On the Grand Trunk Road (21 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

BOOK: On the Grand Trunk Road
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Walking back to the office, I talked with McGee about two possibilities. One was that Finch and Revelle had told the truth, that they had responded spontaneously to my detailed questions. The other possibility was that the FBI, like the American embassy in Islamabad, had just staged an elaborate drama for our benefit. I was relieved to find that McGee also noticed how quickly and conveniently Finch came into the office with a thick file full of materials on Artis, after Revelle said he had never heard of the case. But this meant nothing, really. And I was exhausted, dizzy.
 
I felt certain about a few things. One was that it was foolish for the FBI to take Hamid Gul, the former Pakistani spy chief, at his word. Perhaps Finch had read the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s biographical sketch of Gul. In January 1989, while Artis was being held incommunicado by Gul’s ISI on suspicion of being involved in an American plot, DIA produced a classified sketch of the Pakistani intelligence chief that described him as “a strong supporter of Pakistan’s ties to the U.S., generally friendly towards the U.S. and the West and very comfortable around foreigners.... His religious practice does not appear to affect his political views.... Gul is a cheerful, ambitious officer, who has a very professional outlook... a sincere and caring individual.” The trouble with this bit of “intelligence” was that even apart from the issue of mutual U.S.-Pakistani suspicion, nearly everybody in Pakistan saw Gul as a master manipulator, a professional liar. American diplomats I talked to about him used words like “devious” and “untrustworthy.” I asked one who had been in Pakistan during the Zia crash and the period of Gul’s reign as spy chief to assess the general. “In retrospect we cannot say that relationship was a good one,” the diplomat said. “We put an awful lot onto that effort and he certainly profited from it. He was profiting from the relationship both personally and in terms of his ideological bent. I think we misunderstood the depth of his anti-Americanism.” That the FBI had settled the Artis matter on Gul’s word seemed preposterous. But Finch said that’s just what he had done.
 
Another thing I felt certain about was that I had been lied to. I just didn’t know by whom or about what.
 
The only way to move forward was to find Artis, a man who reportedly lied about most things to everyone he met. But Artis was on the run and I couldn’t trace him.
 
I wrote a story about the Artis case for the Post. The editors couldn’t quite figure what it was about. It was hard to blame them. They put the story in the paper anyway, mainly to humor me. Afterward I had a meal with my boss, the spy novelist David Ignatius. He listened to my narrative and urged me to see
The Grifters,
the movie about con artists based on a Jim Thompson novel.
 
In the parking lot, Ignatius joked, “We killed Zia, didn’t we?” He meant the American government.
 
“We killed Zia,” I said, also joking. More or less.
 
Some people explain the inexplicable with conspiracy theories. This is certainly the tendency in South Asia. I regard this point of view with some sympathy—for one thing, it lies close to religion, to the postulated existence of God and the Devil, which is the grandest and most attractive conspiracy theory of all. The opposing assumption is that political events are shaped more often by pedestrian human incompetence than by cunning. This is my view and I cling to it, provisionally. There is plenty of historical evidence on each side. In the case of the Zia crash, I could have spent the next few years wandering around in the hall of mirrors, searching for the Devil. It was tempting. The other choice was to go back to South Asia, back to work. I decided to go back to work.
 
I laid a few trawling lines, telling friends and relatives of Artis that I still wanted to talk with him. That summer, when I was on vacation in Connecticut, Artis telephoned
The Washington
Post and asked to speak with me. Ignatius took the call. Artis had a whispery voice, wouldn’t say where he was calling from. He wanted to meet me in August. In Nigeria. Ignatius said he wasn’t sure I would be in Nigeria in August, but he urged Artis to call me directly and work something out. He set up an appointment for Artis to telephone me in the New York bureau the next morning.
 
I got up before dawn to drive to Manhattan and wait for his call. It never came. It’s been a year now. Artis has never called back. I haven’t been able to find him. So what if I did?
 
“Pak One, stand by,” said Mashoud. And then he was gone.
 
7
 
Rulers
 
 
A river without water, a forest without grass, a herd of cattle
without a herdsman, is the land without a king.
—The
Ramayana
 
 
 
 
O
ne night back in New Delhi about a month after Artis made his phantom telephonic appearance, I wandered downstairs late to check the news wire that ran incessantly in my office, producing a rhythmic screech. I was about to flip the machine off when a small Associated Press item out of Karachi passed across it. Kamran Khan, my friend and partner in the Pakistani wonderland, had been attacked and stabbed outside his newspaper office.
 
By the time I touched down at Karachi’s smoky, sprawling airport the next night, it was clear that Kamran would survive his wounds, but it was not so clear whether or not a fresh attack would be mounted against him. On scratchy phone lines to India, Kamran’s friends and colleagues had described what passed for the facts of the case. Since the tentative termination of our plane crash enterprise, Kamran had published a running series of brave if arguably foolhardy investigative reports on political and police corruption in Karachi and surrounding Sind province, a region writer Ian Buruma once described aptly as “a kind of sandy Sicily.” The province is controlled by sometimes interlocking, sometimes competing mafias—political, ethnic, and purely criminal. Heroin trafficking, ransom kidnapping, and abuse of political patronage are the mafias’ main endeavors. They wage their competitions through young toughs armed with some of the tens of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles pumped into Pakistan by the CIA in its effort to aid the Afghan mujaheddin. Kamran had written about the Karachi mafias in local newspapers for years and had endured many threats. But what seemed to have finally provoked an attack was a series on Pakistan’s CIA—not the Central Intelligence Agency but the Criminal Investigative Agency, a police unit in charge of looking into serious crimes. He wrote that the CIA had itself become a criminal enterprise manipulated by the corrupt administration of Sind province’s chief minister, Jam Sadiq Ali. Immediately Kamran received death threats at home. Goons showed up at his doorstep in the night, shouting abuse and daring him to come outside. Friends called to warn privately that Jam Sadiq Ali was furious and ready to strike back. Kamran wrote desperately to the prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, putting on record his demand for political protection. It didn’t work. Two days later, as he stepped from his Suzuki car outside his newspaper office, he was attacked. Two young goons who had followed him on a motorcycle got down and asked his name. After confirming that he was Kamran, they asked why he had written nonsense in the papers. One thrust a knife at Kamran’s chest and throat. Kamran lifted his arm and blocked the blows, which severed his forearm to the bone. He then dashed inside his office, bleeding badly. Colleagues took him to the hospital.
 
There was little doubt but also little direct evidence that Jam, as the Sind chief minister was universally known, had ordered the hit on Kamran. Jam—who died of cancer in early 1992 after denying brazenly for months that there was anything wrong with him—was the sort of charming, effective thug who provoked chuckles of admiration in the parlors of the cynical Pakistani elite. He had been a longtime ally of Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and had gone into exile in London when Zia hanged Bhutto and imposed martial law. People who saw Jam during the London years described him as a little lonely, a fish out of water in the hip, cosmopolitan exile scene surrounding Benazir. Obviously Jam felt snubbed by her. Returning to Pakistan, he waited for his opportunity and then turned on her, agreeing to serve Benazir’s enemies by becoming Sind chief minister when the establishment tossed Benazir out of office in August 1990. Jam seized his chance by cracking down ruthlessly on Benazir’s political machine in Sind. Beginning in late 1990, he arrested thousands of Benazir’s allies and tossed them into jail without charges. He handed out twenty thousand AK-47 licenses to the best-organized political and ethnic opponents of Benazir in Sind, the Mohajir Quami Movement, or MQM, an ethnic mafia that had been formed originally to represent the legitimate political interests of refugees but had become, by 1990, a well-oiled criminal machine. After arming the MQM, Jam took control of sections of the police force, using it to assert his will over Karachi and some rural areas in Sind.
 
Watching all this and then digging into the details, Kamran began to write about the boss. Jam took notice. Zafar Abbas, the BBC’s stringer in Karachi, told me that shortly after Kamran’s reporting began to appear, Jam took Abbas aside at a dinner to ask him, “Who is this Kamran Khan?” When Abbas explained, Jam said that Kamran had better learn that he, Jam, was a different sort of chief minister. Abbas told Jam that he ought not to threaten journalists. “Many people in Karachi are kidnapped,” Jam replied. “Kamran could find that he, too, is kidnapped.” Nobody I talked to—police, army officers, journalists, politicians—doubted that Jam had been behind the knife attack. Of course, nobody was prepared to testify to that in court, either.
 
After I learned that Kamran would survive his wounds, my main objective was to get him out of the country before Jam or somebody else tried again to kill him. By the time I landed in Karachi, Jam was already well into the old feudal game of “First I kill you, then I love you, then I kill you again.” The chief minister had personally ordered that Kamran receive the very best medical care available in Karachi, expense be damned. He had ensured that Kamran was transferred to the Aga Khan hospital, funded by the multimillionaire leader of the Ismaili sect—a hospital that looked cleaner and better managed than most of the ones you see in the United States. Kamran’s room was filled with bouquets of roses sent by the chief minister and his various allies. Kamran and I joked that the bouquets had no doubt been ordered in advance, appropriate for either funeral condolences or get-well wishes, depending on how the attack turned out. Police under the chief minister’s control had been posted outside Kamran’s hospital room. This did not strike either of us as reassuring. Kamran was already on the phone to friends in the army, asking them to please send someone around to replace the provincial police guards.
 
It seemed to us an open question whether the knife attack had been a warning to Kamran successfully executed, and thus the episode was for the moment finished, or a botched murder attempt, in which case we would want to move quickly to avoid a second attack. Obviously, in Karachi, if you really want to kill somebody, you open up on them with an assault rifle. A knife attack is a little antiquated and suggested less-than-lethal intent. Since the only man who could really answer this question about intent was Jam himself, I made an appointment to see him.
 
He invited me to a dinner at his official Karachi residence for a visiting delegation of Chinese Communist officials from Beijing. Multicolored cloth tents had been erected over his front lawn and tables were set atop Persian and Afghan carpets. The Chinese hunched together in their ill-fitting suits and white socks. Jam’s retainers lingered around the buffet table, stuffing themselves with slabs of boned lamb. I mingled with a few Pakistani friends, waiting for the boss to summon me. He did, finally, after slapping the Chinese delegates on their backs and ushering them through the tall, spiked metal gate that guarded his driveway.
 
One of Jam’s retainers took me inside a carpeted reception room filled with tacky ornate furniture and buffeted by subarctic winds from air conditioners on full blast. A few businessmen and ministers in Jam’s government drifted in, either to watch my audience or to wait for one of their own when mine was through. At last Jam entered grandly through sliding glass doors, dressed in a flowing white salwar kameez. He had white hair and a trimmed white beard. When he smiled, a gold tooth sparkled.
 
Before we began, he pushed a button by his chair and summoned in the publisher of Kamran’s newspaper, Mir ul-Rehman. Jam stood and embraced him, then made the introductions.
 
“I am his servant,” Rehman said.
 
“No, I am his servant,” Jam replied. Then he ushered Rehman out.
 
Our conversation was cordial, occasionally intense. Jam criticized Kamran repeatedly, calling him an agent of intelligence services. Kamran’s reporting was never correct; it was “yellow journalism” against Jam’s government. Yet he said that he liked Kamran personally and did not want any harm to come to him.
 
I suggested that there were legal means available to control the press if Jam felt it was irresponsible, and he said, yes, there were, but he went on to talk animatedly about how ineffective the legal means were because the government could never win lawsuits and reporters never felt the pinch of having to pay legal bills. Somehow, the reporters had to learn their lesson. At this point, I ventured that attempted murder was a hard lesson to swallow. Jam said dismissively that the attack on Kamran was not murderous. Twice he accused Kamran of inventing the story that he had raised his arm to block a blow aimed at his chest or throat, saying that, in fact, the assailant had deliberately—politely, even—cut Kamran across the arm.

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