by Adrian Levy
This was an “intelligence failure” of the greatest proportions, Pasha offered, as he desperately cast around for a scapegoat, asking for a full briefing from S-Wing—the untamable jihad section of the ISI.43
May 2, 2011, 8:35 A.M., Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Rawalpindi
An ISI colleague had woken the ISPR chief, General Athar Abbas, at four A.M. “Sir, there’s a rumor going around that Osama bin Laden is dead.”44 He arrived at his office next to GHQ (general headquarters) in Rawalpindi to find his staff “in a total state of paralysis.” And he could not help but wonder why no one more senior had called him. By five A.M., the whole of Pakistan was live to the news and the ISPR had no handle on it.45
President Obama appeared live on TV at eight thirty-five A.M. Pakistan time. The power had come back on in Abbottabad, so the residents of Bilal Town watched amazed as he confirmed what had taken place on their doorstep. “Going forward, it is essential that Pakistan continues to join us in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates,” Obama said, trying to soften the blow.46
General Athar was inundated with calls from the world’s press. “It was so hot,” he remembered. “I didn’t know what to say.” Hearing nothing from up the chain, he asked Kayani and Pasha for permission to issue a statement. “I said that we had to face the brunt and then at least nobody would question us. But the clearance wasn’t coming.” At three P.M. he sent more text messages. “The press is going to eat us up if we don’t interact. We should say it was a security lapse,” he advised the army chiefs. “We should be up front about it. It will at least take some steam out.” Neither of them replied.47
That night, with Pakistan having made no comment, Athar returned home and confided in his wife: “There is a great anger and frustration in the army.” It would find a vent in the civilian world, he feared, and this conflict would feed an age-old cycle of attrition—the rhythm of life in Pakistan since 1947.48
Peshawar, Pakistan
Dr. Shakil Afridi watched the events unfold with horror. Until today he had been fully intending to return to Abbottabad to continue with his next round of vaccinations for Save the Children. While working for Kate, Sue, and Toni, he had never questioned their demands or voiced suspicions, thinking instead of the $55,000 prize in his bank account and more money to come. Now as he watched footage of the Waziristan Palace and learned that this was where Osama bin Laden had lived, he felt sick to his stomach.
Dr. Afridi could see how it looked. The CIA had used him to determine whether Osama was living in the house, a treasonable act that would condemn him in the eyes of the nation, especially the ISI.49 He was terrified.
He tried to call his expat STC colleagues. All the phone numbers he had for them were disconnected. Should he tell his wife, Imrana, or keep quiet? Should he see if their old U.S. visas were still valid? Running would imply guilt, he told himself. He decided to stay put. Maybe Kate or Sue would surface to help extract him from Pakistan. It was the least they owed him.
May 2, 2011, 2 P.M., Washington, D.C.
As Pakistan went to bed, John Brennan addressed the American press at the White House. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser had some direct things to say that seemed like common sense. It was “inconceivable that Osama did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time.”50 Brennan had pointed to what many were thinking, even though it clashed with the White House’s more conciliatory tone. They had got their man, and in the president’s view they did not need to throw Pakistan under the bus.
Having just got off to sleep, General Pasha was woken with the news. He was furious, but he and Kayani still held off issuing a statement.51 In the absence of any official Pakistani reaction or explanation, a global media scrum had converged on Bilal Town, with reporters looking to find answers for themselves.
@ReallyVirtual was there, too. “Watching the watchers watching the watchmen watching the compound … or something like that …” he tweeted over a picture of the house that he referred to as “la Den.”
At ISPR, General Athar faced a deluge of questions he was unable to answer. “Why had the army been so slow to respond to the operation?” “Why had radars not picked up the helicopters flying in?” “Had the electricity supply been deliberately disabled to assist the U.S. operation?” “How had Osama bin Laden been able to live beside the country’s premier military academy for almost six years?” “Had the ISI known he was there all along?”
Pakistan was either complicit, or wretched, was General Athar’s private judgment. He kept thinking back to January, when the ISI had caught the Bali bomber Umar Patek in Abbottabad and Athar had sent a congratulatory message to General Pasha, suggesting they make something of it. At the time, he had not understood why Pasha had not even replied. Now he suspected there was a connection between the two incidents and that Pasha had not wanted ISPR to blunder into a much more sensitive situation.
“The ISI missed very glaring evidence about Umar Patek,” Athar later recalled.52 “What was he doing in Abbottabad? Why did he come? He was the golden goose. He was caught and arrested but the intelligence people failed to connect why he was there.”
Or had Athar missed something? Pasha, too, had demanded answers from S-Wing but they had declined to explain Patek’s presence or what it meant.
In the absence of any guidance from ISPR, conspiracy theories burgeoned that Kayani and Pasha had been in on the operation, and that the ISI had kept Osama prisoner for years. In the United States, several expat Pakistani “intelligence experts” emerged to claim that presidents George W. Bush and Pervez Musharraf had agreed back in 2003 to keep Osama bin Laden alive and imprisoned in Pakistan. One went further and suggested that the Obama administration had commissioned the killing to improve its ratings in a preelection year. Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari had been in on the plot and had kept quiet in the hope that the army chief and his ISI director would be forced to resign. None of this was backed up by the emerging facts.53
Thinking he was helping his country, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan’s high commissioner in London, appeared on British TV. “Whatever has happened, has happened with our consent,” he improvised, having been unable to raise anyone in the presidency or the prime minister’s office.54 But when he ventured that the ISI had helped lay the trap for Osama, he received threatening phone calls from Aabpara.55 “You need to shut up,” he was warned. Being seen as having assisted in the raid was almost worse than being accused of not having known about it in advance as far as the ISI and army were concerned.
In Hasan’s Knightsbridge office, a siege mentality set in, with officials sharing a Photoshop-altered image of President Obama, Mike Mullen, Hillary Clinton, and others watching the live drone feed from the Abbottabad operation with Osama’s face inserted among them. Gallows humor made more sense than the mess Pakistan was in.
The White House tried to take the sting out of Brennan’s scorched-earth statement by announcing that pictures of Osama bin Laden’s dead body would not be made public and that his remains had been buried at sea.
In Pakistan, where the generals continued to stay silent as they struggled to get their stories straight, a subtle reframing of the argument started from the grassroots up. A subordinate of the ISI colonel who had been one of the first into the compound sold bloody crime-scene photographs of dead Ibrahim, Abrar, and Khalid bin Laden to Reuters, undercutting the sanitized version of a “smart raid” that the Obama administration was spinning.
General Kayani finally issued a statement through ISPR on May 5, but it fell short, dabbling with issues of pride and doling out threats. “Any similar action violating the sovereignty of Pakistan will warrant a review on the level of military/intelligence cooperation with the United States,” he thundered. The ISI had provided “initial information,” but the CIA had not shared further developments of intelligence on the case with the ISI, “contrary to the existing practice between the two services.”56
Paltry pena
lties followed. The number of American troops in Pakistan was to be reduced “to the minimum essential.” General Athar at ISPR fretted. Army chief Kayani was on the attack but had not addressed the central issue that everyone was asking: was the military complicit or diminished? “Something that should have gone into examining our intelligence failure was redirected instead into anger at the U.S.,” Athar recalled.57 “Nobody would buy this story.” While a select group of Pakistani reporters known for their loyalty to the military was invited to a private briefing with Kayani, the international media and others began probing conspiracy theories.
Reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad of Asia Times Online claimed to have evidence of official Pakistani collusion, writing that U.S. helicopters had stopped off en route to Abbottabad at Ghazi air base near Haripur, an important facility from where ISI covert operations were staged.58 The CIA and ISI had planned the raid together, Shahzad concluded, although the Americans so mistrusted the Pakistanis that they had not revealed the identity of the target.
Najam Sethi, one of Pakistan’s most prominent newspaper editors, said on his political talk show what many people were thinking: the military must have been “complicit or incompetent.”59 Kamran Khan, a TV pundit normally respectful to the military, questioned Kayani’s and Pasha’s competence. “We have become the biggest haven of terrorism in the world and we have failed to stop it,” he said.60
General Pasha fumed. Part of his reticence was explained by the fact that he had yet to receive a full briefing from S-Wing. He issued a holding statement: “Incomplete information and lack of technical details have resulted in speculations and misreporting.”61 This was the first truth spoken by anyone in the armed forces.
But in the face of the actual gory, surreal news of the world’s most wanted man being run to ground in a military garrison town in Pakistan, and the competing wild stories that were being spawned all over the world, no one was listening to Pasha.
Writing in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria tried to characterize the dreadful misfiring going on in Aabpara when he quoted an unnamed Pakistani scholar who described the military as “like a person, caught in bed with another man’s wife, who is indignant that someone entered his house.”62
ISPR ordered all foreign press out of Abbottabad, citing the need for reporters to obtain “no objection certificates” before entering a military cantonment city. However, none of these were being issued as ISI checkpoints sprung up on all roads leading into the area.
@ReallyVirtual was intrigued: “Question to international journalists in Abbottabad: Are you guys being told to leave because of the CIA safe house discovery?”
Over the previous twenty-four hours, mischievous CIA sources hoping to press home their advantage had leaked details of their surveillance operation in Abbottabad, making reference to “support it had received on the ground,” hinting that it had not been the ISI that had pitched in, but assets recruited by the agency.
The ISI responded by unmasking the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad to the local press, shattering decades-long accords that allowed state secrets to remain so. Days later, the official, Mark Kelton, began to experience severe stomach pain. At first he put it down to bad food, but as the symptoms worsened he was forced to take time off work and eventually he left the country for medical treatment. By July 2011, he was suffering from a “severe medical crisis” and told Langley he could no longer function in the job, leading some colleagues to speculate that Kelton, who had withstood the cold, tightening towel of Putin’s counterintelligence game, had been poisoned by the ISI. He survived after undergoing abdominal surgery but retired from the CIA soon after. His only public comment on the affair was that the cause of his illness “was never clarified.”63
May 9, 2011, Washington, D.C.
The CIA quietly reached out to those who had helped them, a dozen Pakistanis who were advised to quit the country immediately lest they be accused of collusion with the United States.64 At the top of the list was Lieutenant Colonel Saeed Iqbal, the former ISI officer. He and his wife, a former steward for Pakistan International Airways, were relocated to California, while his properties and businesses were put up for sale.65
Another to arrive in the United States was Osama bin Laden’s architect Mohammed Younis, whose paperwork was seen by Western intelligence agencies before it was seized by the ISI and suggested that Lashkar-e-Taiba had helped the Kuwaiti brothers purchase the plot on which the Waziristan Palace was built.66 As Lashkar-e-Taiba reported to S-Wing, the implications were dangerous and unsettling.67
In the immediate aftermath of the raid, U.S. officials also reached out to Dr. Shakil Afridi to warn that his life could be in danger, but he sat at home in Peshawar, refusing to move, telling family members, “I have done nothing wrong.”68
Pakistan’s ambassador Husain Haqqani, a political jouster who once had been a close adviser to Benazir Bhutto, had been on a scheduled trip from Washington to Islamabad as the raid unfurled and learned of it during a stopover in London. He was told to get straight back on the plane to the United States and plump up the media so that it did not blame Pakistan’s government, armed forces, or intelligence services for having allowed Osama’s presence in the country, as that would have been a violation of UN Security Council resolutions 1267 and 1373.69 Haqqani was also instructed to seek an official apology from the United States for violating Pakistani sovereignty but, when he got back, all officials wanted to talk about was how and when Pakistan was going to return the wrecked Black Hawk. It had been removed from the compound and taken to general headquarters in Rawalpindi, where it was being closely inspected.
In Pakistan, a ferocious game of musical chairs had begun. A few days after the raid, John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, flew into Islamabad and was persuaded by General Kayani to emphasize Pakistan’s ongoing role as an ally in the war on terror. As a quid pro quo, General Pasha agreed to go to Washington. “Most of the ISI” had had no knowledge of bin Laden being in Pakistan, he maintained.70 He asked for time to run his own investigation into the raid, aware how low the military’s popularity was inside the country and how remote Rawalpindi was from Washington. Some civilian officials were now arguing that this might be the time to contain the khaki behemoth.
To prepare for Pasha’s Washington showdown, Kayani ordered a board of inquiry into the Abbottabad raid led by the adjutant general, a senior military officer. Even before it began, Pasha said that he was confident it “would not uncover any support network within the military and intelligence establishment.”71
Behind the scenes, the ISI began an urgent cleanup operation. In Kohat, two of Ibrahim’s nephews and his brother-in-law were taken away by the ISI.72 In Shangla, relatives of Maryam were also picked up.73
Commentator Najam Sethi, among Pakistan’s most respected media stars, who had accused the army of being complicit or incompetent, was called to what he described as a “stormy” face-to-face confrontation with a senior ISI official. “He accused me of everything, anti-Pakistan, anti-army, anti-everything,” Sethi recalled.74 When he was tipped off that his name had been maliciously added to a terrorist hit list, he and his wife temporarily left the country.
Osama’s once-helpful neighbor Shamraiz Khan vanished, as did first-on-the-scene Constable Nazar Mohammad. Next to disappear were two of the men who had built the house, one of the female nurses who had accompanied Dr. Shakil Afridi during his vaccination program, a doctor who had treated Ibrahim’s children at his clinic, a mechanic who had repaired Ibrahim’s vehicles, a man who had cut down trees in the compound just before the raid—even the milkman.75
According to written ISI procedures, everyone would be interrogated and rated for reliability on a scale of A to E, while the quality of his or her information was marked from 1 to 5.76 Those who were scored as A1 had the most to fear.
@ReallyVirtual, somehow still free, tweeted: “Ever heard of locking the door after the horse has bolted?”77
On May
23, the ISI came for Dr. Afridi, announcing to the media that he had been arrested while trying to flee to Afghanistan. His incredulous wife, Imrana, who feared the black hole her husband had fallen into, contested the ISI’s account, saying: “He was picked up while shopping in the market in Peshawar.” It was now well beyond anyone’s capability in the United States to assist him.
In detention, somewhere unspecified, Dr. Afridi pleaded ignorance, saying that he had been as shocked as everyone else to see the compound on TV, never having been told that Osama was in the crosshairs. The health campaign he had worked on was genuine as far as he was concerned. He was more sorry than they could imagine.
Protesting his client’s innocence, and invoking habeas corpus, which in Pakistan was tantamount to an invitation for sensitive agencies to fast-track a back-alley killing and sling the body into a gutter, Dr. Afridi’s lawyer pointed out that the family still had valid U.S. visas and if they had had something to hide they would have run already.
General Pasha beat the courts to make a judgment: Afridi “was a hero for the Americans and a traitor for us.”78 The doctor’s lawyer was threatened and withdrew from the case.
General Pasha then went after Save the Children, claiming that it had “a history of involvement with the CIA.” Despite strong denials from the nongovernmental organization (NGO) that it had any such links, six expats employed in Pakistan by Save the Children were expelled, its main office in Islamabad was forced to temporarily close, and its polio campaign, which had saved thousands of lives across Pakistan, ground to a virtual halt. Dozens of female health workers were killed in retaliatory attacks that broadened out to all NGOs, whose ability to work in the country was eroded.79
Asked about the ISI’s murderous reputation, General Pasha conceded that in the past many “decent people” had been harmed. But he added that prior to Abbottabad he had ushered in a new era, making “changes to its mind-set, culture and methodology.” Those who criticized and still feared the ISI were people “who should fear the ISI,” as they were more often than not “working against the national interest.”