88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (46 page)

Such precautions had long since been a way of life in a country where a measure of latent hostility always lurked just below the surface for Westerners, and particularly Americans. Large crowds, especially those gathered for Friday prayers, were to be strictly avoided. And any concentration of Westerners that had been advertised or could be anticipated, such as that at the Sunday morning pickup point for our hiking group, was a potential invitation to tragedy for the unwary.

For the two years before 9/11, on every schoolday morning, I would stand before the heavy, solid metal gate at the front of our house, waiting for the school bus while my son Doug stayed inside. Mr. ‘Abdul Qadir, the guard, knew everyone in the neighborhood. I would scan up and down the block, and quiz him about any loiterers, anyone who seemed out of place. Anybody unknown would be confronted by Qadir, in his green-and-khaki uniform with the outsize brass buckle, a stout stick tucked under his arm, and asked to explain his business.

None of this diminished our enjoyment of an exotic and fascinating country. We traveled widely, especially in the mountainous north, hiking in the Kagan Valley and along the rushing torrents of Kafiristan, near Chitral. Doug and I would go on weekend jaunts to experience the sights and smells of the ancient bazaars of Lahore and Peshawar. While I was chained to a desk, Paula joined groups to scale the heights of Nanga Parbat, ninth highest mountain in the world, and to float down the Indus River on pole barges.

When 9/11 struck, Doug had been devastated to leave his school and head off, with his mother, to exile in America. He had also been mystified by the attitudes of some of his Pakistani schoolmates: though closely acquainted with the West, and from families who had opted expressly for an American-style education for their offspring, many displayed satisfaction at seeing Americans as the victims, rather than the agents, of violence. “Now you see what it’s like,” one had said.

With families away and a huge crisis to deal with, I and my colleagues had been consumed in a blur of eighteen-hour days and
seven-day workweeks. But with the fall of Kandahar, I encouraged them to carve out a little time, at least, for personal relaxation. Beginning in February, Dave and I began to indulge ourselves in a weekly round of golf, which became a Sunday morning ritual.

Golf in South Asia is something of a communal undertaking. On a reference from a friend, I sought out Sulayman as my caddy. A tall, slender, laconic young man, and an excellent golfer, Sulayman took on additional duties as my instructor/coach and, golf being golf, occasional spiritual advisor as well. He soon recruited the rest of my golfing entourage. This included a bag carrier, two or three ball-spotters, and various other hangers-on of indeterminate role.

We would meet at the Islamabad Golf Club. Upon my arrival, my various satraps would set about industriously cleaning balls and scrubbing clubs as Sulayman and I went through our prescribed warm-ups on the practice tee and at the putting green. As we made our cumbersome way around the course, the spirits of my golfing claque would rise and fall sharply with the vicissitudes of my game. A blistering drive of 250 yards down the right-center fairway would be cause for euphoria. Player, caddy, and bag carriers would march off the tee smartly, while the ball-spotting outliers would converge in the fairway to marvel at the prowess of their patron. An outright duff would produce despondency: shoulders would slump, and my followers would scuffle dejectedly along the turf in their ill-fitting sandals.

Having long been away from the game, and months of overwork having done nothing to improve upon my modest skills, a significant number of my drives would sail beyond the boundary stakes in the direction of deep eucalyptus groves, where a loud report would signal the impact of ball with trunk. It was the duty of the ball-spotters to find these errant missiles. Not infrequently, I would arrive on the scene after such mishaps in a foul humor, only to find my spotters loitering nonchalantly near a ball—mine—in the first cut of the rough. I would raise an eyebrow. “Good bounce, sir,” was the assessment. I would look at them skeptically, but what was one to say? Far be it from me to subject my good fortune to excessive scrutiny. It had characterized most of my career.

Over the weeks, my game improved under Sulayman’s patient tutelage, though I sometimes failed to appreciate his wry humor. On one occasion I sent a drive on a wide parabola to an area beyond the ability even of my ball-spotters to penetrate. A drop in the fairway was followed by a pathetic miss-hit of 50 yards or so. A fourth strike sent the ball into a deep sandtrap. It required three more swings, accompanied by some imaginative oaths, to propel the ball from the trap and onto the green, a good 80 feet from the pin. I was sufficiently disgusted by this time that I didn’t bother to line up the putt, instead knocking the ball haphazardly in the general direction of the hole. It struck the back of the cup and went in. Still seething, I stalked silently toward the next tee, Sulayman matching me stride for stride. “Putting good,” he said.

On Sunday, February 3, I was about to get up for my weekly round with Dave when I received an unexpected call from Paula. My father had just died of a heart attack, collapsing on the tennis court. I had known he wasn’t doing so well, as the symptoms of congestive heart failure were creeping back ten years after quadruple bypass surgery. I rushed home to my mother and my siblings.

After the funeral, there were important decisions to be made. Dependents of official Americans were being allowed to return to Pakistan. Doug very much wanted to rejoin his classmates and resume his old life, but Paula was skeptical: there were only six months left in our tour, and she and Doug had put down roots in Virginia. Like Doug, I felt strongly that they should return to Pakistan. There were dangers, yes, but we had always managed them before. We were devoted to service, and to overseas living; this is what we did.

The decision to allow dependents to return was not without controversy. CIA, and specifically CTC, were leery. For my part, I had argued strongly that the threat was manageable. In the weeks and months after the start of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan there had been mass demonstrations in Pakistani cities, and public outrage at the United States had been feverish. And yet, there had been no attacks on Americans; other Western embassies, though on heightened alert, had allowed their dependents to remain. Now, with hostilities in Afghanistan effectively ended, the atmosphere was becoming more normal.

CTC had wondered about the effect of al-Qa’ida militants fleeing Afghanistan into Pakistan. Most of these, I pointed out, were simple fighters. They were disoriented, on unfamiliar ground, and most were attempting to transit Pakistan as quickly as possible for less hostile regions. We and the Pakistanis were capturing them in wholesale numbers. Yes, al-Qa’ida would have both motive and some means to strike us, but that was true in many other places; there was no reason, I said, to believe that we could not, with prudence, mitigate the threat to our safety. Most of the dependents returned to post, Paula and Doug among them.

We and our fellow hikers had stopped for a break on a mountain path when I received a call from the Marine standing guard at Post One, the principal security monitoring center of the embassy. Details were sketchy, but there had been a number of explosions at the Christian church located in the diplomatic quarter. There were dead and wounded. The church was regularly attended by Americans from the mission and NGOs.

When Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin saw me rushing down the hall toward her office two hours later, her eyes widened in shocked surprise. It was the first of several such encounters I would have that day. Initial reports from the church had listed me among the dead, and Chamberlin had so reported to her senior staff.

It took some time to piece the facts together, but it appeared a slight, dark-skinned young man had run down the center aisle of the half-full church, thrown several grenades, and then blown himself up. Among the seventy or so Pakistani Christians and Westerners present, five were killed and forty-six injured. That evening, Paula, keeping vigil, as one of the embassy nurses, over the Americans lying wounded at the hospital, sat down quietly with the embassy physician as they explained to young Zachary Green that his mother, Barbara, and his half sister Kristen Wormsley, were dead. Kristen was about to graduate from high school; her college plans had been set. Zachary’s father Milton, like Barbara a member of the embassy staff, had also been hurt. Ten Americans had been wounded in all.

Within days of the church attack, the wife of a French diplomat discovered
a bomb attached to her car. The January abduction in Karachi and execution of Daniel Pearl, the
Wall Street Journal
reporter, could no longer be considered an unfortunate aberration. There was now no question of official American families remaining in Pakistan. Doug said his final goodbyes at school, and he and Paula left.

Pakistan continued its descent into violence. It had long been a turbulent place, where civic tensions could spawn vicious mobs at a moment’s notice, and where religiously inspired attacks against Shia, Christians, and other minorities were common. Now the list of targets would increase. On May 8, eleven French naval engineers and two Pakistanis were killed by a car bomb outside the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. On June 15, I journeyed to Karachi to visit colleagues who had escaped serious harm when a car bomb detonated just outside the U.S. Consulate.

Post-9/11 Pakistan is not alone in succumbing to greater levels of violence. We have seen similar events throughout the region. But in my view, America has often greatly overreacted. Experiences such as that in Pakistan have made us gun-shy. Far too many posts, including those in countries where terrorist violence has been relatively infrequent, have been declared “unaccompanied,” with no non-employees allowed. Rather than
managing
risk, the U.S. government has sought to
avoid
risk. There is a price to be paid for such timidity. Unaccompanied posts eventually suffer greatly in their performance when employees, the vast majority of whom have family responsibilities that our culture, rightly, takes more seriously than ever, avoid them. Even in places to which it is not appropriate to bring children, at least permitting adult dependents would be an improvement.

Worse yet, in all too many cases, those employees who are assigned to dangerous posts are not permitted to do their jobs properly by traveling freely and maintaining local contacts, instead being confined to fortified installations. Yes, greater openness will inevitably produce more official American casualties, in an environment where recriminations in Congress and elsewhere make sensible risk-taking greatly hazardous
to the careers of senior bureaucrats. But if America is to meet its responsibilities, courage, both physical and political, will be required. Like Horatius at the gate, American spies and diplomats will accept the risks associated with their calling, but only if permitted to do so.

MARCH 29, 2002

I
T HAD BEEN A
particularly late night, but I had a spring in my step as I strode across the sun-dappled lobby of a luxury hotel in Islamabad. I found my delegation, several members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and their wives, sitting in the breakfast room. This was not the sort of meeting I would normally hold, and certainly not the normal venue for it. I had held my formal briefing for the legislators the previous afternoon, but had promised to stop by before their planned departure that morning to update them regarding a certain ongoing matter. They looked up as I ambled over to their table. I held the suspense for a bit longer as I settled into a chair and greeted them confidently. I looked about for some coffee. “I have good news,” I said finally. “We’ve captured Abu Zubayda.”

Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, aka Abu Zubayda, had been an obsession for me for two and a half years. For months even before the February night in 2000 when former Ambassador Bill Milam and I met with President Musharraf to seek his help in capturing the man, I had watched with growing frustration as this master terrorist logistician traveled repeatedly through Pakistan to and from al-Qa’ida’s Afghan training camps. He maintained a sort of underground railroad, facilitating the movement of young Muslim men to and from their courses of instruction in the dark arts, providing them with tickets, guidance, lodging, and assistance with their travel documents. We couldn’t generate information precise or immediate enough to force the government of Pakistan to capture him on his jaunts through their
country. And in spite of President Musharraf’s assurances and my own importunings, General Mahmud of the ISI would not help us.

All that changed at the precipice of 9/11, but in the months thereafter Zubayda went to ground. In February 2002, reliable reporting placed him in Waziristan, in the Pakistani Tribal Areas. By that time, hundreds of foreign fighters were fleeing Afghanistan, trying to make their way through Pakistan, which they now considered hostile territory, into Iran, from where they hoped to return to the Arab countries most of them had come from. We presumed Zubayda was arranging travel or safehaven for fugitive Arab fighters in the Tribal Areas, but could not be sure, and our sources did not want to look for him there. Zubayda was a professional, and highly suspicious. If our agents were to search for him without a transparently good reason for doing so, they would immediately fall under sustained, and perhaps lethal, suspicion.

In early March, we had clear indications that Abu Zubayda was somewhere in Faisalabad, in the “settled areas” of Pakistan, and that a significant number of his fleeing Afghan Arab fighters were with him. This initially came as a surprise. Faisalabad had never been on our screen, but on examination it proved to be a likely place for our quarry to hide. A gritty, sprawling industrial town in northeast Punjab Province, it was the third largest metropolis in Pakistan, after Karachi and Lahore, though with nowhere near the prominence or social cachet. Located at a major road and rail junction about 75 miles west-southwest of Lahore, it was an easy place to travel quietly to or from, a perfect place to get lost in.