Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (24 page)

Except that the Iraqi prime minister did not consider the INIS to be a part of his government. We tried to impress on Maliki that this indeed was his service. Shahwani was his intelligence chief. “He serves at your pleasure,” I told him. But Maliki would never bite on that. The station chief arranged one session with Shahwani briefing Maliki alongside Stan McChrystal (who was conducting missions similar to INIS on the US side), but it seemed to have no effect.

Maliki simply never trusted Shahwani. He was a Sunni, and a Turkoman to boot. He was hated by the Iranians (many of whose countrymen he had killed) and he was being pushed by CIA (with whom he was quite comfortable). But Maliki wouldn’t move him out either, even when we invited him to do so. He just had little to do with him. The only time Maliki tasked Shahwani was to gather information on the prime minister’s political rivals, which Shahwani refused to do.

In time the Shia-dominated government came after Shahwani. They accused him of a role in the improper sale of aircraft from the Baghdad Aero Club, an unfounded charge of petty corruption in a country whose capital city resembled one of Dante’s circles of hell and whose political elites were skimming tens of millions of dollars in US aid. The police raided Shahwani’s office and home while he was abroad, and we parked him in Amman while we ratcheted up pressure on the Iraqis to resolve the case. It took time, but we succeeded. On return to Baghdad via a CIA aircraft, Shahwani was ushered into the CIA station, where he took a
welcome-home call from me. The station chief told me that the INIS boss was visibly moved by the consideration.

Shahwani was back, but we were working with a losing hand. Maliki set up a separate service, contrary to Iraqi law, just one part of an overall campaign to make sure that all security organs were Shia (rather than national), beholden to him (rather than the government writ large), and acceptable to Iran. The INIS was marginalized, purged, and slowly faded. Shahwani finally resigned in 2009.

A lot of that was still in the future in August 2006. The visit had been incredibly productive for me. I got to see the situation firsthand and to visit with a variety of Iraqi officials. I also got to appreciate the burdens under which the station was operating.

The station had a thermometer in front of its entrance. As I walked out onto the asphalt street, the dial on the thermometer was maxed out at 117 degrees. It simply couldn’t read any higher.

You try to sustain normalcy, even in such circumstances. On Saturday evening a few of us walked over to the double-wide trailers that served as the Green Zone chapel. The Mass and the sacrament followed the global Catholic script, but everything else was different: like almost everyone else I was in desert camouflage, Kevlar, and armed throughout holy Mass. I was touched, though, as I went to communion and the lay Eucharistic minister, perhaps recognizing the name "Hayden” on my name tag, said, “
Michael
, the Body of Christ.”

Sunday morning we helicoptered out to the Baghdad airport, surrounded by our security detail and Blackwater contract guards. That was easier than trying to drive the ten miles from the Green Zone, even though the station and American GIs had to move supplies and people along that route daily. The embassy’s armored bus service always drew fire.

Iraq was a mess. It had been a sobering visit that left me troubled and worried about where the nation’s most important foreign policy thrust was heading.

In Islamabad, Jose Rodriguez and I met with Ashfaq Parvez
Kayani, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI. It was the first of many meetings I had with this thoroughly professional but soft-spoken, almost mumbling, chain-smoking former corps commander. Those last characteristics often had me leaning into the cloud of smoke that routinely enveloped the ISI chief in order to understand him.

Kayani later became the most powerful man in Pakistan as chief of army staff, and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, burned up the air miles between Islamabad and Washington trying to cultivate him. As ISI chief in 2006, Kayani was important enough already. Musharraf would never have put anyone into the job whom he didn’t totally trust.

Kayani commanded respect as a soldier’s soldier, but working with Pakistan, and working with ISI in particular, was always very difficult. Pakistani and American interests in Afghanistan and in the region were not the same. That didn’t evolve out of malice, but out of very different worldviews. In an effort to figure out why, I often asked myself, What constitutes Pakistan? Some nations (like Germany) put a lot of stock in blood; others (like us) wrap themselves around ideology. What about Pakistan?

I came up with two things. First, it was
not
India. And second, Islam. And it soon became clear to me that it didn’t matter what specific issue I was raising with my ISI counterpart. Fundamentally, what I was asking my partner to do was to pay less attention to India (which he would never do) and cooperate with me in making war on a small and particularly virulent slice of Islam (which he would find very difficult to do).

ISI was a complex organization. We got along well enough with the counterterrorism branch, but we also knew that, all the while, other parts of the organization were sustaining Pakistani ties to Pashtun and other militants as a hedge against Indian encirclement. For us, Afghanistan was a war to be won against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. For Pakistan it constituted strategic depth in the primary struggle against India.

Mullen, even with expending so much effort cultivating Kayani, ended his time as chairman in September 2011 by accusing ISI of supporting the terrorist Haqqani network’s attack on the US embassy in Kabul. “The Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency,” he concluded.

Some uninformed observers have opined that the Abbottabad raid in May 2011 to kill bin Laden poisoned the relationship between the United States and Pakistan. It didn’t. It merely tore the veil off.

Shortly before the Abbottabad raid, a Kayani successor, Ahmed Shuja Pasha (chapter 18), was named one of the world’s hundred most influential people by
Time
magazine in 2011. The magazine asked me to draft a short write-up on Pasha. I agreed and then called current and former US government officials to get some advice on what to say, particularly something to say that might help the overall relationship. I asked for specific words to describe Pasha and ISI. One of the gentler ones suggested to me was “duplicitous.”

That wasn’t particularly useful, so I just observed that “changes in Pakistan—the growth of fundamentalism, nationalism and anti-Americanism—have squeezed the space in which any ISI chief can cooperate with the United States. Pasha, a Pakistani patriot and American partner, now must find these two roles even more difficult to reconcile—and at a time when much of US counterterrorism success depends on exactly that.”

Pakistan had been a good enough partner in the period immediately after 9/11, when Musharraf had agreed to turn up the heat on Arab and Uzbek terrorists who were running free in Pakistan’s settled areas. Indeed, CIA may have captured more terrorists with ISI cooperation than with any other service. While terrorists were in and around Pakistani cities, they were as much a threat to Pakistan as they were to us. When al-Qaeda settled in the distant tribal regions, the Pakistanis were less interested and, frankly, far less capable of helping us.

Then there was the threat of violent blowback. The Pakistanis always
made it clear that if bin Laden or Zawahiri were ever located, for example, the potential blowback might prohibit a Pakistani response.

The 2006 visit with Kayani wasn’t personally strained. We were just coming from different places, and in truth, we Americans bore part of the responsibility for the strategic estrangement. I was once with Kayani on a small aircraft preparing to land in the United States. As I looked at the increasingly visible landscape out the window, I turned to the general and said, “When I am on final approach in a foreign country, I try to let the landscape wash over me and tell me something about the country I am visiting. What do you think, General, when you look out this window?”

Kayani told me about his time at the army’s Command and General Staff College in Kansas in the late 1980s. When he was there, he and his wife used to take weekend excursions. They would simply head in a cardinal direction for four or five hours to see what they could see. When they had driven far enough, he would pull off at an interchange, park the car, and go into one of those ubiquitous motels to see if they had a room for the night. Kayani turned and looked at me, and said approvingly, “In every one of those instances, it was clear to me that the motel clerk assumed that I was an American.”

Kayani’s was the last Pakistani cohort to attend American military schools. Such training opportunities were ended by the United States in 1990 because of Pakistan’s ongoing nuclear program. Without such contacts, the Pakistani and American military and security communities were strangers to one another and remained so for more than a decade. Action in one sphere (counterproliferation) had impacts in another (counterterrorism).

I left Rodriguez in Islamabad and flew off to Kabul, Afghanistan. Things were so hectic that summer that a few days after my exit, the Pakistanis arrested Rashid Rauf, a British citizen of Pakistani descent who was thought to be the mastermind of an al-Qaeda plot to bomb multiple wide-body jets flying from London to the United States.

His arrest forced British authorities to round up some two dozen of his
co-conspirators in London, whom they had under surveillance. The Brits were none too happy with the Pakistanis or us. They’d been hoping to have time to gather more evidence for a criminal case against the plotters. They ultimately charged some of them with conspiracy to commit murder and other offenses, but the trials—because of a lack of admissible evidence—were hard, lengthy, and often inconclusive.

The Pakistanis arrested Rauf because they had a fleeting chance while he was on the move and they knew what he was doing—and they didn’t want to take the heat if any of those airliners actually went down.

But ISI did not want to move against Rauf without American support and cover. Jose tells the story that the Pakistanis knew that Rauf would be passing through one of their checkpoints. “Should we arrest him?” they asked. It came down to Jose having to make a decision while being driven by ISI to a dinner. He understood the Pakistanis’ motivation. He said, “Yes,” and as quickly as possible called Washington—where the US government had recently given London assurances that the United States would not push for the arrest of Rauf. All hell broke loose at my headquarters. I was glad to be in a war zone.

The next month Rodriguez and I were together heading to New York. The subject of Rashid Rauf came up. I sympathized with Jose. I saw no benefit in looking back. “You made the only call you could.”

In any event, disrupting the plot was a great success. We had provided the British an awful lot of the background information that led to the arrests. It was a truly cooperative and remarkable achievement by British and American intelligence. This was the most serious plot since 9/11, and we owned it. The only issue we had was when we were going to arrest these guys. In the end, the Pakistanis made that call for us.

After the plot had been disrupted, a CIA officer asked to see me. He wanted to present me with a model of the United airliner that was used on Heathrow–East Coast runs. His brother was a pilot on that run and he wanted him to give this to me. “I don’t know what you guys did. I just want to say thank you” was the message from the pilot.

Kabul was the third stop on the August 2006 trip, and there I got the
chance to visit the CIA station. Like our other war zone station in Baghdad, it was very large and doing very important work.

I also had a pleasant dinner with Afghan president Hamid Karzai at the presidential palace. Karzai is a complex individual, and there is no doubt that history has put him in positions for which history did not prepare him. But this was before most of that was painfully obvious and before his real alienation from the United States. This night, Karzai was relaxed, conversational, and approachable. We ate family-style, and as I filled my plate with Afghan delicacies, the president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan warned me not to eat the salad. “Unless, of course,” he said, “you want an extended stay in Kabul.” You don’t get that kind of warning from every head of state.

He was pleased that I seemed to like Afghan food and commented that there were many good Afghan restaurants in Washington. “But, Mr. President, the best ones are in Baltimore,” I said. At which Karzai smiled, silently conceding that I had done my homework and was aware that his elder brother owned such an establishment.

On a more serious note, I found Karzai then and later easy to talk to and comfortable with us. Perhaps it was because we would always discuss things that neither of us intended to become public. Almost by definition I was working to not put him (or us) in an embarrassing position. When I was alone with him briefing him on proposed courses of action, he was universally serious and supportive. He continued to talk to CIA even after his public spats with Washington began.

Then-senator Biden famously threw his napkin down and declared, “This dinner is over,” in February 2008 when Karzai denied there was corruption in Afghanistan. Biden was with two other senators, and from the press accounts, it sounds like one of the family-style dinners I had enjoyed with the president. I can think of no worse course of action than to humiliate Karzai this way.

I also spent time in Kabul with Amrullah Saleh, the head of NDS, the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence service. Amrullah was young, barely thirty-five, energetic, and self-taught. He had
thoroughly mastered English, mostly through reading, and his occasional mispronunciation of obscure English words made his earnestness even more endearing.

Although he was serving a Pashtun president, Amrullah was a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley and a disciple of Northern Alliance chieftain Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was killed on 9/9 by al-Qaeda suicide bombers (chapter 3). Amrullah was a patriot, fanatically anti-Taliban, and most important for us, thoroughly honest. He was someone we could work with to professionalize the NDS, get it to respect basic human rights, and eliminate ghost officers from its payroll.