by Adrian Levy
May 22, 2011, 8:30 P.M., Pakistan Naval Air Station Mehran, Karachi, Pakistan
The attackers wore black overalls. They cut through the naval base’s perimeter fence at a security camera blind spot and stole across the tarmac before shooting off volleys of rocket-propelled grenades to destroy $80 million in warplanes and marine surveillance aircraft.
Pakistani commandos took sixteen hours to seize back control of the base, by which time a dozen military personnel were dead in the most significant attack on a Pakistani military target since the raid on the GHQ in 2009. The assault appeared even more perilous when it was revealed that the components of several nuclear warheads were housed nearby. It was the second incident in under a month that underscored the apparent lack of preparedness on the part of Pakistan’s military chiefs, and it caused fury across the country, both inside the military and in the wider civilian community.
The lower ranks questioned the competence of Kayani and Pasha. Some officers privately demanded they resign, as intelligence came to the fore appearing to show that Al Qaeda sleepers inside the base had planned the raid.
The story was quickly picked up by Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Asia Times Online Pakistan bureau chief, who chose this tense moment to identify Ilyas Kashmiri—an Al Qaeda militant who had once been an army commando and then an ISI hired hand—as the mastermind of the attack. According to Shahzad, Kashmiri blamed the army for having failed to protect Osama in Abbottabad and he had mounted the Mehran raid in retaliation.80 For generals Kayani and Pasha, a claim that Al Qaeda had infiltrated a major naval station was the worst story combination imaginable. But to get ahead of his rivals in the international media, Shahzad deliberately courted danger these days.
Since his coverage of the Waziristan Accord conference in 2006, the reporter had built a reputation for his risky exposés. He went further than most other journalists, building up contacts within militant circles while speaking regularly to the ISI. Some stories proved wildly inaccurate. But he was right enough of the time to have become an irritant for the military and intelligence services, which had threatened him verbally on several occasions.
Friends of Shahzad warned him that maintaining a relationship with the ISI created dangerous expectations of loyalty and that it was best not to talk to them at all so they could not accuse him of betrayal.81 But he disregarded the advice.
Five weeks before Abbottabad, he had written a story claiming Osama had recently met Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who also had once been deeply connected to the ISI. Shahzad claimed that he had been summoned to the ISI headquarters at Aabpara the day after his article appeared and ordered to retract his story. A senior ISI official allegedly informed him that the ISI “want the world to believe that Osama is dead.” Shahzad refused to retract his story and left Aabpara, telling friends that the ISI was “trying to protect bin Laden.”82
A vicious attack the previous year on his colleague, investigative reporter Umar Cheema, should have served as another warning that the ISI was in no mood for public criticism.83 Men in commando outfits who made clear they were acting on behalf of the ISI had abducted Cheema in Islamabad after he wrote pieces critical of the army. He was filmed being sodomized with a metal rod. When they had finished with him, they shaved off his mustache and eyebrows before dumping him in a ditch ten miles outside Islamabad.
Two days after Shahzad broke the Mehran naval base story, he was driving through one of Islamabad’s most secure neighborhoods on his way to a TV panel discussion about how Al Qaeda had infiltrated the navy, when he, too, vanished.84 The next morning, a farmer clearing debris from the Upper Jhelum Canal, ninety miles southeast of the capital, retrieved his battered body from a storm drain.85
According to the postmortem, the reporter, who was wearing his best suit and tie, had been beaten to death with a metal rod, his rib cage smashed on both sides, his lungs and liver ruptured. He was the forty-sixth Pakistani journalist to be killed since 2001.
Zafar Sheikh, his friend and colleague, who had accompanied him on trips into the Tribal Areas, spelled it out. “I used to be a brave journalist,” he said.86 “But I will be frank with you. I don’t want to get killed like Saleem. I am just writing stereotypical bullshit stories [now]—and no one is angry.”
Two days after Shahzad’s body was identified, a perturbed Admiral Mike Mullen gave an outspoken media briefing on the incident, saying that Shahzad’s killing had been “sanctioned by the government” of Pakistan and that the order to kill him had come from a senior officer on General Kayani’s staff.
Shocked, Kayani ordered General Athar Abbas at ISPR to issue a response. The ISI denied any responsibility and declared that “baseless accusations against the country’s sensitive agencies … are totally unfounded.”87
On June 3, Ilyas Kashmiri, who up until then had been protected as a former spook and contemporary asset, was killed in a U.S. drone attack near Wana in South Waziristan. For the first time, the Pakistani military admitted responsibility for the attack, confirming that it had provided Kashmiri’s coordinates to the CIA.88
May 20, 2011, G-6 Safe House, Islamabad, Pakistan
That month, bin Laden’s wives, children, and grandchildren were reunited on General Pasha’s instructions at an ISI safe house in G-6, a middle-class sector of Islamabad close to Aabpara.
Not happy that the army was investigating itself through the adjutant general, the Supreme Court of Pakistan had ordered a judicial inquiry into the circumstances leading up to bin Laden’s killing. Dubbed the Abbottabad Commission, it consisted of four senior government officials and had authority to examine official documents and interview all relevant witnesses, including bin Laden’s family. The army succeeded in getting one loyalist on the commission, a retired general called Nadeem Ahmed, who set out his position even before interviewing a single witness, telling Australian journalists that he firmly believed “that no intelligence organization in Pakistan would do such a stupid thing” as harbor Osama bin Laden. But still General Pasha was worried about what the commission might turn up and he wanted to ensure that the ISI interrogated the most critical witnesses first.
A date had been fixed for his forthcoming visit to Washington, where he had been invited to present his findings about Osama’s presence in Pakistan to the CIA. To pile on the pressure, the White House had announced it was putting on hold $800 million in military assistance to Pakistan. The money would only be released if Pasha’s explanations were deemed satisfactory.
However, bin Laden’s wives refused to play ball. As soon as she moved into the G-6 villa, Khairiah began complaining about the accommodations. There were no blackout blinds and close neighbors could see in.89 It was as if she were back in Tehran at the Tourist Complex.
Worried that she would try to arrange some kind of breakout, female officers from the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) who normally worked at the airport patting down female passengers, were brought in to guard the family around the clock, as the ISI prepared to interrogate them—appointing two retired colonels and a brigadier.90
The wives refused to speak to the male officers. Besides their objection to the religious insult, they were too busy dealing with traumatized children who suffered frequent nightmares and wet their beds, they said. The most affected were Hussein, who had seen his father being shot, and Sumaiya, Miriam, and Safiyah, who had been forced to identify the body. While Khairiah guarded the front of the house, Seham, who had lost not only her husband but also her son, Khalid, retreated into her Koran. Amal, whose leg wound had still not healed, spent her days in bed.
With the CIA as well as Saudi and Yemeni intelligence also demanding access to the wives, the ISI’s biggest concern was tutoring the women and children to stay quiet about anything incriminating they may have witnessed over the years.
To clear the resistance, the retired ISI officers brought in a female professor from Islamabad’s International Islamic University (IIU) to act as an intermediary.91
Dr. Zaitoon Begum, a stout,
dour woman who wore her hijab pulled tightly around her face, had studied for her master’s degree in Arabic literature at a university in Mecca and held a Ph.D. in Arabic.92 At IIU she had a reputation for being deeply patriotic and reportedly scolding female students who refused to wear the hijab.93 She was a perfect fit for Khairiah, who, in exchange for answering Dr. Zaitoon’s questions, demanded the return of her religious books and jewelry and “compensation for the loss of the house.”94
After the ISI agreed to these requests, Khairiah and the other wives consented to answer some questions through Dr. Zaitoon, and the three interrogators set down the bare bones of a version of their story to be presented to the commission and to the CIA in Washington.
However, while the ISI interrogators recorded graphic descriptions of the night of the raid, the wives’ accounts of their years spent in Pakistan were extraordinarily incomplete. None of them explained how they had reached Abbottabad or who had protected them there. None of them were asked any questions that touched on collusion and camouflage: how the household had first embedded in Pakistan and what mechanisms had enabled the family to remain cloaked in Abbottabad without detection for so many years.
The ISI reserved its harshest treatment for Maryam, a Pakistani citizen who would be produced in a court if the ISI got its way, and who, like Dr. Shakil Afridi, was threatened with treason and the death penalty. She was held in secret detention, while close family members in Shangla and Kohat were interrogated and threatened.
Rejected by her parents and in-laws, who all wanted to place as much distance between themselves and Abbottabad as possible, Maryam was not only physically scarred but also a widow with no financial means and eight mouths to feed—her own children and Bushra’s. “As far as I was concerned my life was already over,” she said.
She tried to cooperate but the sessions became increasingly aggressive.95
Having ensured that most of those who knew anything about Osama’s time in Pakistan were silenced or disappeared, the ISI turned its attention to limiting the powers of investigation granted by Zardari’s civilian government to the Abbottabad Commission—the four-man panel of experts who were supposed to examine every facet of the bin Laden case.
While General Pasha knew he could rely on General Nadeem Ahmed, who had overseen the army’s relief efforts after the earthquake of 2005, the others would require more persuasion to present a favorable conclusion.
Within weeks of the inquiry getting under way, a panel member, a retired inspector general of police, went off to the United States for a prolonged period of medical treatment, which meant he was not on hand to hear the evidence.
Another panel member, a retired judge, buried himself in legal arguments.
However, the fourth commission member posed a significant problem for Pasha. He was Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, a well-respected former ambassador to some of Pakistan’s most challenging posts including the United States, Russia, China, and India. He came from illustrious but deeply principled stock.
His Irish mother, Jennifer, had married his father, the son of a Balochi tribal chief, after meeting at a ball in an Oxford college in 1939.96 Relocating to the new country of Pakistan in 1948, Jennifer had become the first female member of the national assembly from her province, and she later acted as an intermediary for rebels who staged an armed uprising against the federal government. When she died in 2008, thousands of Pashtun tribesmen and a smattering of Taliban raised cheers for “Mummy Jennifer” as the cortège passed through Pishin, the Qazi family stronghold.
When the ISI tried to fob off Qazi with an edited summary of bin Laden family interrogations, he insisted on meeting the wives face-to-face. For weeks, the ISI resisted, hiding behind a tangle of legalistic and diplomatic discussions about travel documents and to what countries they might be deported once the official case against them had been heard.97
To waste more time, the women were moved to different heavily guarded villas around Islamabad, during which times they would be inaccessible to the commission for a requisite “settling in” period.
But Qazi, who had battled with the State Department under George W. Bush’s first administration and served as special representative to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Sudan, was relentless.
July 2011, Washington, D.C.
General Pasha arrived in Washington for his showdown with the CIA on July 13. Leon Panetta had been made defense secretary several days earlier and so Pasha met the acting CIA director, Mike Morell—who he did not know personally and therefore instinctively mistrusted.
Following usual protocol, Pakistan’s ambassador Husain Haqqani greeted General Pasha at the airport. In the car, the mood between the two men was tense. Pasha suspected that Haqqani had something to do with a fake memo purportedly written by President Zardari to the U.S. government, warning of a possible military coup in Pakistan after the Abbottabad raid. It had reached Admiral Mike Mullen on May 10, causing Pasha untold problems. Haqqani guessed that Pasha had fueled the rumors that he was a CIA stooge.
When they did talk, Pasha maintained that there was no way the ISI had known Osama’s whereabouts. “He talks in metaphors and all these colorful things,” Haqqani recalled.
“Look, there are so many intelligence failures; why is everyone blaming us?” Pasha asked. “Don’t you realize this is about weakening and undermining Pakistan. We had nothing to do with OBL. It was a failure but it was a failure of the U.S. as well as us. The U.S. would never have been able to do this if they did not have some of the intel we had earlier shared with them.”98
Haqqani was incredulous. “I had met Pasha a few times. A U.S. senator once said publicly that he was a boldfaced liar and I thought that too. He thought he was really a patriot who represented the military, and what he knew and wanted the world to know is what was relevant. He was pleasant at a personal level but not well-read or knowledgeable, and usually not as clever as he believed he was.”99
In his meeting with Morell, Pasha went on the offensive, arguing that intelligence gathering was often an imperfect science and that one’s enemy could sometimes hide in plain sight. He complained that the CIA had passed on numerous false leads about bin Laden’s location that had wasted valuable ISI time. If the CIA had been more honest about its hunt for bin Laden, the ISI would have been better placed to assist.
For his part, Morell refused to apologize for violating Pakistani sovereignty and complained about Pakistan’s ongoing support for banned outfits like the Haqqani network, which shared a name with Ambassador Husain Haqqani but had no connection to him. If Pakistan wanted to benefit from the $800 million in withheld U.S. assistance, it would have to demonstrate a genuine willingness to cooperate in the search for high-value targets still in Pakistan: Dr. al-Zawahiri and the rest of Al Qaeda Central, Mullah Omar, and the Haqqanis.
Pasha returned from his Washington trip furious and determined to air his version of the story. Soon after, the ISI decided to preempt the Abbottabad Commission and publish its own version of what had happened. For assistance, it turned to Brigadier Shaukat Qadir, a retired infantry commander who had served above General Kayani when the latter was a younger officer and who now worked as a “risk analyst” and commentator.100
Chain-smoking Qadir was commissioned to write a book that he pointedly entitled Operation Geronimo: The Betrayal and Execution of Osama bin Laden and Its Aftermath.101
He bragged that he had benefited from what he described as “fairly detailed briefings by both senior military officers and ISI officials ranging from high level officers to field operatives” and assured that he had been provided with “all details, with nothing held back.”102 However, he was not a pushover, he maintained, describing his dealings with the ISI as being like trying to “grab an eel in your bare hands.”103
Qadir made two visits to Osama’s house, approved by General Kayani, and his personal connections to an ISI brigadier who interrogated Osama’s three wives shortly after the raid ensured he had access to some of
what they said, too.104 Pasha gave permission for him to speak to the ISI’s counterterrorism wing and to the ISI colonel who had been responsible for securing the compound on the night of the raid and whose deputy had sold the pictures of the bodies. There were several other unidentified ISI sources, including an official he called Othman.
Many of his conclusions were highly contentious, including a claim that Amal bin Laden had described how Osama had flown to the Gulf for a kidney transplant operation while she stayed with Ibrahim’s relatives in Suleman Talaab in 2002 or 2003. Afterward, he took two medicines for the rest of his life, which Ibrahim picked up in bulk once a month from Peshawar.105 This explained, Qadir wrote, how a Saudi militant with a known kidney ailment was able to survive, although he did not explore how the world’s most wanted man had been able to leave Pakistan and reenter without some kind of official assistance.
Qadir’s version of events had the ISI all over Osama in the days after Tora Bora, claiming they had tracked him to Kunar after 9/11 and then to the Shawal Valley, in South Waziristan in the spring of 2003. But after that, “he just faded away.” Qadir said the ISI had mainly stopped looking for him after Khalid Shaikh Mohammad informed them that “OBL was very sick and frequently needed treatment.”106
He also claimed that the Americans had identified the Abbottabad compound with the willing assistance of Osama’s senior wife, Khairiah. Upon her arrival in Abbottabad in February 2011, tensions had erupted between her and Amal, who had accused her rival of having betrayed their husband’s location to Iranian and American intelligence. He went on to relate how Khairiah’s arrival had particularly spooked Osama’s son Khalid, who had challenged her only to be told, “I have one final duty to perform for my husband.”
According to Qadir, Amal witnessed this scene and then watched as Khalid warned his father that Khairiah was about to betray him. “So be it,” Osama had replied fatalistically.107
