The Way of the Knife (15 page)

And yet Kayani was controlled where others were hotheaded. After militants based in Pakistan launched a deadly attack on India’s parliament in New Delhi in late 2001 and it looked as if the two nuclear rivals might go to war, Kayani was the army commander in charge of marshaling Pakistani forces along the border with India. He won praise inside Pakistan for quietly managing the tense situation, staying in contact with his Indian counterparts, and
preventing the simmering dispute
from escalating into nuclear war. He won General Musharraf’s loyalty two years later, when he was in charge of the investigations into the December 2003 assassination attempts on the president.

It wasn’t long after Kayani took over the ISI that he had earned a grudging respect at CIA headquarters for being something of a master manipulator—this was a compliment—and a man who always kept his most important agendas a secret. During meetings, he could go long stretches without speaking a word, appearing to be asleep. Then, when a subject came up that agitated him, he would speak passionately for several minutes and then return to his somnolent state. He golfed obsessively and went everywhere trailing a cloud of cigarette smoke.

He rarely spoke about himself, and when he did it was difficult to understand what he was saying, because of his tendency to mumble. Where his ISI predecessor, General ul Haq, was dapper and suave, General Kayani was rumpled and unpretentious. During trips to Washington, D.C., he insisted that his limousine driver take him to Marshalls, the discount-clothing chain,
where he would shop for suits and ties
. Above all, he could wait patiently for what he wanted. One top American spy recalled a lengthy meeting with Kayani during which the Pakistani general spent half an hour meticulously rolling a cigarette between his fingers. Then, after taking one puff, he gently stubbed it out.

General Kayani took over the ISI at a time when Pakistani leaders were becoming increasingly convinced that the Americans had lost their stomach for the fight in Afghanistan. The Iraq war had diverted Washington’s attention away from Afghanistan, and soldiers, spies, and politicians in Islamabad believed it was only a matter of time before the rising violence in Pakistan’s western neighbor would threaten the government in Islamabad. According to several Pakistani officials in positions of authority at that time, it was during this period when the ISI decided to take a more active role with the Afghan Taliban, hoping to steer Afghanistan toward a political future that was acceptable to Islamabad.

General Kayani was consumed with the past, and he understood that Afghanistan’s bloody history was prologue to America’s war in that country. He had been studying Afghanistan for decades and was an expert in the dynamics that helped Afghan insurgents vanquish a superpower in the 1980s. In 1988, as a young Pakistani army major studying at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas, Kayani wrote a master’s thesis about the Soviet war in Afghanistan titled “Strengths and Weaknesses of the Afghan Resistance Movement.” By then, the Soviet Union had endured nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan, and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev had already begun to pull out his troops. Over ninety-eight pages of clear, straightforward prose, Kayani examined how the Afghan Resistance Movement (ARM) had bled the vaunted Soviet army and increased “
the price of Soviet presence in Afghanistan
.”

Kayani was, in essence, writing the playbook for how Pakistan could hold the strings in Afghanistan during the occupation of a foreign army. Pakistan, he wrote, could use proxy militias to wreak havoc in the country but also to control the groups effectively so that Islamabad could avoid a direct confrontation with the occupying force.

In a country without national identity, Kayani argued, it was necessary for the Afghan resistance to build support in the tribal system and to gradually weaken Afghanistan’s central government. As for Pakistan, Kayani believed that Islamabad likely didn’t want to be on a “collision course” with the Soviet Union, or at least didn’t want the Afghan resistance to set them on that path. Therefore, it was essential for Pakistan’s security to keep the strength of the Afghan resistance “managed.”

By the time he took over the ISI in 2004, Kayani knew that the Afghan war would be decided not by soldiers in mountain redoubts but by politicians in Washington who had an acute sensitivity to America’s limited tolerance for
years more of bloody conflict
. He knew because he had studied what had happened to the Soviets. In his thesis, he wrote that “the most striking feature of the Soviet military effort at present is the increasing evidence that it may not be designed to secure a purely military solution through a decisive defeat of the ARM.

“This is likely due to the realization that such a military solution is not obtainable short of entailing massive, and perhaps intolerable, personnel losses and economic and political cost.”

In 2004, Kayani’s thesis sat in the library at Fort Leavenworth, amid stacks of other largely ignored research papers written by foreign officers who went to Kansas to study how the United States Army fights its battles. This was a manual for a different kind of battle, a secret guerrilla campaign. Two decades after the young Pakistani military officer wrote it, he was the country’s spymaster, in the perfect position to put it to use.

7:
CONVERGENCE

“Deniability is built in and should be a big plus.”

—Enrique Prado

O
n a cold afternoon in early 2005, CIA director Porter Goss was attending a ceremony for a class of agency case officers graduating from “The Farm,” the CIA’s training base at Camp Peary, in southern Virginia. It was a standard ritual for CIA directors to make the trip down to the base for the graduations, and the ceremonies were a brief moment of normalcy for the graduates before they began their lives of cover identities, deceit, and, occasionally, extreme danger. But the ceremony was cut short after one of Goss’s aides came to him with an urgent message. Within minutes, the CIA director and his bodyguards had loaded back into a Blackhawk helicopter and were flying north. But instead of returning to Langley, Goss flew directly to the Pentagon to meet with Donald Rumsfeld.
There was about to be
a military assault into Pakistan.

A Pakistani agent working for the CIA had delivered the American spies a rare tip: There was to be a high-level meeting of al Qaeda officials in Bajaur, one of the desolate tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan. The agent had been tracking Abu Faraj al-Libi, the third-ranking official in al Qaeda, who had occasionally been spotted
riding around the mountain villages
of Pakistan on a red motorcycle. The agent told his CIA handlers not only that al-Libi would be at the gathering but also that Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, might attend.

A plan of attack was hastily put together, and Goss and Rumsfeld considered the risks. Three dozen Navy SEALs would jump out of a C-130 cargo plane and parachute into a drop zone not far from where the meeting was supposed to take place. The SEALs would attack the compound, grab as many people as possible, and take them to a staging area where everyone would be spirited back over the Afghanistan border in helicopters. Goss urged that the military carry out the mission, and he had the backing of Lt. General Stanley McChrystal, a rail-thin and intense ascetic who had taken over Joint Special Operations Command in 2003.

But Rumsfeld and his top intelligence aide, Stephen Cambone, resisted the plan. It was too risky, they said, and Rumsfeld demanded that dozens more Army Rangers be added to the mission so they could bail out the SEALs in case something went wrong. The invasion force swelled to more than 150 troops, and Rumsfeld decided there was no way an operation that size could be kept from President Pervez Musharraf. Another objection came from the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, who had been awakened in the middle of the night and told that a large group of well-armed Americans were about to enter the country. “
This is a really bad idea, Stan
,” the station chief told McChrystal, who had been the one to call him. “You might kill a couple of al Qaeda guys, but it won’t be worth it.

“You’re invading Pakistan,” he said.

All the while, the SEALs were sitting inside the C-130 at Bagram Air Base, waiting for the final orders to launch the mission. They waited for hours before the mission was finally scrubbed.

Rumsfeld’s concerns about the assault were largely about intelligence. The information came from one CIA source, and the defense secretary thought that a single strand of information was a shaky basis for a high-risk mission into the snowy mountains of western Pakistan. He also didn’t trust the CIA’s track record, and in early 2005 the spy agency was having difficulty convincing anyone—especially Rumsfeld—about the credibility of its intelligence analysis. American spy agencies were still reeling from the Iraq war debacle, when they had judged that Saddam Hussein was keeping stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and a cloud of suspicion hung over all of the CIA’s assessments for several years afterward. As much as Goss was frustrated by how the discussions about the Bajaur operation ended, there was nothing he could do. Rumsfeld didn’t trust even a CIA judgment that there was an 80 percent chance that al-Zawahiri was at the meeting, and Rumsfeld was the one in charge of the troops. As one aide to Goss described it, “It was like your dad telling you that you can’t have the car for the weekend.”

But beyond the questions about the reliability of the intelligence, the episode was also a bleak reminder that, several years after the September 11 attacks, the war against international terror groups remained haphazard and chaotic. Neither the CIA nor the Pentagon had a coherent plan for the secret wars outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Both agencies were still locked in turf battles, set to prove to the White House that they ought to be in charge of the global manhunt. And, increasingly, they were mimicking each other: the CIA, after Nek Muhammad’s killing in Pakistan, becoming ever more a lethal, paramilitary organization, and the Pentagon ramping up its spying operations to support a special-operations war. There were no clear ground rules. When an emergency came up, like the intelligence about the al Qaeda meeting in Bajaur, there was no plan in place to act on it.

—

IF THERE WAS ONE EVENT
that had catalyzed the CIA’s escalation of lethal operations, it was the completion of a devastating internal report in May 2004 by the spy agency’s inspector general. The 106-page report by John Helgerson kicked out the foundation upon which the CIA detention-and-interrogation program had rested, and it raised questions about whether CIA officers might face criminal prosecution for the brutal interrogations carried out inside the agency’s network of secret prisons. It suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and exploiting the phobias of prisoners—such as confining them in a small box with live bugs—violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which prohibits “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” The CIA had subjected several detainees to waterboarding—wherein the prisoner was hooded and immobilized on a wooden plank while water was poured over his face, creating the sensation of drowning—and in one month alone
had used the technique
on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the September 11 attacks, 183 times.

Waterboarding was one of a number of interrogation techniques that had been authorized by the Justice Department, but Helgerson’s report also detailed a pattern of freelancing in the black sites, what the inspector general called “
unauthorized, improvised, inhumane
, and undocumented” detention-and-interrogation techniques. There were instances of interrogators conducting mock executions to scare the detainees into talking; one CIA interrogator pointed a spinning drill at a prisoner’s head.

The CIA’s secret prison program had grown from a single, spartan facility in Bangkok, Thailand, to an archipelago of jails throughout the world. Jose Rodriguez, the head of the Counterterrorist Center, had intended the prisons to be a more permanent alternative to the Thailand site, which had originally been code-named “Cat’s Eye” but later renamed when CIA officers thought the designation seemed racially insensitive. Thailand was where the CIA had held its first two prisoners, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, but as the CIA and its partner spy services began rounding up dozens of prisoners in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries, Rodgriguez and CTC officers decided the spy agency needed far more prison space.

The CIA’s detention-and-interrogation program would become the most infamous and divisive aspect of the Bush administration’s strategy against al Qaeda, but the way the CIA set up the black prisons was somewhat prosaic. Rodriguez ordered a team at the Counterterrorist Center to work with engineers and outside contractors, and when the prisons were near completion the CIA hired a small supply company to provide toilets, plumbing equipment, earplugs, bedding, and other prison supplies. The contractors bought some of the equipment at Target and Walmart and flew it to the jails: one of them in a nondescript building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Lithuania.
The waterboards were bought locally
, constructed from lumber purchased near some of the secret sites.

The jails were small—intended to house about half a dozen detainees—and the cells had some special features designed specially to accommodate the brutal methods used by CIA interrogators, such as flexible, plywood-covered walls that might soften the impact of someone being slammed into a wall. The detainees were prevented from communicating with one another and were kept in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day. The remaining hour was for exercise, when CIA security officers wearing black ski masks removed the prisoners from their cells. By 2004, CIA prison wardens had imposed a system of reward and punishment. Detainees who were considered well behaved received books and DVDs.
The entertainment was taken away
if the prisoner misbehaved. The CIA, an espionage service created after World War II to inform American presidents about the world around them, had become the Department of Secret Corrections.