How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the
United States
By MARK MAZZETTIAPRIL 9, 2013
The burly
American was escorted by Pakistani policemen into a crowded interrogation room.
Amid a clatter of ringing mobile phones and cross talk among the cops speaking
a mishmash of Urdu, Punjabi and English, the investigator tried to decipher the
facts of the case.
“America,
you from America?”
“Yes.”
“You’re
from America, and you belong to the American Embassy?”
“Yes,”
the American voice said loudly above the chatter. “My passport — at the site I
showed the police officer. . . . It’s somewhere. It’s lost.”
On the
jumpy video footage of the interrogation, he reached beneath his checkered
flannel shirt and produced a jumble of identification badges hanging around his
neck. “This is an old badge. This is Islamabad.” He showed the badge to the man
across the desk and then flipped to a more recent one proving his employment in
the American Consulate in Lahore.
“You are working at the consulate general in
Lahore?” the policeman asked.
“Yes.”
“As a . .
. ?”
“I, I
just work as a consultant there.”
“Consultant?”
The man behind the desk paused for a moment and then shot a question in Urdu to
another policeman. “And what’s the name?”
“Raymond
Davis,” the officer responded.
“Raymond
Davis,” the American confirmed. “Can I sit down?”
“Please
do. Give you water?” the officer asked.
“Do you
have a bottle? A bottle of water?” Davis asked.
Another
officer in the room laughed. “You want water?” he asked. “No money, no water.”
Another
policeman walked into the room and asked for an update. “Is he understanding
everything? And he just killed two men?”
Hours
earlier, Davis had been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his thick frame
wedged into the driver’s seat of a white Honda Civic. A city once ruled by
Mughals, Sikhs and the British, Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual
capital, and for nearly a decade it had been on the fringes of America’s secret
war in Pakistan. But the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been
redrawn in recent years, and factions that once had little contact with one
another had cemented new alliances in response to the C.I.A.’s drone campaign
in the western mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies
dreaming up bloody attacks against India were now aligning themselves closer to
Al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these
groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was why Davis and a C.I.A. team set up
operations from a safe house in the city.
But now
Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two young men who
approached his car on a black motorcycle, their guns drawn, at an intersection
congested with cars, bicycles and rickshaws. Davis took his semiautomatic Glock
pistol and shot through the windshield, shattering the glass and hitting one of
the men numerous times. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his car and
shot several rounds into his back.
He
radioed the American Consulate for help, and within minutes a Toyota Land
Cruiser was in sight, careering in the wrong direction down a one-way street.
But the S.U.V. struck and killed a young Pakistani motorcyclist and then drove
away. An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia was found, including a black mask,
approximately 100 bullets and a piece of cloth bearing an American flag. The
camera inside Davis’s car contained photos of Pakistani military installations,
taken surreptitiously.
More than
two years later, the Raymond Davis episode has been largely forgotten in the
United States. It was immediately overshadowed by the dramatic raid months
later that killed Osama bin Laden — consigned to a footnote in the doleful
narrative of America’s relationship with Pakistan. But dozens of interviews
conducted over several months, with government officials and intelligence
officers in Pakistan and in the United States, tell a different story: that the
real unraveling of the relationship was set off by the flurry of bullets Davis
unleashed on the afternoon of Jan. 27, 2011, and exacerbated by a series of
misguided decisions in the days and weeks that followed. In Pakistan, it is the
Davis affair, more than the Bin Laden raid, that is still discussed in the country’s
crowded bazaars and corridors of power.
Davis
was taken to
Kot Lakhpat prison, on the industrial fringes of Lahore, a jail with a
reputation for inmates dying under murky circumstances. He was separated from
the rest of the prisoners and held in a section of the decaying facility where
the guards didn’t carry weapons, a concession for his safety that American
officials managed to extract from the prison staff. The United States Consulate
in Lahore had negotiated another safeguard: A small team of dogs was tasting
Davis’s food, checking that it had not been laced with poison.
For many
senior Pakistani spies, the man sitting in the jail cell represented solid
proof of their suspicions that the C.I.A. had sent a vast secret army to
Pakistan, men who sowed chaos and violence as part of the covert American war
in the country. For the C.I.A., the eventual disclosure of Davis’s role with
the agency shed an unflattering light on a post–Sept. 11 reality: that the
C.I.A. had farmed out some of its most sensitive jobs to outside contractors —
many of them with neither the experience nor the temperament to work in the war
zones of the Islamic world.
The third
child of a bricklayer and a cook, Davis grew up in a small clapboard house
outside Big Stone Gap, a town of nearly 6,000 people in Virginia coal country.
He became a football and wrestling star at the local high school, and after
graduating in 1993, Davis enlisted in the Army and did a tour in Macedonia in
1994 as a United Nations peacekeeper. When his five-year hitch in the infantry
was up, he re-enlisted, this time in the Army’s Third Special Forces Group
based at Fort Bragg, N.C. He left the Army in 2003 and, like hundreds of other
retired Navy SEALs and Green Berets, was hired by the private security firm Blackwater
and soon found himself in Iraq working security for the C.I.A.
Little is
known about his work for Blackwater, but by 2006, Davis had left the firm and,
together with his wife, founded a security company in Las Vegas. Soon he was
hired by the C.I.A. as a private contractor, what the agency calls a “Green
Badge,” for the color of the identification cards that contractors show to
enter C.I.A. headquarters at Langley. Like Davis, many of the contractors were
hired to fill out the C.I.A.’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 ensure that case officers
wouldn’t be walking into an ambush. Officers from the C.I.A.’s security branch
came under withering fire on the roof of the agency’s base in Benghazi, Libya,
last September. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had so
stretched the C.I.A.’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 C.I.A. to Pakistan in 2008, he worked from
the agency’s base in Peshawar, earning upward of $200,000 a year.
By
mid-February 2011, with Davis still sitting in prison, anti-American passions
were fully inflamed, and daily street protests and newspaper editorials
demanded that the government not cave to Washington’s demands for Davis’s
release but instead sentence him to death. The evidence at the time indicated
that the men Davis killed had carried out a string of petty thefts that day,
but there was an added problem: the third man killed by the unmarked American
S.U.V. fleeing the scene. Making matters even worse for Davis was the fact that
he was imprisoned in Lahore, where the family of Nawaz Sharif dominated the
political culture. The former leader of the country 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, a four-hour
drive 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 the Pakistanis
already suspected, and what Raymond Davis’s marksmanship made clear: He wasn’t
just another paper-shuffling American diplomat. Davis’s work in Pakistan was
much darker, and it involved probing an exposed nerve in the
already-hypersensitive relationship between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s military
intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.
Ever
since the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (the
Army of the Pure) dispatched teams of assassins to lay siege to luxury hotels
and other sites in Mumbai, India, in November 2008, killing and wounding more
than 500 people over four days of mayhem, C.I.A. 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 agency to assign more of its
expanding army of operatives in Pakistan toward gathering intelligence about
Lashkar’s operations — a decision that put the interests of the C.I.A. and the
I.S.I. 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 to
go into Pakistani cities on espionage missions against a group that the I.S.I.
considered a valuable proxy force in its continuing battle with India.
The
I.S.I. had nurtured the group for years as a useful asset against India, and
Lashkar’s sprawling headquarters outside Lahore housed a radical madrassa, a
market, a hospital, even a fish farm. The group’s charismatic leader, Hafiz
Muhammad Saeed, had been put under house arrest at various times, but in 2009
the Lahore High Court quashed all terrorism charges against him 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 U.S. offered a $10 million reward for evidence linking Saeed to the
Mumbai attacks, he continued to move freely in public, burnishing his legend as
a Pakistani version of Robin Hood.
By the
time Raymond Davis moved into a safe house with a handful of other C.I.A.
officers and contractors in late 2010, the bulk of the agency’s officers in
Lahore were focused on investigating the growth of Lashkar. To get more of its
spies into Pakistan, the C.I.A. had exploited the arcane rules in place for
approving visas for Americans. The State Department, the C.I.A. and the
Pentagon all had separate channels to request visas for their personnel, and
all of them led to the desk of Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s pro-American
ambassador in Washington. Haqqani had orders from Islamabad to be lenient in
approving the visas, because many of the Americans coming to Pakistan were — at
least officially — going to be administering millions of dollars in foreign-aid
money. 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 didn’t have accurate records of their identities and
whereabouts.
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 separates a leafy
area, called the Diplomatic Enclave, from the rest of the city. Inside the
embassy, the work of diplomats and spies is kept largely separate, with the
C.I.A. station occupying a warren of offices in its own wing, accessed only
through doors with coded locks.
After
Davis was picked up by the Lahore police, the embassy became a house divided by
more than mere geography. Just days before the shootings, the C.I.A. sent a new
station chief to Islamabad. Old-school and stubborn, the new chief did not come
to Pakistan to be friendly with the I.S.I. Instead, he wanted to recruit more
Pakistani agents to work for the C.I.A. under the I.S.I.’s nose, expand
electronic surveillance of I.S.I. offices and share little information with
Pakistani intelligence officers.
That
hard-nosed attitude inevitably put him at odds with the American ambassador in
Islamabad, Cameron Munter. A bookish career diplomat with a Ph.D. in history,
Munter had ascended the ranks of the State Department’s bureaucracy and
accepted several postings in Iraq before ultimately taking 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 W. Patterson, an aggressive diplomat who, in the three
years before Munter arrived, cultivated close ties to officials in the Bush and
Obama administrations and won praise from the C.I.A. for her unflinching
support for drone strikes in the tribal areas.
Munter
saw some value to the drone program but was skeptical about the long-term
benefits. 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. He 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 C.I.A. believed that really counted.
With
Davis sitting in prison, Munter argued that it was essential to go immediately
to the head of the I.S.I. at the time, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, to cut a
deal. The U.S. would admit that Davis was working for the C.I.A., and Davis
would quietly be spirited out of the country, never to return again. But the
C.I.A. objected. Davis had been spying on a militant group with extensive ties
to the I.S.I., and the C.I.A. didn’t want to own up to it. Top C.I.A. officials
worried that appealing for mercy from the I.S.I. might doom Davis. He could be
killed in prison before the Obama administration could pressure Islamabad to
release him 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
C.I.A. station chief told Munter 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 dissemble both in
public and in private about what exactly Davis had been doing in the country.
On Feb. 15, more than two weeks after the shootings, President Obama offered
his first comments about the Davis affair. The matter was simple, Obama said in
a news conference: 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. He had been admitted into
Pakistan on a diplomatic passport. But there was a dispute about whether his
work in the Lahore Consulate, as opposed to the American Embassy in Islamabad,
gave him full diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic
Relations. And 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 I.S.I. and whom
C.I.A. officials still would not admit they controlled. General Pasha, the
I.S.I. chief, spoke privately by phone and in person with Leon Panetta, then
the director of the C.I.A., to get more information about the matter. He suspected
that Davis was a C.I.A. employee and suggested to Panetta that the two spy
agencies handle the matter quietly. Meeting with Panetta, he posed a direct
question.
Was Davis
working for the C.I.A.? 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, and he
decided to leave 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.
That the
C.I.A. director would be overseeing a large clandestine network of American
spies in Pakistan and then lie to the I.S.I. 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 the I.S.I. teamed with the C.I.A. in
Peshawar to hunt for Osama bin Laden in western Pakistan. Where had it gone so
wrong?
While
the spy agencies
had had a fraught relationship since the beginning of the Afghan war, the first
major breach came in July 2008, when C.I.A. officers in Islamabad paid a visit
to Gen. 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 C.I.A. give Pakistan advance
warning before launching missiles from Predator or Reaper drones in the tribal
areas. From that point on, the C.I.A. officers told Kayani, the C.I.A.’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 highly classified C.I.A.
internal memo, 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 the tribal areas. That assessment became the cornerstone of a
yearlong discussion about the Pakistan problem. Some experts in the State Department
warned that expanding the C.I.A. war in Pakistan would further stoke
anti-American anger on the streets and could push the country into chaos. But
officials inside the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center argued for escalating the
drone campaign without the I.S.I.’s blessing. Since the first C.I.A. drone
strike in Pakistan in 2004, only a small number of militants on the C.I.A.’s
list of “high-value targets” had been killed by drone strikes, and other
potential strikes were scuttled at the last minute because of delays in getting
Pakistani approval, or because the targets seemed to have been tipped off and
had fled.
So, in
July 2008, when the C.I.A.’s director, Michael Hayden, and his deputy, Stephen
Kappes, came to the White House to present the agency’s plan to wage a
unilateral war in the mountains of Pakistan, it wasn’t a hard sell to a
frustrated president. That began the relentless, years-long drone assault on
the tribal areas that President Obama continued when he took office. And as the
C.I.A.’s relationship with the I.S.I. soured, Langley sent station chiefs out
to Islamabad who spent far less time and energy building up good will with
Pakistani spies than their predecessors had. From 2008 on, the agency cycled a
succession of seasoned case officers through Islamabad, and each left Pakistan
more embittered than the last. One of them had to leave the country in haste
when his identity was revealed in the Pakistani press. The C.I.A. suspected the
leak came from the I.S.I.
Even many
of the operations that at first seemed likely to signal a new era of
cooperation between the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. ended in recriminations and
finger-pointing. In January 2010, a clandestine team of C.I.A. officers and
American special-operations troops working in Karachi traced a cellphone to a
house in Baldia Town, a slum in the western part of the sprawling city. The
C.I.A. did not conduct unilateral operations inside large Pakistani cities, so
the Americans notified the I.S.I. about the intelligence. Pakistani troops and
policemen launched a surprise raid on the house.
Although
the C.I.A. didn’t know in advance, hiding inside the house was Mullah Abdul
Ghani Baradar, a man considered to be the Afghan Taliban’s military commander
and the second in command to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban.
Only after suspects in the house were arrested and questioned did the C.I.A.
learn that Baradar was among the detainees. The I.S.I. took him to a detention
facility in an industrial section of Islamabad and refused the C.I.A. access to
him. “At that point, things got really complicated,” one former C.I.A. officer
said.
Was the
entire episode a setup? Rumors had circulated inside Pakistan that Baradar
wanted to cut a deal with the Americans and bring the Taliban to the
negotiating table in Afghanistan. Had the I.S.I. somehow engineered the entire
arrest, feeding intelligence to the C.I.A. so that Baradar could be taken off
the street and the nascent peace talks spoiled? Had the I.S.I. played the
C.I.A.? Months later, senior C.I.A. officials at Langley still couldn’t answer
those questions. Today, more than three years later, Mullah Baradar remains in
Pakistani custody.
As Davis
languished in the jail cell in Lahore, the C.I.A. was pursuing its
most promising lead about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden since 2001, when
he escaped from Tora Bora, in Afghanistan, and fled across the border into
Pakistan. A small group of officers inside the agency’s Counterterrorism Center
had become convinced that Bin Laden was hiding in a large compound in
Abbottabad, a quiet hamlet north of Islamabad. For months, Panetta had been
pushing clandestine officers to find a shred of hard proof that Bin Laden was
hiding in the compound. The intelligence-gathering operating in Abbottabad had
become the highest priority for the C.I.A. in Pakistan.
It was
therefore more than a bit inconvenient that one of its undercover officers was
sitting in a jail in Lahore facing a double murder charge. Pakistan’s Islamist
parties organized street protests and threatened violent riots if Raymond Davis
was not tried and hanged for his crimes. American diplomats in Lahore regularly
visited Davis, but the Obama administration continued to stonewall Pakistan’s
government about the nature of Davis’s work in the country.
And then
the episode claimed another victim. On Feb. 6, the grieving widow of one of
Davis’s victims swallowed a lethal amount of rat poison and was rushed to the
hospital in Faisalabad, where doctors pumped her stomach. The woman, Shumaila
Faheem, was certain that the United States and Pakistan would quietly broker a
deal to release her husband’s killer from prison, a view she expressed to her
doctors from her hospital bed. “They are already treating my husband’s murderer
like a V.I.P. in police custody, and I am sure they will let him go because of
international pressure,” she said. She died shortly afterward and instantly
became a martyr for anti-American groups inside Pakistan.
The furor
over the Davis incident was quickly escalating, threatening to shut down most
C.I.A. operations in the country and derail the intelligence-gathering
operation in Abbottabad. But the C.I.A. stood firm and sent top officials to
Islamabad, who told Ambassador Munter to stick to the strategy.
By then,
though, Munter had decided that the C.I.A.’s strategy wasn’t working, and
eventually even high-level officials in the agency began to realize that
stonewalling the Pakistanis was only causing the I.S.I. to dig in. After
discussions among White House, State Department and C.I.A. officials in
Washington, Munter approached General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief, and came clean.
Davis was with the C.I.A., he said, and the United States needed to get him out
of the country as quickly as possible. Pasha was fuming that Leon Panetta had
lied to him, and he was going to make the Americans squirm by letting Davis sit
in jail while he considered — on his own timetable — the best way to resolve
the situation.
Back in
Washington, Ambassador Haqqani was summoned to C.I.A. headquarters on Feb. 21
and taken into Panetta’s spacious office overlooking the agency’s campus in
Langley, Va. Sitting around a large conference table, Panetta asked Haqqani for
his help securing Davis’s release.
“If
you’re going to send a Jason Bourne character to Pakistan, he should have the
skills of a Jason Bourne to get away,” Haqqani shot back, according to one
person who attended the meeting.
More than
a week later, General Pasha came back to Ambassador Munter to discuss a new
strategy. It was a solution based on an ancient tradition that would allow the
matter to be settled outside the unpredictable court system. The issue had
already been discussed among a number of Pakistani and American officials,
including Ambassador Haqqani in Washington. The reckoning for Davis’s actions
would come in the form of “blood money,” or diyat, a custom under Shariah law that
compensates the families of victims for their dead relatives. The matter would
be handled quietly, and Davis would be released from jail.
Pasha
ordered I.S.I. operatives in Lahore to meet the families of the three men
killed during the January episode and negotiate a settlement. Some of the
relatives initially resisted, but the I.S.I. negotiators were not about to let
the talks collapse. After weeks of discussions, the parties agreed on a total
of 200 million Pakistani rupees, approximately $2.34 million, to offer
“forgiveness” to the jailed C.I.A. officer.
Only a
small group of Obama administration officials knew of the talks, and as they
dragged on, Lahore’s high court was preparing to rule on whether Davis would be
granted diplomatic immunity, a decision the C.I.A. expected to go against the
United States and worried might set a precedent for future cases in Pakistan.
Davis
remained in the dark about all of this. When he arrived for his court
appearance on March 16, he was fully expecting to hear that the trial would
proceed and that the judge would issue a new court date. He was escorted into
the courtroom, his wrists cuffed in front of him, and locked inside an iron
cage near the judge’s bench. According to one person’s account, General Pasha
sat in the back of the courtroom, his cellphone out. He began sending out a
stream of nervous text messages to Ambassador Munter, updating him about the
court proceedings. Pasha was one of the most powerful men in Pakistan, and yet
the I.S.I. had little control over the mercurial courts in Lahore, and he
wasn’t entirely sure that things would proceed according to plan.
The first
part of the hearing went as everyone expected. The judge, saying that the case
would go ahead, noted that his ruling on diplomatic immunity would come in a
matter of days. Pakistani reporters frantically began filing their stories
about how this seemed a blow to the American case, and that it appeared that
Davis would not be released from jail anytime soon. But then the judge ordered
the courtroom cleared, and General Pasha’s secret plan unfolded.
Through a
side entrance, 18 relatives of the victims walked into the room, and the judge
announced that the civil court had switched to a Shariah court. Each of the
family members approached Davis, some of them with tears in their eyes or
sobbing outright, and announced that he or she forgave him. Pasha sent another
text message to Munter: The matter was settled. Davis was a free man. In a
Lahore courtroom, the laws of God had trumped the laws of man.
The drama
played out entirely in Urdu, and throughout the proceeding, a baffled Davis sat
silently inside the cage. He was even more stunned when I.S.I. operatives
whisked him out of the courthouse through a back entrance and pushed him into a
waiting car that sped to the Lahore airport.
The move
had been choreographed to get Davis out of the country as quickly as possible.
American officials, including Munter, were waiting for Davis at the airport,
and some began to worry. Davis had, after all, already shot dead two men he
believed were threatening him. If he thought he was being taken away to be
killed, he might try to make an escape, even try to kill the I.S.I. operatives
inside the car. When the car arrived at the airport and pulled up to the plane
ready to take Davis out of Pakistan, the C.I.A. operative was in a daze. It
appeared to the Americans waiting for him that Davis realized only then that he
was safe.
The
Davis affair led Langley to order dozens of covert officers out of
Pakistan in the hope of lowering the temperature in the C.I.A. – I.S.I.
relationship. Ambassador Munter issued a public statement shortly after the
bizarre court proceeding, saying he was “grateful for the generosity” of the
families and expressing regret for the entire incident and the “suffering it
caused.”
But the
secret deal only fueled the anger in Pakistan, and anti-American protests
flared in major cities, including Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. Demonstrators
set tires ablaze, clashed with Pakistani riot police and brandished placards
with slogans like “I Am Raymond Davis, Give Me a Break, I Am Just a C.I.A. Hit
Man.”
The
entire episode — and bin Laden’s killing in Abbottabad later that spring —
extinguished any lingering productive relations between the United States and
Pakistan. Leon Panetta’s relationship with General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief, was
poisoned, and the already small number of Obama officials pushing for better
relations between Washington and Islamabad dwindled even further. Munter was
reporting daily back to Washington about the negative impact of the armed-drone
campaign and about how the C.I.A. seemed to be conducting a war in a vacuum,
oblivious to the ramifications that the drone strikes were having on American
relations with Pakistan’s government.
The
C.I.A. had approval from the White House to carry out missile strikes in
Pakistan even when the agency’s targeters weren’t certain about exactly whom
they were killing. Under the rules of so-called “signature strikes,” decisions
about whether to fire missiles from drones could be made based on patterns of
activity deemed suspicious. For instance, if a group of young “military-age
males” were observed moving in and out of a suspected militant training camp
and were thought to be carrying weapons, they could be considered legitimate
targets. American officials admit it is nearly impossible to judge a person’s
age from thousands of feet in the air, and in Pakistan’s tribal areas,
adolescent boys are often among militant fighters. Using such broad definitions
to determine who was a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target allowed
Obama administration officials at one point to claim that the escalation of
drone strikes in Pakistan had not killed any civilians for a year. It was
something of a trick of logic: in an area of known militant activity, all
military-age males could be considered enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who
was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a combatant.
The
perils of this approach were laid bare on March 17, 2011, the day after Davis
was released from prison and spirited out of the country. C.I.A. drones
attacked a tribal council meeting in the village of Datta Khel, in North
Waziristan, killing dozens of men. Ambassador Munter and some at the Pentagon
thought the timing of the strike was disastrous, and some American officials
suspected that the massive strike was the C.I.A. venting its anger about the
Davis episode. More important, however, many American officials believed that
the strike was botched, and that dozens of people died who shouldn’t have.
Other
American officials came to the C.I.A.’s defense, saying that the tribal
gathering was in fact a meeting of senior militants and therefore a legitimate
target. But the drone strike unleashed a furious response in Pakistan, and
street protests in Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar forced the temporary closure of
American consulates in those cities.
Munter
said he believed that the C.I.A. was being reckless and that his position as
ambassador was becoming untenable. His relationship with the C.I.A. station
chief in Islamabad, already strained because of their disagreements over the
handling of the Davis case, deteriorated even further when Munter demanded that
the C.I.A. give him the chance to call off specific missile strikes. During one
screaming match between the two men, Munter tried to make sure the station
chief knew who was in charge, only to be reminded of who really held the power
in Pakistan.
“You’re
not the ambassador!” Munter shouted.
“You’re
right, and I don’t want to be the ambassador,” the station chief replied.
This turf
battle spread to Washington, and a month after Bin Laden was killed, President
Obama’s top advisers were arguing in a National Security Council meeting over
who really was in charge in Pakistan. At the June 2011 meeting, Munter, who participated
via secure video link, began making his case that he should have veto power
over specific drone strikes.
Panetta
cut Munter off, telling him that the C.I.A. had the authority to do what it
wanted in Pakistan. It didn’t need to get the ambassador’s approval for
anything.
“I don’t
work for you,” Panetta told Munter, according to several people at the meeting.
But
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to Munter’s defense. She turned to
Panetta and told him that he was wrong to assume he could steamroll the
ambassador and launch strikes against his approval.
“No,
Hillary,” Panetta said, “it’s you who are flat wrong.”
There was
a stunned silence, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon tried to regain
control of the meeting. In the weeks that followed, Donilon brokered a
compromise of sorts: Munter would be allowed to object to specific drone
strikes, but the C.I.A. could still press its case to the White House and get
approval for strikes even over the ambassador’s objections. Obama’s C.I.A. had,
in essence, won yet again.
As for
Raymond Davis, he tried to settle back into his life in the United States
after being flown out of Pakistan. He found work as a firearms instructor, but
in the end he couldn’t stay out of trouble. On Oct. 1, 2011, just seven months
after his abrupt departure from Pakistan, Davis was eyeing a parking spot in
front of a bagel shop in Highlands Ranch, Colo., a suburb of Denver. So was
Jeffrey Maes, a 50-year-old minister who was driving with his wife and two
young daughters. When Maes beat Davis to the spot, Davis shouted profanities
through his open window. Then he jumped out of his car and confronted Maes,
telling the minister that he had been waiting for the parking spot.
According
to an affidavit given by Maes, he told Davis to “relax and quit being stupid.”
Davis
struck Maes in the face, knocking him to the pavement. Maes said in court that
when he stood up from the fall, Davis continued to hit him. The minister’s
wife, later recalling the episode, said she had never in her life seen a man so
full of rage. Just last month, after protracted legal proceedings, Davis
pleaded guilty to a charge of third-degree misdemeanor assault and was
sentenced to two years of probation. A judge ordered him to pay restitution and
attend anger-management classes.
On the
streets and in the markets of Pakistan, Raymond Davis remains the boogeyman, an
American killer lurking in the subconscious of a deeply insecure nation. On a
steamy summer night last summer, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed — the head of Lashkar-e-Taiba
and the reason Davis and his team were sent to Lahore in the first place —
stood on the back of a flatbed truck and spoke to thousands of cheering
supporters less than a mile from Pakistan’s Parliament building in Islamabad. A
$10 million American bounty still hung over Saeed’s head, part of a broader
squeeze on Lashkar-e-Taiba’s finances. But there he was, out in the open and
whipping the crowd into a fury with a pledge to “rid Pakistan of American
slavery.” The rally was the culmination of a march from Lahore to Islamabad
that Saeed ordered to protest American involvement in the country. The night
before the march reached the capital, six Pakistani troops were killed by
gunmen riding motorcycles not far from where the marchers were spending the
night, leading to speculation that Saeed had ordered the attack.
But Saeed
insisted that night that he was not to blame for the deaths. The killers were
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 men.
“It was
the Americans!” he shouted to loud approvals. “It was Blackwater!” The cheers
grew even louder. He saved the biggest applause line for last: “It was another
Raymond Davis!”
This article is adapted from “The Way of the Knife: The
C.I.A., a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” published by the
Penguin Press.
Mark Mazzetti is a national-security
correspondent for The Times. He shared a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Editor: Joel Lovell
