The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

  “You banking spooks have it made,” Kate said. “I’d be lucky to find a Dunkin Donuts near my office.” Claire motioned to a passing waiter and ordered two more drinks.

  “And I can take the Metro to work,” Claire said. “Actually, I thought you’d complain that this place was stuffy and elitist.”

  “No, I get into the District so infrequently that it’s a treat. It’s sort of funky, actually. I saw an old guy walk by a minute ago who was a senator when I was in elementary school. And it might be a while before I get a chance to visit this place again.”

  “It seems like you just got here.”

  “Yes, but I’m ready. I realize now that I’m not ever going to be successful or even useful behind a desk,” Kate said, “though I take my hat off to people like you who can be—and are.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “You know I am. But things are moving fast. They need me.”

  Claire asked if there was any news about Mort Feldman. Kate looked around, but the bar was so noisy and crowded and she was confident no one could be eavesdropping, and everyone nearby seemed deep in conversation. The only exception was a young man who looked like a clotheshorse sitting alone across the room, He was fixated on Claire; he stared at her intently, but he was too far away to hear them.

  “No news, beyond what I told you earlier,” she said quietly. “The theory across the river is that if his body isn’t found right away, that’s probably a hopeful thing. But we need to find him in the next week or we’re likely never to get him back.”

  “You know I’m praying for him. I can’t imagine what it’s like working under conditions like that.”

  “You’ve already done a lot more than you may realize. That money transfer to Paris you uncovered—that was pure gold. There could be something there. I’m sure there is.”

  Kate told Claire about the conversation Mort Feldman had had with Brigadier Mahmood hours before his disappearance.

  “And you think the $11 million might have been payment for a nuclear device Mahmood was talking about?”

  “That would certainly explain why the hawaladar in Paris wanted to see the cash before he agreed to move forward with the financial transfer. Good old-fashioned caution. Whatever it is, it’s not a run of the mill arms purchase, and if it’s drugs, then the money is moving in the wrong direction.”

  “Well, there’s actually something new that I have for you along those lines,” Stoppard said. “We’ve identified the owner of the account to whom the money was shipped. It’s in synch with your current thinking.”

  “Who is it?”

  “An old-time arms dealer named Jacques LeClerc. He’s done business with the Palestinians for years, and the Serbs, and quite a few other groups, and we’re pretty sure that he’s the source of some of the Taliban matériel we captured in Afghanistan. We’ve known about him since Iran-Contra, apparently, though it’s a lot harder for him to hide his business dealings now than then. He’s got a house in Florida.”

  “That gives us extra leverage,” Kate said. “Do you know if he’s ever done anything related to nuclear technology.”

  “No, strictly small arms, though he has been known to sell Stingers, which is why he’s on our shit list. We have actually used him to repatriate Stingers, about a dozen over the years at $180K a pop. He scrounged from among those that went missing in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Probably made a nice profit courtesy of Uncle Sam.”

  Kate recalled that the Agency had supplied some 1,500 portable (forty pounds) surface-to-air Stinger missiles to the mujahideen in Afghanistan in an operation known as Cyclone in the late 1980s, along with 200 launchers. The infrared homing device built into the missile made it easy for minimally trained Afghan resistance fighters to shoot down Mi-17 twin-turbine helicopters, the primary method of Soviet transport in the mountains. This gave the mujahideen a decisive margin of victory, some said, and was the watershed event of the war, leading eventually to the Soviet retreat and the collapse of the USSR.

  Because Stingers were so deadly and could be used by terrorists to target commercial aircraft, the U.S. Congress authorized $55 million in 1989 to buy back as many of the Stingers as CIA could track down, including purchases from shady characters like LeClerc. Today, twenty years later, Stingers still showed up in arms bazaars in Qatar, Croatia, North Korea, Djibouti, Yemen, Pakistan, and other third-world nations. They were among the most effective weapons ever developed, even at a cost of nearly a quarter of a million dollars each. Because the downing of a commercial airliner guaranteed worldwide headlines, they were a ‘must-have’ technology for any terrorist group with serious aspirations.

  “LeClerc is quite a character,” Stoppard said. “He’s master of what we call the ‘triangular trade’ in the money-laundering biz. LeClerc is the owner of a Cayman registered company with offices in Paris called Security Exports, SA. In a typical deal, Security Exports buys arms from Bulgaria or Russia, either from former military men who have stolen the goods or from legal factories selling on the black market. Via Security Exports, LeClerc delivers arms to his customers in Pakistan or Afghanistan. The buyers need hard currency to pay LeClerc, so they buy or steal raw opium in Karachi or Kabul and ship it to Albania. There it is refined and marketed for cash in Europe.

  “The cash is then shipped from Tirana to Paris where it is used to pay Security Exports for arms already shipped. So you’ve got a triangular trade that essentially converts drugs into armaments, with Jacques LeClerc taking a healthy cut as middleman.”

  “Pretty cool,” Kate said. “But if I’m following the money trail, then the hard currency would never leave Europe. The raw opium arrives in Albania, is refined, and then sold in Europe. That cash goes to pay LeClerc, right? So how did the $11 million you tracked wind up in Kabul?”

  “You are a quick study,” Claire said. “The fact that dollar bills move from Kabul to Paris, via Dubai, is a sure indicator that this is an unusual deal, not part of the day-to-day flow of illegal arms from Europe to Asia. Whatever the customer wants LeClerc to get for him, he’s willing to use hard cash in Afghanistan to get it, without the delay involved in converting drugs into euros or dollars. That’s like paying an extra premium.”

  “So this is unique, something really special?” Kate asked.

  “No doubt about it,” Stoppard said. “Though the one piece of the puzzle that I haven’t figured yet is the source of the money in Kabul. That would probably lead you to the buyer. That would tell you for sure.”

  “Well, I’m going to be in Kabul in about a week. Maybe that’s my first assignment.”

  Kate noticed that the handsome young man at the bar was now deep in conversation with an anorexic girl with jet-black hair. He had forgotten Claire.

  Chapter 12 — Islamabad

  The day after Olof Wheatley’s Gulfstream-4 landed at a military airfield outside Islamabad, security services found two live 107-MM rockets near the Inter-Services Intelligence headquarters complex off the Kashmir Highway in the G6/1 Sector of the city. The rockets were attached to a pair of cellphones for remote launching. Brigadier Mahmood’s driver told him of the discovery on the way to work, anticipating correctly that the counterterrorism chief would be delayed by blocked traffic.

  Though Brigadier Mahmood had hastily scheduled a formal meeting with Wheatley the day before (only after his boss, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, refused to meet with him), the brigadier did not make a connection between the rockets and the senior visitor from America’s Central Intelligence Agency. ISI was frequently the target of attack by Pakistani terrorists.

  Wheatley was due to arrive at Mahmood’s ISI office at 10 AM. It was now half-past nine.

  The weapons were found by groundskeepers cutting the grass along a tree-lined greenbelt next to the Capital Development Authority, about a half-mile west of the ISI compound at Aabpara.

  Brigadier Mahmood’s car slowed to a crawl at 7th Avenue, where a contingent of police, military, and bomb di
sposal units had cordoned off the area.

  “How many of our chaps are out there, do you think?” Mahmood asked, craning forward to get a better view of the teams of men scouring the grassy field.

  “At least one thousand,” the driver said, “maybe two thousand. When I left the garage this morning, they told me they had already found the SIM cards. They are going over every square centimeter of turf to make sure they miss nothing.”

  The driver inched his way forward to the unmarked entrance of the ISI campus, next door to a private clinic for the Islamabad elite. A military policeman saluted smartly and activated a control opening a rolling steel gate. The half-dozen adobe buildings within could have been mistaken for a private military college, complete with cricket pitches and well-tended gardens and fountains.

  Brigadier Mahmood’s office was in the central building, which housed also, on its top floor, the offices of Pakistan’s chief spy, ISI Director General Pasha.

  Brigadier Mahmood was in the third year of a three-year rotation with the ISI from the Army Strategic Forces Command at Rawalpindi, which was the Army corps responsible for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. He thought of himself as a tactician and strategist, not a spy or a diplomat, and there were times, like the present, when he counted the days until his ISI deployment would be over. His intellectual heroes were Kahn and Khan—Herman and Abdul Qadeer—along with Hendryk Warsaw. Ian Fleming’s 007 was not a man he admired. And, to be frank, he sometimes found Americans difficult to deal with, though always idealists and usually honest.

  The rear passenger door of Mahmood’s car was opened smartly by an adjutant at the entrance to the central ISI building and Mahmood went inside to his first floor office. Colonel Ehsan Akram, his principal assistant, was waiting for him in the larger outer office. Here, Brigadier Mahmood held conferences and had a large ceremonial desk, though he rarely used it. Mahmood motioned Akram to follow him into a smaller, private office, the place where he did most of his real work.

  “What are we going to tell Wheatley?” Mahmood asked, dropping himself into the squeaky swivel chair behind his desk.

  “We can tell him, if you wish, that we have located an abandoned van on the Grand Trunk Road to Peshawar,” Akram said.

  “And we know this is the van used to take Feldman how?”

  “Clothing. They took off his Western clothes and left them in the van.”

  “That won’t be enough,” Mahmood said. “We are going to need some sort of statement from his captors. Now that Wheatley is here, you can well imagine that we will have no rest until we give the Americans something to go on, or until Feldman is found. The next few days will not be pleasant, I promise you.”

  “We can offer to take them to the site. Let them observe the forensics,” Akram said.

  “Yes, an excellent idea.”

  A captain on Colonel Akram’s staff knocked on the door of the outer office and told both men that Olof Wheatley had arrived from the American Embassy. He was alone. Brigadier Mahmood had expected Wheatley to come with a gaggle of staffers. It increased his respect for him that he had come by himself.

  Mahmood told the captain to show Wheatley in. He walked out to his larger outer office followed by Colonel Akram and shut the door of his private office behind him. Mahmood recognized Wheatley from his ISI file, though he seemed older and his eyes were circled with fatigue.

  “I sincerely wish this visit were made under different circumstances,” Wheatley said, shaking hands. Mahmood introduced him to Colonel Akram and offered him a seat in an armchair at a coffee table near a floor-to-ceiling window fronting on a small patio and garden. Mahmood took the other chair; Akram sat on the couch. An orderly wearing a turban brought in tea and biscuits.

  “General Pasha is most apologetic that his schedule did not permit...” Mahmood began.

  “I understand completely,” Wheatley said. “I fully appreciate the political problems that color our diplomatic relations, especially in light of recent events, but I’m here today as a member, with you, of a professional intelligence service. I’m asking for your help as a fellow intelligence officer.”

  “And you shall have it,” Mahmood said. “I am no more a politician than you are, and I am confident we will find Mr. Feldman, and that we will apprehend his abductors. I think, too, that is what most Pakistani citizens want as well.”

  “I hope you’re right, but obviously we’re very concerned. This is the fifth day since he was kidnapped. A week is a critical milestone in these cases. I can’t help but remember that Daniel Pearl was murdered after six days. Seven days seems to be the magic number in these situations, not just in Pakistan.”

  “But our mutual enemies must realize that Mr. Feldman is worth more to them alive than dead. And recall also that all of Pearl’s kidnappers were tried and convicted by our courts, and given life sentences.”

  Wheatley decided to try a different tack. He needed Mahmood’s cooperation desperately at a time when it would not necessarily be easy to get it.

  “What is your personal view of this?” Wheatley asked. “Do you have any sense of who might be responsible?”

  “Well, a lot of our recent problems have been caused by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni splinter group formed a decade ago.”

  “I’m familiar with them,” Wheatley said. “Though they seem to cause more problems for Pakistan than they do for the United States.”

  “Precisely,” Mahmood said. “Although they certainly share some of the aims of Al Qaeda.”

  A NCO knocked on the door, came in and delivered a folded sheet of blue paper to Colonel Akram as Mahmood was speaking.

  “Is there any hint of a link to the OBL raid a month ago?” Wheatley said.

  “Nothing—no chatter of any planning along those lines, and it seems to be that Al Qaeda usually proceeds more deliberately, more slowly, with greater care.”

  Colonel Akram handed the blue paper to Brigadier Mahmood, who read it quickly.

  “Well, this is indeed an interesting development,” Mahmood said. “I was about to tell you that we discovered a van that was likely used to abduct Mr. Feldman five nights ago, and now it appears we also have found the driver.”

  “May I witness your interrogation of him?” Wheatley said.

  “Perhaps, eventually,” Mahmood said, pausing. He thought for a moment about how candid he should be with Wheatley. He decided he should take his CIA colleague into his confidence.

  “Actually, it’s a bit embarrassing to me personally,” Mahmood said. “The man we think drove the van in which Mr. Feldman was abducted is known to me. He’s the chap I use routinely when I’m in Peshawar to drive my staff car.”

  ***

  “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the ISI itself were in this up to their eyebrows,” the American Ambassador to Pakistan said. “In fact, that sly devil Mahmood practically admitted it to you this morning.”

  Olof Wheatley nodded, picking at an excellent dish of cubed beef karahi with tomatoes and chickpeas, a spicy curry served that evening with basmati rice and freshly made tandoori naan, a leavened flatbread baked in a clay oven, along with a rather pungent California Pinot Noir.

  Fully recovered now from his jet lag, Wheatley was in the dining room of the ambassador’s sprawling official residence in the Diplomatic Enclave. The ambassador was a career Foreign Service Officer in his late fifties, rail thin with a full head of silver hair, who had previously served as ambassador to Turkey. Wheatley had met him briefly a decade earlier in Prague, where the diplomat was then posted as Economic Counselor at a time Wheatley was contemplating a large investment for his hedge fund there. Tonight the two men were dining alone, the ambassador having asked his servants to leave after dinner was served so that he could talk confidentially with Wheatley.

  “It makes me sick to think that some of these ISI people were probably involved in 9/11,” the ambassador added, taking a sip of wine.

  “It was a two-way street,” Wheatley said. “And I must say that Mahmood
impressed me as a straight shooter.”

  “He’s not a career intelligence man,” the ambassador said. “More of a military engineer. He came up in the nuclear program, a protégé of A. Q. Khan I believe, but of course you already know that.”

  “For years we pump mega-bucks through the ISI to arm Islamist crazies in Afghanistan,” Wheatley said, “both before and after the Russians invaded in ‘79, and now we’re surprised to find that ISI has some real Al Qaeda sympathies? This was a problem of our own creation. There was a time when we thought Osama Bin Laden was doing the Lord’s work, don’t forget. Osama Bin Laden was our guy. The press skims over that. We need to learn to think longer term.”

  “Well, if you want to try to tie this to the bigger picture here, I can tell you that for the last year, the only thing the Pakistanis have been really worried about—and I mean really worried about—is what is going to happen up north in Afghanistan.”