The Way of the Knife (6 page)

They can occupy all the cities, but they can’t occupy all the mountains, the militia leader continued, as General ul Haq recalls the meeting. “So we will go to the mountains and we will resist. Just like we did against the Soviet Union.”

News that the famous commander had been in Islamabad quickly spread to the American embassy, and CIA station chief Robert Grenier immediately visited General ul Haq to get more information. Not only had Haqqani been in the capital, ul Haq acknowledged, but he had met with him. He hadn’t bothered to tell the CIA chief, he said, because
nothing productive came from the meeting
.

“I don’t think he is going to be helpful,” ul Haq said.

—

ALTHOUGH HE HAD INSTALLED
a new general to lead the ISI, Musharraf’s purge of Islamists inside the military went only so far. At the same time General ul Haq took over the military spy service, Musharraf appointed Lt. General Ali Jan Aurakzai, a close friend and longtime Taliban sympathizer, to take over the army’s corps in Peshawar, the same job that ul Haq had just vacated.

Peshawar, a bustling market city, is the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, a territory named by the British for its position at the outer edge of the “settled” lands.
*
The job in Peshawar also gave General Aurakzai oversight of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the harsh, mountainous lands ruled by wild men of the Wazir and Mehsud tribes and where the government’s writ meant little.

The British had had little success taming the tribal lands that had been part of the British Raj, and eventually gave up. As a twenty-three-year-old journalist visiting India in 1897, Winston Churchill spent six weeks with Britain’s Malakand Field Force and sent dispatches to
The Daily Telegraph
describing the snowcapped mountains where “
range after range
is seen as the long surges of an Atlantic swell, and in the distance some glittering snow peak suggests a white-crested roller, higher than the rest.”

“The drenching rains which fall each year,” Churchill continued, “have washed the soil from the sides of the hills until they have become strangely grooved by numberless water-courses, and the black primeval rock is everywhere exposed.” Just as the lands had changed little since Churchill’s time, the people of the tribal areas remained fiercely distrustful of outsiders. It is a place, Britain’s future prime minister observed, where “every man’s hand is against the other, and all against the stranger.”

General Aurakzai had long ago proven his loyalty to Musharraf as another of the military conspirators behind the 1999 coup. According to some accounts it had been Aurakzai who showed up at former president Nawaz Sharif’s house, pointed a gun in his face, and told him that the military was taking charge in Pakistan. He was a commanding figure who had been raised in the tribal areas and had spent enough time in the mountains to know that regular Pakistani troops were not trained for the mission they were about to undertake. He told Musharraf he doubted there were many foreign al Qaeda operatives fleeing across the border into Pakistan.

But CIA officers in Islamabad thought differently. Months after Pakistani soldiers moved into the tribal areas, CIA officers began feeding the ISI steady reports about the arrival of Arab fighters in the mountains, but General Aurakzai’s military patrols turned up nothing. Grenier, the CIA’s Islamabad station chief, said that Aurakzai and other Pakistani officials with whom he met worried that Pakistani troops rumbling through mountain villages could touch off a tribal uprising. The officials didn’t want to believe that al Qaeda had established a new base in Pakistan, less than a hundred miles from the bases in Afghanistan where the group had planned the September 11 attacks. It was “
an inconvenient fact
,” said Grenier.

Aurakzai held the Peshawar command until his retirement in 2004 and for years continued to deny the presence of Arab fighters in the tribal areas. In 2005, he told a reporter that the notion that Osama bin Laden might be hiding in Pakistan was purely conjecture, and he never saw any evidence that Arab fighters had set up operations in the tribal areas.
The hunt for bin Laden
and al Qaeda in Pakistan, he said, was pointless.

—

BUT OTHERS KNEW BETTER.
Brigadier-General Asad Munir had just assumed his post as the ISI’s chief of station in Peshawar when the September 11 attacks occurred, and it wasn’t long before the Americans began arriving there. They came in small numbers at first, no more than a dozen, and set up at the fortified U.S. consulate inside the city. It was late 2001, and they had come to work with their Pakistani counterparts to hunt down al Qaeda operatives escaping the fighting in Afghanistan. They had come to work with Asad Munir.

“I had never met a CIA man,” Munir recalled, taking long drags of a Benson & Hedges cigarette, the smoke sometimes obscuring a face with the rugged looks of an aging Bollywood leading man. His thoughts turned wistfully to the early years after the September 11 attacks when the spies of America and Pakistan seemed to be fighting the same enemy.

“We were just like friends.”

The Americans, led by a CIA officer named Keith, were at first suspicious of Munir and most everyone else from the ISI. But after two weeks, Munir said,
the suspicions had dissolved
. Peshawar was the westernmost city in which the CIA could establish a large base, and by the middle of 2002 the agency had turned the American consulate there into a hub for espionage operations. Antennas were erected on the roof, new computers were installed, clandestine officers arrived using thin covers. It was, in effect, a spy station posing as a diplomatic outpost.

Munir also remembered the other men who arrived, the “technical people.” Munir wouldn’t have known, but the technical teams were part of a shadowy Pentagon unit called Gray Fox—officially the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity, based at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia—which sent clandestine officers around the world with special equipment to intercept communications. With their arrival, the database of suspicious cell-phone numbers that the U.S.–Pakistani team used to track down al Qaeda around Peshawar and in the tribal areas expanded dramatically. Twelve numbers turned into one hundred, one hundred into twelve hundred. Names of Algerians, Libyans, Saudis, and others that neither the CIA nor the ISI had heard before were added to the roster, and the “list grew like crazy,” Munir said. Most of the foreigners that Munir and the Americans were hunting had moved into Pakistan between December 2001 and April 2002, having escaped from the American bombing campaign at Tora Bora and the Shah-i-Kot Valley, in eastern Afghanistan. They were Arabs and Uzbeks and Chechens and natives of other Central Asian countries. Some were looking to make their way back to the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Some were simply looking for a new home and began laying down roots by marrying local Pashtun women.

Each day the ISI and CIA operatives in Peshawar would pore over a thick stack of transcripts from intercepted conversations and then use the intelligence to plan raids to capture militants in and around Peshawar. The intelligence from the intercepts went only so far, and with a soda-straw view of the war, the spies in Peshawar sometimes made arrests they would never have made if they’d had access to more information. Once, in June 2003, they traced the cell phone of an Algerian operative, Adil Hadi al Jaza’iri, to a large public swimming pool near Peshawar. When they arrived there they found more than a hundred men in the pool. Without a photograph of al Jaza’iri there was no way they could make the arrest. One of the ISI operatives called the phone number they suspected belonged to al Jaza’iri and watched as a bearded man swam to the side of the pool to pick up his ringing cell phone. A team of Peshawar policemen rushed to the man,
dripping wet in his swimsuit
.

But they had accidently arrested a double agent. Unbeknownst to them, al Jaza’iri had been
informing on al Qaeda for Britain’s MI6
. The Algerian man was shipped to Guantánamo Bay, and British intelligence had one less informant.

Years later, Munir keeps many of the spy stories to himself, sticking to a code he also expects his American partners to honor. He thinks about the respect that the two spy services once had for each other, respect that might even have been something approaching trust. It was a “thoroughly enjoyable” time, he said, and a moment that he knows can never be re-created because of the years of suspicion that would follow.

The success of the operations led by Asad Munir and the CIA officers around Peshawar, together with the capture of senior bin Laden lieutenants like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh in other Pakistani cities, led many top Bush officials to believe that the partnership was working. The al Qaeda figures in Pakistan were being whisked out of the country to Afghanistan, to Thailand, to Romania and other countries that had allowed the CIA to construct secret prisons on their soil. The CIA was sending millions of dollars to the ISI when the bills for Islamabad’s support came due. So lucrative had the arrangement become for the Pakistanis that a joke circulated in Islamabad that for each terrorist the ISI helped capture, two new ones needed to be created to keep the racket going.

As Asad Munir saw it, the vague ambitions the ISI had in 2001 to maintain its ties to the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network had, by 2003 and 2004, morphed into a carefully crafted strategy to use these groups to Islamabad’s advantage for a postwar Afghanistan. The Pakistani analysis had been proven wrong: The war in Afghanistan had not turned out to be a short affair. Moreover, the decision by the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2003 was proof to many in the Pakistani military and intelligence services that Washington had lost interest in Afghanistan and would once again make a chaotic exit from the country. Pakistan needed to protect itself.

“The Americans came to Afghanistan without having a plan in totality: ‘How do we enter and how do we exit?’” said Munir. “They were not interested at that time in the Taliban. Their focus was on al Qaeda.

“Pakistan did have second thoughts that these people, the Americans, are not going to secure Afghanistan,” he said. “We thought, ‘They will leave, and we will have to live with the Afghans.’”

He paused, taking another drag from his cigarette.

“We have our own interests and our own security concerns.”

3:
CLOAK-AND-DAGGER MEN

“Certainly we don’t need a regiment of cloak-and-dagger men, earning their campaign ribbons—and, indeed, their promotions—by planning new exploits throughout the world. Theirs is a self-generating enterprise.”

—Senator Frank Church, 1976

T
here was a time, not very long ago, when the CIA was out of the killing business.

When Ross Newland joined the spy agency, in the late 1970s, the CIA wasn’t looking to pick any fights abroad. Newland was fresh out of graduate school, and the CIA was reeling from the body blows it had absorbed from congressional committees that had investigated the agency’s covert actions since its founding, in 1947. Congress was tightening its control over secret activities, and chastened CIA leaders began to refocus the agency’s activities on stealing the secrets of foreign regimes—traditional espionage—rather than overthrowing them or trying to kill their leaders.

President Jimmy Carter, who had campaigned to put an end to the CIA’s overseas adventures, had installed Admiral Stansfield Turner at Langley partly to rein in a spy agency he thought had run amok. Newland and a generation of CIA case officers who joined the agency during this period were told that the CIA would only invite trouble if it got back into the work of killing. By the end of his career, Newland would see the agency come full circle on the matter of lethal action, and he would come to question the wisdom of the CIA’s embrace of its role as the willing executioner of America’s enemies.

The CIA had been established with a relatively simple mission: collect and analyze intelligence so that American presidents could know each day about the various threats facing the United States. President Truman had not wanted the agency to become America’s secret army, but since a vague clause in the National Security Act of 1947 authorized the CIA to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security,” American presidents have used this “covert action” authority to dispatch the CIA on sabotage operations, propaganda campaigns, election rigging, and
assassination attempts
.

From the start, critics questioned whether the United States needed a spy service separate from the Defense Department. In defending the agency’s independence, CIA directors have pointed out what they have that the Pentagon does not. It has a cadre of undercover officers who can carry out covert missions overseas where the hand of the United States is hidden. The CIA answers directly to the president, the argument goes, and can carry out his orders more quickly, and more quietly, than the military. The residents of the Oval Office have turned to covert action hundreds of times, and often have come to regret it. But memories are short, new presidents arrive at the White House every four or eight years, and a familiar pattern played out over the second half of the twentieth century: presidential approval of aggressive CIA operations, messy congressional investigations when the details of those operations were exposed, retrenchment and soul-searching at Langley, criticisms that the CIA had become risk-averse, then another period of aggressive covert action. Sometimes the cycle began at the very start of a presidency. During his first week in office, President John F. Kennedy told his advisers he didn’t believe that the CIA was aggressive enough in Vietnam and set in motion a secret war against Hanoi that would eventually become
the largest and most complex
covert action of its time.