The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  Second, there is the Bhutto family. Zia had, after all, usurped power from President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He had also allowed Bhutto to be hanged like a common criminal in 1979 on what Bhutto’s family viewed as a trumped-up charge. In addition, Zia outlawed Bhutto’s political party, the Pakistan People’s Party; imprisoned his wife (even though she was suffering from lung cancer) and his daughter, Benazir Bhutto; and had both his sons, who were in exile abroad, convicted of high crimes in absentia. The eldest son, Shah Nawaz, was then murdered in France in 1986, and the younger son, Mir Murtaza, driven into hiding. Demanding vengeance, Mir Murtaza Bhutto headed an anti-Zia group called Al Zulfikar (“the sword”), which operated out of Afghanistan and Syria. One of its operations was to hijack a Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 727 with 100 passengers aboard. Another involved attempting to blow Pak One out of the sky with Zia aboard it by firing a Soviet-built SAM 7 missile at it. In all, Mir Murtaza claimed he was behind five attempts to assassinate Zia. Initially, his group also had taken credit for the successful destruction of Pak One in a phone call to the BBC, but it subsequently retracted this claim. In any case, there was no doubt that he was well motivated. (Mir Murtaza was killed in a shootout with police in Karachi in 1996.)

  A third theory is that the KGB killed Zia. Moscow also had a motive, since Zia was behind covert attacks on Soviet troops not only in Afghanistan but in the Soviet Union itself. Earlier that August, the Soviet Union had temporarily suspended its troop withdrawals from Afghanistan because it alleged that Zia had violated the Geneva Accords, which had been signed in May. A spokesman for the foreign ministry in Moscow said only a week before the crash that Zia’s “obstructionist policy cannot be tolerated.” Moscow officials even took the extraordinary step of calling in the American Ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock, and informing him that it intended “to teach Zia a lesson.” It certainly had the means in place in Pakistan to make this threat credible, having trained, subsidized, and effectively run the Afghan intelligence service, WAD, which operated in Pakistan. In 1988, according to a State Department report, such covert operations had killed and wounded more than 1,400 people in Pakistan.

  A fourth theory was that India was the culprit. Less than two weeks before the crash, the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, had warned Pakistan that it would have cause “to regret its behavior” in covertly supplying weapons to Sikh terrorists in India. Not only had the Sikhs assassinated Indira Gandhi, Rajiv’s mother, when she was prime minister, they now had more than 2,000 armed guerrillas located mainly around the Pakistan border, and Zia had been supplying them with AK-47 assault rifles, rocket launchers, and sanctuaries inside Pakistan. Accordingly, India had a motive to get rid of Zia. It also had the means, having organized a special covert-action unit that went by the initials R.A.W, to recruit agents inside Pakistan.

  A fifth theory was that Shiites were behind Zia’s death. Zia’s Sunni regime had been repressing the Shiite minority, and, according to this theory, the Shiites struck back by recruiting the Shiite copilot of Zia’s plane, Wing Commander Sajid. This was why Pakistani military authorities arrested the Shiite pilot of the backup C-130, who was a close friend of Sajid, and interrogated him for more than two months. (Even under torture, he insisted that, as far as he knew, Sajid was a loyal pilot who would not commit suicide.) The problem here was that in order to crash the plane Sajid would have had to overpower the rest of the four-man flight crew, but no such struggle had been heard over the radio.

  Finally, there is the Army coup theory. Zia had told his close associates that he planned to purge and reorganize the army, and this threat, according to this theory, would provide a motive for a preemptive move against Zia. Among the few top generals not aboard Pak One was General Aslam Beg, the Army’s vice chief of staff. He waved good-bye to Zia from the runway, and then, after the crash, flew immediately to Islamabad to take control, ordering army units to cordon off official residences, government buildings, and other strategic locations in the capital.

  My assessment is that Zia and all thirty people aboard Pak One, were victims of sabotage. After going to Islamabad and Lahore to investigate in 1989, I was allowed to read the red-cover secret U.S. report on the accident by a U.S. Defense Department official, who asked to remain anonymous. This report reinforced my conclusion that the pilots and flight crew were incapacitated by a quick-acting nerve gas, such as “VX,” which is odorless, easily transportable in liquid form, and, when vaporized by a small explosion, would cause paralysis and loss of speech within thirty seconds. VX gas would leave precisely the residue of phosphorous that was found in the chemical analysis of debris from the cockpit. A soda-sized can of VX could have been planted in the air vent of the pilot’s compartment and triggered by a pressure sensor to activate on takeoff.

  But who did it? All the suspected parties—including Mir Murtazi Bhutto’s terrorists—had the capability of obtaining VX or a similar nerve gas, and any of them could have recruited an agent to plant a gas bomb on Pak One, since it had been grounded at the airstrip at Bahawalpur in violation of the prescribed procedure of flying it to the larger airport at Multan, where it could be properly guarded. During its four-hour grounding at Bahawalpur, workers reportedly entered Pak One without being searched in order to work on adjusting its cargo door. One of them could have planted a device. So all the suspects had the means to sabotage the plane. But only one of these parties, the Pakistan military, had the power to stop the planned autopsies, seize the telephone records of calls made to Zia and Rahman just prior to the crash, transfer the military personnel at Bahawalpur who might have witnessed the crime, stifle interrogations of police, and keep the FBI out of the picture. In short, only the Pakistan generals who assumed control that day had the power to create a cover-up that followed the crash. They also had a motive for making it look like something more legitimate than a coup d’état.

  In addition, the Pakistan military was the only agency capable of assuring that both President Zia and his second-in-command, General Rahman, were on the plane together. And unless both of these men could be eliminated simultaneously, no regime change could be certain. According to General Rahman’s family, whom I interviewed at length in Lahore, General Rahman had not wanted to go to the tank demonstration, but he was told that Zia needed his counsel on an “urgent matter.” So, under pressure from a general on Beg’s staff, he changed his plans and flew with Zia. But that counsel turned out to be untrue. Not only was Zia surprised to see Rahman on the plane, but, as General Rahman related in a phone call from Bahawalpur to his son just before his death, Zia told him that there was no “urgent matter” requiring his presence on the plane.

  Zia’s eldest son, Ijaz ul-Haq, also believed that his father had been manipulated by the military into going to the tank demonstration. He told me that his father was in the midst of making major changes in the military hierarchy and saw no point in going to this tank demonstration. He then received “continued calls” from General Mahmud Durrani, who was on Beg’s staff, pressing him to be at the demonstration. The general said that the “Americans would consider it a slight” if he missed this event. So, despite his misgivings, he agreed to go. But according to U.S. Ambassador Robert Bigger Oakley, who in August 1988 had been the assistant to the president for Pakistan on the National Security Council, neither the U.S. embassy nor the military mission had pressed for Zia’s attendance. He also told me that Ambassador Raphel, his predecessor, made a snap decision twenty-four hours beforehand to fly on Pak One when he learned, to his surprise, that Zia would be aboard the plane. If so, Zia, like Rahman, had been misled by his advisors.

  The level of orchestration necessary to bring about this regime change, both before the crash and in effecting the cover-up after the crash, persuades me that this was an inside job by a Pakistani military cabal. The journalistic lesson in the Zia case is that even when a government officially embargoes a subject, such as the Pakistan government did in this case, in a relatively porous country such as P
akistan, it is possible to get answers from low-level civil servants, such as air tower controllers, mortuary officers, and police officials.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE SUBMERGED SPY

  On September 24, 1978, the Brillig, a thirty-one-foot sloop, was found off the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. No one was aboard the vessel. Its owner, and last known passenger, was John Arthur Paisley, a fifty-five-year-old former deputy director of the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research, who had worked on ultra-secret assessments of the CIA, such as “B Team,” a unit of the president’s foreign intelligence advisory board. In his last known communication from the boat, Paisley informed a friend, Mike Yohn, over the ship-to-shore radio that he had an important report to write. Aboard the Brillig, which Paisley had named from the “Jabberwocky” poem in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass, was a telephone directory from the CIA and other documents.

  Then, on September 26, 1978, Paisley’s body bobbed up in the nearby Patuxent River. Strapped to the body, which had been disfigured beyond recognition by its immersion, were diving weights weighing thirty-eight pounds. The autopsy established that the cause of death was a gunshot wound behind the left ear. There were also rope burns on the neck. But since there was no evidence of anyone else aboard the Brillig, the death was ruled a suicide by Calvert County, Maryland coroner, Dr. George Weems. Since no weapon had been found on the ship, and there was no blood or brain tissue anywhere on deck, the theory of the Maryland State Police was that Paisley must have strapped thirty-eight pounds of weight on his chest, positioned himself in the water next to the boat, and then shot himself.

  APPARENT SUICIDES OF INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVES

  DATE VICTIM CAUSE OF DEATH

  FEBRUARY 10, 1941 General Walter Krivitsky Soviet intelligence defector Shot by pistol

  NOVEMBER 28, 1953 Frank Olson liaison with CIA technical division Leapt from window after being given LSD

  JULY 20, 1963 Jack Dunlap CIA liaison with NSA and a double agent for the Soviet Union Carbon monoxide poisoning

  OCTOBER 29, 1965 Frank Wisner CIA executive Shot with shotgun

  OCTOBER 8, 1968 Major-General Horst Wendland deputy head of the BND Shot by pistol

  OCTOBER 8, 1968 Admiral Hermann Ludke NATO liaison Shot by rifle

  OCTOBER 15, 1968 Hans-Heinrich Schenk German Ministry official Hanged by rope

  OCTOBER 16, 1968 Edeltraud Grapentin German Ministry official Sleeping pills overdose

  OCTOBER 18, 1968 Colonel Johannes Grimm German Defense Agency Shot by pistol

  OCTOBER 23, 1968 Gerald Bohm German Ministry official Drowned in river

  SEPTEMBER 26, 1978 John Paisley CIA official Drowned

  APRIL 29, 1983 Waldo Dubberstei Defense Intelligence official (and suspected double agent) Shot with shotgun

  This verdict raised eyebrows among his former colleagues at the CIA, since it was well known that Paisley was right-handed, so to shoot himself behind his left ear would be difficult. As a result of the unconvincing verdict, a number of theories have emerged to account for the death. First, there is the coroner’s theory that Paisley shot himself. Despite the convolutions he would have had to go through, it is possible that he shot himself behind the left ear while holding onto the boat.

  Second, there is the “man-who-never-was” theory. In this version, the corpse that floated to the surface was not that of Paisley but a corpse dressed in his clothing. The basis for this theory, which has been advanced by investigative journalist Joseph Trento among others, is that the CIA’s office of security had focused its search for a possible mole in Paisley’s unit just before his retirement from the CIA in 1974. In this view, Paisley faked his own death to avoid being exposed as a KGB mole. The theory proceeds from the fact that the badly decomposed corpse had been cremated without being positively identified by any of Paisley’s family members. In addition, the skin on his fingers had been peeled back several layers, making fingerprint identification less than certain.

  Finally, there is the theory that Paisley was killed by an unknown party. In these circumstances, murder is the only plausible alternative to suicide.

  My assessment is that this was a case of a murder that did not go as planned. The evidence is that the corpse was Paisley’s. Not only was there one matching fingerprint, but Paisley’s own dentist identified the dental work (even though this identification had to be done from memory, since the dental X-rays had been lost when the dentist had moved offices). The suicide theory is not credible to me, because the fact that no weapon was found at the scene is not consistent with suicide. Nor are the rope burns on the corpse’s neck or the bullet hole behind the left ear. It is also implausible that a man bent on suicide would both shoot and, by wearing weights, drown himself.

  A far simpler explanation is that he was shot elsewhere, execution-style, behind the left ear, after he made the call to his friend. His body was then weighted down, possibly with even more weight than was found strapped to his chest, and then dropped in the water, with the expectation that the weights would keep the body from surfacing. The motive may well have been intelligence-related in light of the CIA documents on the boat. Graham Greene’s 1978 novel The Human Factor, which concerns the problem of eliminating a suspected mole in an intelligence service, may be illuminating here. In Greene’s spy story, a secret service discovers a mole but assesses that a court trial could compromise its secret operation. So it elects to use a non-judicial remedy by poisoning the mole with aflatoxin, which disguises the murder as an accidental death as the result of ingesting moldy peanuts. While this is fiction, intelligence services did have this capability in the late 1970s. If Paisley had been involved in some sort of double-game of spying, it is possible that one side disposed of him in a way that, if the body had not surfaced, would make the murder appear to be a disappearance as the result of a boating accident. In any case, as a large part of the evidence has been lost or destroyed, including even the fingerprint sample in CIA records, Paisley’s death remains an unsolved crime.

  The intrigue that surrounds an intelligence operative in life does not necessarily end with his demise, even if his death is declared an apparent suicide or accidental death. This is especially true if the death is violent and there are no witnesses. For example, the demise of CIA liaison Frank Olson, who fell or was defenestrated from a tenth-floor window at the Hotel Pennsylvania on November 28, 1953, remained the subject of such intense speculation that more than four decades later, after the body was exhumed and a second autopsy was performed, the district attorney in New York ordered a belated homicide investigation, though no charges were ever brought. Since spies are occupationally engaged in a life of deception, in which their biography is often rearranged into a legend to suit the requisites of national security, their deaths are not always accepted as what they appear to be.

  PART THREE

  COLD CASE FILE

  CHAPTER 15

  JACK THE RIPPER

  Jack the Ripper may be the most celebrated serial killer in history. Not only has he been the subject of books, movies, television reenactments, and even an opera, but his name is commonly used by tabloid journalists as convenient shorthand to describe a depraved serial killer. The real mystery is whether “Jack The Ripper” actually existed or if he was a composite character used by the rising tabloid media to link a number of unrelated murders to sell newspapers and increase circulation. Prior to the emergence of Jack the Ripper in Victorian London in 1888, there had been a large number of attacks on prostitutes on the unlit streets and in the alleys of the Whitechapel district of London. Since there was much ethnic violence in these slums, the police paid little attention to the attacks. But the new tabloids—so named because the content was compressed like a pharmaceutical tablet into four pages—were in the midst of a take-no-prisoner circulation war for survival. The newest of them, The Star, which was close to going bankrupt, saw an opportunity in the prostitute murders. Since there was little interest in individual murders of pros
titutes, it linked three together and attributed the killings to single serial murderer. The demonic name it gave him came from a letter of unknown provenance claiming authorship of the murders that was signed “Jack the Ripper.” The letter came through the mail on September 28, 1888, to the main provider of stories to The Star, the Central News Agency. The “Jack the Ripper” name caught the public’s imagination and reversed The Star’s faltering circulation. To compete with it, the other tabloids had to outdo it in reporting Jack the Ripper’s deeds, and in less than six months, eleven separate deaths were attributed to the sinister killer.

  What happened outside this circulation war is less clear. There was only one witness to the prostitute attacks, Emma Elizabeth Smith. Although fatally wounded by stabbing, she lived long enough to describe her attackers to the police. She said it was a gang of a few men and a teenager. This narrative of a gang contradicted the press’s version of a solitary “Jack the Ripper.” Such gang assaults were not uncommon in 1888. No other victim lived to identify her attacker, nor were there any other witnesses to the attacks. No weapons, clothing, or other telltale clues were found at any of the crime scenes. The police only had bodies, blood, and gore to go on. Without such forensic tools as fingerprint, hair, fiber, blood, or DNA analysis, it was not possible to tie the crimes to a single killer.

  The police had only one means of linking any of the prostitute murders: a unique modus operandi. In a number of the crimes there were common features: necks were slashed, torsos were cut open, and organs removed. The problem here is that tabloids published enough of the gory anatomical details that another killer or killers could have imitated this modus operandi so that their crimes would be blamed on “Jack the Ripper.” In any case, the modus operandi did not fit all eleven cases in police files. In the first two cases, the murdered prostitutes, Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram, were stabbed, not slashed. They next four victims, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, were slashed and had organs removed. In one case, that of Elizabeth Stride, the victim was slashed but the organs were not removed. According to Sir Melville Macnaghten, the assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, only five victims fit the pattern. He speculated that in the case of Elizabeth Stride, the murderer might have been interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps. He wrote in his official report, “the Whitechapel murderer had five victims—and five victims only.” Dr. Percy Clark, the assistant to the examining pathologist, who closely examined all these victims, reduced the number further, saying that only three of the victims conformed to the same modus operandi. (Andrew Cook, a historian who reexamined all the police reports for his 2009 book Jack the Ripper: Case Closed, went even further, concluding that all the killings were unconnected.) In any case, according to the medical examiner and police closest to the case, most of the murders were not committed by the same predator. Indeed, according to those closest to the investigation, the killer’s profile only fits three of the murder cases.