Let Bhutto Eat Grass 2

by Shaunak Agarkhedkar

  ‘It’s a risk worth taking, sir,’ Arora insisted. ‘If we get him, we stop their nuclear weapons programme in its tracks.’ ‘No, at best it would slow them down. Think back to Khan’s escape to Karachi last year, man. How many suitcases full of blueprints did he carry with him? Do you think the ISI have not thought of securing all those documents and debriefing Khan himself? If I were a betting man I would happily wager my house on the possibility that the ISI now knows everything about uranium enrichment that Abdul Qadeer Khan did. But even if we ignore that, there is also the little matter of travelling to The Hague and catching him before he boards his flight. That window closed hours before the cable reached us. No, I did not call you to my office to indulge your James Bond fantasies. Think! As Case Officer, what do you recommend we do?’

  Arora lapsed into silence. The remark about double-o-seven stung.

  ‘We could use the asset Malathi cultivated in the Penose,’ Arora suggested, referring to the organised criminal underbelly of major cities in the Netherlands.

  ‘Not enough time to contact the asset and put in place a plan with reasonable odds of success. Besides, it ignores everything I just said. No can do! Think harder, Arora!’ Almeida exhorted, slamming his fist on the table for effect.

  ‘Surveillance,’ Arora said, finally overcoming the deep desire to take the easy way out by murdering Khan. ‘If we can find out who he is meeting at the Hague, we may be able to penetrate the network they are using for procuring centrifuge components. We will have access to their operation once again.’

  ‘Excellent. Send a cable to that effect. Surveillance logs should be sent to you for analysis,’ Almeida said. ‘I trust you will brief Captain Sablok about this matter.’ Then he picked up a file from a corner of his desk and began flipping through its contents. Arora skimmed the cable’s contents one last time, then placed it almost reverentially back on Almeida’s desk.

  ***

  Chief Mishra was unusually grumpy. His section had failed at a task he had set them. Under ordinary circumstances it wouldn’t have bothered him: intelligence was like navigating an unknown maze underground, and not every turn led to a pot of gold. Some led to the Minotaur. But in this instance the failure rankled, and he thought it had begun affecting him physically. The joint between the first and second phalanges of the index finger on his right hand had swollen, and the finger was now severely twisted, bent against the natural movement of the joint and pointing upwards in a grotesque imitation of a bow. His shoulders bothered him almost every day, and walking was becoming an ordeal with his left knee hurting ever so often. His doctor advised rest.

  ‘Stress will make it worse,’ the doctor added. ‘Consider taking a long vacation.’

  Mrs Mishra had smirked at that. The last vacation she remembered was the one they took immediately after their wedding, and even that had been spent mostly visiting this temple and that to propitiate Mishra’s parents.

  Nine months had passed since Abdul Qadeer Khan returned to Karachi in December 1975. Nine months since he had called his best Case Officer—a brilliant young man by the name of Ashk—into his office and told him to ‘find the bastard and infiltrate the facility where they have him, at all costs.’

  Not only had Ashk been unable to infiltrate the facility, he didn’t even know whether the Pakistan government had Khan in Sindh, Balochistan, Northwest Frontier Province, or Punjab.

  Mishra was a patient man. One had to have oodles of patience to survive in his profession. But he was beginning to run out of it.

  The last time Ashk had stepped into Mishra’s office a few days after Independence Day, the atmosphere had grown rather heated.

  ‘Find me something useful,’ Mishra had told him.

  ‘We are trying, sir,’ Ashk had replied. ‘If you would recall the report on all the steps we have taken...’

  ‘Those steps have yielded nothing. The Union of India doesn’t pay us to write reports!’

  ‘They have hidden him, sir.’

  ‘Did you expect them to print details about him above the fold in the Daily Jang or Dawn? If I hadn’t anticipated them to take every measure to keep us from finding out about him, I wouldn’t have assigned this operation to you. I refuse to believe that someone like Abdul Qadeer can just disappear in Pakistan without at least one of your networks finding out about it. He is definitely working for them—they went to great lengths to support him in Amsterdam and then extract him to Karachi. He has to be part of some department or another. Considering the size of his ego—you read the psychological profile that the Europe section prepared, I hope—I’m certain he got Bhutto to make him the head of whatever department is working on his uranium plant.’

  Ashk said nothing as Mishra paused, more to catch his breath than gather his thoughts. He knew what the risk of interrupting the Chief in the middle of a monologue entailed. Like all Case Officers, there were some risks he wasn’t willing to take.

  ‘If he heads a bloody department, he has been assimilated by the bureaucracy in some manner or the other. He has subordinates. Where did they come from? Did Bhutto disband the PAEC teams that Munir Ahmad Khan headed? Have those teams been subsumed under Abdul Qadeer’s department? If Khan has subordinates then he has superiors too.’

  ‘Indications are that he reports directly to Bhutto, sir,’ Ashk spoke up.

  ‘Bhutto might lend him an ear when a major issue needs to be resolved, but do you really expect him to approve each and every voucher Abdul Qadeer signs? His department has a budget. Someone approves it. It has expenses. Someone approves those too. It has bank accounts to receive funds and make payments. Someone manages the bloody thing. All these people have wives and children, friends and family, and colleagues. It doesn’t matter how conscientious they are about secrecy: word gets out. For god’s sake, man, the Pakistanis gossip as much as we do. Do you think they don’t talk about the strange engineer returned from the Netherlands with a gori mem for a wife?’ After a brief pause, Mishra continued, ‘You have two months to bring me substantial intelligence. Otherwise you’ll be reassigned to the Policy desk.’

  Ashk climbed the stairs two steps at a time. It was exactly five weeks since Mishra had given him two months to show results. He carried a manila folder and the air of vindication.

  ‘Bhutto is keeping the project under direct control, sir,’ he said without preamble, as soon as he entered Mishra’s cabin.

  Mishra stared at him but did not react. He was in a better mood today, and he knew this particular Case Officer liked to narrate his findings in a peculiar manner, as if he were writing a short story.

  ‘An account was recently opened with the National Bank of Pakistan in the name of something called the “Special Works Organisation”. This entity is distinct from the Frontier Works Organisation—two independent sources confirmed this,’ Ashk said, referring to a military engineering unit that was part of the Pakistan Army Corps of Engineers. ‘One of the signatories for this account is a Brigadier by the name of Anis Ali Syed. The other signatories are lower ranked, and one is a civilian. Very little information is available about the Brigadier except that he is sapper known as much for his resourcefulness as for integrity. Considering the preliminary nature of enquiries, I felt it better to avoid rooting through his personnel file at GHQ. Coincidentally, the account for the Special Works Organisation is held in the GHQ Rawalpindi branch of the bank.’

  GHQ Rawalpindi was the commonly used term for the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army.

  ‘Of course,’ Mishra remarked.

  ‘Indeed, sir. A senior officer is a signatory for a newly created account held at the GHQ branch: these two facts lead me to believe this organisation is pertinent to my investigation. Over the past two decades at least, the Pakistan Army has restricted its transactions to the main bank accounts. The last time such an account was created—with a senior officer as signatory—was when the Frontier Works Or
ganisation was formed in 1966.’

  ‘It could just be a unit created for infrastructure,’ Mishra said, playing devil’s advocate, ‘for building roads and dams. It may turn out to have nothing to do with Abdul Qadeer Khan.’

  ‘I considered that possibility, sir. That’s why I dug deeper, but not in Rawalpindi. My network in Islamabad didn’t find much, but one asset in the bureaucracy—a mid-level babu in the Audit and Accounts Service—swears by the almighty dollar that the order to form the Special Works Organisation came directly from the Prime Minister’s Office. He didn’t see the document with his own eyes, of course. But he has a brother-in-law who works in the Cabinet Secretariat. Apparently the order was signed by Bhutto himself on the 31st of July this year. When asked about the purpose of creating such an organisation which reports directly to the Prime Minister, the brother-in-law clammed up, mentioning only that it is responsible for procuring equipment.’

  ‘The government of Pakistan wouldn’t be so careless,’ Mishra replied. ‘If an organisation headed by a serving Brigadier seeks to procure high-tech equipment, the government’s role in the whole affair will be obvious.’

  ‘Fair point, sir. But given that the state of Pakistan’s private industry is as bad as ours, I don’t think the government has any choice in the matter. Assuming that the equipment they are after costs a lot of money, few entities in Pakistan could credibly seek to procure it.’

  Mishra nodded along. This line of enquiry showed promise.

  ‘There are also murmurs, sir, of disgruntled department heads in the scientific establishment. The same source mentioned a delegation of four department heads meeting with the Prime Minister last month about their best and brightest being seconded elsewhere. Those four department heads were summarily overruled by Bhutto.’

  ‘Khan!’

  ‘That would be my guess too, sir,’ the Case Officer replied, a smile beginning to break out on his face as he saw the reviled Policy desk fade into the distance. ‘The asset doesn’t know yet where the scientists are being seconded. I have asked him to gently probe the matter.’

  He then handed over the manila folder to Mishra who accepted it but appeared in no hurry to open it and read the documents within.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mishra said with an air of finality. ‘Keep probing the bureaucrat. See if any other asset can corroborate the information. You have two more months.’

  ***

  The surveillance placed on Abdul Qadeer Khan at the Hague was a hastily planned operation. Amit Kumar deployed a college student named Maria and a plumber named Petrus—people he had personally recruited just a few months earlier—to monitor the Second Secretary’s residence that Saturday morning. Moments after he had assured himself that both assets were en route, he notified New Delhi via cable.

  Arora was furious.

  ‘Two fresh recruits being deployed suggests a lack of appreciation for how critical this operation is,’ he cabled back five minutes later. ‘Should the operation fail, the consequences will be tremendous. Strongly suggest you deploy more assets and approach the operation with the seriousness it deserves.’

  In his office at the Hague, Kumar read Arora’s cable and sighed. He could feel the faint footsteps of a lasting headache approaching in his skull.

  Maria and Petrus were the only white Dutch assets of his who could be deployed at such short notice. Kumar would have had to ignore protocol to contact the rest, protocol put in place to protect them and him from discovery. His networks had assets of other ethnicities, of course. Indian and Bangladeshi expatriates in particular made up almost one-third of his networks. And quite a few of them were low enough on the totem pole of their respective networks to accept a hasty surveillance job. They would have been cheaper too. But money wasn’t everything. South Asians loitering all day near the Second Secretary’s residence would be far more conspicuous, especially to the Pakistanis inside the apartment.

  Besides, as a rule, Kumar avoided assigning Bangladeshis to keep watch on Pakistani officials. This reluctance was unusual. Given the bad blood between Pakistan and Bangladesh, it was easy to use one against the other. Indeed, many of his peers—Indian and otherwise—had done exactly that since March 1971 and Operation Searchlight. But the risks were unacceptable to Kumar. People whose family and friends were victims of genocide rarely forgave or forgot the perpetrators. There was no accounting for the deep scars left behind by barbarism of the sort Dhaka had suffered. Just one expatriate Bangla reliving his Mukti Bahini days on the streets of the Hague or Amsterdam would be enough to destroy Kumar’s cover and lay his networks bare for the BVD. He preferred to make do with whatever Dutch assets he could muster.

  ‘All available assets have been deployed. I am quite aware of the critical nature of this operation, thank you,’ he wrote on a sheet of paper. Then, flipping the one-time pad open to the appropriate page, he encoded the message, preferring to type the encoded text directly onto the Teletext machine. When the entire message had been typed, he paused. As far as he was concerned, Arora was a has-been. Ordinarily he would have ignored him completely. But the cable he had sent to the Chief earlier had received a reply from Arora within minutes. The implication was either that Arora was working closely with the Chief—perhaps as his staff officer—or Arora was running an operation targeting this Abdul Qadeer Khan and the Chief felt the operation important enough to let Arora direct a Resident. Taking a deep breath, Kumar jabbed at the button to transmit. As the machine whirred into action, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Something told him there would be hell to pay if the surveillance failed.

  Maria’s job that Saturday was to read a novel while keeping an eye on a building in one of the nicer neighbourhoods of the city. Six to eight hours of work that would pay enough to cover her expenses for a month. She grabbed two novels on the way out, dumped them in a rucksack, and cycled to the neighbourhood. It took her ten minutes.

  The red brick apartment building in the Old City Centre of the Hague stood on a busy road. It was three storeys tall with ornate grey French balconies looking down on a small garden across the road. She found a spot in that garden that gave her a clear view of the building entrance. The bench was under a large chestnut tree whose branches and leaves obscured her from the windows and balconies of the apartments. That wouldn’t prevent someone on the street or inside the café on the ground floor of the building from noticing that she was keeping an eye on the building’s entrance. It would have been easier to hide that if she had worn sunglasses. But Maria hadn’t worn sunglasses since kindergarten when she had been diagnosed with myopia and given spectacles.

  A few minutes after sitting down and orienting herself with the road and buildings around her, she pulled the first novel out of her rucksack and began reading “Carrie”. She had reached the point in the novel when Carrie has her first period when a balding Dutchman dressed in a business suit emerged from the building fifteen to twenty minutes after entering it. He paused at the door, checked that the briefcase he was carrying was locked, then began walking eastwards. Maria rose from her seat, carefully placed a bookmark—a dry leaf lying next to her on the bench—in the book to mark her place, and began walking eastwards. Along the way she yawned, stretched her arms above her head, and gave every impression that she was just walking to clear her mind. She didn’t have to walk far. Twenty metres up the street, the businessman unlocked a Mercedes Benz and drove away. Maria memorised the car’s registration number, then walked back to her bench. Picking up the novel, she removed the bookmark and immersed herself once more in the world of Chamberlain, Maine.

  Petrus wore dark grey overalls and carried his plumber’s tool bag. He sat in his car, a worn-down Volkswagen parked a good distance away from the red brick apartment building. He could see its entrance in his rear view mirror between greasy fingerprints. His front windows were rolled down. The cigarette in his left hand smouldered in the gentle breeze, its ashes fal
ling outside the car. It was his seventh cigarette that day, the second of the afternoon. The car reeked of tobacco. Seven people had entered the building since Petrus’s arrival that morning. Five of those had exited. None of them had walked westward, towards him, so he had ignored them as he had been instructed. This was his first job as a private detective’s assistant. Well, calling it a job was a bit of a joke, Petrus told himself. It was one day of work and paid as much as he made in half a week.

  He stared at the entrance and wondered why someone would pay him so much money for sitting in his damned car and smoking. The neighbourhood was posh, no doubt. But what kind of a person would care about who entered and who left an apartment building? Movement beyond the windscreen caught his attention. A woman stood a few metres away, apparently waiting for someone. She was rich—he could tell from the clothes she wore. He tried to recall if she had entered the building he was supposed to watch. She turned her neck and saw him staring at her. Grimacing, she deliberately turned away.

  ‘Fuck you too!’ Petrus muttered to himself.

  Perhaps that’s what this ‘job’ was about. Some rich bastard trying to find the other rich bastard having an affair with his wife.

  Someone exited the red brick apartment. Petrus wracked his brains to remember if he had seen him entering. By the time he concluded that the person had indeed entered some time earlier, the man was almost at Petrus’s car. The plumber let him walk past, using the time to etch his appearance into his own mind, then waited a bit longer. When the suspect was a good fifty metres ahead of him, Petrus got out of his car and locked it. Then he began following the suspect.

  Five minutes of walking and a thirty-minute tram ride later, Petrus had a name and an address. He considered stopping for a beer on the way back, then thought better of it.