Dirty Wars (76 page)

Meanwhile, reporters in the United States tracked down Davis's wife, Rebecca, at their home in Highlands Ranch outside Denver, Colorado. She directed them to a phone number provided to her by the US government. It was a
number at CIA headquarters
in Langley, Virginia.

During his interrogation, Davis told his inquisitors that he had come from the American Consulate when the attempted robbery took place. But according to the GPS device in his car, he had come from a private residence in the upscale Scotch Corner Upper Mall in eastern Lahore. “
The accused has concealed
the fact,” a police report later noted. “He refused to reply to any question during investigations, saying the American consulate had forbidden him to answer any question.” The house from which Davis departed earlier that day, if the recovered GPS data can be trusted, was
well known to Pakistan's spy agency
.

“
BOY, WE'RE IN A WORLD OF HURT
!” Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer recalled thinking the moment he heard of Davis's arrest. “The spy game between the ISI and CIA has gotten much worse.” Shaffer, a veteran clandestine operator who had worked for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency on highly classified operations, coordinated the Human Intelligence program in Afghanistan in the early stages of the war there and planned covert incursions into Pakistan. He knew how high the stakes were when Davis was taken into custody by the Pakistanis. “The Obama Administration, senior level, probably didn't know all of the details of what was going on,” Shaffer said.

Long before the shooting at Mozang Chowk, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency knew Raymond Davis was not a diplomat and that he wasn't sweating it out in the US Consulate stamping passports.

Davis had
arrived in Pakistan
a week before the Lahore shooting, but that was not his first time in the country. He was a seasoned Special Forces operator, an ex–Green Beret who served as a
Special Operations weapons sergeant
. His last assignment in the military was with the 3rd Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg, where JSOC is headquartered. In 2003, as the Iraq occupation was swinging into full gear, Davis
left the military
to become a private contractor, a move that would send him straight to the heart of US covert and clandestine operations. His first known trip to Pakistan was in December 2008, when he began working for the notorious
private security firm Blackwater
on a secret CIA contract. His job as a contractor for the Agency's Global Response Staff (GRS) was to provide protection for CIA operatives deployed to Pakistan as part of the ever-widening presence of Agency personnel coordinating Washington's covert war there. The gig often put him in direct proximity to case officers meeting with secret sources or preparing sensitive operations. His official cover, as a regional affairs officer at the embassy, was a
common cover
for CIA operatives and contractors.

While Davis was working for Blackwater, the company was at the center of the CIA's most sensitive covert operations in Pakistan, helping to
run its drone bombing campaign
and targeted killing and capture operations. Blackwater, which had long been used by the Bush administration as an “unattributable” force that could conduct off-the-books operations cloaked in secrecy and layers of subcontracts, had its tentacles in almost every aspect of US covert ops. Not only was the company working for the CIA on its assassination program, but it also worked closely with the Joint Special Operations Command. While at Blackwater, Davis was at the nexus of the key organizations running the covert campaign.

Assigned to the company's CIA security detail, Davis
moved between
Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar. According to a former JSOC staffer who worked on its classified operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Davis was working as a contractor for the CIA, he was approached by JSOC and asked to simultaneously work on its operations in Pakistan, utilizing his more palatable CIA cover. “
Davis was ‘vanilla' Special Forces
, not a black ops guy,” said the source. “There is nothing cooler for those guys than being approached by JSOC and being asked to do something for them. It was like a pro bono side gig for JSOC.”

It was the beginning of Davis's foray into the muddiest realm of covert US operations in Pakistan. Davis had worked with Blackwater in Pakistan until August 2010. In September of that year, he became a free agent and
signed a contract worth $200,000
for “Overseas Protective Services.” As a contract vehicle, he used a company called Hyperion Protective Services, LLC, which described itself as providing “
loss and risk management professionals
.” It was registered at an
address in Las Vegas
. Davis and his wife were listed, along with one other person, as its officers. The address was actually a
post office box
in a UPS store in a strip mall next to a Super Cuts barbershop. Davis returned to Pakistan.

The former JSOC staffer said that Davis helped to “wash” money and to establish safe houses for JSOC personnel, in addition to his work for the CIA. “All over the world we have people that, literally, are peripheral to policy and are just in-country to collect human intelligence or to facilitate special ops or espionage,” he said. That is, at least in part, what Davis was doing in Pakistan. His various roles, some legit, some covers and some covers within covers—diplomat, technical adviser, Blackwater contractor, CIA bodyguard, Green Beret, JSOC asset—suggest that his story and that of the secret US war in Pakistan are far more complicated, and less benign, than official accounts have led us to believe.

That someone like Davis would end up working with JSOC is hardly a stretch. Many Blackwater operatives—quite a few of whom were former Special Ops or Special Forces—who originally went to Pakistan as security contractors eventually started working with JSOC on its targeted kill and capture operations. “
The Blackwater individuals
have the experience. A lot of these individuals are retired military, and they've been around twenty to thirty years and have experience that the younger Green Beret guys don't,” said retired lieutenant colonel Jeffrey Addicott, a well-connected military lawyer who served as senior legal counsel for US Army Special Forces. “They're known entities. Everybody knows who they are, what their capabilities are, and they've got the experience. They're very valuable.”

Special Ops veterans “
make much more money
being the smarts of
these operations, planning hits in various countries and basing it off their experience in Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia,” said a US military intelligence source. “They were there for all of these things, they know what the hell they're talking about.” He added: “They hire back people that used to work for them and had already planned and executed these [types of] operations.”

When exactly this began in Pakistan is unclear. Blackwater had a presence along the Afghan-Pakistan border dating back to April 2002, when it won its
first “black” contract
to protect CIA operations in Afghanistan in the early stages of the US war. It also held diplomatic security, logistical and CIA contracts in Pakistan. According to a former senior Blackwater executive and the military intelligence source, the relationship with JSOC intensified after President Bush authorized an expansion of Special Ops activities in Pakistan.

I asked the former senior Blackwater executive, who had extensive experience in Pakistan, for confirmation of what the military intelligence source told me—that Blackwater forces were not actively killing people in Pakistan, but rather supporting JSOC and the CIA in doing so. “
That's not entirely accurate
,” he replied. He concurred with the military intelligence source's description of the JSOC and CIA programs, but he pointed to another role he said Blackwater played in Pakistan, not for the US government but for Islamabad. He said Blackwater worked on a subcontract for Kestral Logistics, a
powerful Pakistani firm
that specialized in military logistical support, private security and intelligence consulting. It was staffed with former high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. Although Kestral's main offices were in Pakistan, it also had branches in several other countries. Kestral did a robust business in defense logistics with the Pakistani government and other nations, as well as top US defense companies. Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince, had a “pretty close relationship” with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. “They've met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another.” Working with Kestral, the former executive said, Blackwater provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan.

According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrated with Kestral's forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they worked in conjunction with
the Pakistani Interior Ministry's paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as “frontier scouts”). The Blackwater personnel were technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line was often blurred in the field. Blackwater was “providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral's folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they're having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they're executing the job,” he said. “You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas.” He said that when Blackwater personnel were out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engaged in operations against suspected terrorists. “You've got BW guys that are assisting...and they're all going to want to go on the jobs—so they're going to go with them,” he said. “So, the things that you're seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that—in some of those cases, you're going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not
in
the house.” Blackwater, he said, was paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. “That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, ‘Hey, no, we don't have any Westerners doing this. It's all local and our people are doing it.' But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work.” The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater worked with the Frontier Corps, saying, “There's no real oversight. It's not really on people's radar screen.”

A spokesperson for the US State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), which is responsible for issuing licenses to US corporations to provide defense-related services to foreign governments or entities, would neither confirm nor deny that Blackwater had a license to work in Pakistan or to work with Kestral. “
We cannot help you
,” said department spokesperson David McKeeby after checking with the relevant DDTC officials. “You'll have to contact the companies directly.” Black-water's spokesman said the company had “
no operations of any kind
” in Pakistan other than one employee working for the DoD. Kestral did not respond to inquiries about its relationship with Blackwater.

According to
federal lobbying records
,
Kestral had hired
former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues “regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States.” Noriega was hired through his firm,
Vision Americas
, which he ran with
Christina Rocca
, a former CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 2001 to
2006 and was deeply involved in shaping US policy toward Pakistan. In October 2009, Kestral
paid Vision Americas $15,000
and gave a Vision Americas-affiliated firm,
Firecreek Ltd.
, an equal amount to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues.

IN NOVEMBER
2009, as I worked on an investigative report for the
Nation
magazine on JSOC's targeted killing operations in Pakistan, I received an unprompted call on my cell phone the day before publication from Captain John Kirby, the spokesperson for Admiral Michael Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Obama's most senior military adviser. Kirby wouldn't explain how he got my number or how he had heard about the story. “Let's just leave it at: we heard about it,” he told me bluntly. Kirby told me that my story was false but would not go on record saying that. Instead, he told me, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.” He told me bluntly that if we published the story, which connected Blackwater to JSOC's operations in Pakistan, I would be “on thin ice.”

We had confidence in our sources, so despite this clear attempt at intimidation, the
Nation
ran the story. The next day, when the article, titled “The Secret US War in Pakistan,” was published, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell
called it “conspiratorial
” and explicitly denied that US Special Operations Forces were doing anything other than “training” in Pakistan. Morrell told reporters: “We have basically, I think, a few dozen forces on the ground in Pakistan who are involved in a train-the-trainer mission. These are Special Operations Forces. We've been very candid about this. They are—they have been for months, if not years now, training Pakistani forces so that they can in turn train other Pakistani military on how to—on certain skills and operational techniques. And that's the extent of our—our, you know, military boots on the ground in Pakistan, despite whatever conspiratorial theories that, you know, magazines...may want to cook up. There's nothing to it.”