The Way of the Knife Read online

  The third child of a poor bricklayer and a cook, Raymond Allen Davis grew up in a small clapboard house in the Strawberry Patch hamlet of Big Stone Gap, a town of six thousand people in Virginia coal country named for the gap in the mountains where the Powell River sluiced through. Shy and reserved, Davis was unusually strong and became a football and wrestling star at the local high school. After graduating, in 1993, he enlisted in the Army infantry and did a tour in Macedonia in 1994 as a United Nations peacekeeper. When his five-year hitch in the infantry was up, in 1998, he reenlisted, this time in the Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg. He left the Army in 2003 and, like hundreds of other retired Navy SEALs and Green Berets, was hired by Erik Prince’s company, Blackwater USA, and soon found himself in Iraq working as a security guard for the CIA.

  Little is known about his work for Blackwater, but by 2006 he had left the firm and, together with his wife, founded a private security company in Las Vegas. Soon he was hired by the CIA as a private contractor, what the agency calls a “Green Badge,” for the color of the identification cards that contractors show to enter CIA headquarters at Langley. Like Davis, many of the contractors were hired to fill out the CIA’s Global Response Staff—bodyguards who traveled to war zones to protect case officers, assess the security of potential meeting spots, even make initial contact with sources to make sure that case officers wouldn’t be walking into an ambush. It was officers from the CIA’s security branch who would come under withering fire the following year on the roof of the agency’s base in Benghazi, Libya. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had so stretched the CIA’s own cadre of security officers that the agency was forced to pay inflated sums to private contractors to do the security jobs. When Davis first deployed with the CIA to Pakistan in 2008, he worked from the CIA base in Peshawar, earning upward of two hundred thousand dollars per year, including benefits and expenses.

  Davis had already been in jail for several weeks by mid-February 2011, and it was unlikely he would be freed anytime soon. The murder case had inflamed anti-American passions inside Pakistan, with street protests and purple newspaper editorials demanding that Pakistan’s government not cave to Washington’s demands for Davis’s release and instead sentence him to death. The evidence at the time indicated that the men Davis had killed had carried out a string of petty thefts that day, but there was an added problem: a third man killed by the unmarked American SUV fleeing the scene.

  Making matters even worse for Davis, the American had been imprisoned in Lahore, where the family of Nawaz Sharif dominated the political culture. The former president made no secret about his intentions to once again run Pakistan, making him the chief antagonist to President Asif Ali Zardari and his political machine in Islamabad, 250 miles away. As the American embassy in Islamabad leaned on Zardari’s government to get Davis released from jail, the diplomats soon realized that Zardari had little influence over the police officers and judges in the city of the president’s bitter rival.

  But the most significant factor ensuring that Davis would languish in jail was that the Obama administration had yet to tell Pakistan’s government what it already suspected, and what Raymond Davis’s marksmanship in the Lahore traffic circle made clear: He wasn’t just another paper-shuffling American diplomat. Davis’s work in Pakistan was much darker, and involved probing an exposed nerve in the already hypersensitive relationship between the CIA and the ISI.

  Ever since the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, the “Army of the Pure,” dispatched teams of assassins to lay siege to luxury hotels in Mumbai, India, in November 2008, killing and wounding more than five hundred people over four days of mayhem, CIA analysts had been warning that the group was seeking to raise its global profile by carrying out spectacular attacks beyond South Asia. This spurred the CIA to assign more of its expanding cadre of operatives in Pakistan toward gathering intelligence about Lashkar’s operations—a decision that put the interests of the CIA and ISI in direct conflict. It was one thing for American spies to be lurking around the tribal areas hunting for al Qaeda figures; it was quite another for the CIA to go into Pakistani cities on espionage missions against a group that the ISI considered a valuable proxy force.

  Lashkar was founded in 1990 as an alliance of various groups that the Pakistani spy service had nurtured to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The group’s focus turned almost immediately from Afghanistan to India, and Pakistani president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq began sending Lashkar fighters to Kashmir to act as a counterweight to Kashmiri independence groups the president feared might push to create a separate state in the disputed mountain region claimed by both India and Pakistan. The ISI had nurtured the group for years as a useful asset against India, and the fact that its leaders operated in plain sight made a mockery of President Musharraf’s “banning” of the group in 2002 after a brazen assault on the Indian parliament building in New Delhi. Lashkar’s sprawling headquarters in Muridke, a Lahore suburb along the famous Grand Trunk Road, housed a radical madrassa, a market, a hospital, and even a fish farm. The compound had been built with contributions from wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries, but Lashkar also ran successful fund-raising campaigns and delivered a raft of social services to the poor using an allied organization, Jamaat-ud-Dawah (“Party of Truth”), as a front.

  The group’s charismatic leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, had been put under house arrest over the years, but in 2009 the Lahore High Court quashed all terrorism charges against the fifty-nine-year-old and set him free. A stocky man with a wild beard, Saeed preached out in the open on many Fridays, flanked by bodyguards and delivering sermons to throngs of his followers about the imperialism of the United States, India, and Israel. Even after the United States offered a $10 million reward for information linking Saeed to the Mumbai attacks, he continued to move freely in public, further cementing his legend as a Pakistani version of Robin Hood.

  By the time Raymond Davis had moved into a safe house with a handful of other CIA officers and contractors in late 2010, the bulk of agency officers in Lahore were involved in collecting information about the growth of Lashkar. With many of the CIA operatives brought into the country under false cover to mask their movements, Pakistani intelligence officials could make only wild guesses about what the Americans were doing.

  To get more of its spies into Pakistan, the CIA had exploited the arcane rules in place for approving visas for Americans. The State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon all had separate channels to request visas for their personnel, and all of them landed at the desk of Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s pro-American ambassador in Washington. Haqqani, a former politician and professor at Boston University, had orders from Islamabad to be lenient in approving the visas, since many of the Americans coming to Pakistan were—at least officially—going to be administering millions of dollars in foreign aid money to Pakistan. By the time of the Lahore killings, in early 2011, so many Americans were operating inside Pakistan under both legitimate and false identities that even the U.S. embassy in Pakistan didn’t have accurate records to keep track of their identities and whereabouts.

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  THE AMERICAN EMBASSY in Islamabad is essentially a fortress within a fortress, a pile of buildings enclosed by walls topped with razor wire and surveillance cameras and then encircled by an outer ring of walls that separate a leafy area, called the Diplomatic Enclave, from the rest of the city. If it seemed like overkill, and a bit undiplomatic, to have the U.S. government cloistered behind so much concrete and steel, the Americans at least had good reason: The previous embassy had been set on fire in 1979 by student protestors enraged over false reports that the United States was behind the occupation of the Great Mosque, in Mecca. In actuality, a radical Islamic splinter group had seized the mosque and taken hostages among the hundreds of thousands who had come to Mecca for the haj. Inside the American embassy, the work of diplomats and spies is kept largely separate, with the CIA station occupying a wa
rren of offices in its own wing of the embassy, accessed only through doors with encrypted locks.

  But after Raymond Davis was picked up by the Lahore police, the embassy became a house divided by more than mere geography. Just two days before the shootings in Lahore, the CIA had sent a new station chief to Islamabad, the latest in what had become something of a revolving door at the agency’s main Pakistan outpost. His previous foreign posting had been in Russia, where the CIA had sent its most wily and capable officers during the Cold War and more recently had assigned personnel tough enough to knock heads with the SVR, the KGB’s post-Soviet incarnation. Old-school and stubborn, the new chief did not come to Pakistan to be friendly with the ISI. Instead, he wanted to recruit more Pakistani agents to work for the CIA under the ISI’s nose, expand electronic surveillance of ISI offices, and share little information with Pakistani intelligence officers. This hawkish approach to spycraft has long had a name within the CIA: Moscow Rules. The strategy was now being applied to Pakistan, making the new station chief feel right at home.

  That hard-nosed attitude almost immediately put him at odds with the American ambassador in Islamabad, Cameron Munter. A bookish career diplomat from California with a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University, Munter had ascended the ranks of the State Department’s bureaucracy focused on Europe. He then accepted several postings in Iraq and ultimately took over the American mission in Islamabad, in late 2010. The job was considered one of the State Department’s most important and difficult assignments, and Munter had the burden of following Anne Patterson, an aggressive diplomat who, in the three years before Munter arrived, had cultivated close ties to officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations. She had won praise from the CIA for her unflinching support for drone strikes in the tribal areas.

  Munter, though, saw things differently; he was skeptical about the long-term value of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan. Arriving in Islamabad at a time when relations between the United States and Pakistan were quickly deteriorating, Munter wondered whether the pace of the drone war might be undercutting relations with an important ally for the quick fix of killing midlevel terrorists. Munter would learn soon enough that his views about the drone program ultimately mattered little. In the Obama administration, when it came to questions about war and peace in Pakistan, it was what the CIA believed that really counted.

  With Raymond Davis sitting in prison, Munter argued it was essential to go immediately to the head of the ISI, Lt. General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, to cut a deal. The United States would admit that Davis was working for the CIA, the families of the Lahore victims would be secretly compensated, and Davis would quietly be spirited out of the country, never to return again. But the CIA objected. Davis had been spying on a militant group with extensive ties to the ISI, and the CIA didn’t want to own up to it. Top CIA officials worried that appealing for mercy from the ISI might doom Davis. He could be killed in prison before the Obama administration could pressure Islamabad to release Davis on the grounds that he was a foreign diplomat with immunity from local laws—even those prohibiting murder. On the day of Davis’s arrest, the CIA station chief walked into Munter’s office and announced that a decision had been made to stonewall the Pakistanis. Don’t cut a deal, he warned, adding: Pakistan is the enemy.

  The strategy meant that American officials, from top to bottom, had to obfuscate both in public and in private about what exactly Raymond Davis had been doing in the country. On February 15, more than two weeks after the shootings, President Obama offered his first comments about the Raymond Davis affair during a press conference. The matter was simple, Obama said: Davis, “our diplomat in Pakistan,” should be immediately released under the “very simple principle” of diplomatic immunity. “If our diplomats are in another country,” said the president, “then they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution.”

  Calling Davis a “diplomat” was, technically, accurate. Davis had been admitted into Pakistan on a diplomatic passport, which under normal circumstances would protect him from being prosecuted in a foreign country. But after the shootings in Lahore, the Pakistanis were not exactly receptive to debating the finer points of international law. As they saw it, Davis was an American spy who had not been declared to the ISI and whom CIA officials still would not admit they controlled. Shortly before Obama’s press conference, General Pasha, the ISI chief, had traveled to Washington to meet with Leon Panetta and get more information about the matter. He was nearly convinced that Davis was a CIA employee and suggested to Panetta that the two spy agencies handle the matter quietly. Sitting in Panetta’s office, he posed a direct question.

  Was Davis working for the CIA? Pasha asked.

  No, he’s not one of ours, Panetta replied.

  Panetta went on to say that the matter was out of his hands, and that the issue was being handled inside State Department channels. Pasha was furious when he left CIA headquarters, and he decided to leave Raymond Davis’s fate in the hands of the judges in Lahore. The United States had just lost its chance, he told others, to quickly end the dispute.

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  THAT THE CIA DIRECTOR would be overseeing a large clandestine network of American spies in Pakistan, and then dissemble to the ISI director about the extent of America’s secret war in the country, showed just how much the relationship had unraveled since the days in 2002, when Asad Munir teamed up with the CIA in Peshawar to hunt for Osama bin Laden in western Pakistan. Things were far worse even than during the period in 2006, when the ISI allowed Art Keller and other CIA operatives to work out of Pakistani military bases in the tribal areas. Where had it gone so wrong?

  While the spy agencies had had a fraught relationship since the beginning of the Afghan war, the real breach came in July 2008, when CIA officers in Islamabad paid a visit to General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani army chief, to tell him that President Bush had signed off on a set of secret orders authorizing a new strategy in the drone wars. No longer would the CIA give Pakistan advance warning before launching missiles from Predator or Reaper drones in the tribal areas. From that point on, the CIA officers told Kayani, the CIA’s killing campaign in Pakistan would be a unilateral war.

  The decision had been made in Washington after months of wrenching debate about the growth of militancy in Pakistan’s tribal areas; a CIA internal assessment had likened it to al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan in the years before the September 11 attacks. The highly classified CIA paper, dated May 1, 2007, concluded that al Qaeda was at its most dangerous since 2001 because of the base of operations that militants had established in North Waziristan, South Waziristan, Bajaur, and the other tribal areas.

  That assessment became the cornerstone of a yearlong discussion about the Pakistan problem. Some of the Pakistan experts in the State Department warned that expanding the CIA war in Pakistan would further stoke anti-American anger on the streets and could push the country over the brink. But officials inside the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center argued for escalating the drone campaign without the ISI’s blessing. Since the killing of Nek Muhammad in 2004, they said, there had been fewer than twenty-five drone strikes in Pakistan, and only three of those strikes killed militants on the CIA’s list of “high-value targets.” Other potential strikes had been scuttled at the last minute because of delays in getting Pakistani approval for the strikes, or because the targets seemed to have been tipped off and had fled. The targeters inside the CTC had been trying to amass evidence that members of the ISI’s Directorate S—the branch with historical ties to militant groups—had alerted the militants, but there was no clear proof.

  Unlike years earlier, when some CIA case officers had derided the Counterterrorism Center operatives as Philistines and “boys with toys,” by 2008 the various factions within the spy agency had united around the position that the drone campaign should intensify. Since late 2005, the CIA had managed to develop more sources in the tribal areas who could provide precise information about the whereabouts of al Q
aeda leaders. Moreover, defense contractor General Atomics had ramped up production of Predator and Reaper drones, allowing the CIA to propose near-constant surveillance over suspected al Qaeda compounds and training camps with the unmanned aircraft. Inside the CIA’s analytics division, the Directorate of Intelligence, analysts had decided that launching unilateral operations in Pakistan would not, as Bush officials worried for years, lead to the ouster of Pakistan’s secular government and a rise of Islamist rule in the country. The analysts concluded that the civilian government in Islamabad led by Asif Ali Zardari, who was elected after General Musharraf caved to demands to step down, was just strong enough to weather any surge in public anger that came from an increase in drone strikes.

  The change in leadership at the Pentagon had also contributed to the Bush administration’s taking a more aggressive approach in Pakistan. For all his efforts to expand his authorities to dispatch special-operations troops outside of war zones, Donald Rumsfeld had actually been cautious about carrying out too many “boots on the ground” operations inside Pakistan, fearing a public backlash that might undercut President Musharraf. But with Musharraf gone, Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates, believed that the United States could take more risks in the country. Gates, the former CIA director, had helped manage the CIA’s covert campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s and saw the benefits of a partnership with Pakistan. But he also had a jaundiced view of how Pakistan managed its security and knew Islamabad wouldn’t take aggressive action against militant groups in the tribal areas if it had neither the interest nor the ability to do so. During his first trip to Afghanistan as defense secretary, Gates sat in a secure briefing room at Bagram Air Base where Rear Admiral Robert Harward, deputy commander of Joint Special Operations Command, gave a classified briefing on all of the compounds in the tribal areas where the military believed al Qaeda operatives were hiding. “Well, why don’t you go in and get them?” Gates asked.