The Way of the Knife (35 page)

The move had been choreographed to get Davis out of the country as quickly as possible. But American officials, including Munter, waiting for Davis at the airport began to worry. Davis had, after all, already shot dead two men he believed were threatening him. If he thought he was being taken away to be killed, he might try to make an escape, even try to kill the ISI operatives inside the car. Sure enough, when the car arrived at the airport and pulled up to the plane ready to take Davis out of Pakistan, the CIA operative was in a daze. It appeared to the Americans waiting for him that Davis was only realizing then
that he was safe
.

Raymond Davis got on the plane and flew west, over the mountains and into Afghanistan, where he was handed over to CIA officers in Kabul. For the first time since late January, he was able to tell his story about the killings in Lahore, his arrest, and his incarceration—without the fear of Pakistani spies listening in.

He tried to settle back into his life in the United States, but in the end Raymond Davis couldn’t stay out of jail. On October 1, 2011, just seven months after his abrupt departure from Pakistan, Davis was eyeing a parking spot in front of a bagel shop in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. So was Jeff Maes,
a fifty-year-old minister
who was driving with his wife and two young daughters. When Maes beat Davis to the spot, Davis stopped his car behind Maes’s parked vehicle and shouted profanities through his open window. Then he jumped out of his car and confronted Maes, telling the minister that he had been waiting for the parking spot.

“
Relax,” Maes said, “and quit being stupid
.”

Davis struck Maes in the face, knocking him to the pavement. Maes testified that when he stood up from the fall, Davis continued to hit him. Davis was eventually arrested on charges of third-degree assault and disorderly conduct, but the charges were upgraded to felony assault when Maes’s injuries turned out to be worse than originally thought. The minister’s wife, later recalling the episode, said she had never in her life seen a man so full of rage.

—

THE DAVIS AFFAIR HAD
led Langley to order dozens of covert officers out of Pakistan in the hope of lowering the temperature in the CIA–ISI relationship. Ambassador Munter issued a public statement shortly after the bizarre court proceeding, saying he was “grateful for the generosity of the families” and expressing regret for the entire incident and the “suffering it caused.”

But the secret deal only fanned the anger in Pakistan, and anti-American protests flared in major cities, including Islamabad, Karachi, and Lahore. Demonstrators set tires ablaze, clashed with Pakistani riot police, and brandished placards with slogans such as
I AM RAYMOND DAVIS, GIVE ME A BREAK, I AM JUST A CIA HIT MAN
.

He had become a bogeyman in Pakistan, an American assassin lurking in the subconscious of a deeply insecure nation. He was the subject of wild conspiracy theories, and his name was regularly heard at anti-American rallies. After the CIA scaled back operations in Pakistan, one Pakistani newspaper even cited the withdrawal of the secret American army as the reason why there had been
a reduction of terrorist violence
in Pakistan in recent months.

On a steamy summer night the following year, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed—the head of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the reason Raymond Davis and his team had been sent to Lahore in the first place—stood on the back of a flatbed truck and spoke to thousands of cheering supporters less than a mile from Pakistan’s parliament building in Islamabad. A $10 million American bounty still hung over Saeed’s head, part of a broader squeeze on Lashkar-e-Taiba’s finances. But there he was, out in the open and whipping the crowd into a fury with a pledge to “rid Pakistan of American slavery.” The rally was the culmination of a march from Lahore to Islamabad that Saeed had ordered to protest American involvement in Pakistan. The night before the march reached the capital, six Pakistani troops had been killed by gunmen riding motorcycles not far from where the marchers were spending the night, leading to speculation that Saeed had ordered the attack.

But
Saeed insisted that night
that he was not to blame for the deaths. The killers had been foreigners, he told the crowd, a group of assassins with a secret agenda to destabilize Pakistan and steal its nuclear arsenal. With a dramatic flourish, he said he knew exactly who had killed the six men.

“It was the Americans!” he shouted to loud approvals.

“It was Blackwater!” and the cheers grew even louder.

He saved the biggest applause line for last:

“It was another Raymond Davis!”

15:
THE DOCTOR AND THE SHEIKH

“I don’t want to be the ambassador.”

—CIA station chief in Islamabad

D
r. Shakil Afridi had already been working for the CIA for more than a year when his American handler gave him a new set of instructions. It was January 2011, the month of Raymond Davis’s arrest, and the Pakistani surgeon had just gone through the lengthy protocol the CIA had put in place for him to meet his American contact. Two men would pick him up at a designated spot—sometimes a Shell gas station, sometimes a crowded outdoor market—body-search him, and order him to lie down in the backseat of their car with a blanket covering him. That day the car zigzagged through the streets of Islamabad until stopping to let Afridi out. There,
an American woman he knew
only as Sue was waiting for him in a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Sue told the doctor that he should prepare to launch a vaccination campaign aimed at inoculating women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five against hepatitis B. She instructed that he should begin in two towns in Kashmir—Bagh and Muzaffarabad—and in the region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, focusing on the pastoral garrison town of Abbottabad. The campaign should take six months, she said, carried out in three phases. Afridi made quick calculations about the cost of the campaign, factoring in the large markup he always included when he was giving his price for a CIA operation. He would need 5.3 million rupees, he told Sue, about fifty-five thousand dollars.

Afridi by then had become comfortable with the Americans, and he knew that the CIA wasn’t about to start quibbling over money. He was exactly what the Americans were desperate for—an agent who could move easily through cities and villages in Pakistan without raising the suspicions of either militants or Pakistan’s intelligence service. He was the perfect spy, and the Americans paid handsomely for that.

Sue was just the latest in a succession of CIA officers who had been assigned to work with Afridi since 2009, when the doctor with a checkered history was first approached by the Americans. Then in his late forties, he had risen from humble origins to become Pakistan’s top doctor for Khyber Agency in the tribal areas, despite being dogged by allegations that he regularly accepted kickbacks from medical suppliers, ordered unnecessary surgical procedures, and
sold hospital medicines
on the black market.

Few doubted his dedication to improving health conditions in one of the world’s poorest regions, but Afridi was also a fast talker who enjoyed telling bawdy jokes to female colleagues and was a bit too eager to push the boundaries of medical ethics to make extra money. The allegations against him eventually came to the attention of Mangal Bagh, a former bus driver turned warlord and drug runner in Khyber Agency, who was the leader of an obscure group called Lashkar-e-Islam. Bagh’s fighters regularly received medical treatment from Afridi. The warlord summoned Afridi to his house and demanded that the doctor pay a fine of one million rupees, about ten thousand dollars, for his transgressions. When Afridi refused, Bagh kidnapped him and detained him for a week until he paid.

Afridi was attending a medical workshop in Peshawar in November 2009 when, according to an account he later gave to Pakistani investigators, a man approached him claiming to be the Pakistan country director for Save the Children, the international charity. The man, Mike McGrath, took an immediate interest in Afridi’s work and invited him to Islamabad so the two could talk further over dinner. Whether or not Afridi suspected there was an ulterior motive is unclear, but when he arrived in the Pakistani capital on the appointed day he attended a dinner at McGrath’s house in a posh section of Islamabad. There, he said, he met a tall blond woman in her late thirties whom he would later describe as having “British looks.” She called herself Kate, and she became Dr. Shakil Afridi’s first CIA handler.

Save the Children has denied that neither McGrath nor any of its employees do any work for the CIA. American officials also dispute that Save the Children was ever used for spying, saying that if the CIA were to use large international charities to help recruit agents it would put all aid workers at risk of reprisals. Nevertheless, when a Pakistani investigative report of Afridi’s work for the CIA and his meeting with McGrath became public in Pakistan, officials in
Islamabad moved to shutter
all of the group’s operations inside the country.

What American officials don’t dispute, however, is that midway through the last decade the CIA began sending officers into Pakistan undercover in a number of professions that might allow the spies to move freely through the country. During the “surge” of CIA officers into Pakistan beginning in 2005 and 2006, when Art Keller was deployed to the tribal areas, American spies arrived in Pakistan in a desperate search for clues about Osama bin Laden and stretched the normally accepted rules of international spycraft.

After the Church Committee revelations of the 1970s, the CIA implemented a policy of not recruiting American journalists, clergy, or Peace Corps volunteers to spy for the agency, all of which had been routine up to that time. But senior CIA leaders said these post-Church rules were not cast in stone. Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1996, CIA director John Deutch said there might be instances of “extreme threat to the nation” when the CIA might need to abandon the policy. Under certain circumstances, Deutch said, “
I believe it is unreasonable
to foreclose the witting use of any likely source of information.” The CIA never restricted itself from recruiting foreign journalists or foreign aid workers, but American officials have long understood the dangers of using humanitarian workers as spies. Still, the CIA would carry out all manner of activities in the years after the September 11 attacks—from making detainees endure near drowning in secret prisons to killing militant suspects with armed drones—using the justification that the operations were necessary to keep the country safe. Expanding the categories of who can be recruited to spy was just another tactic of a CIA in the midst of an enduring war.

During the two years after Dr. Afridi’s first meeting with the tall, blond CIA officer, the Pakistani doctor would conduct a number of public health campaigns as a ruse to gather intelligence on militant activity in the tribal areas. Vaccination campaigns were considered a good front for spying: DNA information could be collected from the needles used on children and analyzed for leads on the whereabouts of al Qaeda operatives for whom the CIA already had DNA information. In that time, Afridi conducted half a dozen vaccination campaigns around Khyber Agency, and
the CIA paid him
eight million rupees. According to his account, every few months he was passed off to a new CIA handler, from “Kate” to “Toni” to “Sara” and finally to “Sue,” who assumed his case in December 2010. He was given a laptop computer and a secure transmitter to communicate with the CIA, and he was alerted to the Americans trying to reach him
when the transmitter
sent out a beeping sound.

—

ONE MONTH
into the vaccination campaign in Abbottabad, Sue told Dr. Afridi to focus his activities in Bilal Town, an upper-middle-class neighborhood not far from the headquarters of Pakistan’s premier military academy, the country’s equivalent of West Point. The hepatitis-B program was already being carried out in a slipshod manner, ignoring established protocols that dictate a careful, neighborhood-by-neighborhood strategy for vaccination campaigns. Afridi hadn’t even bought enough injections to ensure that everyone in his target population of fifteen-to-forty-five-year-old women received the multiple injections required to be vaccinated. Some local officials had even refused to cooperate with Afridi under the assumption that he didn’t have permission for his work. Shaheena Mamraiz, a public health officer in Abbottabad, said she was taken aback by Afridi’s aggressiveness when he burst into her office in March 2011 wearing a black business suit and telling her the details of his planned vaccination campaign. It was only after urgings from her supervisor that
she agreed to cooperate with Afridi
.

Of course, the details of exactly who in the greater Abbottabad area would be vaccinated were irrelevant to Afridi’s CIA handlers. By spring 2011, a small cluster of officers inside the Counterterrorism Center at Langley and at the CIA station in Islamabad were interested only in Bilal Town and, more specifically, the large walled compound on Pathan Street that American spy satellites had spent months watching. Afridi’s CIA handlers never told the doctor whom they suspected was hiding in the house. Whether Osama bin Laden and his entourage were living there was still a matter of intense speculation, and American officials hoped that getting inside the house might settle the matter. With the vaccination campaign as a cover, the CIA wanted Afridi to get one of his staff inside the compound and get what American soldiers and spies still didn’t have after nearly a decade of frantic searching: hard evidence of where Osama bin Laden was hiding.

But neither Afridi nor any member of his staff was able to provide that. On the day Dr. Afridi vaccinated residents of Pathan Street, the only people to refuse the hepatitis-B vaccinations lived in the mysterious compound, the ones who rarely ventured beyond the house and burned their trash rather than send it out for collection. Afridi was told that two reclusive brothers from Waziristan, along with their families, occupied the house and that the men had no interest in meeting anyone from the neighborhood. After investigating further, a female health worker on Afridi’s team managed to get the cell-phone number of one of the “brothers” who lived in the house. She called the number using Dr. Afridi’s phone and spoke to a man who said he was away from the house and that
she should call again in the evening
.