The Way of the Knife Read online

  But Saeed insisted that night that he was not to blame for the deaths. The killers had been foreigners, he told the crowd, a group of assassins with a secret agenda to destabilize Pakistan and steal its nuclear arsenal. With a dramatic flourish, he said he knew exactly who had killed the six men.

  “It was the Americans!” he shouted to loud approvals.

  “It was Blackwater!” and the cheers grew even louder.

  He saved the biggest applause line for last:

  “It was another Raymond Davis!”

  15: THE DOCTOR AND THE SHEIKH

  “I don’t want to be the ambassador.”

  —CIA station chief in Islamabad

  Dr. Shakil Afridi had already been working for the CIA for more than a year when his American handler gave him a new set of instructions. It was January 2011, the month of Raymond Davis’s arrest, and the Pakistani surgeon had just gone through the lengthy protocol the CIA had put in place for him to meet his American contact. Two men would pick him up at a designated spot—sometimes a Shell gas station, sometimes a crowded outdoor market—body-search him, and order him to lie down in the backseat of their car with a blanket covering him. That day the car zigzagged through the streets of Islamabad until stopping to let Afridi out. There, an American woman he knew only as Sue was waiting for him in a Toyota Land Cruiser.

  Sue told the doctor that he should prepare to launch a vaccination campaign aimed at inoculating women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five against hepatitis B. She instructed that he should begin in two towns in Kashmir—Bagh and Muzaffarabad—and in the region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, focusing on the pastoral garrison town of Abbottabad. The campaign should take six months, she said, carried out in three phases. Afridi made quick calculations about the cost of the campaign, factoring in the large markup he always included when he was giving his price for a CIA operation. He would need 5.3 million rupees, he told Sue, about fifty-five thousand dollars.

  Afridi by then had become comfortable with the Americans, and he knew that the CIA wasn’t about to start quibbling over money. He was exactly what the Americans were desperate for—an agent who could move easily through cities and villages in Pakistan without raising the suspicions of either militants or Pakistan’s intelligence service. He was the perfect spy, and the Americans paid handsomely for that.

  Sue was just the latest in a succession of CIA officers who had been assigned to work with Afridi since 2009, when the doctor with a checkered history was first approached by the Americans. Then in his late forties, he had risen from humble origins to become Pakistan’s top doctor for Khyber Agency in the tribal areas, despite being dogged by allegations that he regularly accepted kickbacks from medical suppliers, ordered unnecessary surgical procedures, and sold hospital medicines on the black market.

  Few doubted his dedication to improving health conditions in one of the world’s poorest regions, but Afridi was also a fast talker who enjoyed telling bawdy jokes to female colleagues and was a bit too eager to push the boundaries of medical ethics to make extra money. The allegations against him eventually came to the attention of Mangal Bagh, a former bus driver turned warlord and drug runner in Khyber Agency, who was the leader of an obscure group called Lashkar-e-Islam. Bagh’s fighters regularly received medical treatment from Afridi. The warlord summoned Afridi to his house and demanded that the doctor pay a fine of one million rupees, about ten thousand dollars, for his transgressions. When Afridi refused, Bagh kidnapped him and detained him for a week until he paid.

  Afridi was attending a medical workshop in Peshawar in November 2009 when, according to an account he later gave to Pakistani investigators, a man approached him claiming to be the Pakistan country director for Save the Children, the international charity. The man, Mike McGrath, took an immediate interest in Afridi’s work and invited him to Islamabad so the two could talk further over dinner. Whether or not Afridi suspected there was an ulterior motive is unclear, but when he arrived in the Pakistani capital on the appointed day he attended a dinner at McGrath’s house in a posh section of Islamabad. There, he said, he met a tall blond woman in her late thirties whom he would later describe as having “British looks.” She called herself Kate, and she became Dr. Shakil Afridi’s first CIA handler.

  Save the Children has denied that neither McGrath nor any of its employees do any work for the CIA. American officials also dispute that Save the Children was ever used for spying, saying that if the CIA were to use large international charities to help recruit agents it would put all aid workers at risk of reprisals. Nevertheless, when a Pakistani investigative report of Afridi’s work for the CIA and his meeting with McGrath became public in Pakistan, officials in Islamabad moved to shutter all of the group’s operations inside the country.

  What American officials don’t dispute, however, is that midway through the last decade the CIA began sending officers into Pakistan undercover in a number of professions that might allow the spies to move freely through the country. During the “surge” of CIA officers into Pakistan beginning in 2005 and 2006, when Art Keller was deployed to the tribal areas, American spies arrived in Pakistan in a desperate search for clues about Osama bin Laden and stretched the normally accepted rules of international spycraft.

  After the Church Committee revelations of the 1970s, the CIA implemented a policy of not recruiting American journalists, clergy, or Peace Corps volunteers to spy for the agency, all of which had been routine up to that time. But senior CIA leaders said these post-Church rules were not cast in stone. Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1996, CIA director John Deutch said there might be instances of “extreme threat to the nation” when the CIA might need to abandon the policy. Under certain circumstances, Deutch said, “I believe it is unreasonable to foreclose the witting use of any likely source of information.” The CIA never restricted itself from recruiting foreign journalists or foreign aid workers, but American officials have long understood the dangers of using humanitarian workers as spies. Still, the CIA would carry out all manner of activities in the years after the September 11 attacks—from making detainees endure near drowning in secret prisons to killing militant suspects with armed drones—using the justification that the operations were necessary to keep the country safe. Expanding the categories of who can be recruited to spy was just another tactic of a CIA in the midst of an enduring war.

  During the two years after Dr. Afridi’s first meeting with the tall, blond CIA officer, the Pakistani doctor would conduct a number of public health campaigns as a ruse to gather intelligence on militant activity in the tribal areas. Vaccination campaigns were considered a good front for spying: DNA information could be collected from the needles used on children and analyzed for leads on the whereabouts of al Qaeda operatives for whom the CIA already had DNA information. In that time, Afridi conducted half a dozen vaccination campaigns around Khyber Agency, and the CIA paid him eight million rupees. According to his account, every few months he was passed off to a new CIA handler, from “Kate” to “Toni” to “Sara” and finally to “Sue,” who assumed his case in December 2010. He was given a laptop computer and a secure transmitter to communicate with the CIA, and he was alerted to the Americans trying to reach him when the transmitter sent out a beeping sound.

  —

  ONE MONTH into the vaccination campaign in Abbottabad, Sue told Dr. Afridi to focus his activities in Bilal Town, an upper-middle-class neighborhood not far from the headquarters of Pakistan’s premier military academy, the country’s equivalent of West Point. The hepatitis-B program was already being carried out in a slipshod manner, ignoring established protocols that dictate a careful, neighborhood-by-neighborhood strategy for vaccination campaigns. Afridi hadn’t even bought enough injections to ensure that everyone in his target population of fifteen-to-forty-five-year-old women received the multiple injections required to be vaccinated. Some local officials had even refused to cooperate with Afridi under the assumption that he didn’t have permission
for his work. Shaheena Mamraiz, a public health officer in Abbottabad, said she was taken aback by Afridi’s aggressiveness when he burst into her office in March 2011 wearing a black business suit and telling her the details of his planned vaccination campaign. It was only after urgings from her supervisor that she agreed to cooperate with Afridi.

  Of course, the details of exactly who in the greater Abbottabad area would be vaccinated were irrelevant to Afridi’s CIA handlers. By spring 2011, a small cluster of officers inside the Counterterrorism Center at Langley and at the CIA station in Islamabad were interested only in Bilal Town and, more specifically, the large walled compound on Pathan Street that American spy satellites had spent months watching. Afridi’s CIA handlers never told the doctor whom they suspected was hiding in the house. Whether Osama bin Laden and his entourage were living there was still a matter of intense speculation, and American officials hoped that getting inside the house might settle the matter. With the vaccination campaign as a cover, the CIA wanted Afridi to get one of his staff inside the compound and get what American soldiers and spies still didn’t have after nearly a decade of frantic searching: hard evidence of where Osama bin Laden was hiding.

  But neither Afridi nor any member of his staff was able to provide that. On the day Dr. Afridi vaccinated residents of Pathan Street, the only people to refuse the hepatitis-B vaccinations lived in the mysterious compound, the ones who rarely ventured beyond the house and burned their trash rather than send it out for collection. Afridi was told that two reclusive brothers from Waziristan, along with their families, occupied the house and that the men had no interest in meeting anyone from the neighborhood. After investigating further, a female health worker on Afridi’s team managed to get the cell-phone number of one of the “brothers” who lived in the house. She called the number using Dr. Afridi’s phone and spoke to a man who said he was away from the house and that she should call again in the evening.

  The vaccination team never got into the compound, and Afridi decided that pressing the matter might arouse suspicions and prompt the people in the compound to alter their procedures or even flee. Having completed the work in Bilal Town, Dr. Afridi went to Islamabad with his empty vaccination kits to where Sue and her Toyota Land Cruiser were waiting for him at a designated spot. He told her everything he knew about the people in the compound. He handed her the vaccination kits, and she handed him 5.3 million rupees in cash.

  —

  FROM A MAKESHIFT BASE in eastern Afghanistan, four American helicopters lifted off, banked east against a moonless sky, and brought dozens of heavily armed young men into battle in a country where the United States had not declared war. The group of Navy SEALs had prepared for a bloody firefight with fiercely loyal men defending Osama bin Laden, or even with Pakistani troops: A decade of secret American operations inside Pakistan had so frayed relations between two putative allies that a pitched battle between American and Pakistani troops in the middle-class hamlet of Abbottabad was a risk that the SEALs contemplated as they touched down inside bin Laden’s walled compound.

  There had been ominous signs of disaster as the helicopters reached their destination. One of the helicopters got caught in a wind vortex and was forced into a hard landing after its tail clipped the wall of the compound, a snafu with echoes of the failed 1980 mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran. But once the SEALs penetrated the house on Pathan Street with C-4 explosives and made their way up the stairs, bin Laden’s end came swiftly. The Americans saw the al Qaeda leader at the top of the stairs on the third floor, peering out of his room, and one of the commandos shot him in the right side of his face. He fell back into his bedroom and lay twitching on the floor in a pool of blood. The SEALs took pictures of bin Laden’s corpse, put it into a body bag, and dragged it down the stairs and out the door.

  Less than forty minutes after the helicopters arrived in Abbottabad, history’s most expensive and exasperating manhunt had been brought to an end. The SEALs destroyed the downed helicopter to prevent the Pakistanis from gaining access to the classified navigation equipment inside, with only the helicopter’s severed tail surviving the planned destruction. They piled into the functioning Blackhawk and a Chinook helicopter that had been waiting in reserve. They flew west, back into Afghanistan, carrying bin Laden and dozens of computer hard drives, cell phones, and thumb drives that had been scattered around the compound.

  The details of the bin Laden raid did not trickle out into Pakistan until later that day. As they did, Asad Munir sat mesmerized in front of the television in his living room. He was convinced there was more to the story. The former ISI station chief in Peshawar, the man who spoke reverentially about his days working with the CIA in the months after the September 11 attacks, was certain that the CIA would never carry out a military operation in the middle of his country without the help of Pakistani soldiers or spies. “How could they?” he recalled thinking. “The CIA doesn’t have any troops.”

  But that night, the CIA did have troops.

  In the months before the mission was launched, as spy satellites peering down from space took pictures of the house on Pathan Street and Dr. Afridi and his team tried to get inside the compound, U.S. military and intelligence officials presented the White House with a number of attack options. The option considered least risky, using a B-2 stealth bomber to slip past Pakistani radar and raze the compound, was ruled out because it would have provided the Obama administration no definitive proof that bin Laden had been killed in the operation. Pakistani authorities would cordon off the area and sift through the rubble, and the only details that the United States would learn would be those things that the ISI chose to tell.

  President Obama instead chose the riskier option, sending the SEALs deep into Pakistan to kill bin Laden. Besides the obvious perils of such an operation, officials worried about sending American ground troops so far into Pakistan. Until then, the only combat missions the American military had carried out on Pakistani soil had been in the tribal areas. The missions took place within miles of the Afghan border, allowing for a quick escape back into Afghanistan if something went wrong.

  There was also the question with which American leaders had been grappling for years: Under what authority could the United States send troops into a country with which America was not at war? It was the question that Donald Rumsfeld asked in the days after the September 11 attacks, when he looked with envy at the CIA’s ability to go to war anywhere around the globe. In the years since, lawyers and policy makers had steadily chipped away at the wall separating the work of soldiers and spies. The rivalries between the Pentagon and CIA during the early part of the decade gave way to a détente and a new arrangement in which special-operations troops on combat or spying missions were “sheep-dipped”: temporarily turned into CIA operatives.

  So as President Obama made the final decisions about the bin Laden operation, a decade of evolution in the way America wages war gave him more options than had existed for previous American presidents. It would be an American military mission, carried out by teams of Navy SEALs. But the entire team was “sheep-dipped” for the mission, put under the CIA’s Title 50 authority for launching covert actions. President Obama put CIA director Leon Panetta in charge of the operation.

  From the moment that the Blackhawk helicopters took off from the base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, through the tense minutes when the SEALs moved up the dark staircase in the house on Pathan Street, to the final moments when the helicopters rose into the sky carrying bin Laden’s dead body, Panetta relayed updates from the mission to rapt Obama administration officials jammed into the White House Situation Room. The liberal Democratic congressman from California, a man who learned only shortly before arriving at Langley that much of his job would require delivering death sentences to America’s enemies around the world, had the controls of the killing machine. As the operation unfolded, Panetta kept one hand in his pocket, fingering a string of rosary beads.

  The suffocating tension
inside the White House Situation Room lifted only after all the SEALs had piled into the helicopters and escaped Pakistani airspace without forcing a confrontation with the Pakistani air force. But back in Abbottabad, the wreckage from one of the Blackhawks was still burning and several dead bodies lay on the floor of the house where the SEALs had done their violent work.

  Somebody was going to have to tell the Pakistanis what had just happened.

  The task fell to Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been something of a troubleshooter as the United States and Pakistan lurched from one crisis to the next. The son of a Hollywood press agent and a man who from an early age saw the value of cultivating personal relationships, Mullen had developed a close rapport with General Kayani—the former head of the ISI who had become army chief—during endless dinners at Kayani’s house in Islamabad. The two men would talk late into the night about Pakistan’s precarious security in a region dominated by India, China, and Russia, with Kayani chain-smoking through each dinner course. Mullen had spent the flights to Islamabad reading Freedom at Midnight, the 1975 classic about India’s independence from the British Empire and the India–Pakistan partition. One member of Mullen’s traveling entourage noticed that, from behind, the two men even looked alike—roughly the same height, same hair color, same slightly rumpled khaki uniform, similar lumbering gait—distinguished only by the cigarette smoke that rose from the Pakistani general.

  Speaking from a phone outside the Situation Room, Mullen called Kayani and informed him of what had just happened.

  Kayani already knew the basics. Hours earlier, he had taken a call from one of his aides, who told him about vague reports that a helicopter had crashed in Abbottabad. Kayani’s first thought was that Pakistan was under attack from India, and he immediately ordered his air-force commanders to scramble F-16 jets to repel the invasion. But the concerns about an Indian attack soon receded, and by the time Mullen called Kayani, the Pakistani general knew that Americans had been in his country.