Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  On February 3, the United States revised its position. This time, it labeled Davis “a member of the administrative and technical staff of the U.S. embassy.” According to Pakistani officials, Davis had never been certified as a diplomat because of “unresolved queries” about him made by Pakistan to the United States.

  Rage was spreading across the country. Ten days after the shooting, in a hospital bed in Faisalabad, Shumaila Kanwal, Faheem’s widow, was using her last breaths to record a video statement. She had swallowed rat poison and was ending her own life to protest what she called her husband’s murder at the hands of a US agent. “I want blood for blood,” she said as she gasped for air and struggled to focus her eyes. “The way my husband was shot, his killer should be shot in the same fashion.” Imran Haider, the brother of the other man shot by Davis, said his brother had recently learned that his wife was pregnant. He expressed anger that his brother was being “smeared” as a bandit. “He was clean,” he declared. “All we want is for this American to go on trial and for a proper investigation to be done. He should face the death penalty. No deals.”

  Shumaila died shortly after her statement was recorded. Her death further inflamed the already outraged Pakistani public. Islamic parties staged huge demonstrations, burning effigies of Davis and declaring him a terrorist, a spy and, perhaps worst of all, an agent of Blackwater.

  It soon became clear that Pakistan was not going to quietly release Davis. The United States began a feverish campaign to get him out. The CIA went so far as to cease its drone bombings in the country, reportedly at the request of the ISI. That the United States halted the drone attacks was remarkable, given their centrality to the US strategy in Pakistan. “The arrest of this guy is a very positive thing for us,” declared Mullah Jihad Yar, a Pakistani Taliban commander. “Our forces used to be hit by attacks every other day. Now we can move more freely.” For Agency veterans, US moves indicated how badly they wanted Davis sprung. “The Embassy/Station wants Davis back because they don’t want him to start talking about whatever else they are up to unilaterally,” Giraldi, the former CIA officer, suggested. As for the issue of immunity, Giraldi asserted that Davis did not have it. “To be a diplomat legally speaking you have to be accredited to the foreign ministry of the country and they have to accept your accreditation. You are then entered on the diplomatic list,” he asserted. “Most US Embassy employees in most overseas posts do not have diplomatic status and therefore do not have immunity except insofar as the local government might extend some protections to them as a courtesy. There is absolutely no indication that Davis went through the accreditation procedure or anything like that even if he was traveling on a dip[lomatic] passport.”

  As reports flooded the Pakistani press of Davis’s affiliation with the CIA, JSOC and Blackwater, major US media outlets and US government officials promoted the line that Davis was a diplomat. “We continue to make clear to the government of Pakistan that our diplomat has diplomatic immunity, in our view was acting in self-defense and should be released,” declared State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley in a February 7 statement that was reported by CNN, CBS, PBS, USA Today and other major news outlets. “Pakistan should fulfill its international obligations under the Vienna Convention.”

  In response to pressure from Washington, the US-friendly government of Asif Zardari was preparing to recognize Davis as a diplomat but met resistance from its own officials. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, was asked to certify Davis as a diplomat but refused, saying the request did not match the “official record” on Davis at the Foreign Ministry. “Our expert opinion suggested that the blanket immunity the US embassy is asking for is unjustified,” he later said. In response, Secretary of State Clinton snubbed Qureshi at an international security conference in Munich, Germany. Qureshi was then swiftly removed as foreign minister, he charged, because of his “principled stance” against granting Davis immunity. In taking this position, Qureshi passed the issue to the courts in Lahore, ensuring that the Davis saga would continue. Leading US lawmakers threatened to withhold US humanitarian aid to Pakistan if Davis was not released. President Zardari called such threats “counterproductive,” writing in the Washington Post, “In an incendiary environment, hot rhetoric and dysfunctional warnings can start fires that will be difficult to extinguish.”

  As Raymond Davis sat in his cell in the Kot Lakhpat Jail, US officials feared for his safety. As many as three prisoners had been murdered by guards in the facility. Some Pakistani officials expressed concern that the CIA would try a spectacular prison break. Davis’s food was tested for poison by dogs before being served to him. While his masters tried to free him, Davis remained cool and defiant. During an interrogation after the shooting, Davis, clean-shaven and wearing a blue pullover fleece, told his interrogator, “The US ambassador says I have [immunity], so I’m not answering any questions.” Davis demanded to see his passport. “Right on the front page,” he said, motioning his hands in a framing motion. “Diplomatic passport.” As the interrogator attempted to question him further, Davis announced he would not answer any more questions. “I’m going back to my room,” Davis told the man, then got up from the table. “You can’t go like this,” the interrogator declared. “You are not a diplomat.” Davis simply reiterated that he would not answer any more questions as he headed for the door.

  Back in Washington, the full weight of the Obama administration was being thrown behind the cause of his freedom. “In our view, he acted in self-defense, when confronted by two armed men on motorcycles,” Crowley declared at the State Department. He “had every reason to believe that the armed men meant him bodily harm.” He demanded Davis’s release.

  On February 15, with Davis still in jail and a Pakistani judge preparing to rule on whether he was entitled to immunity, Senator John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, arrived in Pakistan. Kerry was well known in Pakistan as the co-sponsor of a massive $7.5 billion aid package to the country. Kerry met with President Zardari and other top officials, and then with a group of Pakistani journalists in Lahore, where he made the case that Davis was a diplomat and should be released into US custody. “We have to—all of us—respect the law,” Kerry said, sitting in a lounge chair surrounded by the Pakistani media. Television networks in Pakistan carried his remarks live. The law governing diplomatic immunity, Kerry said, “is not a law that Pakistan idly signed up to. Your leaders signed up for this long, long ago.” Kerry spoke slowly, almost as though he were speaking to a class of children rather than journalists. “We didn’t create this. We live with it and it’s important for us to live with it because there are incidents that occur sometimes in one part of the world or another where diplomats are not able to do the job that they are called on to do in very dangerous circumstances sometimes unless they have that immunity.”

  The journalists pressed Kerry on Davis’s status and asked why, in their eyes, it seemed the United States was not respecting Pakistan’s laws and judicial process. “It is the strong belief of our government that this case does not belong in the court. And it does not belong in the court because this man has diplomatic immunity as an administrative, technical employee of the embassy of the United States in Islamabad,” Kerry responded. “We believe the documentation makes that clear. That’s our position. We’re not disrespecting your court. We completely respect your courts. We want your courts to be strong and to be vibrant...but we have to respect international law.” Kerry called on Pakistan to “let the facts and let the reality speak for itself here.”

  It is highly doubtful that John Kerry actually believed that Davis was an “administrative, technical employee of the embassy.” As chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry was privy to the most sensitive US intelligence and was thoroughly briefed before departing for Pakistan.

  As Kerry worked Pakistani officials, back in Washington, President Obama very publicly owned Davis. “With respect to Mr. Davis, our diplomat in Pakistan, we’ve got a very sim
ple principle here that every country in the world that is party to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations has upheld in the past and should uphold in the future. And that is if—if our diplomats are in another country, then they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution,” Obama declared at the White House. “If it starts being fair game on our ambassadors around the world, including in dangerous places where we may have differences with those governments...and they start being vulnerable to prosecution locally, that—that’s untenable. It means they can’t do their job.” Obama said the administration had been “very firm” in making the US demands to Pakistan clear and was working “to get this person released.” Obama added, “For those who aren’t familiar with the background on this, a couple of Pakistanis were killed in a incident between Mr. Davis within—in Pakistan. So, obviously, we’re concerned about the loss of life. You know, we’re not callous about that. But there’s a broader principle at stake that I think we have to uphold.”

  While Obama, Kerry and other US officials publicly characterized Davis as a diplomat, several major US media outlets, most prominent among them the New York Times, had already learned that Davis was, in fact, working for the CIA. At the request of the Obama administration, the Times and other US outlets agreed to withhold that fact from their reporting on the case. The Times later reported that it agreed not to report Davis’s CIA connection after administration officials “argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk.” (The Associated Press also acknowledged that it learned that Davis was working for the CIA “immediately after the shootings,” but did not report it.) New York Times reports referred to Davis as an “American official” and described “the mystery about what Mr. Davis was doing with this inventory of gadgets” and the speculation it had sparked in the Pakistani media, even as the Times knew he was working for the CIA. “It’s one thing for a newspaper to withhold information because they believe its disclosure would endanger lives,” constitutional lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald observed. “But here, the U.S. Government has spent weeks making public statements that were misleading in the extreme—Obama’s calling Davis ‘our diplomat in Pakistan’—while the New York Times deliberately concealed facts undermining those government claims because government officials told them to do so. That’s called being an active enabler of government propaganda.”

  The first major world media outlet to report the CIA connection was London’s Guardian newspaper. Both the CIA and Britain’s MI-5 pressured the paper not to publish the information. Ultimately, the paper went ahead with the story, publishing it in its February 21 edition. “We came to the view that his CIA-ness was a critical part of the story, bound to be a factor in his trial or in attempts to have him released,” Ian Katz, the Guardian’s deputy editor in charge of news, said. “The reasons we were given for not naming him were, firstly, that it may complicate his release—that is not our job. If he was held hostage other factors would kick in but he is in the judicial process. The other reason given by the CIA was that he would come to harm in prison.” Once the Guardian printed it, US media outlets were given permission by the CIA to publish it themselves. In its first story identifying Davis as CIA, the Times quoted George Little, a CIA spokesman: “Our security personnel around the world act in a support role providing security for American officials. They do not conduct foreign intelligence collection or covert operations.” In reality, the line between the Agency’s “security” guards and operatives was almost nonexistent after a decade of operating together in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  Senator Kerry held secret talks with Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, where they discussed the United States paying “blood money” to the families of Davis’s victims and the man run over by his backup team. While the CIA and ISI waged a war through media leaks and accusations, both the US and Pakistani governments knew that Davis would be released. The question was when and what the ISI would get from the CIA before that happened. In mid-February, after Davis had been in custody for two weeks, CIA director Panetta talked to ISI chief Pasha, who demanded that the United States identify “all the Ray Davises working in Pakistan, behind our backs.” Following that discussion, the ISI agreed to help facilitate and support a plan to pay off the victims’ families, paving the way for Davis’s release.

  In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee a day after Kerry’s visit to Pakistan, Panetta called the CIA’s relationship to the ISI “one of the most complicated relationships that I’ve seen in a long time.” A few days later, the Associated Press obtained the draft of a statement that the ISI was preparing that indicated that the ISI “is ready to split with the CIA because of its frustration over what it calls heavy-handed pressure and its anger over what it believes is a covert U.S. operation involving hundreds of contract spies.” The statement, which was never released, declared that following the Davis shooting, “Post-incident conduct of the CIA has virtually put the partnership into question.... It is hard to predict if the relationship will ever reach the level at which it was prior to the Davis episode,” adding bluntly: “The onus of not stalling this relationship between the two agencies now squarely lies on the CIA.”

  In late February, Davis was hauled into a Lahore courtroom and asked to sign a charge sheet, acknowledging he had “murdered” the two men. Davis refused to sign and repeated his contention that he had immunity. In the meantime, the ISI was combing through the paperwork from the visa applications of hundreds of Americans issued visas over the previous six months. The ISI claimed that Davis’s application contained “bogus references and phone numbers” and was looking for similar red flags in other visa files.

  On February 25, police in Peshawar arrested another US security contractor, Aaron DeHaven, whose company, Catalyst Services, boasted that its team had “been involved in some of the most significant events of the last 20 years, whether it was the breakup of the former Soviet Union, the US effort in Somalia, or the Global War on Terror” and that its members had “careers in the United States Military and the United States Department of Defense.” The Pakistani press immediately branded him a Davis-like spy. Reports soon appeared that dozens of “contractors” had fled the country.

  The Pakistani government had to be seen as cracking down, and the United States was resigned to let it do so as long as it resulted in Davis’s freedom. The CIA’s George Little said that the Agency’s ties to the ISI “have been strong over the years, and when there are issues to sort out, we work through them. That’s the sign of a healthy partnership.” Despite the CIA’s public declarations, that partnership was, in reality, at an all-time low. But for the US military, the stakes were too high to let the Davis affair get any more out of hand. America’s war in Afghanistan was entirely dependent on Pakistan’s cooperation. Without Islamabad’s support, crucial US supply routes would be shut down. The generals had had enough.

  ON FEBRUARY 23, the closing act to the Davis saga was initiated far away from the jail where the American sat awaiting his fate. In fact, the deal was sealed in neither Pakistan nor the United States, but at a secluded luxury beach resort in Muscat, the capital of Oman, a nation in the Arabian Peninsula. “Where do you go to think seriously and bring sanity to a maddening situation? Far from the madding crowd to a peaceful Omani luxury resort of course. So that’s what the military leadership of the US and Pakistan did,” declared a Pakistani military readout of the meeting. In a private conference room, the most powerful figures in the US military met with their Pakistani counterparts. Led by Admiral Mullen, the US delegation included Admiral Eric Olson, the commander of the US Special Operations Command; General David Petraeus; and General James Mattis, the commander of CENTCOM. They met with Pakistan’s top military official, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and Major General Javed Iqbal, its director general of military operations. “The US-Pakistan relationship is heading downhill as speculation mounts about US intentions in Pakistan,” the Pakistani readout stated. “
The Davis affair brought all these suspicions to the surface.”

  Referring to the reported rift between the CIA and ISI, the readout indicated that the US military officials “had to point out that once beyond a tipping point the situation would be taken over by political forces that could not be controlled.” According to the readout, the US delegation asked the Pakistani generals “to step in and do what the governments were failing to do—especially because the US military was at a critical stage in Afghanistan and Pakistan was the key to control and resolution.” It concluded, “The militaries will now brief and guide their civilian masters and hopefully bring about a qualitative change in the US-Pakistan Relationship by arresting the downhill descent and moving it in the right direction.”

  After the Oman meeting, sources within the ISI said that the CIA had agreed not to conduct unilateral operations in Pakistan in return for its support in freeing Davis. “They will do nothing behind our backs that will result in people getting killed or arrested,” a Pakistani official told the Guardian. That of course was not true. It is even unclear whether the CIA said it. The New York Times reported that US officials “insisted...the CIA made no pledges to scale back covert operations in Pakistan or to give the Pakistani government or its intelligence agency a roster of American spies operating in the country—assertions that Pakistani officials disputed.”

  In any case, the United States and Pakistan began putting together a plot to use Islamic Sharia law to free Davis. From the moment Davis shot the two men in Lahore, the families of his victims and the third man killed by his backup team publicly insisted that they wanted no payments or bribes, but rather wanted Davis tried and hanged. On her deathbed, Shumaila Kanwal, Faheem’s widow, said she feared that justice would not be served because of a political deal. For weeks, mobs of angry protesters demonstrated at every court hearing, demanding that Davis be charged and tried. For both the United States and Pakistan, that was not an option.