88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  We would meet at the Islamabad Golf Club. Upon my arrival, my various satraps would set about industriously cleaning balls and scrubbing clubs as Sulayman and I went through our prescribed warm-ups on the practice tee and at the putting green. As we made our cumbersome way around the course, the spirits of my golfing claque would rise and fall sharply with the vicissitudes of my game. A blistering drive of 250 yards down the right-center fairway would be cause for euphoria. Player, caddy, and bag carriers would march off the tee smartly, while the ball-spotting outliers would converge in the fairway to marvel at the prowess of their patron. An outright duff would produce despondency: shoulders would slump, and my followers would scuffle dejectedly along the turf in their ill-fitting sandals.

  Having long been away from the game, and months of overwork having done nothing to improve upon my modest skills, a significant number of my drives would sail beyond the boundary stakes in the direction of deep eucalyptus groves, where a loud report would signal the impact of ball with trunk. It was the duty of the ball-spotters to find these errant missiles. Not infrequently, I would arrive on the scene after such mishaps in a foul humor, only to find my spotters loitering nonchalantly near a ball—mine—in the first cut of the rough. I would raise an eyebrow. “Good bounce, sir,” was the assessment. I would look at them skeptically, but what was one to say? Far be it from me to subject my good fortune to excessive scrutiny. It had characterized most of my career.

  Over the weeks, my game improved under Sulayman’s patient tutelage, though I sometimes failed to appreciate his wry humor. On one occasion I sent a drive on a wide parabola to an area beyond the ability even of my ball-spotters to penetrate. A drop in the fairway was followed by a pathetic miss-hit of 50 yards or so. A fourth strike sent the ball into a deep sandtrap. It required three more swings, accompanied by some imaginative oaths, to propel the ball from the trap and onto the green, a good 80 feet from the pin. I was sufficiently disgusted by this time that I didn’t bother to line up the putt, instead knocking the ball haphazardly in the general direction of the hole. It struck the back of the cup and went in. Still seething, I stalked silently toward the next tee, Sulayman matching me stride for stride. “Putting good,” he said.

  On Sunday, February 3, I was about to get up for my weekly round with Dave when I received an unexpected call from Paula. My father had just died of a heart attack, collapsing on the tennis court. I had known he wasn’t doing so well, as the symptoms of congestive heart failure were creeping back ten years after quadruple bypass surgery. I rushed home to my mother and my siblings.

  After the funeral, there were important decisions to be made. Dependents of official Americans were being allowed to return to Pakistan. Doug very much wanted to rejoin his classmates and resume his old life, but Paula was skeptical: there were only six months left in our tour, and she and Doug had put down roots in Virginia. Like Doug, I felt strongly that they should return to Pakistan. There were dangers, yes, but we had always managed them before. We were devoted to service, and to overseas living; this is what we did.

  The decision to allow dependents to return was not without controversy. CIA, and specifically CTC, were leery. For my part, I had argued strongly that the threat was manageable. In the weeks and months after the start of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan there had been mass demonstrations in Pakistani cities, and public outrage at the United States had been feverish. And yet, there had been no attacks on Americans; other Western embassies, though on heightened alert, had allowed their dependents to remain. Now, with hostilities in Afghanistan effectively ended, the atmosphere was becoming more normal.

  CTC had wondered about the effect of al-Qa’ida militants fleeing Afghanistan into Pakistan. Most of these, I pointed out, were simple fighters. They were disoriented, on unfamiliar ground, and most were attempting to transit Pakistan as quickly as possible for less hostile regions. We and the Pakistanis were capturing them in wholesale numbers. Yes, al-Qa’ida would have both motive and some means to strike us, but that was true in many other places; there was no reason, I said, to believe that we could not, with prudence, mitigate the threat to our safety. Most of the dependents returned to post, Paula and Doug among them.

  We and our fellow hikers had stopped for a break on a mountain path when I received a call from the Marine standing guard at Post One, the principal security monitoring center of the embassy. Details were sketchy, but there had been a number of explosions at the Christian church located in the diplomatic quarter. There were dead and wounded. The church was regularly attended by Americans from the mission and NGOs.

  When Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin saw me rushing down the hall toward her office two hours later, her eyes widened in shocked surprise. It was the first of several such encounters I would have that day. Initial reports from the church had listed me among the dead, and Chamberlin had so reported to her senior staff.

  It took some time to piece the facts together, but it appeared a slight, dark-skinned young man had run down the center aisle of the half-full church, thrown several grenades, and then blown himself up. Among the seventy or so Pakistani Christians and Westerners present, five were killed and forty-six injured. That evening, Paula, keeping vigil, as one of the embassy nurses, over the Americans lying wounded at the hospital, sat down quietly with the embassy physician as they explained to young Zachary Green that his mother, Barbara, and his half sister Kristen Wormsley, were dead. Kristen was about to graduate from high school; her college plans had been set. Zachary’s father Milton, like Barbara a member of the embassy staff, had also been hurt. Ten Americans had been wounded in all.

  Within days of the church attack, the wife of a French diplomat discovered a bomb attached to her car. The January abduction in Karachi and execution of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, could no longer be considered an unfortunate aberration. There was now no question of official American families remaining in Pakistan. Doug said his final goodbyes at school, and he and Paula left.

  Pakistan continued its descent into violence. It had long been a turbulent place, where civic tensions could spawn vicious mobs at a moment’s notice, and where religiously inspired attacks against Shia, Christians, and other minorities were common. Now the list of targets would increase. On May 8, eleven French naval engineers and two Pakistanis were killed by a car bomb outside the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. On June 15, I journeyed to Karachi to visit colleagues who had escaped serious harm when a car bomb detonated just outside the U.S. Consulate.

  * * *

  Post-9/11 Pakistan is not alone in succumbing to greater levels of violence. We have seen similar events throughout the region. But in my view, America has often greatly overreacted. Experiences such as that in Pakistan have made us gun-shy. Far too many posts, including those in countries where terrorist violence has been relatively infrequent, have been declared “unaccompanied,” with no non-employees allowed. Rather than managing risk, the U.S. government has sought to avoid risk. There is a price to be paid for such timidity. Unaccompanied posts eventually suffer greatly in their performance when employees, the vast majority of whom have family responsibilities that our culture, rightly, takes more seriously than ever, avoid them. Even in places to which it is not appropriate to bring children, at least permitting adult dependents would be an improvement.

  Worse yet, in all too many cases, those employees who are assigned to dangerous posts are not permitted to do their jobs properly by traveling freely and maintaining local contacts, instead being confined to fortified installations. Yes, greater openness will inevitably produce more official American casualties, in an environment where recriminations in Congress and elsewhere make sensible risk-taking greatly hazardous to the careers of senior bureaucrats. But if America is to meet its responsibilities, courage, both physical and political, will be required. Like Horatius at the gate, American spies and diplomats will accept the risks associated with their calling, but only if permitted to do so.

  Chapter 41 />
  * * *

  THE RECKONING

  MARCH 29, 2002

  IT HAD BEEN A particularly late night, but I had a spring in my step as I strode across the sun-dappled lobby of a luxury hotel in Islamabad. I found my delegation, several members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and their wives, sitting in the breakfast room. This was not the sort of meeting I would normally hold, and certainly not the normal venue for it. I had held my formal briefing for the legislators the previous afternoon, but had promised to stop by before their planned departure that morning to update them regarding a certain ongoing matter. They looked up as I ambled over to their table. I held the suspense for a bit longer as I settled into a chair and greeted them confidently. I looked about for some coffee. “I have good news,” I said finally. “We’ve captured Abu Zubayda.”

  Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, aka Abu Zubayda, had been an obsession for me for two and a half years. For months even before the February night in 2000 when former Ambassador Bill Milam and I met with President Musharraf to seek his help in capturing the man, I had watched with growing frustration as this master terrorist logistician traveled repeatedly through Pakistan to and from al-Qa’ida’s Afghan training camps. He maintained a sort of underground railroad, facilitating the movement of young Muslim men to and from their courses of instruction in the dark arts, providing them with tickets, guidance, lodging, and assistance with their travel documents. We couldn’t generate information precise or immediate enough to force the government of Pakistan to capture him on his jaunts through their country. And in spite of President Musharraf’s assurances and my own importunings, General Mahmud of the ISI would not help us.

  All that changed at the precipice of 9/11, but in the months thereafter Zubayda went to ground. In February 2002, reliable reporting placed him in Waziristan, in the Pakistani Tribal Areas. By that time, hundreds of foreign fighters were fleeing Afghanistan, trying to make their way through Pakistan, which they now considered hostile territory, into Iran, from where they hoped to return to the Arab countries most of them had come from. We presumed Zubayda was arranging travel or safehaven for fugitive Arab fighters in the Tribal Areas, but could not be sure, and our sources did not want to look for him there. Zubayda was a professional, and highly suspicious. If our agents were to search for him without a transparently good reason for doing so, they would immediately fall under sustained, and perhaps lethal, suspicion.

  In early March, we had clear indications that Abu Zubayda was somewhere in Faisalabad, in the “settled areas” of Pakistan, and that a significant number of his fleeing Afghan Arab fighters were with him. This initially came as a surprise. Faisalabad had never been on our screen, but on examination it proved to be a likely place for our quarry to hide. A gritty, sprawling industrial town in northeast Punjab Province, it was the third largest metropolis in Pakistan, after Karachi and Lahore, though with nowhere near the prominence or social cachet. Located at a major road and rail junction about 75 miles west-southwest of Lahore, it was an easy place to travel quietly to or from, a perfect place to get lost in.

  Our targeting system went into overdrive, and we began generating multiple sites for General Imran and his operators—many more than we would be able to handle at one time, even if only a portion of the suspected targets proved viable. Until then, we had done a maximum of two or three raids on a given night, but since we couldn’t pin Abu Zubayda to any particular one of the targeted locations, we determined that we would have to hit every identified site simultaneously, in hopes that Zubayda might be in one of them. Manpower would of course be no problem for the Pakistanis, but we would not have nearly enough Americans—CIA or FBI—to go around; both had to be present at each target location. We deployed a number of our officers to Faisalabad, with a senior visiting ethnic-Arab CIA case officer in charge—a first-rate fellow dubbed “Detroit” by the FBI—to work with the Pakistanis under Dave’s supervision and set the raid plan. I went to work getting us more resources.

  The one source of readily deployable people, not otherwise productively occupied, that I knew of was the Incident Response Team (IRT) in CTC. This unit had a long and undistinguished pedigree. It had been created with much fanfare back in the 1980s, given a dedicated aircraft, highly skilled operational and technical officers, and the most sophisticated gadgetry available at the time. The idea was that any time there was a terrorist incident anywhere in the world, such as a plane hijacking or hostage taking, the IRT would be sent in to provide advice, guidance, and technical assistance to the host government. It was a wonderful idea, with a small wrinkle: No country would have it. Any time there is a terrorist incident, the government of the concerned country wants to demonstrate that it is competent to deal with it. Inviting foreigners to handle a high-profile situation is a political impossibility, and bringing in such a team surreptitiously, directly under the glare of world media, would be unfeasible. Add to that the fact that many governments will want to have the flexibility to deal with such incidents in their own way—perhaps to include paying ransom or striking some other deal the United States is likely to disapprove of—and you begin to understand why the Incident Response Team may not have been such a good idea after all. As the years of inaction mounted, the team became something of a refuge for misfits and problem children.

  I got a bad feeling when I held a video conference with the unit’s chief. I made clear that I was only looking for people who could passively observe detentions and make copies of any materials seized: all the muscle would be provided by the Pakistanis. The IRT, bristling with guns and pent-up testosterone, was looking for validation and a larger role. They would prove problematic, but I’d gotten the bodies I needed.

  On the afternoon of March 28, 2002, Dave laid out the plan for the visiting senators. After ground investigations led by the ISI, we had winnowed the number of targets in Faisalabad to fourteen. We had identified another three related locations well outside town. All would be hit simultaneously. I rated the chances of capturing Abu Zubayda at fifty-fifty. We had also identified another “safe” location quite some distance from Faisalabad to which we thought Abu Zubayda might flee if we missed him in the first wave. We would allow for reasonable travel time, and then hit that one, too.

  The raids were to be launched late that night. Two hours beforehand, I got a call from “Detroit.” The ISI had detected a “squirter”: one of the militants had left a target villa under surveillance, and boarded a train south. Surely we should not have him arrested right away, Detroit advised. He might alert others with a cell phone. Should we just let him go?

  “No,” I said. “For all we know, it might be Abu Zubayda.” We had not told the ISI about our main target. “Have the Pakistanis break off surveillance so as to avoid alerting him. They can relay a full description ahead and have him picked up at a scheduled stop after the start of the raids.” I lost all track of this fellow in the subsequent excitement; I have no idea if he was ever picked up.

  At most locations, the raids went smoothly. Dozens of foreign militants were captured. The teams at at least two locations claimed initially to have captured Zubayda, based on identification from outdated photographs, but just as quickly concluded they were in error. There was firing at one location not far from the safehouse in Faisalabad where our officers were staged. A militant had attempted to escape across the roof of the villa in which he was trapped, but was shot several times in the thigh and lower abdomen by a member of the Punjab Rangers, a paramilitary force pressed into service by the ISI. Badly wounded and bleeding profusely, the man was dumped onto the rear bed of a police pickup truck. Dave Falco, a visiting FBI special agent, took a look at him. The man in the truck appeared quite different from the one in the photograph. He was considerably heavier, and had no facial hair. “It’s him,” Dave said.

  Chris Reimann, the legal attaché, rushed to the scene. He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said, but Falco was adamant. They took a picture at the scene, which was
sent by sat link to CIA Headquarters. Within a few minutes, after some technical analysis, CTC returned its assessment: an over 85 percent likelihood that this was, in fact, Abu Zubayda. That was encouraging, but in the meantime the wounded captive was bleeding to death. He had to be gotten to a hospital. A Pakistani police driver leapt behind the wheel of the truck. It wouldn’t start. A mixed group of Pakistanis and Americans pushed to jump-start it; finally, the engine caught with a lurch, and the truck raced off, with several other vehicles following.

  Detroit reached me in my office. I directed that there was to be an American with Abu Zubayda every minute, 24/7, until we could get him out of the country. I didn’t relish the thought of trying to explain how we had let him escape if he went missing. Detroit set up a round-the-clock watch at the hospital. All the IRT members, notably, declined to participate. The raids over, they were eager to return to a safer locale. Soon, Detroit was back on the phone. He was with Zubayda.

  “There’s firing outside the hospital,” he said. He hadn’t seen anything penetrate the building, but feared they might be under attack. Dave, my deputy, immediately phoned Imran. The general called back ten minutes later, laughing.

  “It’s just celebratory firing,” he said. “There’s a wedding in the neighborhood.”

  I arrived home at three in the morning. Four hours later, I was driving myself in an armored SUV to a breakfast appointment in town.

  As is now well known, Abu Zubayda survived his wounds. After a day and a half in that hospital in Faisalabad, he was sufficiently stable to be moved by helicopter to a hospital in Lahore. A day later, he was loaded aboard a CIA plane and taken to a third country where he was treated, and then interrogated. He was the first senior member of al-Qa’ida to be captured. It was his apprehension which triggered—one might say forced—CIA back into the business of interrogation, after a hiatus of many years.