Davis also had in his possession a “blood chit,” which is distributed to all US military personnel entering a hostile environment. According to the US military’s Joint Publication 3-50 on Personnel Recovery, a blood chit “is a small sheet of material on which is imprinted an American flag, a statement in English and several languages common to the populace in the operational area, and numbers in each corner and, in some cases, centered under the flag, that identify the particular chit. The blood chit identifies the bearer as an American and promises a reward by the USG [US government] to anyone providing assistance to the bearer or helping the bearer to return to friendly control.” They are to be used by US military forces under siege, lost or in imminent danger of capture or harm “after all other measure(s) of independent evasion and escape have failed and the evader(s) or escapee(s) consider(s) assistance vital to survival.”
At some point on January 27, as Davis traveled through Lahore, he came in contact with the men on the motorcycle, twenty-two-year-old Faizan Haider and twenty-six-year-old Faheem Shamshad, also known as Muhammad Faheem. According to the US version of events, the two men scoped out Davis as he stopped at an ATM to withdraw money and then put in place a plan to rob him. But according to four Pakistani sources who spoke to ABC News shortly after the incident, the two men were actually working for the ISI and began tracking Davis after he had crossed “a red line.” Days before the incident, Davis “was asked to leave an area of Lahore restricted by the military,” according to ABC’s sources. “His cell phone was tracked, said one government official, and some of his calls were made to the Waziristan tribal areas, where the Pakistani Taliban and a dozen other militant groups have a safe haven. Pakistani intelligence officials saw him as a threat who was ‘encroaching on their turf,’” an official said. “Yes, they belonged to the security establishment,” a Pakistani security official told Karachi’s Express Tribune newspaper. “[T]hey found the activities of the American official detrimental to our national security.” Complicating all of this, other Pakistani officials emphatically denied the men were ISI.
Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer said he heard credible reports from his colleagues who work on Pakistan that the two men were in fact ISI. “They were just going to pick him up and make a point, ‘We know who you are,’” Shaffer said. Because Davis had not been declared as CIA to the ISI, “they were gonna make the point to say, ‘We know you’re here.’”
“I know a lot more about this than I can say, unfortunately,” Shaffer added. “It suffices to say that the Davis issue was prompted by the ISI, there was a provocation, there was a reason why Davis reacted the way he did and this gamesmanship had gotten to the point where CIA was basically being trailed by the very folks they’re working with.”
Which “red line” Davis crossed, if in fact that is what prompted the two men to track him, may never be known. Perhaps it involved getting too close to Lashkar-e-Taiba. Perhaps he was working to expose its ties to the ISI. Maybe he was scouting targets for the Agency’s drone bombings. Some suggested that Davis was the CIA’s new chief of station. Some Pakistani officials went so far as to offer up a wild conspiracy theory that Davis was actually working with the Taliban and other militant groups to plan attacks on civilian targets that could be blamed on terrorists. It was a common allegation hurled at Blackwater in places like Peshawar, the capital of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and a central front in the covert US war in Pakistan. Despite the incendiary nature of these allegations, no evidence was ever produced to back up any of these charges. “The Lahore killings were a blessing in disguise for our security agencies who suspected that Davis was masterminding terrorist activities in Lahore and other parts of Punjab,” a senior Punjab police official alleged, adding that Davis had “close ties” with the Pakistani Taliban. “Davis was instrumental in recruiting young people from Punjab for the Taliban to fuel the bloody insurgency.” Police officials said that the call logs from Davis’s phones showed records of links with more than thirty Pakistanis, including “27 militants” from the Taliban and the militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which is designated as a terrorist group by both the United States and Pakistan.
Other Pakistani government sources alleged that Davis was in the country and known to the ISI and had been authorized to work on a CIA program conducting surveillance of al Qaeda and the Taliban. “Davis’s job was to trail links of the Taliban and al Qaeda in different parts of Pakistan,” a source told the Tribune. “But, instead, investigators found that he had developed close links” with the Taliban. “The government and security agencies were surprised to know that Davis and some of his colleagues were involved in activities that were not spelled out in the agreement.” The mainstream Pakistani conspiracy theories on Davis suggested that the American operative was setting up false flag bombings to force the Pakistani government to take a more aggressive approach toward militant groups or to give the impression that the country’s nuclear weapons were not secure. No evidence was ever presented to support these allegations.
The truth may never be known, but it is certainly possible that Davis was up to something with the Taliban and al Qaeda that Pakistan did not like and the US government would never want to acknowledge. “All countries conduct espionage,” asserted Colonel Patrick Lang. “In the course of that task in the ‘game of nations,’ some things are done in ‘liaison’ with a country’s service, in this case, the ISI, and others are not. They are done unilaterally, i.e., illegally in the country where they occur. If one does not do that, then one is vulnerable to the agenda of the ‘liaison’ service.” The US intelligence community, Lang argued, “is often accused of not really knowing what is ‘going on’ in a country. The way to avoid that is to do some things ‘unilaterally.’ In this case are the ISI irritated? I am sure they are. Do you think we believe that Pakistan does not operate ‘unilaterally’ in the US? If we do, then we are fools.”
In any event, given the programs Raymond Davis was known to have worked on, the US version of events and its characterization of him as a diplomat or a “technical adviser” or, as the New York Times characterized the US position: “a paper-shuffling diplomat who stamped visas as a day job,” are impossible to believe. Perhaps he was CIA. It is also possible that his CIA status was a cover within a cover and that, as my military intelligence source suggested, he was working with JSOC. “That’s common,” Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer told me. “It all gets mish-mashed together. The sad truth is,” Shaffer asserted, US officials, including ambassadors and policy makers not directly looped in to an operation, “don’t really know, what’s going on, anywhere. It all gets kind of blurred together.” Shaffer added that Davis’s cover was all about “Layering.” He said, “You always have a cover within a cover and it depends on how far you are trying to throw someone off, especially if you assume you are going to be rolled up at some point in time. You always have throwaways.”
It is not uncommon for CIA operatives to work under cover as diplomats. It is standard operating procedure for many nations. The RAO, where Davis said he worked, was a common cover for US spies. Everyone who needed to know was aware of such cover arrangements. When an operation goes south, it usually does not play out in public. Discreet arrangements are made, and sometimes prisoners are exchanged or payoffs authorized. It is all part of the spy game. But this particular incident occurred in broad daylight, in a crowded intersection, with scores of eyewitnesses.
If Davis had been revealed to be working for JSOC in Pakistan, that would have been the scenario most offensive to the ISI. After Obama’s 2008 election, while Pakistan’s government tried to curb the flow of CIA operatives into the country, the United States began increasing the number of covert personnel it allowed “cover” as diplomats. The ISI had long dealt with the CIA, but JSOC was an entirely different beast, one the ISI would find terrifying.
In addition to being the lead agency in US targeted killing operations, JSOC was also the premier US entity responsible for counterprolif
eration. In Pakistan, theories that the United States was plotting to snatch the country’s nuclear weapons were rampant and the source of endless commentary on its news channels. The idea wasn’t just paranoia. JSOC had in fact drawn up plans to secure Pakistan’s nukes in the event of a coup or other destabilization. In the late 1990s, it was revealed that plans existed for JSOC to be prepared to deploy anywhere across the globe “to recover sensitive NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] materials in the hands of terrorist groups, to slip undetected into rogue countries to gain evidence of a secret WMD development program, to sabotage such a program, and to detect, disarm, disable, or seize WMD.” While such plans were hardly unique to Pakistan, they fueled the ISI’s obsession with JSOC.
Former Pakistani brigadier F. B. Ali described two phases of JSOC’s operations in Pakistan, the first being the “hot pursuit” arrangement with JSOC dating back to President Musharraf’s time. “The second phase of the JSOC influx occurred after the US decided to undertake a large, long-term aid program for Pakistan,” Ali observed. “The US applied for visas for a large number of staff and support personnel to manage the program. The ISI insisted on security vetting all visa applicants, which held up the process. The US exerted huge pressure on the government, warning that the aid program would be adversely affected.” Pakistan’s government, Ali alleged, acquiesced and allowed a large flow of Americans into Pakistan. That claim was backed up by an ISI official who claimed thousands of visas had been issued to US Embassy personnel over a five-month period leading up to the Davis incident, “following a government directive to the Pakistan Embassy in Washington to issue visas without the usual vetting by the interior ministry and the ISI.” According to an Associated Press report in late February 2011, “Within two days of receiving that directive, the Pakistani Embassy issued 400 visas and since then thousands more have been issued.” In all, according to the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, more than 3,500 visas were issued to US diplomats, military personnel and employees of “allied agencies” in 2010.
At the time of the Davis incident, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry stated that there were 851 Americans with diplomatic immunity in Pakistan, 297 of whom were not working “in a diplomatic capacity.” But the Interior Ministry listed more than four hundred “special Americans,” suspected by Pakistani security officials to be “operatives of US intelligence agencies who are on covert missions in Pakistan, reporting to” JSOC. “The ‘official’ version of what they are doing is gathering counter-terrorism intelligence,” Brigadier Ali asserted. “But the ISI rank and file knew otherwise; they just couldn’t get the dominant US-friendly brass to do anything about it. Until Raymond Davis gunned down a couple of ISI auxiliaries on the streets of Lahore, and the US publicly came down like a ton of bricks to get him freed.”
Whatever Davis was doing and for whom he was doing it prior to pulling up at the Mozang Chowk intersection in Lahore on January 27, 2011, what happened that day was straight out of a spy movie.
At some point, Davis pegged the two guys on the motorcycle in front of him as a threat. As he told it, one of the men brandished a firearm in a menacing way. Davis grabbed his Glock 9 and fired five shots through his front windshield, with deadly precision, taking down Muhammad Faheem, who was on the back of the bike. One shot hit him in the head, just above his ear. Another pierced his stomach. The driver of the motorcycle, Faizan Haider, hopped off the bike and started to flee. Davis, Glock in hand, stepped out of his car, aimed and fired five more shots. Haider fell thirty feet from his motorcycle. At least two shots hit him in the back. He later died in the hospital.
According to eyewitnesses, after shooting the two men, Davis returned calmly to his vehicle and took out a military-grade radio. He called for backup. Before getting back into his vehicle, onlookers in the crowded intersection watched as Davis walked over to the blood-soaked bodies of the two men he had shot and photographed them. As crowds began to descend on the streets, the potential for a mob forming was strong. Traffic police called out for Davis to stop. He ignored them, got back in his car—the windshield riddled with the bullet holes made by his own Glock—and sped off. In the meantime, a Toyota Land Cruiser was speeding through the streets of Lahore. Its license plate, bearing the tag LZN-6970, was a fake. The driver of Davis’s backup vehicle was not about to wait in congested traffic. He punched it, hopping onto the median of a crowded road, and then darted into incoming traffic, weaving the vehicle toward Mozang Chowk. About five hundred yards from the intersection where the shooting happened, the Land Cruiser slammed into the motorcycle of a Pakistani man, Ibadur Rehman, crushing him, and then continued on toward the scene. After discovering that Davis was already gone, the men in the Land Cruiser fled.
By the time his backup vehicle arrived, Davis had made it two miles from Mozang Chowk. But the chase ended swiftly. He was confronted by local police at a crowded market in Old Anarkali in Lahore. Davis put up no resistance and was taken into custody. He worked for the US government, Davis told them. His seven-week ordeal was just beginning. While Davis was on his way to a Punjab police station for questioning, the men on his backup team were making their getaway. Somewhere near Faletti’s Hotel, several items fell from their vehicle, among them four ammunition clips, 100 bullets, a black mask, a knife with a compass and a piece of fabric emblazoned with an American flag—another blood chit. They returned to the CIA-JSOC safe house, destroyed all government documents in their possession and headed for the US Consulate. The men inside that vehicle were never heard from nor seen again in Pakistan. The United States, claiming they had diplomatic immunity, whisked them out of the country before the Pakistanis could question them. “They have flown the coop, they are already in America,” a senior Pakistani official remarked.
It took less than twenty-four hours for word of the incident to spread like wildfire through Pakistan. In Lahore, angry mobs of protesters called for Davis to be hanged. Reports began emerging in the Pakistani press that Davis was CIA and a Blackwater agent. As he stood inside Lahore’s Lytton Road Police Station, chaos surrounded the calm American. Police officers, investigators and others in the room spoke to one another heatedly. They stumbled to pronounce his name. Davis insisted that they find his passport. He insisted he was a consultant at the consulate in Lahore and that he had a diplomatic passport. Unlike his colleagues who had gotten themselves in trouble in Pakistan in the months before the shooting in Lahore, Davis would not be going home anytime soon. He was transferred to Kot Lakhpat Jail as Pakistani authorities intensified their investigation, including a forensic review of the crime scene. Autopsies were performed on the three dead men (the two shot by Davis and the man who was run down by his backup team) before their bodies were handed over to their families for burial.
According to the Pakistani police investigation, Davis’s claim that he fired in self-defense “is not correct.” The postmortem report indicated that both men who were killed by Davis were shot from behind. Witnesses told the Pakistani police that Haider was gunned down as he ran from the motorcycle “to save his life.” Davis told the police that Faheem had cocked his weapon and aimed it at him. When police recovered Faheem’s weapon, “the chamber of the deceased’s pistol [was] empty and the bullets were in the magazine.” Moreover, according to police, “no one saw them aiming at” Davis. When police asked Davis for a license for his weapons, they said he couldn’t produce one. To the Punjab police, the incident quickly became a murder investigation. Davis was ordered held for six days, pending further investigation.
The particulars of the incident were not nearly as important as the high-stakes game that would play out between the United States and Pakistan. Unbeknownst to the Pakistani government, five months before Raymond Davis was taken into custody, US intelligence had made a discovery of potentially incalculable value. The CIA had located a courier linked to Osama bin Laden. They tracked his movements, which ultimately led them to a large house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Using satellite imagery, intelligence analysts noticed
the movements of a mysterious figure inside the compound. The White House believed it had found bin Laden. Just as Admiral McRaven began gaming out scenarios JSOC could use to kill or capture the al Qaeda leader, Davis had shot the men in Lahore and now sat in a Pakistani jail. The United States feared that if it raided the house in Abbottabad, Davis could be killed in retaliation for the violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. Washington had to get its man out of there.
Unaware of the US planning to go after what Washington believed was bin Laden’s home inside Pakistan, the government in Islamabad viewed the Davis incident as an opportunity to win the upper hand in its intelligence wars with the United States. “For the ISI, the Davis incident is a godsend,” an editorial in the Economist concluded. “It is furious with the way American agents work independently, tracking al-Qaeda, Taliban and other militants who have slipped into Lahore and Karachi to flee drone attacks on the mountainous border with Afghanistan.”
The US government’s response to Davis’s arrest was clumsy. It is entirely possible that Davis’s actual role in Pakistan—whether CIA, JSOC or both—was not fully known by the US Embassy. The day after Davis was arrested, a spokesman for the US Embassy in Islamabad, Alberto Rodriguez, told a Pakistani television station, “I can confirm that the person that’s involved in the incident is an employee of the consulate.” Soon after, on January 27, the US Embassy sent a diplomatic note to the Pakistani Foreign Ministry claiming Davis as “an employee of U.S. Consulate General Lahore and holder of a diplomatic passport.” That was consistent with the statement Davis gave to police. The problem for the United States, however, was that this designation meant that the Pakistani authorities could argue that he was not entitled to full immunity but was instead covered by the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. That treaty provided that “Consular officers shall not be liable to arrest or detention pending trial, except in the case of a grave crime and pursuant to a decision by the competent judicial authority.” Surely, the Pakistanis argued, murder is a grave crime.
Dirty Wars Page 59
