The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

Though he usually enjoyed his visits to Peshawar, and especially the serenity of the cantonment, his thoughts were fixed on the pre-dawn telephone call from his chief of staff, Colonel Ehsan Akram, which had awakened him with news of the overnight catastrophe in Abbottabad.

  “The Americans have kidnapped and killed the Sheikh,” Akram had told him in clipped English. “They invaded our air-space a few hours ago with a task force of Navy SEALS in Black Hawks. Our air defenses failed completely.”

  Brigadier Mahmood was stunned. He was shocked as much by the audacity of the venture as by the Pakistani intelligence failure. This was a disaster, and an incident that would undoubtedly give rise in the coming days to the worst credibility and accountability crisis Pakistan’s military had faced in its 65-year history.

  Pakistani press and citizens would be outraged, particularly since the invading Americans were back at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan before anyone in Islamabad was the wiser. How could the Army pretend to protect the nation from India if such an incursion was possible?

  Akram told Mahmood that U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, the most senior American military officer, had not even bothered to telephone his counterpart in Islamabad, the Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, until three hours after the SEALs had left Pakistani air space. The Americans had violated Pakistan’s sovereignty with total disregard and then taken their time to apologize about it. And all this less than a mile from the dusty parade grounds of the Pakistan Military Academy.

  “The Prime Minister has already been on the phone with General Pasha,” Akram continued, referring to the director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, or ISI. “He is furious with Washington, but he is even more brassed off with Pasha and the ISI Directorate. How could we have failed to see this coming?” How indeed. It was inexplicable.

  Mahmood had spoken in the past week with the CIA station chief at the American Embassy in Islamabad and had detected nothing amiss, though even in the best of times Morton Feldman was hard to read. So much for honor among thieves and trust among intelligence agencies.

  This was an unforgivable breach, and while it was true that CIA and the Americans would be punished, Mahmood knew, it was also clear that the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence would be punished even more. Yet the greater question, Mahmood reflected as his car sped toward the city center, was whether the Americans, who were so much better at tactics than they were at long-term strategy or political planning, realized that they had now opened the door to a new danger far more lethal than Al Qaeda’s aging hierarchy.

  ***

  Mahmood told his driver to drop him off beyond the silversmiths’ market, a few hundred yards from the precincts of the ancient Mohabbat Khan Mosque.

  “Collect me here tomorrow evening,” he ordered, stepping into the dusty street. Peshawar’s Old City was noisy, overcrowded, and polluted. Its buildings were made of low-slung concrete blocks painted with bright primary colors—reds, greens, and yellows. The bazaar’s narrow, congested alleys even at this morning hour teemed with bearded Pathans and the occasional woman in a burqa, jostling with rickshaws, pedi-cabs, donkeys, and smoking motorbikes that regularly backfired with the sound of gunshots, though one never knew for sure, for there were guns everywhere.

  There was the charming sense, for Brigadier Mahmood, that this was the end of the line in Pakistan, a frontier town bordering some dangerous, alien world beyond. Peshawar for generations had been the terminus of the Grand Trunk Road that began 1,600 miles south in Calcutta. Peshawar was the last stop on the railway, the furthest reach of civilization on the whole subcontinent and the last outpost under the control of a functioning government. Beyond lay Afghanistan, an ungoverned and perhaps ungovernable wilderness.

  Mahmood watched his car pull away, leaving him in a cloud of ochre dust. He walked to the ablution pond fronting the West Façade of the 300-year-old Islamic house of worship, self-conscious of his Western clothing. The side entrance was tiny but ornate, a beautiful gemstone in an area of the Old City that was called the Jeweler’s Bazaar. Within the mosque, he took off his shoes and made his way to an inconspicuous door behind the minbar, the elaborately carved wooden pulpit where the imams delivered Friday sermons.

  Passing through this door, he followed a corridor to a room where he exchanged his neatly pressed Western suit for a well-worn shalwar kameez, the loosely fitting tunic and pantaloons that are the universal garment of men and women in South Asia. These clothes were waiting for him, folded across a wooden chair. He added a black vest and donned a turban stained from years of use. He hid a pair of worn sandals in a woolen sack and slung it over his shoulder.

  Mahmood padded softly in stocking feet into the vast central prayer hall beneath a fluted eggshell dome. Facing the quibla, the wall of the mosque aligned toward Mecca, he spent hours in prayer and meditation.

  ***

  After the dhuhr prayers at mid-day, Mahmood left the mosque in a packed huddle of men dressed much like himself. Passing along Andar Sheher Bazaar beyond the mosque gate, he stopped at a small outdoor restaurant where he ordered chicken karahi cooked in onion, tomatoes, and black pepper. Finishing his meal, he walked to Church Street and Chowk Yadgar Square, a place often used for political rallies. To satisfy himself that he was not being followed, he circled back to the mosque along fume-choked narrow lanes off the main thoroughfares. As he strolled, he considered the import of a statement he had heard at an American military school years previously, an aphorism of sorts enunciated by an American officer: “No counter-insurgency in the history of warfare has ever concluded without dialogue with the enemy.” It was a pity the Americans so rarely took their own good advice. He rejoined Andar Sheher and continued on to one of the portals to the Old City, Asamai Gate, near Bala Hisar Fort.

  There, he waited for the man who would take him to see Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb.

  Chapter 2 — Islamabad, Pakistan

  Kate Langley awoke to a trio of cats yowling outside her flat on the 32-acre American Embassy campus in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. Feral cats throughout the city were drawn to the American compound because the handouts were so good there. A glance at the bedside clock told her it was 4:00 AM local time, 6:00 PM the previous evening in Washington. She had slept two hours and she was slammed, but the warm feeling of success, the ‘high’ that had enveloped her at the moment of Osama Bin Laden’s death a few hours previously, energized her once again.

  From the command post in the secure communications ‘tank’ on the third floor of the chancery, Kate had been part of the historic group monitoring the progress of Team Six in Abbottabad. She had learned at the same instant as the President of the United States and his advisors in the White House Situation Room that OBL had been captured and killed.

  Kate showered and took a little extra time to shampoo her long brunette hair and apply a rinse, a rare treat. Kate prided herself on being a low-maintenance woman. She was 5’ 7”, 125 pounds, brown eyes, skin that never sunburned but tanned easily, athletic, a marathon runner. She had symmetrical features, attractive but not quite beautiful, and she was picky enough to have learned self-sufficiency and the virtues of having her double bed sleep one.

  As she toweled off, she braced herself for what she knew would be a tough few weeks. The President had wondered aloud on the secure network how Bin Laden could have found refuge in a military garrison town home to three regimental headquarters, the Pakistani version of West Point. There were barracks filled with soldiers just yards away!

  Small wonder the decision had been taken in Washington not to notify the ISI or any Pakistanis. They had to have known Bin Laden was in Abbottabad and perhaps were complicit in harboring him. But even so, now there would be hell to pay with the Pak Government. From the Prime Minister on down, Pakistan would strongly protest the American military incursion. It would be a very busy day at the American Embassy.

  At 32, Kate was serving her third overseas tour. She was a CIA employee under official cover.
She was also, on the official roster, a vice consul in the visa section of the embassy, a job that entailed long, boring hours interviewing Pakistanis who yearned to travel to the United States, most of whom would never receive visas. That official job was a ruse to conceal the fact that she was a member of a small team of CIA officers serving under Chief of Station Morton Feldman, a crusty veteran of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, a man with 35 years of intelligence service under his belt. Some of her colleagues at the Embassy knew she was CIA, but not all of them. ‘Need to know’ and compartmentalization were keys to survival in a country where CIA was too often perceived by Pakistani citizens as synonymous with evil American intent.

  Since CIA officers under official cover were carried on the diplomatic list and were subject to diplomatic immunity, Kate was probably safe from Pakistani jails. Should the Pakistanis ever object to anything Kate was doing, the worst that she could expect, at least in theory, was that she would be expelled from the country—declared persona non grata in the official lingo or, more colloquially, ‘PNG’d.’ By bilateral treaty, Pakistan could not imprison or prosecute diplomats; they could only kick them out of Pakistan. A reciprocal deal worked for Pakistani spies in Washington, D.C. precisely the same way.

  The Pakistani intelligence services knew who most of the CIA officers at the American Embassy were, and of course they were in regular contact with Mort Feldman who coordinated joint CIA-ISI operations such as the support for the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the outfit which had earlier toppled the Taliban.

  In the first week of May 2011, the odds of one or more members of CIA’s Islamabad Station being PNG’d were vastly greater than usual. General Ahmad Pasha, head of ISI, was sure to be livid that his sister U.S. intelligence agency had carried off a headline-grabbing raid in Pakistan without informing him. He might want to react, Kate thought, that very morning, by kicking Americans out of the country as punishment for embarrassing him.

  The Embassy compound was a ‘Little America’ in the heart of Islamabad’s most quiet and exclusive zone, the Diplomatic Enclave on the eastern edge of the great city. Though Kate would have much preferred to live outside the compound so she could savor the real Pakistan, she was too junior to rate off-post quarters. So she had to make do with living on the campus, which was not unlike a college campus in a midwestern state back home. One of its advantages was that she could walk to work. She was always at her desk early.

  On this day, Kate left her flat before sunrise and headed toward the three story whitewashed chancery in the western quadrant of the compound. The hot season was beginning. It was already 75 degrees and would hit triple digits. She detoured by the Olympic swimming pool just to get a little cardio going, walking briskly. The grounds were extensive, as ‘Amembassy Islamabad’ was one of the largest overseas missions maintained by the Department of State. In the years following 9/11, Washington had spent upwards of $1 billion to upgrade facilities here, $200 million alone spent in retrofitting and expanding the housing complex where Kate had her flat.

  Since it was before normal business hours, Kate entered via the main doors, crossed the marble lobby bearing the Great Seal of the United States, and showed her laminated ID to the Marine barricading access to the elevators and stairwell.

  Today the Marine on duty was a handsome twenty-something named Stewart from Oklahoma. As an attractive single American woman on campus, Kate was popular with the 60-odd Marines assigned to the Islamabad mission, including the smaller contingents who guarded the consulates in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar. She was always invited to their Friday night beer parties and film screenings.

  “Hey, Stewie,” she said. “Anyone on three?”

  “Just your boss, ma’am,” Stewart said. Stewie didn’t call her ‘ma’am’ at Marine Corps parties, but this was business, and Marines were always very good at distinguishing work from leisure and never mixing up the two.

  Kate headed for the stairs rather than the elevator. She bounded up two steps at a time to the third floor.

  ***

  Kate’s windowless office was the size of a large closet. It had a gunmetal gray desk, a chipped four-drawer steel file cabinet for unclassified documents, and a hefty Mosler safe for secret material. She had a chair with armrests behind the desk for her own use and a second chair (sans armrests) for visitors. Nothing in her office, she had once observed, besides the pencils, the telephone, and the computer, had been manufactured after the early 1980s when the embassy was completely rebuilt. The darkest day in Amembassy Islamabad’s history was November 22, 1979, when hoards of Pakistani students, enraged by a false report that the United States had bombed Mecca, stormed the old embassy and burned it to its foundations. Two Americans and two local employees were slaughtered in that attack.

  She could hear Mort Feldman’s booming voice down the hall, probably savoring the previous night’s victory with senior executive management at headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Kate walked to Feldman’s office, not much larger than her own but with a coveted window, to let him know she had come to work early. He was behind his desk sitting in an oversize executive chair, telephone pressed to his ear. When he saw her, he waved her in.

  “Olof, Kate has just stuck her head in,” he said into the receiver. “Let me put you on the squawk box.”

  Feldman was an oversized man, physically and emotionally, a human bear who had earned an enviable reputation in his decades in espionage. He had once been reasonably fit, if not athletic, but years in management, deskbound, had expanded his waistline. It was said behind his back that his belt, if extended, would significantly exceed his height. Olof, the man on the other end of the secure phone line, was Olof Wheatley, the chief of the Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group, the entity that monitored and analyzed the activities of foreign counterparts to CIA, including the ISI in Pakistan.

  “Kate, I was just sharing with Mortie some of the concerns we have at home now that OBL has been put down,” Wheatley said on the speakerphone. There was a tinny distortion in his voice. Olof was connected via STU III secure phones. These encrypted voice communication and were considered sufficiently impenetrable for material up to Top Secret. Though there were more portable models, if you were willing to lug it around you could pack a STU III in your luggage and use it in your hotel room, so long as you kept its special encryption key with you at all times.

  “Every bad actor in Pakistan who ever had the most tenuous connection to OBL is going to feel the hair rise up on the back of his neck when he reads the morning paper,” he continued. “As you know from watching the take-down, we recovered thousands of pages of written text and thirty computers and hard drives. Anyone named in one of those computer drives is going to start acting squirrelly this morning.”

  “Or go to ground,” Kate said.

  “Or to ground,” Wheatley admitted. “But we know from the good work you and Mortie have been doing that Pakistan’s military and the Inter-Services Intelligence guys have been covertly sponsoring at least four militant groups with global reach, including Al Qaeda, and that last night’s events, though embarrassing, will almost certainly not deter them. They sponsor terrorism, that’s what they do. We don’t have incentives to make them change course.”

  Kate knew ISI’s sponsorship of terror, as she had been involved in cooperative ventures with ISI. She had seen how uncooperative they could be, while saying all the right things. Duplicity was an art form in South Asia.

  “So it’s going to be important for everyone at the Islamabad station to stay alert. There could be a domino effect here. OBL’s exposure may lead us to other high value targets.”

  Wheatley omitted to say that the terrorist hunt in Pakistan was mainly driven by technology controlled in Washington, not Islamabad. Analysts monitoring satellite and predator drone imagery had spotted the OBL compound in Abbottabad. But it was Islamabad station that had determined that OBL’s house had no telephone or Internet service. Human spies were subordinate to mach
ines, but sometimes human spies made all the difference.

  “We need to focus on Peshawar,” Feldman said. “That’s probably where Al-Zawahiri is hiding, and he probably isn’t lying as low as OBL did. He isn’t six foot four. He can blend in a crowd more easily.”

  Kate listened carefully. She had hoped for months to transfer on TDY temp duty to Peshawar, which was far more likely than dull Islamabad to provide her with interesting work, work out in the streets instead of behind a desk.

  Perhaps coming in early would give her an advantage in persuading Mort Feldman to support such a request.

  ***

  It was not to be. Kate learned two days later that she was among a handful of Agency staffers in Islamabad who had been declared persona non grata—unwelcome—by the Government of Pakistan.

  She was alleged by the Foreign Ministry to have engaged in “activities incompatible with diplomatic status,” code words for espionage, though everyone understood that it was payback for SEAL Team Six and the embarrassment they had caused. One hundred U.S. Army training personnel were also asked to leave the country.

  Mort Feldman was sympathetic, but there was little he could do. As chief of station, he had been exempted from deportation (though when irritated sufficiently, sometimes Pakistan even kicked out CIA station chiefs). He told Kate to pack a few essentials and plan to leave within 24 hours. Arrangements had already been made to fly her to Washington by commercial carrier via London. Her personal belongings would be packed and sent on a few weeks later.