by Steve Coll
The assessment about the matter on the Seventh Floor at Langley was similar: It wasn’t as if Raymond Davis got drunk and killed people on a rampage. He was doing his job. He was assaulted by armed men and responded. The fatal accident caused by the rescue mission was unfortunate but not an egregious crime. At the Lahore consulate, Conroy could not see a reason to delay evacuation. Davis had diplomatic status, as did the two men in the rescue vehicle, she firmly believed. “We don’t want three Raymond Davises” in Pakistani custody, she and the C.I.A. agreed. They arranged for the two hit-and-run men to fly out of Lahore that night. They were out of the country before Pakistan’s government could object.17
Zulfiqar Hameed, the Pakistani police superintendent, went through the evidence collected from Davis’s car. Hameed was a skilled detective, but it did not require the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Davis was C.I.A. The detainee’s papers included documents from a bank account in the United States that listed the agency as his employer. The thirty or so photos in his digital camera included tourist-style shots from when Davis had been stationed in Peshawar but also surveillance-type photos of a few Pakistani military facilities, including some near Punjab’s border with India, as well as private homes in Lahore. The sloppiness in tradecraft reflected how little the station worried about being held to account by I.S.I.18
In Washington, Husain Haqqani, the Pakistani ambassador, called his contacts at the C.I.A. to ask if Davis was one of theirs. “I want a categorical yes or no,” he said.
“No,” his C.I.A. contact said emphatically.
A few days later, the I.S.I. sent Haqqani a memo documenting everything the service and the police had learned about Davis—his bank information, his wife’s name, much of his career history. The contractor’s tradecraft was laughable, Haqqani thought. The ambassador was a political figure and author of penetrating books about the Pakistani Army who nonetheless had little power other than that derived from his close relationship with President Zardari. He was a complicated man but cooperated with the C.I.A. and State Department. They don’t know how to have friends, he thought, reflecting on the C.I.A.’s lie to him. They only know how to buy out friends or bully them.19
At I.S.I. headquarters, Pasha learned quickly that Davis worked for the C.I.A. He decided to test the quality of his relationship with Panetta by feigning ignorance.
“Is he your boy? If he is, we’ll help you get him out.”
No, Panetta told him.
All right, then, Pasha said, fuming privately. We will let the law take its course.20
That week, Panetta was reviewing the latest evidence that Osama Bin Laden might be hiding near Pakistan’s leading military academy. The C.I.A. director was preparing to brief the case to a wider circle in Obama’s national security cabinet and at the White House. If Bin Laden was at the house in Abbottabad, someone in I.S.I. had to know about it, Panetta was inclined to think.21 By now the mentality that I.S.I. was an enemy of America—despite Pakistan’s status as an officially designated major non-N.A.T.O. ally receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid each year—was so embedded around the C.I.A. and the Pentagon that it was a kind of reflex, a safe zone of conventional wisdom. Richard Holbrooke had hoped that 2010 might be the year the United States changed the Pakistan Army’s strategic calculus toward Afghanistan. It had turned out to be the year the Obama administration changed its calculus about Pakistan.
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Kayani’s “3.0” memo to President Obama and his generals remained unanswered. The administration just did not seem to know what to say. Admiral Mullen’s staff drafted a reply and passed it to the White House, but Lute’s aides thought it was too accommodating. A paralyzing debate ensued over who should author the reply letter. Kayani was the true leader of Pakistan yet he was notionally subservient to the democratically elected president, Zardari. Would it be bad form, a violation of democracy promotion principles, for Obama to write back to Kayani directly? This went around and around. In the end, Lute supervised a drafting process led by his aide Shamila Chaudhary. An interagency review produced an authorized, classified reply letter in late January 2011, just as the Raymond Davis mess unfolded.
They debated whether to share with Kayani the C.I.A.’s analysis of which leaders of the Taliban might be most receptive to peace negotiations, but then decided not to provide that intelligence. State Department analysts proposed a reply promising deeper engagement, but those at C.I.A. and some sections of the Pentagon wanted more threatening language about I.S.I.’s conduct. The final reply was tough. It repeated the American assessment that Pakistan had accommodated Afghan Taliban on its soil for too long, that I.S.I. was not moving adequately. The letter posed some questions for Kayani to consider: Could he help bring Saudi Arabia into a more constructive role in persuading the Taliban to forsake war for politics? Could he help bring the Iranians into a more constructive posture? But the overall attitude from Obama down was hardening. When Cameron Munter encountered the president occasionally at the White House early that year, Obama would grab his arm and say, “We have to stay tough with these guys.”22
On February 5, at the Munich Security Conference, an annual Davos-like affair for defense officials, Hillary Clinton met privately with Kayani and handed him the reply to his “3.0” memo. The subject of Raymond Davis hijacked most of their discussion. We have important issues like reconciliation with the Taliban to discuss, Clinton told Kayani, but we can’t do that while we have this distraction unresolved.
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A second secret meeting with Tayeb Agha was arranged for February 15 in Qatar. Chris Wood briefed the Conflict Resolution Cell from Kabul, where he had rotated again as station chief. The agency now targeted Taliban decision making for intelligence collection, to gain insights about what the other side was thinking as negotiations unfolded. They had obtained a draft text in Pashto that apparently originated from the Quetta Shura. The text reportedly came from a leadership meeting in Karachi. The Taliban leaders agreed that Al Qaeda was “out of control” and brought them trouble. The C.I.A. collection effort also demonstrated that Tayeb Agha was not sending e-mails or otherwise communicating with I.S.I. officers.23
Frank Ruggiero and Jeff Hayes flew to Doha with the Pentagon’s Chris Kolenda. Ruggiero and Hayes met Tayeb Agha at a private compound arranged by the Qatari emir. The Taliban envoy reported that Mullah Omar was aware of this meeting, unlike the one in Munich. So was Mullah Mansour.
The Americans raised the possibility of including Karzai’s administration in future negotiations. Tayeb Agha rejected the idea emphatically. “We will not deal with the Afghan government,” he said. There was no point in even discussing it. The Americans tried to push him off this talking point over dinner, but made no progress.24
Ruggiero said that they needed proof of Tayeb Agha’s standing to go any further. They proposed two ways that the Taliban envoy could demonstrate his authority. One was to publish an unusual statement about an international event under Mullah Omar’s name that they would agree on in advance. The other was to deliver proof that Bowe Bergdahl, the Taliban prisoner, was alive. If Tayeb Agha could prove that he was all right, this would further show that the Taliban controlled the Haqqanis as Tayeb Agha claimed. Tayeb Agha said he would work on it.
Three days later, speaking at the Asia Society, Hillary Clinton went semipublic about the talks. She described the administration’s strategy as including “an Afghan-led political process to split the weakened Taliban off from Al Qaeda and reconcile those who will renounce violence and accept the Afghan constitution.” To the Taliban, she said, “Break ties with Al Qaeda, renounce violence, and abide by the Afghan constitution, and you can rejoin Afghan society; refuse and you will continue to face the consequences of being tied to Al Qaeda as an enemy of the international community.” The Taliban “cannot wait us out,” she declared. “They cannot defeat us. And they cannot escape this choice.”25<
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The Conflict Resolution Cell was prepared to deceive I.S.I. about the Taliban talks but the White House team concluded they could not afford to keep Hamid Karzai in the dark. They had enough problems with him. Ruggiero and Hayes flew to Kabul and briefed Karzai at the palace.
Obama held another secure video call with Karzai on March 2, 2011. It was again a difficult conversation, punctuated by Karzai’s complaints about civilian casualties and Obama’s about the corruption at Kabul Bank. Obama said the purpose of talking to Tayeb Agha was to develop “an Afghan process.”
“I know Tayeb Agha,” Karzai said. “He is very close to Mullah Omar and Pakistan.” His role “shows Pakistan is serious.”
“Pakistan is not fully on board,” Obama acknowledged. “Without Pakistan, we can’t enforce this” if the negotiation got anywhere, Obama added.
“Afghanistan is a client state, not a partner” of the United States, Karzai complained.
“We want the smallest footprint possible,” Obama said. “We want you to be an ally, not a client.”
“Afghanistan will support you if you want us to be a partner,” Karzai repeated, and yet he made clear his opposition to Petraeus’s military strategy. Karzai said he wanted American “troops on bases, not villages.” That was just about the opposite of counterinsurgency.26
As Obama had asked before: How could the United States fight a war with such an ally?
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A few days later, Leon Panetta arrived at the White House with a scale model of the Abbottabad compound the C.I.A. had been studying. He reviewed the evidence about Osama Bin Laden’s possible presence with Donilon, Mullen, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs James Cartwright, McDonough, and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. The C.I.A. was not certain Bin Laden was there, Panetta said, and yet “there was a real chance” they had found him. Panetta and Admiral William McRaven, the commander of Special Operations Command, had developed half a dozen options if Obama decided to act. One was a bomber strike to destroy the compound and all those inside. Another was a more limited bombing strike that might spare some civilians but could make it difficult to know whether Bin Laden had been killed. Another was a helicopter assault by Special Forces. There were two options that would involve cooperating with I.S.I. and the Pakistan Army. One was a joint raid with Pakistani forces. Another was to “simply tell the Pakistanis what we knew about the compound and urge them to act,” as Panetta summarized it. When Panetta returned to Langley that day, Donilon called to say that Obama “believes we need to move very quickly.”27
That increased the pressure to somehow extract Raymond Davis from Pakistani custody. If the United States attacked the Abbottabad house on its own and Davis was still in prison, he might well be killed. In late February, The Guardian disclosed that Davis was C.I.A., further exposing the lies Panetta and agency officials had told Pasha and Husain Haqqani. The day-to-day diplomatic efforts to free Davis, meanwhile, as one participant remarked, suffered from the worst of the American system: C.I.A. testosterone and State Department lawyering. Cameron Munter, the ambassador in Islamabad, was among those who thought the situation was salvageable, but only if the United States came clean with Pasha and respectfully sought his cooperation.
Munter called on Kayani and Pasha in Rawalpindi. “We know who this guy is,” they told him. Why on Earth would you persist in treating us as if we don’t know the truth?
Yes, of course, Munter answered, confirming Davis’s role privately, but what are we going to do? The Obama administration held that Davis had diplomatic immunity and should be released on those grounds. The Pakistani government—not least I.S.I.—had whipped up such a media frenzy about Raymond Davis that it was now politically implausible in Pakistan to simply release him on the terms demanded by Washington.
There were potential self-inflicted problems with the American claim about Davis’s immunity—minor problems, but enough to create room for Pakistani resistance. Under the Vienna Convention, which governs immunity for diplomats, and to which both the United States and Pakistan were parties, immunity is established by a two-part test. First, the individual obtains a diplomatic visa. Davis did so; he traveled to Pakistan on a diplomatic passport. Second, notice is given by the embassy to the host government. The Americans believed adequate notice had been given, but in one updated list sent to the Foreign Ministry long after Davis had arrived, his name was not present. Munter described this as a bookkeeping error and sent an updated list after Davis’s arrest. If Pakistan were a friendly ally, it might have been enough. It wasn’t. Another problem was that when Davis was arrested, he said he was a contractor with the consulate. He should have asserted that he was a diplomat at the embassy. Consular protection is more limited than diplomatic immunity and might not protect him from a murder prosecution.
In Washington, Tom Donilon summoned Husain Haqqani, the Pakistani ambassador, to the West Wing. Donilon said that Davis’s immunity was unarguable. “I’m a lawyer. I know this.”
“It’s not documented,” Haqqani answered. He wanted to help but they would have to find some other solution than Pakistan capitulating. Haqqani felt that Donilon was trying to cajole him into backdating Davis’s registration as a diplomat, if that’s what was necessary.
Panetta invited Haqqani to the Seventh Floor at Old Headquarters. By now a new idea had been identified by both American and Pakistani negotiators, one that might save face. The United States could pay “blood money” to the families of Davis’s two victims and the families could choose to forgive him. (The Rehman family would be left out of such a deal because the United States had never acknowledged that one of its citizens was driving the vehicle that killed him.) C.I.A. lawyers had determined there was nothing illegal about the proposal, but it did smack of paying ransom to release a hostage.
“Leon, you always say that you’re on the side of whatever solves the problem,” Haqqani said. “There’s only one way to solve the problem,” and that was blood money.
Haqqani added that he had “a bone to pick” with Panetta. “You lied.” He added, “If you’re going to send a Jason Bourne to our country, make sure he has the skills to get out like Jason Bourne,” Haqqani added.
Panetta apologized for the deception, but said, “If we’re going to do complaints, we can do that, too.”28
Pasha remained aggrieved by what the Davis case had exposed, namely, that the C.I.A. was running extensive unilateral operations in Pakistan, belying the agency’s frequent statements to Pasha’s face that it considered I.S.I. to be a friendly service.
It was not easy to parse Pasha’s resentments. I.S.I. directors knew that the C.I.A. ran unilateral operations in Pakistan and had done so for years; there was nothing new about that. I.S.I. ran unilateral operations inside the United States, too, trying to influence American policy toward Kashmir and monitoring or harassing expatriates. Yet the scale and character of the recent C.I.A. activity—the dozens of officers and contractors riding around with Glocks, infrared lamps, and wire cutters—was a departure. The United States would never accept such activity from a foreign intelligence service in Washington or New York. Why would it expect Pakistan to do so uncomplainingly? Given Pakistani nationalism, Cameron Munter reflected, Pasha was about as pro-American as was realistic to expect at the top of the army. If it weren’t for him, Davis would never have a chance to get out of prison. And yet his C.I.A. counterparts fumed, “What a bastard.”
In Lahore that February, the police at first held Raymond Davis at their safe house. Conroy visited regularly and consulate officers brought in snacks, magazines, and changes of clothes. The Pakistani police shuttled burgers from a nearby Hardee’s franchise. After fourteen days in police custody, however, Pakistani law required that Davis be transferred to prison. Someone in the Pakistani system decided that there was a risk that the United States would deliberately poison Davis, and then blame Pakistan for th
e death. Davis was arraigned for trial on criminal charges of murder and was transferred to the high-security wing of teeming Kot Lakhpat prison on the outskirts of Lahore. Conroy was ordered to cease bringing Davis food. The American prisoner was restricted to lentils and other Punjabi staples cleared as edible by his jailers. The warden arranged for his food to be tasted before it reached him. As the weeks dragged on Conroy continued to visit, but the conditions were rougher and the prisoner’s anxiety levels rose.29
I.S.I. hired Raja Irshad, an Islamabad lawyer in his sixties who kept a long dyed beard, to negotiate the blood money deal that might end the stalemate. Irshad met with more than a dozen family members related to the two robbers Davis had killed. He persuaded them, with the intimidating power of I.S.I. behind him, to accept a pool of compensation of 200 million rupees, or about $2.3 million, to be divided equally between the two clans. Widows, mothers, brothers, and sisters would receive shares according to the precepts of Islamic inheritance law. They would all be enriched. An arm of the Pakistani government would disburse the funds.30
On March 16, 2011, Davis arrived in court for what he believed to be a hearing on procedural motions. Police escorted him to a courtroom cage, where he was shackled. When the lawyers were settled, Irshad stood. Davis’s local lawyers objected to Irshad’s intervention, having no idea why the I.S.I. lawyer was present. A prolonged cacophony in Urdu erupted.
“What’s all the noise and shouting about?” Davis asked.31
The judge carefully interrogated each of the blood money recipients, to make a record of their forgiveness and to tally the amounts each would receive. The judge also required Davis to plead guilty to illegal possession of weapons, an admission that undermined his claim to diplomatic immunity. Davis pleaded guilty; the judge declared him free. An S.U.V. surrounded by police escorts whisked him to the airport. He flew out of Pakistani airspace before midnight.
