Let Bhutto Eat Grass 2

by Shaunak Agarkhedkar

  ‘Then people working nearby are probably inhaling minute quantities of it every day.’

  He wondered if that wasn’t a health hazard.

  ‘It depends on the concentration. A small amount can be excreted by the body, although it does tend to bioaccumulate. Bioaccumulate,’ she repeated, seeing the confusion on his face, ‘the body can process and excrete some of the uranium inhaled or consumed, but some portion tends to accumulate in various tissues and organs.’

  ‘So if I got you a tissue sample, could you determine the uranium concentration?’

  She could, she told him.

  ‘What kind of tissue sample do you need?’

  She rattled off a list, adding, ‘A urine sample might work too. Or hair.’

  ‘Hair?’

  ‘Yes, heavy metals tend to bioaccumulate in hair and nails as well.’

  After a few more questions, primarily about how those samples would be analysed and if different isotopes of uranium could be detected, he got up to leave. Thanking her for her time, he reminded her once again of the OSA before leaving.

  NINE

  All those who found themselves—through the accident of birth or the intentional act of migration—in the province of Punjab in Pakistan knew to fear Kot Lakhpat and District Jail Sialkot. Although stories about those two institutions served as terrifying deterrents and weighed on the minds of those who acted against the Pakistani state, the Wing had always managed to find men who were willing to sneak across the border into Pakistan and live there under an assumed identity. These were the Wing’s Illegal Residents, or Illegals, people who operated without the protective umbrella of diplomatic cover. Case officers and Residents regarded them with a mix of awe, pity, and scorn. Some Illegals were volunteers. Others had to be induced or coerced with promises of excitement, money, social standing, and the possibility of pulling themselves out of poverty with a government job on their return. It was these men who did a lot of the dirty and dangerous work of espionage. Since they did not arrive in diplomatic roles, they were able to operate inside Pakistan with greater freedom and anonymity than the Residents. Illegals recruited assets, smuggled documents, cleared drop-boxes, fed low-level intelligence to Residents, and often helped other Illegals cross the border. And they did all that as long as their nerve held, or as long as the Pakistani deep state—Ghulam Jilani Khan’s very own thugs—remained unaware of their existence.

  Some intrepid case officers had, over the years, volunteered for the job too. Mishra had spent years as an Illegal in Pakistan and had built a formidable network that continued to yield intelligence more than a decade after his departure. It wasn’t, therefore, a lack of suitable agents that stayed the Islamabad Resident’s hand. He had a few veterans who had spent a generation between them as Illegals. They were the ones most likely to survive in close proximity to the deep state while infiltrating the location assigned. Such encounters would leave their mark, though, and they would become known to the deep state and therefore recognisable, like a cursed Ashwatthama. It would be irresponsible to keep them in country on further assignments, and the Wing would have to retire them back to India. The wages of this particular sin that was being demanded of him would be severe for the Resident: it would take years to repair the hole that their retirement would leave in his networks.

  ‘If infiltration is merely to verify, loss of best agents too high a price to pay. Suggest exploring other avenues,’ the Resident cabled Mishra.

  The Chief of the Pakistan section was annoyed. But the argument was sound, and Mishra had to concede.

  ‘Stand by,’ he cabled Islamabad.

  But when Lahore wrote back about the other facility, the stark contrast in the measures undertaken by the Pakistan army for the security of TARGET TWO when compared to TARGET ONE made Mishra’s decision for him. Hours after Sablok returned from Bombay and briefed him and Almeida, he drafted new orders for Islamabad, conveying Sablok’s proposed approach.

  ‘Objective no longer just verification. Do whatever it takes,’ he wrote, ending the cable.

  The terms had been expanded, with verification of the facility’s purpose being just the first of three stages. As the unambiguous orders arrived and unshackled him, the Resident began planning to infiltrate the town instead of going after the facility proper. Seven Illegals were working as part of his networks, acting as cut-outs. One of them had first crossed the border into Pakistan back when the Wing was still part of the Bureau. He had spent years as a guide, helping other Illegals sneak into the land of the pure right under the Pakistan Army’s nose from the Samba sector of Jammu, before finally taking the plunge himself. Whatever his motive, Kishan Lal had spent six years in ‘Pindi at a dhaba frequented by soldiers garrisoned nearby. During that time, he had harvested critical intelligence on troop movements from snippets of conversations between NCOs who worked at GHQ. Blessed with almost inhuman amounts of patience, in the two-and-half years that the Resident had been his handler, Lal hadn’t failed once at a task assigned to him. He was forty-three, an orphan who had somehow made it alive through the blood-soaked air of ‘47 from Gujranwala and Lahore. Finding himself in Jammu a few months later, he had survived by begging for food until a barber had taken pity on the child fleeing in terror from a bearded man in the marketplace. Lal had a wife and two kids back in Jammu, a boy aged fifteen and a girl of twelve. They saw him once every couple of years, for a fortnight or so, before he claimed he had to return to his job in Africa. Kishan Lal would be the tip of the spear.

  Infiltrating Lal wouldn’t be enough, not for such a critical mission. Lal could stumble while walking down the road and crack his skull on a stone, or he could be arrested for looking out of place by one of the soldiers patrolling the area; he could be robbed and murdered, or find himself out of luck and unable to complete the task. There was always an element of chance governing an agent’s life, regardless of how well-trained and careful they were, and they relied heavily on it. Their handlers—case officers and Residents—were not encouraged to follow suit. The Resident decided he would infiltrate two other Illegals independent of Lal in a three-pronged attempt at cracking open the facility’s secrets. Communication had to be straightforward and ordinary. In a town certain to be crawling with ISI thugs and soldiers acting in support, anything out of the ordinary would attract unwelcome attention. Concealment would be through banality, and communication would have to take the form of letters to the family.

  When he briefed every one of them separately, the Resident gave them each their cover, their papers, an address for correspondence, and dictated a letter that they would send after successful infiltration. He also gave two of them a carrier-powered radio receiver smaller than a bar of soap. These had been built by the Wing’s radio engineers in New Delhi specifically for the mission, and had two separate radio circuits within them. The first circuit was tuned to the frequency of Radio Pakistan’s new Medium Wave transmitter at Islamabad and was meant to leech power from that radio signal. The second circuit—also a radio receiver—would then use that power to listen to 888 kHz. This was 15 kHz higher than the All India Radio transmission from near Jalandhar, an unused frequency, dead air so that the radio receivers would ordinarily remain silent. Radio Pakistan was going to unwittingly provide the Wing with the means of communicating urgent messages to its assets. Kishan Lal—now christened Faisal Baig—was the first to travel East down the Grand Trunk Road in a rickety bus headed for Kahuta with a small fortune in Pounds Sterling stitched into the underwear he wore.

  Sarfaraz Malik had been an Illegal in Islamabad since ‘72. A forty-seven-year-old Dogra from a small village near Poonch, he had helped three successive Residents operate networks capable of dipping into four ministries of the federal government. Working in the shadows of a city suffused with counter-intelligence operatives had taken its toll, and Malik had recently turned into the spying equivalent of a hypochondriac and had expressed fears that his co
ver was blown on two occasions in ‘76. The Resident felt Malik was near burning out, and offered him one final mission before a triumphant return to Poonch with enough money to last a lifetime.

  ‘And I’ll see if we can get your son employed in a post office nearby,’ he added.

  The tall man with a handlebar moustache would be the linchpin of the operation. While Baig’s cover story would have him use money earned over a lifetime’s service in foreign lands to buy information and allegiance, Malik would seek shelter among his cultural cousins—the Minhas—a tribe of Dogra Muslims descended from Rajputs who called numerous villages around Kahuta their home. The Resident expected that cultural affinity melded with a finely calibrated cover would help Malik blend in among the fiercely proud natives. He hoped that tribal loyalty would keep Malik’s hosts from informing on him to the Punjabi-dominated deep state.

  Keeping with his cover of a down-on-his-luck refugee of the ‘65 war who had settled down in Peshawar before the call of the melody of his ancestors’ language compelled him to seek the Minhas out, the Resident provided Malik with a modest sum in grubby Pakistani Rupees along with papers that would withstand all but the most invasive background checks. They identified him as Sarfaraz Minhas. He was to play the part of a peasant anyway, keeping his head down and staying out of everyone else’s way, a man completely broken by the vagaries of fate and content with the privilege of existence. If the deep state felt the need to take a long hard look at him, something had to have gone very badly wrong, and no documents would protect him. Kot Lakhpat was filled to the brim with peasants whose only crime was that they displeased their betters. Someone who annoyed Ghulam Jilani Khan’s thugs wouldn’t stand a chance.

  After one final briefing, Minhas departed for Kahuta at dawn a few days after Baig. Back at the High Commission in Islamabad, the Resident uncharacteristically prayed that day.

  The third infiltration needed Mishra’s intervention. Yashwant Ganpatrao Mhatre, a swarthy twenty-eight-year-old former sapper, couldn’t pass for anyone but a Muhajir. After volunteering for the role of an Illegal in the wake of ‘71, he had been trained extensively by the Wing in Urdu and in the cultural habits of those who had migrated from India. The idea was to infiltrate him into Pakistani Sindh where nearly a quarter of the urban population fit that description. But like all plans full of details and foresight, this one too had suffered upon first contact with reality. The training had been the saving grace, serving Mhatre well for four continuous years not in Sindh but further north in Attock where his ancestors had once unfurled the Bhagva. The few within the Wing who knew of him considered the short, squat Maratha a machine impervious to fear or stress. After all, even someone as committed to his own cover as Mishra had taken a week “off” every year or so.

  In Attock, Mhatre had built a tight network composed mostly of Muhajirs who, upon arrival in the land of the pure, had had their rose-tinted glasses ripped off when the native ethnicities of West Pakistan denied them access to most of the state’s resources. The actions of Ayub Khan and Bhutto had only served to accelerate this process of disillusionment with the idea of a Pakistan that accommodated its ethnic minorities without discrimination.

  The intelligence yielded by them on the Kamra air base was immensely consequential to the IAF’s appreciation of Pakistan’s capabilities. It was Mhatre’s relentlessness and discipline that recommended him to the Resident as the third infiltrator. Despite Baig and Minhas’s canniness, there was always the possibility of discovery. The Resident reasoned that news of such an event would be quickly suppressed, leaving him in the dark, possibly for months, about the failure and capture of one or both of his best agents. It would, however, trigger a flurry of activity in the garrison tasked with securing the facility. By infiltrating a sleeper close to the garrison, the Resident hoped to have an early warning of such an eventuality. If both Baig and Minhas were neutralised, his final gambit would be to activate Mhatre. Easing the dark, short Muhajir into a garrison in northern Punjab would be a challenge in itself, though, and after considerable thought, he wrote to Mishra.

  ‘Require unimpeachable credentials for third illegal. Objective to infiltrate garrison at Kahuta. Unable to procure credentials among own network.’

  Even though he didn’t know details, the Resident had heard rumours that the Section Chief had certain strategic assets, moles in high places within the Pakistani state. He had relayed messages from Mishra to dead letter boxes in Islamabad and Rawalpindi without knowing anything about the assets. Those messages were always encoded, and the Resident did not have the One-Time Pad to decode them. As for the identity of the assets being serviced, Mishra didn’t bother to explain and the Resident knew better than to ask.

  Tasked very infrequently, always directly by the big boss, and never in a time-critical manner, these strategic assets were the most closely guarded secret in the Pakistan section of the Wing.

  ***

  1961, New Delhi (India)

  In the retreating chill of February Upendranath Mishra, then a prematurely greying case officer, found himself home early one evening. Making the most of that rarity, his wife dragged him, ignoring his underplayed protests, to a dusty theatre in Old Delhi for a nondescript play directed by her cousin. Mishra did not like that cousin and the last thing he wanted to do that evening was sit through a banal play. But the lead was a young actor from a village among the dunes west of Bikaner, whose uncanny performance as a young Pakistani from Lahore took Mishra back in time. A fortnight later, after appeals to patriotism were made and it was quietly suggested that the most challenging role a thespian could hope to accomplish was not on stage but in real life, the actor—just twenty years of age—was recruited. A year of intense training followed. The actor’s ability to absorb every aspect of what was taught to him and mould his own behaviour to the mannerisms of his trainers surprised the instructors.

  ‘He can pass off as a Pakistani Punjabi from Lahore almost effortlessly, sir,’ Mishra said to his Section Chief, briefing the old man about how the actor’s training was progressing. ‘He has an almost mythical mix of talent and resolve. His diction is flawless. He speaks and writes the Punjabi of the west as if he were born there, and speaks Urdu with a disdainful accent as if he had been forced to learn it. I spent two whole days last week trying to find something about his mannerisms and his way of speaking that could betray his origins in Bikaner.’

  ‘And?’ the Chief asked.

  ‘I couldn’t find a single mistake, sir.’

  ‘I’ll go meet him at the training centre myself, Mishra. If what you’re telling me holds...’

  And it did.

  ‘He will be a strategic asset, Mishra,’ the Section Chief decided. He had interviewed the actor at the Wing’s training centre for over an hour. ‘Tasking will be solely my prerogative. We will not expose him to anyone else in this organisation. You will devise deep cover for him. Funds are not a concern. Once you have done that you will forget all about him. I will be his Case Officer and when I hang up my boots, that responsibility will fall to my successor. Is that clear?’

  And so, while mountain troops were being rushed forward in the east to interdict Chinese supply lines in ‘62, the actor found himself enrolled for a bachelor’s degree at the University of Karachi. Three years later, in the midst of the turbulence of ‘65, he was accepted at Kakul and spent eleven-and-a-half months among the Quid-e-Azam’s own before being commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Pakistan Army’s armoured corps. For the next eleven years, he made steady progress up the khaki ladder, his cover holding firm, even as he remained on the payrolls of Indian intelligence.

  With the birth of the Wing, the Section Chief took the asset with him to the nascent agency. The only people aware of his true identity were Mishra and the Section Chief. When the latter retired, he briefed his successor about the existence and case history of four strategic assets. The actor was the last of the quartet,
the youngest among them, and the only one to have been recruited outside Pakistan.

  The Residents that conveyed orders from the Section Chief to these assets knew that they were dealing with something special, but weren’t permitted to know any details. They deposited coded missives in certain drop-boxes and, after a predetermined number of days, retrieved coded responses from other locations. That was all.

  ***

  1977, Islamabad (Pakistan)

  The Islamabad Resident knew that the requested activation of a strategic asset would not be considered lightly, so he had built as strong a case as he could for utilising a strategic asset’s influence to help infiltrate Mhatre.

  Even though Mishra found the justification sound, the risk of Mhatre’s discovery leading the ISI back to the strategic asset worried him. Instead of agonising over hypotheticals, Mishra wrote a message to the actor briefly outlining the need and asked if there was a way to aid the Illegal without leaving a trail. The encoded letter was two pages long. The Resident dropped it at a location in ‘Pindi and instructed an agent of his, a shopkeeper, to fly the Qaumi Parcam from the roof of his shop.

  Every four days, the Resident checked another drop-box for a response. On the third such check, he found an envelope without any markings. Within it was a single sheet, the letterhead of the Brigade Major of a historically significant infantry brigade. The page was blank except for the stamped seal of the officer and the flourish of a signature above it.

  After quick approval from Mishra, the Resident carefully drafted a demi-official letter addressed to the garrison commander, requesting his personal assistance in securing suitable work for the man carrying it. The rest of it aligned with Mhatre’s cover. After crumpling it a bit and rubbing a dusty fingerprint into it—Mhatre’s left thumb, of course—the Resident dispatched the sleeper to Kahuta. He was now Shaukat Sattar and was to report to the garrison commander, likely a young Captain who was certain to trip over himself to accommodate the request of a Brigade Major. The Resident wondered what would happen if the Captain wrote back to the senior officer, reporting the excellent conditions his man found himself in, but dismissed the possibility that it would lead to complications. Either the asset was the Brigade Major himself, or he was someone who had access to his stationery and seal. Regardless of the specifics, such a person had to have a way of intercepting inconvenient messages.