The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Pak-One was seen off by Lieutenant General Mirza Aslam Beg, the vice COAS, at the Bahawalpur airport. He boarded a smaller turbojet to take him to the Dhamial Army Aviation Airbase in Rawalpindi. On his way to his destination, his pilot overheard a helicopter pilot telling the control tower about the crash. He diverted his turbojet to the site, saw the blazing wreckage on the ground, and resumed his journey. After arriving at the Dhamial Airbase, General Beg rushed to the general headquarters of the army and assumed the rank of the COAS.

  On hearing the news, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, chair of the Senate since 1985 and a confidante of Zia ul Haq, drove to army headquarters, well aware that a provision in the constitution entitled him to become the acting president in case of a power vacuum. Once he had bonded with General Beg, he assumed the presidency. That evening, as army units moved swiftly to cordon off official residences, government buildings, television stations, and other strategic locations in Islamabad, Ishaq Khan addressed the nation on television. He declared ten days of official mourning.

  In Delhi the government announced three days of mourning. Indian president Ramaswamy Venkataraman attended Zia ul Haq’s funeral on August 19. And Rajiv Gandhi cancelled the celebration of his birthday on the twentieth.

  Three major published documents have dealt with the possible perpetrator of this terrorist act. The official board of inquiry, assisted by six US Air Force experts, submitted its report in November 1988. Edward Jay Epstein, an American journalist, investigated the case and published his account in the September 1989 edition of Vanity Fair.

  Finally, the findings of Barbara Crossette, former South Asia correspondent of the New York Times, appeared in the fall 2005 issue of the World Policy Journal. Her star interviewee was Bahawalpur-based General Mahmud Ali Durrani, who was in charge of the tank field tests at the testing site of Tamewali. (The US-made M1 tank designed for desert warfare failed the field trial chiefly because its filters got choked by the local dust, which was a mixture of sand and clay, according to Durrani.) After arriving in Pak-One at the Bahawalpur air port, Zia ul Haq had flown to Tamewali and conferred with Durrani, who presented Zia ul Haq with two crates of mangoes, a local specialty. The president took the crates in his helicopter on his return flight to the Bahawalpur airport to be transferred to Pak-One. These mangoes were checked, one by one, by security, according to Durrani. “I believe some mangoes were also loaded at Bahawalpur which were presented [to Zia ul Haq] by the local military and civilian leadership,” he told Crossette. He had no control over those mangoes or other baggage put on the plane.57

  Pakistan’s board of inquiry ruled out mechanical failure mentioned by Lockheed, the manufacturer of the plane. It concluded that “the accident was most probably caused through the perpetuation of a criminal act or sabotage.” It added that the explosives found in the wreckage and “the use of ultra-sophisticated techniques” indicated “involvement of a specialist organization well versed with carrying out such tasks and possessing the means and abilities for its execution.”58

  Epstein’s inquiry established that President Zia ul Haq’s security staff had gone through the standard procedure for his safety. Pak-One had done the 310-mile flight to and from Bahawalpur the day before. The pilot, Wing Commander Mashood Hassan, had been chosen by Zia ul Haq himself and cleared by air force intelligence. A Cessna security plane did the final check of the area and gave the all clear before Pak-One was allowed to take off. Once the wreckage was sifted and samples of soil taken, the recovered parts of the victims’ bodies were sent in body bags to the Bahawalpur Military Hospital on the night of August 17 and stored there for autopsies by a team of Pakistani and American pathologists.

  The following afternoon, however, the hospital authorities were ordered to return the bags to the coffins for immediate burial. The key evidence of what happened, particularly to the pilot and copilot, thus got buried.59 Durrani explained to Crossette that all the victims were reduced to bits of charred flesh and that they could be identified only by clothing or stray pieces of identification. Zia ul Haq was nothing more than his jawbone. The Pakistani authorities lacked the technical expertise to deal with that sort of contingency.60

  An analysis of the chemicals in the wreckage by the laboratory of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco in Washington found traces of pentaerythritol tertranitrate (PNET), a high explosive used by saboteurs as a detonator, and antimony sulfide used in fuses to set off a device. By using these chemicals, Epstein explained, “Pakistan ordinance experts reconstructed a low-level explosive detonator which could have been used to burst a flask the size of a soda can which probably contained an odorless poison gas [most likely VX] that incapacitated the pilots.”61

  Murtaza Bhutto, the elder son of Zulfikar who had led the Al Zulfikar group in Kabul but later moved to Damascus, had the self-confessed motivation. He had admitted that the guerilla group had tried to assassinate Zia ul Haq on five previous occasions. Once in 1982 a missile it fired had narrowly missed hitting Pak-One.62

  The Al Zulfikar group, Epstein claims, took credit for the Pak-One explosion in a call to the BBC, but the Damascus-based Murtaza retrieved it once it became public that the US ambassador had been killed.63 Zia ul Haq’s son Ijaz ul Haq told Crossette in mid-1989 that he was “101 percent sure” that Murtaza Bhutto was involved.64 But he failed to provide any evidence. His unsubstantiated claim ran counter to what Fatima Bhutto, daughter of Murtaza, had to say in her memoir. “Officially, Al Zulfikar, inactive in the years since [Murtaza’s] brother Shahnawaz’s murder [in 1985], was disbanded,” she noted. “I know my father would have loved knowing that AZO [Al Zulfikar Organization] was among the many groups whose names popped up in regard to General Zia’s plane crash, but their symbolic resistance to the dictator’s tyranny had ended.”65

  The KGB working with KHAD had the reach and the expertise. The State Department blamed KHAD for many terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities in 1987 and 1988. In a few cases, Radio Kabul even announced the bombings before they occurred.66

  Israel’s Mossad too was highly motivated. Israel had repeated its earlier offer of a joint attack on the Kahuta nuclear facility to Rajiv Gandhi in 1987. He had declined it. Mossad had bombed, blackmailed, and threatened many European suppliers to the Kahuta Research Laboratory because Zia ul Haq had promised to share nuclear bomb technology with other Muslim nations. Among those who suspected the involvement of Mossad was Washington’s ambassador to India, John Gunther Dean. Later, in his interview with Crossette, he went on to qualify his statement by saying Israel could have been part of a multinational plot involving India and the Soviet KGB.67

  RAW’s involvement in the crash was less likely, since Indian leaders were unsure who would succeed Zia ul Haq. The accusing finger at the CIA seemed unconvincing, since the US ambassador was scheduled to accompany the Pakistani president. And that schedule, finalized on August 13, according to Durrani,68 was known to the CIA.

  But none of the above would have had the means to abort the chances of a postmortem of the pilots. “Any foreign intelligence service or even Murtaza [Bhutto] might have had the motive and even the means to bring down Pak-One but they would not have had the ability to stop planned autopsies at a military hospital in Pakistan, stifle interrogations or, for that matter, keep the FBI out of the picture,” concluded Epstein. “Nor would they have much of a reason for making the whole thing seem like an accident rather than an assassination. Only elements inside Pakistan would have an obvious motive for making the death of Zia, Rahman and 28 others look like something more legitimate than a coup d’état.”69

  As for the means deployed, the most plausible explanation seems to be that the mango crate loaded directly at the Bahawalpur airport, which by design or accident went unchecked, contained a canister of nerve gas with a timer, which, when dispersed by the plane’s air-conditioning system, killed both pilots, sending the plane out of control.

  At least that possibility in
spired Mohammed Hanif, a London-based journalist and a former Pakistan Air Force pilot, to title his novel on the subject as A Case of Exploding Mangoes, published two decades after the event. His satirical work of imagination attacked militarism, false piety, and overregulation of personal life—as epitomized by Zia ul Haq.70

  13: Rajiv-Benazir

  Rapport—Cut Short

  On hearing of the air crash near Bahawalpur, Benazir Bhutto privately rejoiced at Muhammad Zia ul Haq’s violent death as just retribution for having her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, hanged on trumped-up charges. In public, though, she described the incendiary event as an “act of divine intervention.” Pressured by the Ronald Reagan administration, Zia ul Haq had allowed her to return to Pakistan in 1986 from her self-exile in London.

  Born into the household of a super-rich feudal lord in Larkana, Sindh, Benazir was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Murree and Karachi, and then, at age sixteen, sent to study politics at Radcliffe College. In the absence of a chauffeur-driven car at home, she had to walk to her classes for the first time in her life. By the time she traveled to Shimla along with her president father, “Pinky”—as she was nicknamed—was a Westernized teenager who dressed in clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue and led the life of a doted-on daughter of an affluent foreign leader.

  Following her graduation from Harvard in 1973, she enrolled at Oxford University for further studies. She drove around in a yellow two-seater MG. Her famed parties were liberally lubricated with alcohol, and she loved to dance. “Her Oxford lifestyle was almost a parody of the rich Islamic girl released from the constraints of a rigid Muslim home,” recalled a male contemporary of hers in Oxford. “When she stood for the presidency of the Oxford Union, she skillfully used the rumors about her un-Islamic activities. . . . At the same time she rallied the feminists with the suggestion that she would be held back by the male chauvinists and reactionaries—even though they were the kind of men with whom she enjoyed her leisure time.”1 Endowed with fair skin and high cheekbones in an oval face, the svelte Bhutto had an appealing persona. Yet at her first attempt at the Union presidency she ended up in third place. But after graduating in 1976 with a second in politics, philosophy, and economics, she stood again while pursuing studies in international law and diplomacy at St. Catharine’s College, aiming to join Pakistan’s diplomatic service. She won, becoming the first Asian woman to hold the presidency in the Union’s history.

  Soon after her return home in 1977, her prime minster father was removed from office in a military coup. A few months after his hanging in April 1979, she and her mother, Nusrat Begum, then chair of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), were charged with offenses under martial law. She spent much of the next five years in solitary confinement in dingy prison cells or under house arrest—with a brief respite in 1982 to undergo an ear operation in London. She went into self-exile in January 1984, taking up residence in a London apartment.

  On her return to Lahore on April 10, 1986, she was greeted by two million people. She married Asif Ali Zardari in December 1987, thus overcoming the popular prejudice against older, unmarried women in Pakistan.

  Once Acting President Ghulam Ishaq Khan had announced the election for the National Assembly on November 16, she and Nusrat Begum Bhutto started campaigning furiously for the PPP.

  On the opposite side, the triad of Ishaq Khan, Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Mirza Aslam Beg, and the Islamist chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, resolved to stop the PPP bandwagon. They sponsored the forming of a coalition of conservative and Islamist parties as the Islami Jamhoori Ittihad (Urdu: Islamic Democratic Alliance; IJI), headed by Muhammad Nawaz Sharif. Gul coached IJI candidates to stress that Western-educated Benazir Bhutto, being a close friend of America, was a security risk for Pakistan’s nuclear program. In its leaflets IJI questioned if a woman could become the prime minister of an Islamic state. Posters titled “Villains in Bangles” showed faces of Benazir and Nusrat superimposed on the photos of models riding cycles in swimsuits. The photo of Nusrat Bhutto dancing with President Gerald Ford during the Bhuttos’ visit to Washington in 1975, discovered by Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmed of the ISI, was exploited to the hilt.

  From Party Girl to Prime Minister

  Yet of the 207 contested seats in the National Assembly on November 16, the PPP scored 94, far ahead of the IJI’s 56. Benazir Bhutto won because of being the daughter of the PPP founder, Zulfikar Ali, who was accorded the captivating honorific of Shaheed (Urdu: Martyr), and because the bulk of Pakistanis, who followed the tolerant Sufi version of Islam, yearned to be freed from the puritanical Islamic rigidity imposed on them by dictator Muhammad Zia ul Haq.

  Despite emerging as the leader of the largest group in the National Assembly, it was not until December 1 that Ishaq Khan called on her to form the government. He did so only after he had her accept his conditions conveyed to her by an intermediary: stay away from the nuclear issue; retain Zia ul Haq’s foreign minister, Shahzada Yaqub Khan; and respect the army.

  Benazir Bhutto led a coalition government that included the recently formed Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz (Urdu: Migrant National Movement; MQM), a party of Urdu-speaking Muslim immigrants from India. At the age of thirty-five, she became the first executive prime minister of a Muslim country. She also headed the defense and finance ministries.

  Within a month of Bhutto assuming office, Rajiv Gandhi, accompanied by Sonia and their two children, arrived in Islamabad to attend the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) from December 29 to 31. As SAARC hostess Bhutto invited Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi to dinner, attended by Asif Ali Zardari and Nusrat Begum.

  Since all the diners were nonvegetarian, the dishes they consumed did not deviate from the regular fare at the Pakistani couple’s dinner table. They shared the cuisine of the northern Indian subcontinent. Equally, the wardrobes of Benazir and Sonia had much in common, with Benazir having more pairs of salwar kameez than saris and blouses, and Sonia the other way around. The division of the subcontinent’s northern zone had left intact the common cuisine, dress, and language.

  Recalling the dinner, Rajiv later told his close aides that while Benazir seemed nervous about the possibility of the ISI having bugged the dining room, Zardari was uninhibited in his conversation.2 Zardari would have been even more relaxed if Rajiv had contrived to move the conversation to Bollywood movies, telling him and Benazir about the up-and-coming Bollywood actors Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, and Shah Rukh Khan3—all born in 1965, the year of the Second Indo-Pakistan War. After all, it was movies and a movie theater that had brought Benazir and Asif Ali together. The Bambino Cinema in Karachi, owned by Asif Ali’s father, Hakim Ali, was remarkable on two counts. Its flashing blue neon sign with an image of a woman dancer with gyrating hips glowed all night. Its staple fare was foreign films, patronized among others by Benazir, an aficionado of foreign movies. And it was at this theater that Asif Ali Zardari had first set his eyes on his future wife.

  In terms of social hierarchy, Hakim Ali Zardari, who besides the cinema and the floors above it owned a modest house in rural Sindh, was way below the celebrated Bhutto family. But in a society in which brides were always five to ten years younger than grooms, Asif Ali opted to marry a woman two years his senior in order to boost his social status.

  During their one-on-one meeting with Rajiv the next day, Benazir Bhutto promised to choke off Pakistan’s aid to Sikh separatists. In a 2007 interview, she said, “Does anyone remember that it was I who kept my promise to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi when we met and he appealed to me for help in tackling the Sikhs? Has India forgotten December 1988? Have they forgotten the results of that meeting and how I helped curb the Sikh militancy?” In return, Rajiv Gandhi promised to withdraw Indian troops from the disputed Siachen Glacier, a commitment he later moved forward to a period after the 1989 general election, which he lost.4 Benazir Bhutto reportedly handed over a dossier
of names containing the covert identities of Pakistan’s agents among radical Sikhs who were master­minding the Sikh insurgency. That aided RAW enormously in tracking down the Sikh terrorists and destroying their network—a process that lasted nearly five years.

  On December 31, 1988, Bhutto and Gandhi formalized the informal understanding between Zia ul Haq and Gandhi from three years earlier about nuclear sites, and signed the “Agreement on Prohibition of Attack Against Nuclear Installations and Facilities.” It went into effect on January 27, 1991, and has held ever since.

  Another accord between the two neighbors that has remained in force since 1960 is the World Bank–brokered Indus Waters Treaty (see Chapter 7, p. 155). The treaty is monitored by the Permanent Indus Commission, with a commissioner appointed by each country. Despite several crises and wars, the two sides continued to exchange pertinent data and maintain a cooperative spirit—elements starkly missing from their stances on Kashmir.

  Rajiv-Benazir Rapport Fades

  The Gandhis and Bhutto-Zardari met again in Paris on the bicentenary of the French Revolution on July 14, 1989. Here British prime minister Margaret Thatcher subconsciously fell into the role of a nanny, chaperoning her two subcontinental wards, who seemed to get along famously.

  On his return journey Rajiv Gandhi stopped in Moscow for a meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and then flew to Islamabad to be received as a state guest on July 16 at the Chaklala airport. “Bedecked like a bride, the Chaklala overflows with people,” reported Madhu Jain in India Today magazine. “The Gandhis greet Benazir and husband Zardari like long lost friends—though it’s not been quite 24 hours since they last met in Paris.” At the state banquet, Rajiv Gandhi said, “When an Indian and a Pakistani meet as human beings in a human encounter there is an instant mutual recognition, an embrace that transcends the passing passions of politics. . . . Why must we go round to meet each other? Why can’t we meet in each other’s hearths and homes?”5