The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  Frustrated, the Squad skittered back across the ice to Anantnag. For the next fortnight they returned to Mati Gawran many times, talking and checking, walking among the trees and fording a brook to search the dense and dangerous wooded slopes beyond, leading to wild Mardan, that no one controlled. But there was nothing to see, and still nobody could be persuaded to talk. A few spies remained behind to maintain a quieter surveillance. Some of the Clerk’s men swung by, the Squad heard. Bismillah was spotted a few times too, as were Alpha and the Clerk. But there was no sign of the hostages, although the STF remained a constant presence, its khaki-clad constables, clutching machine guns, arriving for unspecified operations, sometimes bundling terrified, hooded Kashmiris out of their Gypsy jeeps and into their closely guarded netted shelter.

  For once, no report was sent up the line. Nothing would be said of this until the Squad had finished its investigations. They had travelled so far that they could not give up without discovering what had become of Don, Paul, Keith and Dirk, who after such a protracted case felt almost like brothers to them. As far as they knew, the four Westerners were still alive, bargaining for their freedom or resigned to their deaths. The detectives of the Squad could not abandon these vulnerable men at such a critical moment.

  Before winter’s end, the Squad at last got some real news, shocking intelligence that came close to breaking agents and sources who had not stopped working since they were first engaged in July 1995. Finally their contacts, who had risked their lives to become deeply embedded among the renegades and militants, had found an eyewitness to the hostages’ fate whose credentials checked out.

  The source was one of the few Kashmiris who could come and go from Mati Gawran as he pleased. He was connected to the renegades, known to the police STF, and had worked as a scout with the army’s Rashtriya Rifles. Trusted, feared and (if he was honest) compromised too, having got his hands dirty fighting the militancy for many years, he proved his access by telling the Squad’s agents things about Alpha that only his closest aides could know. He went on to divulge that until very recently he had been working as a gunman for Alpha, a dogsbody stationed in and around Mati Gawran, where he had also served the Clerk. He claimed to be one of the last to see the hostages alive, and was prepared to meet the Squad and tell them what he had witnessed.

  Once again the Squad converged on isolated Mati Gawran, finding the eyewitness waiting for them, just as he said he would be, in a clearing in the woods, snow settling on his shoulders. The hostages had returned to the village one more time in December 1995, he told them: ‘The foreigners were hustled into a house by some STF boys and renegades. Since everyone knew me, they let me in too, and I hung around, drinking and talking late into the night. At last, one of the Clerk’s top boys came in, saying they had received new orders and my duty was about to begin. We gathered up the hostages and walked them out into the snow. There was only one end waiting for them, and we all knew it. No one could risk the hostages being released and complaining of collusion, having seen uniforms and STF jeeps, possibly hearing things too that they understood. We led them into the trees, a good, hard walk behind the lower village. I remember that the snow was heavy and deep. And there they were shot. I did not do it, but I saw it with my own eyes. Afterwards, village men were forced at gunpoint to dig a hole down through the frozen earth in which to bury the bodies.’

  The Squad asked for a date. ‘24 December 1995.’

  Wanting to check out the location, the Squad escorted the man through the woods. ‘He walked briskly, illustrating his story, tracing footsteps in the snow: convincingly, authoritatively. The details were compelling,’ one Squad member recollected. ‘But one tree looked like another, and although he tried for several hours, he could not pinpoint an exact burial.’ Was there money to spend on a search, the detectives asked their superiors. Could they hire sniffer dogs and thermal-imaging devices or ground-penetrating radar, and draft in foreign search teams? ‘If we deployed resources, the grave could have been found. We were all certain. But who was going to explain this story of broken allegiances and betrayals to the Western agencies who would be needed to assist with such an operation?’ the Squad member asked. No search was sanctioned. The request lay on file.

  Haunted by what they had discovered, the Crime Branch team debated among themselves. It did not matter how many times they juggled the facts, looking back over all of these arduous months, they always came back to one unpalatable conclusion, says one of the detectives, a senior serving officer who agreed to talk at his government house outside Srinagar. Over masala omelettes and lime soda, he described the dawning realisation that their desire to solve the crime was at odds with the goals of some senior figures in the military and the intelligence services who could have saved the hostages, but chose not to. ‘Wrapping up the kidnapping quickly had suited Crime Branch and the desperate families, who we never met,’ he said, pushing his food around his plate. ‘For us this was a cruel, needless crime that had to be solved. However, for Alpha, who had become unimpeachable, and a few rogue officers in the STF who by now were behaving like gangsters, and for a hard-line clique of agents in Indian intelligence and the army, all of whom had come to operate outside the norms and with absolutely no oversight, there had been no virtue in ending the hostage-taking at all.’

  The detective abandoned his lunch and held his head in his hands, before sending his heavily armed security detail out of earshot. ‘I have never talked about this case before,’ he said, tears welling in his eyes. ‘For years we’ve felt guilt-ridden. I have wanted to say something, and I have waited for this moment to come – even after a decade and a half.’

  Pulling himself together as a batman arrived bearing a bowl of freshly picked apples, he waited for the man to leave before continuing: ‘This was the harshest version of the Game that anyone could imagine. All the time New Delhi said it was trying to crack al Faran, a group within intelligence and the STF was letting them dangle, happy to let the militants portray themselves as savage criminals.’ At every turn, these few agents and operatives had worked to prolong the crisis, hacking away at Rajinder Tikoo’s dialogue, unnamed sources leaking the details of the process, using al Faran’s every concession to humiliate the kidnappers. There was no way those playing the Game would allow a fading militant like Sikander, demonised by his misjudged kidnap plot, to rehabilitate his own reputation and that of the insurgency by freeing the backpackers: ‘Why give Sikander the chance to square this one off, when bad news and the kidnapping could be made to prevail, the hostages vanishing into thin air – blackening the name of the Kashmiri struggle and further blackening the reputation of Pakistan, the country that had backed it?’ When Sikander had tired, Alpha had been ordered to take over, to make the kidnapping cruelly roll on, making it a crime that would be remembered by generations to come. The officer wiped tears from his eyes. ‘We really have lost our humanity,’ he said. ‘This is the price of so many years at war.’

  Furious and frightened, the Squad kept these dangerous, treasonable thoughts to themselves. An approximate date of death and a rough location for the bodies were entered into the al Faran file. A memo was passed up the line. But there would never be a public outing for the details of this most sensitive of cases.

  Others close to the hostage inquiry would never forget it either. Right from the start, Rajinder Tikoo had smelled something foul about the authorities’ al Faran strategy. For a long time afterwards he refused to talk about anything connected to the 1995 kidnapping, or to revisit his days spent waiting for Jehangir to call. But in one unguarded moment in the summer of 2010, a few months after he had retired, he reflected on the slow throttling of his negotiations with the kidnappers’ intermediary: ‘Believe me, when these leaks came in the summer of 1995 we all felt, this is unnecessary. It should not have been done. It was disastrous. They were a full-stop. They made me irrelevant. You have wasted your time doing things, and with a very sad heart you think it is all in vain. In the end, we had it in
the bag, for a small cash sum, but even this was sabotaged.’ After a peg or two of Bagpiper whisky, Tikoo toyed with the possible motives behind the sabotage of his negotiations: ‘The people who did this wanted to prove to the world that these fellows are mercenaries, no respect for anything, no cause, and are basically here to commit terror, and have not even spared the foreign visitors.’ After another peg, he touched on the authorship of the leaks that frustrated his shot at ending the crisis: ‘Somebody in intelligence did this, and he should be whipped and shot. They got their mileage. But it was so very callous.’

  The force’s top brass was required to seek judicial permission before closing the al Faran file. A Case Report was finally submitted to a court in Aishmuqam in May 2002, stating that the investigation was ‘unresolved’ and that the abducted men had not been traced. That report is still ‘pending disposal’ at the court, with no hearing to test the police claims. In Kashmir, where many emergency laws have been promulgated to sidestep the judiciary entirely, some shielding the security forces from prosecution, others enabling suspects to be detained without trial, while all of the practitioners of the Game existed in the shadows, the law had become anaemic. And the rigorous, incendiary al Faran file was quietly closed and placed on the shelf in the Jehangir Chowk Crime Branch headquarters.

  Tied up tight, it became a real Kashmiri story, the kind that emerges like a glistening soap bubble, only to vanish.

  NINETEEN

  Hunting Bears

  Unaware of the Crime Branch Squad’s deliberations in the snowfields of Mati Gawran, the families of Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk spent the run-up to Christmas 1995 doing what they could to remain cheerful, marking the occasion by buying gifts and recording greetings for their missing loved ones, sending them to Kashmir, addressed ‘c/o al Faran’. At best, a sympathiser might pass them on, Julie and Mavis Mangan thought as they posted Keith’s package in Middlesbrough. At worst, the Kashmiris would be forced to think about a group of innocent men who could not be found, thought Jane Schelly, wrapping Don’s presents in Spokane: a harmonica, a recorder, how-to-play manuals for both, a sweater, socks, a scarf and mittens, a toothbrush and sunscreen. ‘Dearest Don,’ she wrote in the accompanying card, ‘Be positive. Keep your hopes up. And dream of the day when we will be together again.’ She wrote in her journal: ‘Cautiously hoping.’ Could Don be home for Christmas? ‘I really don’t think so, but I can’t help but to allow some small hope.’

  A few days before Christmas, Tim Devlin, Mavis and Charlie Mangan’s local MP, announced that the Indian authorities had given him assurances that the presents and cassette recordings had got through to the hostages. This delighted the families. ‘We were all on cloud nine,’ said Mavis, who felt as if the whole of Middlesbrough was celebrating with her. She told everyone the Indians were getting things done at last. Jane spent Christmas morning sitting with her parents on their sofa in Orefield, talking about her hopes for Don’s imminent release: ‘Mom took me into her arms and was hugging me, and we were all hoping for the best.’

  But on Boxing Day morning, Sheikh Mushtaq, a Reuters stringer based in Kashmir, struggled through the snow to Pahalgam, where he discovered that the families’ packages, together with hundreds of letters and cards from well-wishers, had simply been stuffed unopened into a cupboard in the local post office. ‘Up on the snow-clad peaks of Himalaya, Santa Claus will come to help you,’ read one signed by ‘the children of Darlington’. When Mavis heard the news, she collapsed: ‘Yet again, we were simply crushed to the floor.’

  IG Crime Rajinder Tikoo, who was by now back behind his desk, was fond of saying that Kashmiris told you only what they thought you wanted to hear. Wasn’t that how Don and Jane, Julie and Keith, Paul and Cath, Dirk and Anne, Hans Christian and John Childs had ended up in the hills above Pahalgam in the first place? Confirming that someone’s gifts had been received when they had not was the same people-pleasing coin that led tourism officials to pledge that Kashmir was safe when it was a beartrap.

  Then good news began to trickle through again. In February 1996 a photograph emerged that India trumpeted as proof that al Faran was still functioning, and the hostages were still alive. Four unkempt, bearded men had been captured on camera, against a backdrop of a pine forest lacquered with snow. The picture was blurred, the women were told, as it had been copied numerous times. But there was no mistaking the faces. Everyone was ecstatic. For more than two months, since the confusing army account of the Dabran firefight of 4 December in which the Turk and two others had been killed, the hostages’ families had been in limbo. Then there had been al Faran’s cryptic statement of 11 December, in which they had claimed the army – a word that to a militant also meant renegade – had ‘arrested’ three hostages while the fourth was missing, only for New Delhi to dismiss this as a wild lie.

  Finally, out of the frozen hush of a snow-filled landscape came this photo, cutting through all the terrible scenarios that had played in the families’ minds, a straightforward picture that represented a specific moment in time. The Indians dated it at some time in January 1996, several weeks after the Dabran firefight. The newspapers in the subcontinent were filled, for once, with news other than the Prime Minister’s poor prospects in the impending election, for which voting would start in April. The Kashmir hostages were still alive.

  But there was something strange about the photograph. The authorities would at first only describe it, refusing to hand over copies. The image had been procured very recently, and under difficult circumstances, it was said. To publish it, the Indians claimed, would endanger the source. After mounting protests, it was briefly shown to the Scotland Yard and FBI agents who remained in Church Lane, before also being shown to the families. ‘We were warned not to breathe a word,’ Bob Wells said, recalling the secrecy that surrounded the picture.

  The hostages looked remarkably well – almost too healthy, the women thought. Everyone who saw it said the photograph was a long way from the last images they had received, in August 1995, in which the men’s air of bleakness had been painfully apparent.

  Keith still wore the jogging trousers he had been wearing the day he was seized in the Meadow, only now they were faded and grimy. He had someone else’s black padded coat on his shoulders, and what looked like an Afghan pakul cap. He was clutching an assault rifle, in a bizarre pose that his family thought he must have been put up to. They read much into the fact that his face was turned away from the camera, as if he was an involuntary participant in whatever this was.

  All four of the captives looked relaxed, a clubbable huddle that suggested they were ‘in it together’. There were no signs of injury or disease, bandaged feet or scars. Some pondered whether, after all these months, they might have bonded with their captors and become indivisible from them. With the passing of time, the clear distinctions between hostages and kidnappers were blurring; the jarring differences between West and East that had stood out in the first photos were much less evident. Many years later, when John Childs saw this photograph for the first time, he physically recoiled. How easily it could have been him in that picture, he thought as he lingered over the image. He recalled that one of the original kidnappers had carried a Kalashnikov identical to the one Keith was holding: ‘I remember that folding stock and pistol grip. It was most unusual,’ he said, adding that the large ‘cap’ covering the end of the muzzle in the picture reminded him how the militants had always taken care to seal their gun barrels by stuffing a piece of cloth in their ends to prevent snow and dirt from getting inside.

  To Keith’s left was Don, visibly more muscular, his beard more grizzled, and still wearing his blue Gore-Tex Moonstone walking trousers, now worn and dirty above the knees. The most striking change was a Palestinian-style keffiyeh, or checked scarf, wound loosely around his neck to ward off the cold. Jane, who pored over the photo in Spokane, was relieved to see that despite all the rumours about the hostages having their possessions pillaged by the kidnappers, he was still wearing his wedd
ing ring, the one she had had inscribed ‘DFH/JES 8/24/91’.

  To Keith’s right was Dirk, also wearing a keffiyeh, his wrapped around his head in a similar fashion to how the kidnappers wore their turbans. He was wearing a grey-and-red patterned sweater, the Chinese nylon variety available in most Kashmiri winter markets, the V-neck pullover and long-sleeved white T-shirt he had worn back in the summer clearly inadequate for a Kashmiri winter.

  Paul was squatting in front, a keffiyeh tied around his head too, like a bandana, and wearing his own maroon-and-navy fleece. His once angular cheekbones were filled out with a layer of winter fat, suggesting he was well fed and rested – his mother Dianne commented that she had never seen him looking so plump.

  General Saklani described the photograph as ‘solid proof’ the hostages had survived Dabran, and that al Faran was still holding them. The government had not been idle, he said, and ‘direct and indirect contact’ with the kidnappers continued. Hostage negotiators Ramm and co., also unaware of the Crime Branch Squad’s findings, had grown tired of Saklani’s clip-clopping tone, the way his sentences clunked together like a field-gun assembly. They wanted facts. Too much time had been spent attempting to decipher the security forces’ ambiguous rhetoric.