The Way of the Knife (34 page)

So, in July 2008, when CIA director Michael Hayden and his deputy, Stephen Kappes, came to the White House to present the agency’s plan to wage a unilateral war in the mountains of Pakistan to President Bush and his war cabinet, it wasn’t a hard sell to a frustrated president. “We’re going to stop playing the game,” Bush said. “These sons of bitches are killing Americans.
I’ve had enough
.” That began what would become the blistering, years-long drone assault on the tribal areas that President Obama continued when he took office. And as the CIA’s relationship with the ISI soured, Langley sent station chiefs out to Islamabad who spent far less time and energy building up goodwill with Pakistani spies than their predecessors had. Richard Blee, the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden–hunting unit and a former Islamabad station chief, lamented that, at the CIA, “the ‘fuck you’ school took over.” From 2008 on, the CIA cycled a succession of seasoned case officers through Islamabad, and each left Pakistan more embittered than the last.

One of the station chiefs, John Bennett, was a longtime clandestine officer who had run CIA operations in Somalia from the agency’s station in Nairobi and more recently had run the CIA station in South Africa. An officer from the post–Church Committee generation, Bennett arrived in Pakistan with some of the same concerns about CIA targeted-killing operations shared by many of his peers, but his tenure in Pakistan gradually changed his mind. He saw the drones as the only reliable means of eviscerating al Qaeda in Pakistan, especially since most of the intelligence sharing between the CIA and ISI had withered. His relationship with the ISI turned icy when Bennett began to examine the Pakistani agency’s role in ginning up domestic opposition to the drone campaign, and by the time he left Islamabad, in 2010, he had a cynical view of the ISI. To his colleagues, he would recall his time in Pakistan and dealing with the ISI as “years of his life [he’d] never get back.” Bennett’s successor as station chief, who dug even deeper into what he saw as an ISI propaganda campaign to foment anger about the drone strikes, had to leave the country in haste when his identity was revealed in the Pakistani press. The CIA suspected the leak came from the ISI, retaliating because General Pasha was named as a defendant in a New York lawsuit brought by victims of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Even many of the operations that at first blush seemed likely to signal a new era of goodwill between the CIA and the ISI ended in recriminations and finger-pointing. In January 2010, during Bennett’s tenure as CIA station chief, a clandestine American team of CIA officers and special-operations troops working in Karachi traced a cell phone to a house in Baldia Town, a slum in the western part of the sprawling city. The CIA did not conduct unilateral operations inside large Pakistani cities, so the Americans notified the ISI about the intelligence.
Pakistani troops and policemen
launched a surprise raid on the house.

Although the CIA didn’t know in advance, hiding inside the house was Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a man considered to be the Afghan Taliban’s military commander and the second in command to Mullah Mohammed Omar. Only after suspects in the house were arrested and questioned did the CIA learn that Baradar was among the detainees. The ISI took him to a detention facility in an industrial section of Islamabad and refused the CIA access to him. “At that point, things got really complicated,” said one former CIA officer.

Was the entire episode a setup? Rumors had circulated inside Pakistan that Baradar wanted to cut a deal with the Americans and bring the Taliban to the negotiating table in Afghanistan. Had the ISI somehow engineered the entire arrest, feeding intelligence to the CIA so that Baradar could be taken off the street and the nascent peace talks spoiled? Had ISI played the CIA? Months later, senior CIA officials at Langley still couldn’t answer those questions.

—

THE CIA’S STRONG SUSPICION
that the ISI continued to play a double game with the Afghan Taliban was a constant weight on the spying relationship, and yet there were some joint operations that produced an intelligence windfall. In June 2010, eight months before the world had heard the name Raymond Davis, the two spy agencies ramped up a surveillance operation monitoring the cell phones of a group of Arabs suspected of giving logistical support to al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan. But the operation was only “joint” up to a point: The CIA did not tell the Pakistanis that one of the cell-phone numbers belonged to Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the alias of a man whom captured al Qaeda operatives had identified to the CIA years earlier as
a personal courier for Osama bin Laden
. Since first learning about al-Kuwaiti, the trail to the courier had led down multiple blind alleys, and it wasn’t until 2007 that the CIA got a tip from a foreign intelligence service that his real name was Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. This was hardly an uncommon name in the Muslim world, but the new information allowed the National Security Agency to gradually pinpoint a cell-phone number used by the courier and feed it to the CIA for the cell-phone monitoring operation.

It was that summer in 2010 when a call came into al-Kuwaiti’s tapped cell phone. The caller was a friend of al-Kuwaiti’s, contacting him from a country in the Persian Gulf region, and the American snoops were listening.

“We’ve missed you. Where have you been?” asked the man.

Al-Kuwaiti’s response was vague but tantalizing.

“
I’m back with the people I was with before
,” he said.

The coded message seemed to be significant: It suggested that al-Kuwaiti was again working with al Qaeda, and possibly even had a direct line to Osama bin Laden. Using geo-location technology to pinpoint where al-Kuwaiti was using his cell phone, the NSA homed in on an area around Peshawar. That made some sense if al-Kuwaiti was traveling back and forth to the tribal areas, where the bulk of al Qaeda’s top leadership was thought to be hiding, although by then a small group of analysts inside the CIA suspected that bin Laden may be hiding somewhere else, perhaps even in the settled areas of Pakistan. It was a hunch, informed to some degree by sheer process of elimination: The CIA had spent years focused on the tribal areas without as much as a sliver of new evidence that the al Qaeda leader was hiding there. At some point, it made sense to start looking elsewhere.

The hunch proved to be right. Two months after the cell-phone call, a Pakistani man working for the CIA spotted al-Kuwaiti in Peshawar behind the wheel of a white Suzuki Potohar truck with a spare tire attached to the rear gate. He followed al-Kuwaiti out of the city—but not west into the tribal areas and the wild mountains. Instead, the truck drove more than 120 miles east, to a quiet hamlet north of Islamabad that is home to Pakistan’s premier military-training academy and is a popular haven for retired officers who while away their days hitting golf balls on one of Pakistan’s best golf courses. There, in Abbottabad, the Suzuki pulled into a sprawling compound encircled by concrete walls twelve feet high. Rising above the walls were the upper floors of a large house—the top floor distinguished from the others because
it had only small, opaque slits for windows
. The house had neither a phone line nor an Internet connection. Whoever lived inside was trying to stay detached from the outside world.

In the months that followed, Leon Panetta pushed the agency’s Counterterrorism Center to consider a number of exotic schemes to determine who might be hiding in the house, some of them reminiscent of the period before the agency had a fleet of Predators and considered using hot-air balloons to spy on bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan. CTC officers brought a giant telephoto lens into Panetta’s office, the largest lens available, and proposed stationing it in the mountains several miles away. A safe house that the CIA had quietly set up not far from the large compound did not have a line-of-sight view into the house, so
the telephoto lens was useless
from that vantage point. For weeks on end, spy satellites took thousands of photographs of the house during passes over Pakistan, but the eyes in the sky produced no definitive proof that bin Laden was hiding there.

The CIA watched, and waited, for a shred of hard proof that might bring the near decade-long manhunt to an end.

—

WITH THE CIA PURSUING
its most promising bin Laden lead since the terrorist leader escaped his lair at Tora Bora, in Afghanistan, and fled across the border into Pakistan in 2001, it was more than a bit inconvenient that one of its undercover officers was sitting in a jail in Lahore facing a double murder charge. Pakistan’s Islamist parties organized street protests and threatened violent riots if Raymond Davis was not tried and eventually hanged for his crimes. American diplomats in Lahore regularly visited Davis, but the Obama administration continued to stonewall Pakistan’s government about the nature of Davis’s work in the country. And the episode claimed another victim.

On February 6, the grieving widow of one of Davis’s victims swallowed a lethal amount of rat poison and was rushed to the hospital in Faisalabad, where doctors pumped her stomach. The woman, Shumaila Faheem, was certain that the United States and Pakistan would quietly broker a deal to release her husband’s killer from prison, a view she expressed to her doctors from her hospital bed. “They are already treating my husband’s murderer like a VIP in police custody and I am sure they will let him go because of international pressure,” she said. “The man murdered my husband and I demand justice. I don’t care if he is American.
He must not be allowed
to get away with this.” She died shortly afterward and instantly became a martyr for the groups inside Pakistan who had turned the Davis affair into a cause célèbre.

The furor over the Davis incident was quickly escalating, threatening to shut down most CIA operations in the country and possibly even derail the intelligence-gathering operation in Abbottabad. But the CIA stood firm and sent top officials to Islamabad who told Ambassador Munter to stick to the strategy. Force the Pakistanis to release Davis and threaten them with dire consequences if they don’t comply. Dial up the pain, and they will come around.

But Munter had decided by then that the CIA’s strategy had not worked, and he and several other American officials began devising a new plan. After discussions among White House, State Department, and CIA officials in Washington, Munter approached General Pasha, the ISI chief, and came clean. Davis was with the CIA, he said, and the United States needed to get him out of the country as quickly as possible.

Pasha wasn’t about to let the Americans off so easily. He was still fuming that Panetta had lied to him, and he was going to let the Americans squirm by letting Davis sit in jail while he considered—on his own timetable—the best way to resolve the situation.

More than a week later, Pasha came back to Munter with his response. It was a purely Pakistani solution, one based on an ancient tradition that would allow the matter to be settled outside the unpredictable court system. Pasha had devised the plan with a number of Pakistani officials, including Ambassador Haqqani in Washington. The reckoning for Davis’s actions would come in the form of “blood money,” or
diyat,
a custom under sharia law that compensates the families of victims for their dead relatives. The matter would be handled quietly, the CIA would make the secret payments, and
Davis would be released from jail
.

The ISI took over. Pasha ordered ISI operatives in Lahore to meet the families of the three men killed during the January episode and negotiate a settlement. Some of the relatives initially resisted, but the ISI negotiators were not about to let the talks collapse. After weeks of discussions, the parties agreed on a total of two hundred million rupees, approximately $2.34 million,
to offer “forgiveness
” to the jailed CIA officer.

Only a small group of Obama administration officials knew of the talks, and as they dragged on the clock was ticking toward a ruling by Lahore’s High Court about whether Davis would be granted diplomatic immunity, a ruling the CIA expected to go against the United States and worried might set a precedent for future cases in Pakistan.

Raymond Davis remained in the dark about all of this. When he arrived for his court appearance on March 16, he was fully expecting to hear that the trial would proceed and the judge would issue a new court date. He was escorted into the courtroom, his arms handcuffed in front of him, and
locked inside an iron cage
next to the judge’s bench. In the back of the courtroom sat General Pasha, Pakistan’s spymaster, who took out his cell phone and began sending out a stream of nervous text messages to Ambassador Munter, updating him about the court proceedings. Pasha was one of the most powerful men in Pakistan, and yet the ISI had little control over the mercurial courts in Lahore, and he wasn’t entirely sure that things would proceed according to plan.

The first part of the hearing went as everyone expected. The judge, saying that the case would go ahead, noted that his ruling on diplomatic immunity would come in a matter of days. Pakistani reporters frantically began filing their stories about how this seemed a blow to the American case, and that it appeared that Davis would not be released from jail anytime soon. But then the judge ordered all the reporters out of the courtroom, and from the back General Pasha watched his secret plan unfold.

Through a side entrance, eighteen relatives of the three victims walked into the room, and the judge announced that a civil court had switched to a sharia court. Each of the family members approached Davis, some of them with tears in their eyes or sobbing outright, and announced that he or she forgave him. Pasha sent another text message to Munter: The matter was settled. Davis was a free man. In a Lahore courtroom, the laws of God had trumped the laws of man.

The drama had played out entirely in Urdu, and throughout the proceeding a baffled Raymond Davis sat silently inside the steel cage. It was even more jarring when ISI operatives whisked Davis out of the courthouse through a back entrance and pushed him into a waiting car that sped to the Lahore airport.