On the Grand Trunk Road (20 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
“What happened to her?”
“Government came and took her away. Immigration police. Happened about a month ago.”
“Where did they take her?”
“Back to Albania, I think. She was an Albanian.”
“Did she have any children? What did she look like?”
“She was young, attractive, dark. She had one son. His name was Castro.” A pause. “You see, she was probably a Communist.”
Christ. Now what? I drove off into the darkness, trying to connect up all the pieces. All I can tell you is, that night, back at the Marriott by the freeway, too jet-lagged to sleep, I sat on the edge of my bed, smoking, and figured it all out. The Soviets wanted Zia dead. So they sent an Albanian case officer to Chicago to recruit a black American Muslim manic-depressive. Then they sent him to Iran, loaded him up with sabotage equipment, and sent him to Pakistan to kill Zia. The American government had covered the whole thing up because they were afraid that nobody would believe they didn’t do it themselves, since Artis was an American. Sure, sure, it was all plausible.
Coffee and Sunday morning sunlight rescued me briefly. Before driving back to Des Plaines to check with the police about the Albanian, I called back my source on the original Viecelli tip. I bluffed and said that while I had had a very successful day and had found Viecelli’s apartment in Des Plaines, I had discovered that she had moved, and I just wanted to double-check a couple of details.
The person asked what street I’d been looking on. I read out the name. No, no, came the reply, Viecelli lived in Des Plaines, the town I had been in, but on a different street, which the source named casually, before remembering that this was something I wasn’t supposed to be helped on. I wrote the new street name down. I said that the Josephine I’d found the day before had a young son named Castro. Ring a bell? No, the real Josephine had an older son, Paul. Josephine was not young, dark, or attractive. She was in her fifties at least.
All right, forget Castro. Find Viecelli.
I retrieved my atlas and drove back to Des Plaines, to the new street. It was about a mile long in a quiet residential neighborhood of middle-class brick homes on quarter-acre lots. There were lots of yellow ribbons on the trees and doorways to welcome home the troops from the Persian Gulf. I had no address for the Viecellis, so I drove down to one end of the street, parked, and started walking up, knocking on doors. Sunday morning is a good time for that. People are too groggy to be angry.
Two blocks along I got a “yes.” It was from a mild couple in late middle age, he a retired employee of the phone company, she a housewife, baking muffins in the kitchen. The Viecellis, Josephine and Paul, had lived next door for several years, they said. The Viecellis were weird. People in the neighborhood called them the Addams family. They had a shooting range in their basement, a rope with pulleys for targets, shells all over the place. They were famous in the area because they had ripped off nearly all their neighbors, for tens of thousands of dollars. Josephine was always looking for investments in various schemes that she had going. Some of them involved Artis. Artis was supposed to go to Iran to sell blue jeans and video recorders to the people over there—you know, in Iran, they don’t have blue jeans and video recorders, the couple told me.
Josephine Viecelli said that if the neighbors put up ten thousand dollars each to finance the trip, they would get double their money when Artis returned. Everybody had decided to go in on it—double your money sounded pretty good in Des Plaines, Illinois, the couple said. But then in the fall of 1988 Artis disappeared mysteriously. No money, no blue jeans. Josephine Viecelli said she was expecting riches “any day, any day, any day,” the neighbor said. “It just got to the point where it became a real joke. The stories would always change so much.” Eventually, the Viecellis went broke. They sold their house and moved away. Many of the neighbors were angry. They never got their money back. Then, after the Viecellis were gone, investigators started showing up.
“One man told me he was from the CIA, an investigator who came by,” said the wife. “We were going through our own craziness. There was a woman who was here. She did have a badge. Then there was a man. I’m sure it was CIA. The IRS was here, too. State police, private investigators. The only thing I heard from Josephine [about Artis] was that he had gone to Utah, the Cayman Islands, Denver, someplace. The only thing she told me was that what he was doing was investments. Well, we’re writing it off on our taxes.”
They were very nice. They gave me the Viecellis’ new address, said it was not far off. And they gave me a muffin.
I talked to a few more neighbors. It just kept getting more and more weird. The Viecellis were con artists, it seemed. They raised money from their neighbors and gave some of it to Artis, who then traveled overseas on unspecified business in Iran and other Islamic countries.
I asked one neighbor to describe Artis and the Viecelli household. He answered with a string of impressionistic non sequiturs: “There were moving vans, insurance policies, a lot of old cars that would pull up and people, migrants would come out. There was some kind of deal going.” I was wandering now through a Don DeLillo novel.
The Viecellis lived in a basement apartment underneath the freeway—two rooms, crammed with boxes. She was an enormous woman with white hair who never got out of her chair. Her son, Paul, was big, too, with long stringy hair and tattoos on his arms. I told them I had come to talk about Mark Alphonzo Artis. They invited me in.
I sat on a box and asked what had happened to Artis when he was arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of killing Zia. “He said he had business and he asked me if I could basically help him with the funding,” Josephine said. “Nothing came out of it. I lost every cent I had. I don’t know anything about any arrest by the Pakistanis for any plane crash. Afterward, he just said he couldn’t get to a phone.” They told me Artis was currently on the run. He had just pulled a scam in California, swindled a woman in Seattle out of fifty-three thousand dollars, and disappeared.
Paul took me outside. We stood next to his motorcycle. Paul said that when Artis came back from Pakistan, after he was released by Pakistan’s s intelligence service, he acted very strange. “He said stuff about these beads,” Paul said. “He said stuff about the jeeee-had [jihad, or Islamic holy war]. He was always talking about the jeeee-had and stuff. He said nobody would fuck with him because he had these beads on him. They called him Syed Ismail.... When he got back from Pakistan, he was in the nuthouse for a while. He was really into this thing, this religious thing. He used to scare the shit out of me, the way he talked.... He said he was going on Oprah Winfrey and blow the whole thing up [the mystery of Zia’s death], to tell everybody what it was all about.”
That night I flew to Washington. I felt my intuitive connection to Middle America unraveling, and my intuitive connection to Pakistan deepening. Who were these people, with their yellow ribbons and Iranian blue jean schemes?
On the way out of Chicago, I called a local FBI agent. He said the Viecellis and Artis were targets of a federal fraud investigation, but he did’t know if or when arrests would be made.
At the Post I sat down with Jim McGee, one of the paper’s best investigative reporters. I told him what I had. He arched his eyebrows. McGee is so unflappable that if you introduced him to a nine-armed space alien with antennae sticking from its eyes, his first question would be, “So, what’s this we hear about your
supposedly
being a space alien?” I welcomed his sobriety.
supposedly
being a space alien?” I welcomed his sobriety.
McGee set up a meeting with a senior Bush administration official. The official told us that the CIA didn’t know anything about Artis’s being held by the Pakistanis on suspicion of killing Zia. The official said the CIA would be upset to hear about this because even if Artis was a flake, the agency should have known about him. The official ran computer checks on Artis. Nothing, he said.
Then McGee set up an appointment with Oliver Revelle, then the chief of counterterrorism at the FBI. We walked over together to FBI headquarters. We noticed on the sign-in sheet in the lobby that a couple of men from the CIA had signed in just ahead of us. In Revelle’s outer office there were two guys in suits standing around against the walls, trying to look as if they belonged but not doing a very good job of it.
We sat down with Revelle and I told him what I knew about Artis. “If someone like this had been developed as a suspect, I would have known about it,” he said. “To my knowledge, we know nothing of this case.”
At his request, I read out Artis’s full name and passport number. He wrote it down on a slip of paper and buzzed for a secretary. She picked up the paper and left the room. We talked about the crash investigation in general terms. On the question of the bodies, he said, the forensic and pathological investigations “were all done by the Pakistanis.” The FBI had found “no indication of a criminal cause.” Going back over the forensic evidence in detail now would be “really impossible. Some forensic evidence is perishable. Some can be disturbed. Our responsibilities, while significant, are secondary to the Pakistani responsibilities.” So the FBI’s forensic investigation, now that it was on the case, “would not be the same as one that would be conducted here.”
Revelle’s secretary came back with a note. He read it and hit a button on his phone. He talked briefly, out of earshot. No more than five minutes later an FBI agent named Al Finch walked into the room with a thick file in his hand. He sat down. Revelle explained that Finch had traveled to Pakistan twice to work on the FBI’s investigation.
And he knew about Artis.
“He is known to us,” Finch said. “He is a mentally unstable individual.” Finch confirmed the details of Artis’s arrest and his detention by Pakistani intelligence. Finch said Artis had probably been tortured while in Pakistani custody. He said he had heard about the case in the same way Kamran did, from a source in the Pakistan government.
Finch’s investigation of the matter, he continued, consisted of a single act: He went to see Hamid Gul, the Pakistan intelligence chief who had held Artis incommunicado and interrogated him for six months. At this meeting, Gul told Finch that there was nothing to be concerned about. For one thing, the materials in Artis’s possession at the time of his arrest were not so incriminating. The C-130 manual was not actually a manual but “a book on airplanes,” Finch said, quoting Gul. The supposed airport maps were “tourist maps of Iran and Afghanistan.” The electronic gear was a transistor radio. Finch never saw the materials. Nor was he troubled that Artis’s arresting officers in Quetta had described them otherwise at the time of the arrest.
The FBI “accepted the findings of ISI,” Finch said. Artis was not a suspect because “his mental capacity was definitely in question”—as if mental imbalance disqualified somebody from being an assassin. “There were all types of conspiracy theories going about in 1990,” Finch said. “The Pakistanis suspected a lot of things. There were theories concerning Shias from Iran. Hamid Gul, being the ISI director at that time, was dead serious about all the conspiracy theories. They were exploring everything. If there had been any indication that this guy Artis had been involved in the crash, he would have been tried.”
All right, that sounded reasonable. But, I wondered, if Finch had investigated the Artis case in Pakistan, what about this senior American diplomat in Islamabad, the one who told me so elaborately that he had never heard of it before?
“Sure, [he] knew about it. He knew about it after it happened,” Finch answered.
I thought to myself: So why had he lied to me about it just a week before?
The problem with all of this, Finch went on, is that the Pakistanis “do not need a reason. They just need an idea. Someone’s imagination. They will go on and on ad nauseam. Until we could be shown a real motive, it would not be in our interest to go into these.” He sounded pretty disgusted.
I asked about the possibility that Artis worked for the Iranians, that the Iranian government had wanted Zia dead. The Iranians had a track record of assassination, didn’t they?
In fact, Kamran had by now been told by a member of the joint Pakistani intelligence board that had interrogated and apparently tortured Artis for six months that the reason Pakistan finally let him go was that they were convinced he was a CIA plant sent to make them think Tehran killed Zia. The evidence on Artis, this Pakistani intelligence official told Kamran, was too convincing to be real. Mirrors on top of mirrors.
Finch said Gul had indeed believed Artis was a CIA plant sent to make the Pakistanis believe, falsely, that the Iranians killed Zia. “Apparently Artis did have the names of several Iranians” at the time of the arrest, Finch said. But Finch didn’t take any of this seriously because of “the reputation and ability of Hamid Gul. He does not play around. He does not fool around. This particular concoction was not part of our investigation.”
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