Through friend and soft-porn king David Sullivan she said she knew 'amazing secrets' that could topple the Government. Clearly, Pamella was out to squeeze the most out of her sudden, if dubious, fame.

Pamella's rise in London's social circuit has been nothing short of meteoric. After being crowned Miss India in 1982, the aspiring model arrived in New York where she is said to have made contact with arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the Emir of Qatar - wealthy men who reportedly vied for her attention.

From New York, Pamella went to Japan and finally UK, where she met a convicted arms dealer who operated from Paris. Through him, she met record producer Dominique Bordes whom she married in June, 1984. Bordes claims they married because an uncle was forcing Pamella into an arranged match.

"She pleaded with me to marry her to stop him wielding his power over her," says Bordes. "I lead a very simple life and she was definitely not the housewife type. Even five years ago she always had money and nice clothes. At the time 1 had no idea where she got the cash.

Now I can make a pretty shrewd guess." The Frenchman asserts that Pamella was quite obviously very worldly wise when he met her, "nothing like the traditional, demure Indian bride". Pamella left her husband abruptly after only three months, calling him up from London to say she would not return. Says Bordes: "I felt used."

In London, Pamella busied herself socialising once again with the wealthy and powerful. Apart from the embarrassed MPs, her liaisons included Prince Paul of Romania, Italian Count Carlo Colombotti and rock superstar Bill Wyman of The Rolling Stones. Her method of entering the dizzying London social circuit was simple: she advertised herself in corporate magazines like Boardroom and Harpers & Queen as a gourmet cook for high-tone dinner parties.

It was at one such party in a London night-club last summer that the sultry Indian beauty met Andrew Neil, bachelor editor of The Sunday Times newspaper. They had a steamy affair which ended with Pamella slashing Neil's clothes with scissors when he wanted to break off the relationship in August 1988.

When Pamella showed no signs of abandoning him, Neil asked his solicitors to warn her of a restraining order if she contacted him again. It was an ugly end to the affair, but Pamella, showing a vengeful side to her nature, made friends with Donald Trelford, editor of The Observer and a married man.

"She was very worldly wise...nothing like the demure Indian bride." Dominique Bordis

Shortly after breaking up with Neil, Pamella met member of Parliament David Shaw through a mutual friend, Marc Burca, editor of Boardroom magazine. Shaw, having exhausted his quota of three passes to Britain's House of Commons, asked fellow Conservative Party MP Henry Bellingham to provide Pamella a pass so that she could help him research a harmless subject: the publishers net book agreement - a bill to stop bookshops from selling books at a discount.

Said Shaw: "Ms Bordes' research work was thorough and very helpful. She was good." Bellingham, refusing to wilt under opposition party attacks that he had flouted Commons security regulations said the allegations about her were "completely without foundation".

Thereon, the controversy blew into a full-scale sex and security scandal that brought criticism from senior Tory Party ranks, led to calls for a review of the working of MI5. the internal intelligence service, and sparked off a row between the Tory and opposition Labour Party.

A concerned Bellingham told India Today: "This girl is being crucified by the media for no fault of hers. They have not even given her a chance to explain herself. It is very unlikely that she was a high class call girl." He added: "She certainly had very good contacts. She had friends all over the place and, till very recently, she was settling down to a career in business. I think the media have got carried away."

Bellingham also denied that Pamella posed a security risk. "Security is a major issue, but had the security agencies even a shadow of a doubt, they would have contacted me."

One person who knew Pamella well is not so ready to defend her. Like Dominique Bordes before him, Marc Burca says she took advantage of him. "I was taken in by her," he told India Today: "I believed and trusted her, but she never told me everything about herself before asking for introductions to MPs. I may not have introduced her to David Shaw if she had."

Burca, who met Pamella in August, 1988, does, however, defend her against the more serious charges, "She knew a lot of important people and I find it difficult to believe she was what she is accused of being. She was just a wild, crazy girl, who loved parties and expensive clothes."

But confounding her supporters, Pamella, reportedly speaking to friends from hiding, has come out with statements that could only make her case worse. "The city would grind to a standstill if I spoke out, but it would cost a million pounds for me to tell who I have loved and bedded," one tabloid quoted her as saying. "What I could reveal would make Scandal (the just-released film about the Profumo affair) look like a teddy bear's picnic. My amazing secrets could also bring the Government down - just like Christine Keeler did."

Parallels between the two affairs, however, seem to have only one common element - sex. The Profumo affair involved the then cabinet war secretary John Profumo, a naval attache in the Soviet Embassy, and model Christine Keeler. None of the MPs linked with Pamella has the glamour or the sensitive position associated with Profumo.

But the Evening Standard came up with a report that finally focused media attention on the security aspect. The newspaper reported that Pamella had 'close social links' with a high ranking officer in Libyan intelligence, Colonel Ahmed Gedda Feddem - a cousin of Muammar Gadaffi - in Paris arid even made trips to Tripoli in a private jet.

Simultaneously, another tabloid revealed that special branch officers were probing bank accounts that were held by Pamella under the names of P. Singh and P. Chaudhury. But there was no confirmation of this fact as the rumours continued.

There were also rumours that Fleet Street had offered Pamella up to Euro 2 million for exclusive rights to publish her life story. Paul Raymond's Men Only offered her Euro 750,000 to pose in the nude. Says Editor Neville Player: "We think the nation deserves to see all her charms." Pamella turned down the offer. Says Burca: "All she wants now is to have her name cleared. She is not interested in the money. That shows the innocence of the girl."

So far there has been no evidence that she had sexual relations with any member of Parliament. But there seemed enough evidence that she charged for sex and had a life-style disproportionate to her known sources of income.

Clearly, Pamella was no common girl. She was seen in all the best places and was the escort of the dashing Tory Minister of Sports, Colin Moynihan, 34, former Olympic hero, at the Tory Winter Ball last month. She attended a function to launch media tycoon Rupert Murdoch's wife Anna's novel, Family Business, as well as a party at the US Embassy in London celebrating President George Bush's inaugural. Pamella herself told society hostess Lady Edith Foxwell that she had hurt her hip after riding at Gatcombe (Princess Anne's Gloucestershire home).

All this hardly jells with her job as a research assistant which would pay a salary of around Euro 3,000 a year. Neither does the job fit in with her life-style and interests - a research assistantship is the sort of job students of political science apply for if they want to pursue politics as a career.

The tangible effects of the red-hot Bordes affair, of course, seem only a matter of distant speculation. A far more immediate concern has been the possible motive behind the story. Already, theories abound. According to one, it is a media rather than a political scandal, aimed at hitting at Neil, whose meteoric rise is said to have aroused the envy of his rivals.

Another theory is that it was Pamella who engineered the tabloid blitz to make a quick buck. But as she remains in hiding, and the scandal slowly fades from the front pages of British newspapers, provocative snaps of Pamella have now begun to accompany scandalous stories from India - interviews with friends and relatives of an allegedly wayward girl. "I beat her with a dog chain," screamed a tabloid quoting Pamella's distraught mother in New Delhi.

The distraught mother, Shakuntala Chaudhury, quickly made herself unavailable - members of her Defence Colony household, and the Food Corporation of India, where she is employed, say she is on indefinite leave. Before dropping out of sight, Shakuntala issued a statement on her own to a national news agency saying she had disowned her daughter in 1982 for her 'wayward' behaviour.

What was abundantly clear was that Pamella's relations with her mother had been strained for quite some time. Much of the rebelliousness, volatility and ambition that Pamella seems to have acquired appears to stem from the family situation.

A middle class Jat family from Haryana, the Chaudhurys were very much an army family. The father, Major Mahendra Singh Chaudhury, was a war hero who was killed in the Indo-China war of 1962 when Pamella was two months old. Shakuntala's brother, Lieutenant Avtar Singh, died in the 1971 Bangladesh war. Pamella was brought up by the widowed mother, who, from all accounts, was a formidable woman.

After her husband's death, Shakuntala was the hostel-in-charge in Government College, Chandigarh. The then Haryana chief minister Bansi Lal's daughter, Saroj Siwach, was studying there and Shakuntala came in contact with Bansi Lal. With his help, she joined the Haryana Civil Service in January 1975. Says a senior Haryana government official: "She was nominated and did not come in through competition."

While the mother was consolidating her own career, Pamella was packed off to boarding schools - Lawrence School at Sanawar and, from 1974 to 1979, the exclusive Maharani Gayatri Devi School in Jaipur. Pamella's school friends all agree that she had an unhappy family life and that her mother was something of a terror.

Boys were not allowed to phone Pamella at home. One girl recalls being locked into the house with Pam when her mother went out one evening. Another friend remembers Pamella showing her, on return from a summer break, bruises received from a beating. Pamella, say her friends, would get beaten for not doing what she was told.

Pamella apparently also had a complex about being the only girl in the hostel on a scholarship in a school where fees were about Rs 1,000 a month. But even then, she had a fascination for anything from abroad. "She'd be in ecstasy about a little thing like a Camay soap or a shampoo," recalls one school mate. She also had a fixation about the high life. She was in awe of girls who came from wealthy royal families and went out of her way to befriend them.

Pamella's volatility stemmed from her unhappy family life.

Pamella was a good student, bright, active and outgoing. She took up riding at school, excelled in athletics and became a house captain. She was into fitness - tennis, swimming, jogging and exercises - but wasn't overly interested in make-up or concerned about her looks.

She did very well in studies (84 per cent marks in high school). But, as one girl remembers, "her trip in life was shortcuts". She would come around before the exams and ask friends to tell her the story of a book they were meant to have studied. "But whatever her methods," the friend adds, "she did well."

Others who knew her in her first year at Lady Sri Ram College (1979-80) say they found her brilliant. Her high school notes were so useful for examinations that they are still in circulation. The most striking thing about her was not her looks - she was somewhat gawky and heavy boned then - but her warm, lively presence. She could make friends very fast, was tremendously confident and bubbly, full of ideas for fun, constantly stretching the rules.

She smoked, she wore tight shorts and she loved to be with boys. But she was not known for promiscuity. While still in school, she had a crush on a college boy from St Stephens who was into polo and had plenty of money. She confided to her close chums about kissing him in the stables, but as one of them adds: "You know, if she'd gone further, she would have told us. She would never have been able to keep it to herself."

Pamella enjoyed shocking people. College friends recall her shouting in the corridor: "Damn. I forgot my pill. Now what's going to happen?" or "I've got to go to Marie Stopes (an abortion clinic)." But friends say she did it only for effect.

One ex-boyfriend remembers a group of them playing cards together in the heat of summer when the power went off. Pamella promptly peeled off her jeans and coolly continued playing in a kurta and panties. Another time, he recalls, after a game of tennis at the YMCA, she took him up to the top floor and whipped off her T-shirt with a flourish. "She'd try anything. She was that kind of a girl - daring and out for fun," explains a friend.

Friends also recall that Pamella was calculating and ambitious. What she was looking for were the right connections, wild parties and expensive clothes. Bright and confident, she could talk on just about any subject. She was the perfect party girl, pretty, vivacious and popular.

By this time she had cut herself off from her family and drifted around for a while, staying with friends and looking for the big break. One college friend remembers Pamella asking her the story of Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight (about a beautiful, successful and ambitious woman). Pamella's immediate reaction was: "I want to be like that."

She had become convinced that her short cut to money and fame lay in modelling. In mid-1980, she approached Adwave, a Delhi modelling agency owned by television newscaster Komal G.B. Singh. "She looked like any scruffy teenager," recalls Singh, "We were not inspired to photograph her ourselves and asked her to come back with her own pictures." But when Pamella returned weeks later with some pictures, the agency was stunned at how photogenic she was. Pamella the model was on her way.

Her first modelling assignment was for the Bharat Leather Corporation and a string of contracts - Hero Cycles, Oswal, Texla TV - soon followed and her professionalism was soon obvious. Simultaneously, Pamella was making rapid strides up the social ladder - and becoming a familiar face in the capital's cocktail circuit. "She was vivacious, easy on the eye and very, very intelligent. She could talk on any subject," recalls a Delhi executive who knew her well.

As illustration, he recalls: "Once, when a stockbroker had come over, she talked to him about investment banking and shares so knowledgeably that he was convinced she was a financial wizard." Another friend, also an executive, concurs. "She was a sort of quick-change conversationalist. She could talk knowledgeably about advertisements, acting, films, anything," he says.

It wasn't just her looks - Delhi has more than its share of stunners - but that most men found her an appealing mix: sexy, carefree, and also intelligent and caring. Says a Delhi executive in whose flat she stayed for six months: "She was friendly, straightforward, and had no airs. If she wanted to eat she would go to the kitchen and fix something." She was also vague about her past. "She pulled a curtain down on her past. She would say: 'I want to forget my past.'

The real transformation, however, came in Bombay. She arrived there in 1981. determined to push her modelling career. She haunted magazine offices and cultivated photographers like Pablo Bartholomew and Shantanu Sheorey. Binoy Thomas, editor of Society magazine, says: "She came to me once but she only wanted to be on the cover, no less. She was very determined to get ahead."

Other glamour photographers, like Wilas Bhende and Adrian Stevens, remember her as "hard-working and dedicated". Says film photographer Gautam Rajadhyaksha: "She was easy to work with, quiet, punctual, but uncommunicative about herself." For a time Pamella also worked at Silhouette, the hair styling salon at Oberoi Towers.

Her break came when she won the Miss India title in 1982. organised by Femina magazine. Femina staffers during 1982 remember her as being "confident and outgoing". Pamella told Femina then that she had two ambitions: to make it in New York and to learn hair-styling from Harry King.

She landed solid advertising assignments for Boroline, Orkay (until Kittu Gidwani replaced her) and Nescafe. Model Nisha Singh, who travelled with her while making the Nescafe ads in Nepal, says: "She was very attractive and vivacious and full of beans. But she would never tell us anything about herself. You asked her that and she'd stonewall."

Predictably, wild stories about her surfaced, linking her name with some prominent businessmen in Bombay. But once the Pamella story broke in London, they all began to deny any involvement.

In those days, Pamella Singh, as she was now called, hung out with the unit of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and was a close friend of Shabnam - a relative of former Union cabinet minister Rao Birendra Singh - who married a member of the Gandhi crew and now lives in London. By then, she was already at the fringe of the high life.

Says a model friend from her Bombay days: "She always managed to get what she wanted. Once she showed me a dress at a boutique and said she'd like to wear it. It was frightfully expensive. But that evening she was wearing the dress. She had this ability to get things done by men.

Pamella's next stop was Lima, Peru, as the Indian entry for the Miss Universe contest. After that, her associates in Bombay heard from her from distant, far-off places. She wrote to Adrian Stevens saying how the portfolio of pictures he had shot for her was proving useful; she wrote to others from London or Paris saying she was doing well.

She returned to Bombay from New York in 1983 and her friends found her really changed - into strapless tops and micro-minis, scarlet lipstick and long painted nails. She'd also put on airs, but as her accent kept slipping and her complaints about not being able to take the spicy food proved hollow, close friends, detected that there was still a little girl under that sophisticated exterior. But, says one: "By this time, she was in a different league."

Pam, as she is called by friends, visited Delhi in 1984 and in 1986. On her last trip, she was the guest of a prominent industrialist and stayed at the Hyatt Regency hotel before shifting to the Taj Man Singh. She was soon a star attraction in Delhi's cocktail circuit.

The change in her was truly astonishing. Overnight, she seemed to have been transformed into a sophisticated, street-smart woman of the world, fully aware of her power over men - and quite happy to use it to her advantage.

Says a friend from her college days who met her in 1986: "I found her stunning and sexy. She had a whole suite to herself at the Taj. She was out every night and constantly on the phone. She must have been very rich to order Scotch in the room, just like that. Her clothes were very, very expensive. Money talked in every seam."

Where did it all come from? None of her friends in India is prepared to believe that Pamella was a high class call girl in those earlier days. But when she left Bombay for Peruin 1982, all she had was $500 in her purse and a fierce ambition to make it big. And where bigger than the Big Apple?

Virtually broke and with no contacts in New York, Pamella arrived at JFK Airport from where she telephoned the only person she vaguely knew - Bina Ramani, the Sindhi businesswoman and prominent socialite. Ramani had met Pamella during a visit to India in 1982.

Pamella asked if she could stay with Ramani till she found her feet. Recalls Ramani: "She came to stay for a few weeks. She was bright, intelligent, crazy and totally unpredictable. But there was something about Pam that made one like her." And she had a special wav with men. Says Ramani: "She was always hotly discussed. Her opening line was her weapon. She'd grab attention with her one-liners."

It was this talent that launched Pamella into the jet set whirl. Says Ramani: "Within three weeks of arriving in New York, she was inviting me to the private jets of oil millionaires to whom I'd introduced her." One of these was the Sultan of Brunei, the richest man in the world, and the other was Saudi billionaire and arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi. New York acquaintances remember her staying for some time at the Olympic Towers, the plush apartment building owned by Khashoggi.

But as always, Pamella never let go of her roots. Both in New York and London, she retained a close friendship with expatriate Indians, mainly men. In their company, she seems to have been a totally different person and most of them speak about her with a great deal of affection. Says Jaswant Lalvani, a New Yorker who knew her well: "She was a warm and generous person. If she were to call up today and want to come and stay, I'd be very happy to have her."

New York acquaintances say that she worked in an advertising agency for a while and lived with an Indian stockbroker before she joined the billionaires club. Most of them recall that she met Khashoggi through controversial Indian god man Chandraswami, Khashoggi's one-time guru.

But sources close to the godman claim that she already knew Khashoggi when Chandra swami met her in 1985 in New York - he was introduced to her at a reception hosted by a senior Nepali diplomat, who now holds a key portfolio in the Nepalese Government. in his honour. She was into modelling at that time and wanted his contacts.

Other New York sources say that Pamella met Khashoggi in 1983 when he was visiting the city and was looking for a 'social escort', a polite term for the bevy of beauties he kept at his beck and call. She spent some months on his luxury yacht Nabila and is also known to have stayed in the apartment building he owns in Paris, occupied mainly by wealthy Arabs, including Libyans. But Khashoggi was just one among a host of influential connections.

Already well in with the international jet set, Pamella shifted base to London in 1984 where her strategy for entering the highest social circles followed a familiar pattern. She first got friendly with high-living Indians, mainly sons of rich businessmen.

Through them, Pamella made the contacts to launch her assault on British society. She had a ready-made entree - her equestrian background. Pamella had an affair with a well-known British jockey before moving on to higher things - one of Britain's biggest horse-breeders. Her friends say she spent time shuttling between London and the horse-breeder's country estate.

By now, Pamella's varied circle of high finance friends had given her firsthand knowledge of the world of big business. One close friend remembers her holding forth on the commodity market and quoting rates of Brazilian coffee. She claimed, and obviously knew enough about it, to be dabbling seriously in the stock-market.

This is when the life and times of Pamella Singh, now Bordes, started acquiring a dubious tinge. In what was perhaps a desperate attempt to maintain her expensive life-style. Pamella was seen in the company of a well-known. high class madame, also of Indian origin. Obviously, Pamella was living on the thin dividing line between a wild, tempestuous young girl out for a good time and a high class call girl selling her body for large sums of money.

Pamella could be a creature of the tabloids rather than a Pmodern Mata Hari.

What is known is that Pamella then started shuttling between London and Paris with her marriage to Bordes being merely a brief interlude to get her a residence permit to live in France. But after she dumped Bordes, her Paris jaunts were mainly to meet the high-ranking Libyan, Ahmed Gedda Feddem, who spends more time in Paris than Libya.

He stays at either the exclusive George V or the Prince de Galles hotel and is Gadaffi's point man for a host of business deals. He handles oil and other sensitive contracts in Europe. But of his relationship with Pamella, little is known. After the story broke in London, the French intelligence services were asked to investigate. They have reported that no intelligence links existed.

But Feddem is said to be a womaniser and it is well known that he and Gadaffi have the best-looking girls shipped to Tripoli and spend a lot of money on them. The Libyans in Paris don't want to talk about Feddem because it could get them into trouble.

It is, however, not true that he is the head of the Libyan secret service. That distinction belongs to Al Ahmidi-al-Khoueldi. But Feddem, because of his contacts, his role as Gadaffi's agent and his life-style, would almost certainly be involved in some kind of intelligence role.

Moreover, all Pamella's friends say she was quite capable of getting involved in espionage for kicks. Says a London friend: "She would do anything for a wild adventure. If there was any spying involved, she'd have been the first one to get into it."

But with the initial furore over the Pamella affair having died down - and Britain's MI5 clearing her of any security implications - the Pamella affair has raised more questions than it answers.

Is Pamella just an insecure, mixed-up girl whose quest for fame and fortune got her involved in a messy sex scandal? Or is she an expensive call girl with no scruples about whom she sleeps with? Do her bedroom sexploits constitute a serious security threat? Or is she just a creature of London's tabloids ever on the lookout for a scandal? The only one who can provide the answer is Pamella herself. And she isn't telling - except for Euro 1 million and the starring role in a film on her torrid life.