FEBRUARY 2000
AMBASSADOR BILL MILAM WAS on one of his rants. The complaint was a familiar one—his weight. “You’re so damned abstemious,” he complained. “I wish I could do that. I just can’t stop eating. I ought to have my damned jaws wired shut.” Cantankerousness was one of Milam’s most notable traits, and for me, an endearing one. I couldn’t help but like the man, though he did have a habit of trying to make my life harder than it should be just to show he could. He had his reasons for doing so.
Some weeks before, Milam had been at Sunday breakfast at a local sporting club with a colleague, an administrative officer who was a notorious gadfly. He looked around the dining room at the large number of unattached males having breakfast alone or in small groups. “Who the hell are all these people?” he grumbled. “I don’t know any of them.” His companion saw his opportunity, and seized it.
“They’re all Grenier’s people,” he said. He paused for effect. “You know, he runs this place.” The ambassador said nothing for some minutes, seemingly concentrating on his eggs. At length, he stood to leave.
“I run this place,” he snapped.
I was in no doubt myself as to who ran the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. As chief of station, I technically answered to the director of Central Intelligence; Milam, as the U.S. “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary,” technically reported directly to the president. Our relative places in the federal pecking order were clear, and I was best advised to remember it. I depended on the ambassador’s support, or at least on his forbearance. My push to increase our capabilities in Afghanistan was bringing an ever-growing stream of temporary staffers (“TDYers,” as they were called) to town, and their mysterious activities were no doubt exciting considerable sotto voce commentary among my colleagues. I needed their silent cooperation to keep a low profile on the comings and goings of my people, and it just wouldn’t do to alienate them. That was particularly true of the ambassador. I knew that if some of my station’s activities were to come to the unfavorable attention of the Pakistani authorities, it was to the ambassador that I would have to turn for political support. “Remember,” he told me shortly after my arrival, “if you want me with you at the crash landing, make sure I’m with you at the take-off.” I took that to heart, and went out of my way to bring him as much into the picture as possible about what I was doing. Still, I had rather more independent authority than Milam was comfortable with, and he sometimes went out of his way to demonstrate who was in charge.
Now, as we hurtled southward through the night in the back of his BMW limousine, ambassadorial flags snapping, toward the nearby army town of Rawalpindi, I felt the need of his support acutely. I was hoping Milam would be able to get for me something I hadn’t been able to get on my own: some level, at least, of consistent Pakistani support against al-Qa’ida.
A few weeks before, the security authorities in Jordan had uncovered the so-called “Millennium Plot.” Al-Qa’ida-linked operatives had been caught secretly storing a huge quantity of explosives for use in a coordinated series of planned bombings of hotels and other tourist attractions frequented by foreigners along the Jordan River Valley. If there were any doubts regarding al-Qa’ida’s intention to mount another terrorist strike on the scale of the East Africa embassy bombings of 1998, this had put such doubts to rest.
Among those implicated in the Jordan plot were a pair of expatriate Palestinians: One of them, Khalil Deek, a Palestinian-American resident in Peshawar, in Pakistan’s far northwest, had recently been arrested by the Pakistani intelligence service and rendered to Jordan, his country of origin, via a special Jordanian military flight. He had fallen victim to a scenario in which the Pakistanis had both compelling evidence of his complicity in a foreign crime, and such precise information regarding his physical location that they could not have failed to take action without seeming complicit in his activities.
While this success was gratifying, it had involved a concurrence of events that would be extremely difficult to duplicate on a regular basis. If we were to have any realistic hope of capturing the second, and far more important, of the two Palestinians, we would need active Pakistani support in tracking him down.
Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, better known as Abu Zubayda, had been on the CIA radar screen for many months. A senior logistician for al-Qa’ida, we knew he had been transiting regularly through Pakistan between Afghanistan and the wider world, facilitating the movement of Arab recruits to and from the training camps located in Taliban-controlled areas. The extent of his importance to al-Qa’ida had just been demonstrated in Jordan. He was the proximate reason why Milam and I were meeting this night with General Musharraf, the chief of Army Staff and, for four months now, Pakistan’s military dictator.
Entering Army House, the traditional residence of Pakistan’s military chiefs, was like stepping back in time. The architecture, the atmosphere of the place, was redolent of the British Raj. On the surface, the meeting seemed to go well. Musharraf received us cordially and informally. A soft-spoken and unprepossessing man of medium height, he carried himself with a quiet, earnest dignity. Though he may have seized power in a military coup, there was nothing of the bluster or bravado one might have associated with a former commando whose notable military career had been associated rather more with daring than with reflection. Musharraf listened intently to Milam’s presentation. Pronouncing Zubayda’s unfamiliar Arab name with care, the ambassador laid out the case. Here was a very dangerous man, a senior lieutenant of bin Laden’s, who had been implicated by the judicial authorities of Jordan in a major terrorist operation. We knew that he was frequently transiting Pakistan, and we needed Pakistani help to apprehend him before he could strike again. All very straightforward. But the key to the ambassador’s pitch was an implied threat, couched as a simple political reality: for if, God forbid, there were another major al-Qa’ida terrorist operation against the United States in which Abu Zubayda were implicated, and if Pakistan were seen to have been unwilling to bring his activities to an end despite the clear opportunity to do so, the implications for U.S.-Pakistan relations would be severe, if not catastrophic.
Looking at me, Musharraf asked whether information regarding Zubayda had been shared with General Mahmud Ahmed, director-general of the ISI—the infamous organization with which CIA had worked so effectively against the Soviets. I said it had. I pointed out that success against Abu Zubayda would require more of Pakistan than simply to take action based on U.S.-supplied information. We needed active, dynamic cooperation between our two countries, and specifically between our two intelligence services, if we were to generate the real-time, actionable intelligence necessary to find, fix, and apprehend this man. The general replied simply and straightforwardly: He would speak with General Mahmud. The United States could count on Pakistan’s full cooperation against this terrorist threat.
The meeting ought to have buoyed my confidence, but it did not. I felt Musharraf had been sincere. He would no doubt have taken the action we requested if he had been in a position to do so himself. But he was not. As the four-star chief of Army Staff, he presided as a rough “first among equals” over the Pakistan Army’s nine Corps commanders and the handful of other three-star generals, including General Mahmud of the ISI, who made up Pakistan’s senior military leadership. All had considerable autonomy of action, and none more so than Mahmud, particularly given his history with Musharraf. When Musharraf deposed Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s elected prime minister, the coup had actually been launched on the orders of the formidable Mahmud, whose troops controlled Islamabad at the time. It was Mahmud who had placed Sharif under arrest for trying to dismiss Musharraf. This was a debt of loyalty of which Musharraf had to be thoroughly mindful.
As for Mahmud himself, having been quickly named the new Director-General of the ISI after the October coup, he became thoroughly immersed in investigating the financial “crimes” of the Sharif family and their political cronies, and had not found time to meet with me until early December 1999. During that initial meeting, he had shown no great enthusiasm for intelligence cooperation with the CIA. I would immediately embark on a sustained effort to win Mahmud over, but that process had hardly begun when Milam and I ventured to Army House.
This did not mean that Musharraf was incapable of ordering Mahmud to take action. He could if he chose. But given the huge number of challenges with which the newly launched dictator had to deal in his effort to thoroughly reform the Pakistani political system and prepare it for “true democracy,” it seemed clear to me that he would not undertake the sustained effort necessary to get Mahmud to take action against his will unless he perceived a compelling reason to do so. However potent Milam’s implied threat had appeared to me, it was obvious from Musharraf’s reaction that he did not perceive it that way. To him, a clash with the United States over al-Qa’ida was some vaguely hypothetical future possibility; hardly something to dwell upon when he had many more present and immediate crises to deal with. One could see that the warning from Milam hardly registered with the self-styled “Chief Executive” at all.
As we rode together back to Islamabad, I tried to be as upbeat as I could. It was becoming apparent to me, though, that if I wanted Mahmud’s cooperation, winning it was going to require a great deal more effort from me.