Dirty Wars (78 page)

In any event, given the programs Raymond Davis was known to have worked on, the US version of events and its characterization of him as a diplomat or a “technical adviser” or, as the
New York Times
characterized the US position: “
a paper-shuffling diplomat
who stamped visas as a day job,” are impossible to believe. Perhaps he was CIA. It is also possible that his CIA status was a cover within a cover and that, as my military intelligence source suggested, he was working with JSOC. “That's common,”
Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer told me. “It all gets mish-mashed together. The sad truth is,” Shaffer asserted, US officials, including ambassadors and policy makers not directly looped in to an operation, “don't really know, what's going on, anywhere. It all gets kind of blurred together.” Shaffer added that Davis's cover was all about “Layering.” He said, “You always have a cover within a cover and it depends on how far you are trying to throw someone off, especially if you assume you are going to be rolled up at some point in time. You always have throwaways.”

It is not uncommon for CIA operatives to work under cover as diplomats. It is standard operating procedure for many nations. The RAO, where Davis said he worked, was a common cover for US spies. Everyone who needed to know was aware of such cover arrangements. When an operation goes south, it usually does not play out in public. Discreet arrangements are made, and sometimes prisoners are exchanged or payoffs authorized. It is all part of the spy game. But this particular incident occurred in broad daylight, in a crowded intersection, with scores of eyewitnesses.

If Davis had been revealed to be working for JSOC in Pakistan, that would have been the scenario most offensive to the ISI. After Obama's 2008 election, while Pakistan's government tried to curb the flow of CIA operatives into the country, the United States began increasing the number of covert personnel it allowed “cover” as diplomats. The ISI had long dealt with the CIA, but JSOC was an entirely different beast, one the ISI would find terrifying.

In addition to being the lead agency in US targeted killing operations, JSOC was also the premier US entity responsible for counterproliferation. In Pakistan, theories that the United States was plotting to snatch the country's nuclear weapons were rampant and the source of endless commentary on its news channels. The idea wasn't just paranoia. JSOC had in fact
drawn up plans
to secure Pakistan's nukes in the event of a coup or other destabilization. In the late 1990s, it was revealed that plans existed for JSOC to be prepared to deploy anywhere across the globe “to recover sensitive NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] materials in the hands of terrorist groups, to slip undetected into rogue countries to gain evidence of a secret WMD development program, to sabotage such a program, and to
detect, disarm, disable, or seize WMD
.” While such plans were hardly unique to Pakistan, they fueled the ISI's obsession with JSOC.

Former Pakistani brigadier F. B. Ali described two phases of JSOC's operations in Pakistan, the first being the “hot pursuit” arrangement with JSOC dating back to President Musharraf's time. “The
second phase of the JSOC influx
occurred after the US decided to undertake a large, long-term aid program for Pakistan,” Ali observed. “The US applied for visas
for a large number of staff and support personnel to manage the program. The ISI insisted on security vetting all visa applicants, which held up the process. The US exerted huge pressure on the government, warning that the aid program would be adversely affected.” Pakistan's government, Ali alleged, acquiesced and allowed a large flow of Americans into Pakistan. That claim was backed up by an ISI official who claimed thousands of visas had been issued to US Embassy personnel over a five-month period leading up to the Davis incident, “
following a government directive
to the Pakistan Embassy in Washington to issue visas without the usual vetting by the interior ministry and the ISI.” According to an Associated Press report in late February 2011, “Within two days of receiving that directive, the Pakistani Embassy issued 400 visas and since then thousands more have been issued.” In all, according to the Pakistani Embassy in Washington,
more than 3,500 visas
were issued to US diplomats, military personnel and employees of “allied agencies” in 2010.

At the time of the Davis incident, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry stated that there were 851 Americans with diplomatic immunity in Pakistan, 297 of whom were not working “
in a diplomatic capacity
.” But the Interior Ministry listed more than four hundred “
special Americans
,” suspected by Pakistani security officials to be “operatives of US intelligence agencies who are on covert missions in Pakistan, reporting to” JSOC. “
The ‘official' version
of what they are doing is gathering counterterrorism intelligence,” Brigadier Ali asserted. “But the ISI rank and file knew otherwise; they just couldn't get the dominant US-friendly brass to do anything about it. Until Raymond Davis gunned down a couple of ISI auxiliaries on the streets of Lahore, and the US publicly came down like a ton of bricks to get him freed.”

Whatever Davis was doing and for whom he was doing it prior to pulling up at the Mozang Chowk intersection in Lahore on January 27, 2011, what happened that day was straight out of a spy movie.

At some point, Davis pegged the two guys on the motorcycle in front of him as a threat. As he told it, one of the men brandished a firearm in a menacing way. Davis grabbed his Glock 9 and fired five shots through his front windshield, with deadly precision, taking down Muhammad Faheem, who was on the back of the bike. One shot hit him in the head, just above his ear. Another
pierced his stomach
. The driver of the motorcycle, Faizan Haider, hopped off the bike and started to flee. Davis, Glock in hand, stepped out of his car, aimed and fired five more shots. Haider fell thirty feet from his motorcycle.
At least two shots
hit him in the back. He later died in the hospital.

According to eyewitnesses, after shooting the two men, Davis returned calmly to his vehicle and took out a military-grade radio. He called for
backup. Before getting back into his vehicle, onlookers in the crowded intersection watched as Davis walked over to the blood-soaked bodies of the two men he had shot and
photographed them
. As crowds began to descend on the streets, the potential for a mob forming was strong. Traffic police called out for Davis to stop. He ignored them, got back in his car—the windshield riddled with the bullet holes made by his own Glock—and sped off. In the meantime, a Toyota Land Cruiser was speeding through the streets of Lahore. Its
license plate
, bearing the tag LZN-6970, was a fake. The driver of Davis's backup vehicle was not about to wait in congested traffic. He punched it, hopping onto the median of a crowded road, and then darted into incoming traffic, weaving the vehicle toward Mozang Chowk. About five hundred yards from the intersection where the shooting happened, the Land Cruiser
slammed into the motorcycle
of a Pakistani man, Ibadur Rehman, crushing him, and then continued on toward the scene. After discovering that Davis was already gone, the men in the Land Cruiser fled.

By the time his backup vehicle arrived, Davis had
made it two miles
from Mozang Chowk. But the chase ended swiftly. He was confronted by local police at a crowded market in Old Anarkali in Lahore. Davis put up no resistance and was taken into custody. He worked for the US government, Davis told them. His seven-week ordeal was just beginning. While Davis was on his way to a Punjab police station for questioning, the men on his backup team were making their getaway. Somewhere near
Faletti's Hotel
, several items fell from their vehicle, among them four ammunition clips, 100 bullets, a black mask, a knife with a compass and a piece of fabric emblazoned with an American flag—another blood chit. They returned to the CIA-JSOC safe house,
destroyed all government documents
in their possession and headed for the US Consulate. The men inside that vehicle were never heard from nor seen again in Pakistan. The United States, claiming they had diplomatic immunity, whisked them out of the country before the Pakistanis could question them. “
They have flown the coop
, they are already in America,” a senior Pakistani official remarked.

It took less than twenty-four hours for word of the incident to spread like wildfire through Pakistan. In Lahore, angry mobs of protesters
called for Davis to be hanged
. Reports began emerging in the Pakistani press that Davis was CIA and a Blackwater agent. As he stood inside Lahore's Lytton Road Police Station, chaos surrounded the calm American. Police officers, investigators and others in the room spoke to one another heatedly. They stumbled to pronounce his name. Davis insisted that they find his passport. He insisted he was a consultant at the consulate in Lahore and that he had a diplomatic passport. Unlike his colleagues who had gotten
themselves in trouble in Pakistan in the months before the shooting in Lahore, Davis would not be going home anytime soon. He was transferred to Kot Lakhpat Jail as Pakistani authorities intensified their investigation, including a forensic review of the crime scene. Autopsies were performed on the three dead men (the two shot by Davis and the man who was run down by his backup team) before their bodies were handed over to their families for burial.

According to the Pakistani police investigation, Davis's claim that he fired in self-defense “
is not correct
.” The postmortem report indicated that both men who were killed by Davis were shot from behind. Witnesses told the Pakistani police that Haider was gunned down as he ran from the motorcycle “to save his life.” Davis told the police that Faheem had cocked his weapon and aimed it at him. When police recovered Faheem's weapon, “the chamber of the deceased's pistol [was] empty and the bullets were in the magazine.” Moreover, according to police, “no one saw them aiming at” Davis. When police asked Davis for a license for his weapons, they said he couldn't produce one. To the Punjab police, the incident quickly became a murder investigation. Davis was
ordered held for six days
, pending further investigation.

The particulars of the incident were not nearly as important as the high-stakes game that would play out between the United States and Pakistan. Unbeknownst to the Pakistani government, five months before Raymond Davis was taken into custody, US intelligence had made a discovery of potentially incalculable value. The CIA had located a courier linked to Osama bin Laden. They tracked his movements, which ultimately led them to a large house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Using satellite imagery, intelligence analysts noticed the movements of a mysterious figure inside the compound. The White House believed it had found bin Laden. Just as Admiral McRaven began gaming out scenarios JSOC could use to kill or capture the al Qaeda leader, Davis had shot the men in Lahore and now sat in a Pakistani jail.
The United States feared
that if it raided the house in Abbottabad, Davis could be killed in retaliation for the violation of Pakistan's sovereignty. Washington had to get its man out of there.

Unaware of the US planning to go after what Washington believed was bin Laden's home inside Pakistan, the government in Islamabad viewed the Davis incident as an opportunity to win the upper hand in its intelligence wars with the United States. “For the ISI, the
Davis incident is a godsend
,” an editorial in the
Economist
concluded. “It is furious with the way American agents work independently, tracking al-Qaeda, Taliban and other militants who have slipped into Lahore and Karachi to flee drone attacks on the mountainous border with Afghanistan.”

The US government's response to Davis's arrest was clumsy. It is entirely possible that Davis's actual role in Pakistan—whether CIA, JSOC or both—was not fully known by the US Embassy. The day after Davis was arrested, a spokesman for the US Embassy in Islamabad, Alberto Rodriguez, told a Pakistani television station, “
I can confirm
that the person that's involved in the incident is an employee of the consulate.” Soon after, on January 27, the US Embassy sent a diplomatic note to the Pakistani Foreign Ministry claiming Davis as “an
employee of U.S. Consulate
General Lahore and holder of a diplomatic passport.” That was consistent with the statement Davis gave to police. The problem for the United States, however, was that this designation meant that the Pakistani authorities could argue that he was not entitled to full immunity but was instead covered by the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. That treaty provided that “Consular officers shall not be liable to arrest or detention pending trial,
except in the case of a grave crime
and pursuant to a decision by the competent judicial authority.” Surely, the Pakistanis argued, murder is a grave crime.

On February 3, the United States revised its position. This time, it labeled Davis “a member of the
administrative and technical staff
of the U.S. embassy.” According to Pakistani officials, Davis had never been certified as a diplomat because of “
unresolved queries
” about him made by Pakistan to the United States.

Rage was spreading across the country. Ten days after the shooting, in a hospital bed in Faisalabad, Shumaila Kanwal, Faheem's widow, was using her last breaths to record a video statement. She had swallowed rat poison and was ending her own life to protest what she called her husband's murder at the hands of a US agent. “
I want blood for blood
,” she said as she gasped for air and struggled to focus her eyes. “The way my husband was shot, his killer should be shot in the same fashion.” Imran Haider, the brother of the other man shot by Davis, said his brother had recently learned that his wife was pregnant. He expressed anger that his brother was being “smeared” as a bandit. “
He was clean
,” he declared. “All we want is for this American to go on trial and for a proper investigation to be done. He should face the death penalty. No deals.”