The Annals of Unsolved Crime (15 page)

The account of the eyewitnesses at the crash site dovetailed with the radio silence. They had seen the plane slowly pitching up and down. According to a C-130 expert to whom I spoke at Lockheed, a C-130 characteristically goes into a pattern known as a “phugoid” when no pilot is flying it. First, the unattended plane dives toward the ground then the mechanism in the tail automatically overcorrects for this downward motion, causing the plane to head momentarily upward. This pattern would continue, each swing becoming more pronounced until the plane crashed. Analyzing the weight on the plane, and how it had been loaded, this expert calculated that the plane would have made three roller-coaster turns before crashing, which is exactly what the witnesses had reported. He concluded from this pattern that had the pilots been conscious, they would have corrected the “phugoid”—or at least, would have made an effort, which would have been reflected in the settings of the controls. Since this had not happened, only one possibility remained: the pilots were paralyzed, unconscious, or dead.

Meanwhile, an analysis of chemicals found in the plane’s wreckage, performed by the laboratory of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco in Washington, D.C., found foreign traces of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PNET), a secondary high explosive commonly used by saboteurs as a detonator, as well as antimony and sulfur, which, in the compound antimony sulfide, is used in fuses to set off such a device. Using these same chemicals, Pakistan ordnance experts reconstructed a low-level explosive detonator that could have been used to burst a flask the size of a soda can. These tests showed that it was possible that such a device could have been used to dispense an odorless poison gas that incapacitated the pilots. Indeed, the
ATF lab also found phosphorous residue in the cockpit, which could have come from poison gas.

The problem in pursuing this lead was that no medical examinations or autopsies were performed on the bodies of the pilots and other members of the flight crew. Doctors at the military hospital in Bahawalpur reported that parts of the victims’ bodies had been brought there in plastic body bags from the crash site on the night of August 17, and stored there, so that autopsies could be performed by a team of American and Pakistani pathologists. But before the pathologists had arrived, the hospital received orders to return these plastic bags to the coffins for burial. The commanding officer ordered the medical preparations to cease and the bodies to be turned over for immediate burial. The official explanation given in the report is that Islamic law requires burial within twenty-four hours. But this could not have been the real reason, since the bodies were not returned to their families for burial until two days after the crash, as relatives confirmed to me. Nor were the families ever asked permission for autopsy examinations. And, as I learned from a doctor for the Pakistan Air Force, Islamic law notwithstanding, autopsies are routinely done on pilots in cases of air crashes. This intervention made it impossible to determine whether a nerve gas or other toxic agent had paralyzed the crew.

These orders to literally bury the evidence came directly from the Army, which was now under the authority of General Beg, who, after having his turbojet pilot circle over the burning wreckage of Pak One, flew immediately back to Islamabad, to assume command. For their part, Pakistani military authorities concentrated their investigation on the possibility that Shiite fanatics were responsible for the crash. The copilot of Pak One, Wing Commander Sajid, was a Shiite (as are more than ten percent of Pakistan’s Muslims), as was one of the pilots of the backup C-130. This pilot, though he protested his
innocence, was kept in custody for more than two months and roughly interrogated about whether Wing Commander Sajid had discussed a suicide mission. Finally, the Army abandoned this effort after the Air Force demonstrated that it would have been physically impossible for the copilot alone to have caused a C-130 to crash in the way it did.

The government then appointed a commission headed by Justice Shafiur Rehman, a well-respected judge on the Supreme Court, to establish the cause of the crash. Five years later, in 1993, it issued a secret report concluding that the Army had so effectively obstructed the investigation that the perpetrators behind the crash could not be brought to justice. The one uncounted casualty of Pak One was thus the truth.

There is, to be sure, an abundance of theories based on who had a motive to kill General Zia. Not unlike the plot of Agatha Christie’s
Murder on the Orient Express
, in which, if one looked hard enough, everyone aboard the train had a motive for the murder, many parties, with the means to sabotage a plane, had a motive to eliminate Zia.

First, there is the CIA. According to this theory, the CIA had become concerned that Zia was diverting a large share of the weapons it supplied to the ISI to an extreme Mujahideen group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Not only was this group anti-American, but its strategy appeared to be aimed at dividing the rest of the Afghan resistance so that it could take over in Kabul—with Zia’s support.

Second, there is the Bhutto family. Zia had, after all, usurped power from President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He had also allowed Bhutto to be hanged like a common criminal in 1979 on what Bhutto’s family viewed as a trumped-up charge. In addition, Zia outlawed Bhutto’s political party, the Pakistan People’s Party; imprisoned his wife (even though she was suffering from lung cancer) and his daughter, Benazir Bhutto; and had both his sons, who were in exile abroad, convicted of high crimes in
absentia. The eldest son, Shah Nawaz, was then murdered in France in 1986, and the younger son, Mir Murtaza, driven into hiding. Demanding vengeance, Mir Murtaza Bhutto headed an anti-Zia group called Al Zulfikar (“the sword”), which operated out of Afghanistan and Syria. One of its operations was to hijack a Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 727 with 100 passengers aboard. Another involved attempting to blow Pak One out of the sky with Zia aboard it by firing a Soviet-built SAM 7 missile at it. In all, Mir Murtaza claimed he was behind five attempts to assassinate Zia. Initially, his group also had taken credit for the successful destruction of Pak One in a phone call to the BBC, but it subsequently retracted this claim. In any case, there was no doubt that he was well motivated. (Mir Murtaza was killed in a shootout with police in Karachi in 1996.)

A third theory is that the KGB killed Zia. Moscow also had a motive, since Zia was behind covert attacks on Soviet troops not only in Afghanistan but in the Soviet Union itself. Earlier that August, the Soviet Union had temporarily suspended its troop withdrawals from Afghanistan because it alleged that Zia had violated the Geneva Accords, which had been signed in May. A spokesman for the foreign ministry in Moscow said only a week before the crash that Zia’s “obstructionist policy cannot be tolerated.” Moscow officials even took the extraordinary step of calling in the American Ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock, and informing him that it intended “to teach Zia a lesson.” It certainly had the means in place in Pakistan to make this threat credible, having trained, subsidized, and effectively run the Afghan intelligence service, WAD, which operated in Pakistan. In 1988, according to a State Department report, such covert operations had killed and wounded more than 1,400 people in Pakistan.

A fourth theory was that India was the culprit. Less than two weeks before the crash, the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, had warned Pakistan that it would have cause “to
regret its behavior” in covertly supplying weapons to Sikh terrorists in India. Not only had the Sikhs assassinated Indira Gandhi, Rajiv’s mother, when she was prime minister, they now had more than 2,000 armed guerrillas located mainly around the Pakistan border, and Zia had been supplying them with AK-47 assault rifles, rocket launchers, and sanctuaries inside Pakistan. Accordingly, India had a motive to get rid of Zia. It also had the means, having organized a special covert-action unit that went by the initials R.A.W, to recruit agents inside Pakistan.

A fifth theory was that Shiites were behind Zia’s death. Zia’s Sunni regime had been repressing the Shiite minority, and, according to this theory, the Shiites struck back by recruiting the Shiite copilot of Zia’s plane, Wing Commander Sajid. This was why Pakistani military authorities arrested the Shiite pilot of the backup C-130, who was a close friend of Sajid, and interrogated him for more than two months. (Even under torture, he insisted that, as far as he knew, Sajid was a loyal pilot who would not commit suicide.) The problem here was that in order to crash the plane Sajid would have had to overpower the rest of the four-man flight crew, but no such struggle had been heard over the radio.

Finally, there is the Army coup theory. Zia had told his close associates that he planned to purge and reorganize the army, and this threat, according to this theory, would provide a motive for a preemptive move against Zia. Among the few top generals not aboard Pak One was General Aslam Beg, the Army’s vice chief of staff. He waved good-bye to Zia from the runway, and then, after the crash, flew immediately to Islamabad to take control, ordering army units to cordon off official residences, government buildings, and other strategic locations in the capital.

My assessment is that Zia and all thirty people aboard Pak One, were victims of sabotage. After going to Islamabad and
Lahore to investigate in 1989, I was allowed to read the red-cover secret U.S. report on the accident by a U.S. Defense Department official, who asked to remain anonymous. This report reinforced my conclusion that the pilots and flight crew were incapacitated by a quick-acting nerve gas, such as “VX,” which is odorless, easily transportable in liquid form, and, when vaporized by a small explosion, would cause paralysis and loss of speech within thirty seconds. VX gas would leave precisely the residue of phosphorous that was found in the chemical analysis of debris from the cockpit. A soda-sized can of VX could have been planted in the air vent of the pilot’s compartment and triggered by a pressure sensor to activate on takeoff.

But who did it? All the suspected parties—including Mir Murtazi Bhutto’s terrorists—had the capability of obtaining VX or a similar nerve gas, and any of them could have recruited an agent to plant a gas bomb on Pak One, since it had been grounded at the airstrip at Bahawalpur in violation of the prescribed procedure of flying it to the larger airport at Multan, where it could be properly guarded. During its four-hour grounding at Bahawalpur, workers reportedly entered Pak One without being searched in order to work on adjusting its cargo door. One of them could have planted a device. So all the suspects had the means to sabotage the plane. But only one of these parties, the Pakistan military, had the power to stop the planned autopsies, seize the telephone records of calls made to Zia and Rahman just prior to the crash, transfer the military personnel at Bahawalpur who might have witnessed the crime, stifle interrogations of police, and keep the FBI out of the picture. In short, only the Pakistan generals who assumed control that day had the power to create a cover-up that followed the crash. They also had a motive for making it look like something more legitimate than a coup d’état.

In addition, the Pakistan military was the only agency capable of assuring that both President Zia and his
second-in-command, General Rahman, were on the plane together. And unless both of these men could be eliminated simultaneously, no regime change could be certain. According to General Rahman’s family, whom I interviewed at length in Lahore, General Rahman had not wanted to go to the tank demonstration, but he was told that Zia needed his counsel on an “urgent matter.” So, under pressure from a general on Beg’s staff, he changed his plans and flew with Zia. But that counsel turned out to be untrue. Not only was Zia surprised to see Rahman on the plane, but, as General Rahman related in a phone call from Bahawalpur to his son just before his death, Zia told him that there was no “urgent matter” requiring his presence on the plane.

Zia’s eldest son, Ijaz ul-Haq, also believed that his father had been manipulated by the military into going to the tank demonstration. He told me that his father was in the midst of making major changes in the military hierarchy and saw no point in going to this tank demonstration. He then received “continued calls” from General Mahmud Durrani, who was on Beg’s staff, pressing him to be at the demonstration. The general said that the “Americans would consider it a slight” if he missed this event. So, despite his misgivings, he agreed to go. But according to U.S. Ambassador Robert Bigger Oakley, who in August 1988 had been the assistant to the president for Pakistan on the National Security Council, neither the U.S. embassy nor the military mission had pressed for Zia’s attendance. He also told me that Ambassador Raphel, his predecessor, made a snap decision twenty-four hours beforehand to fly on Pak One when he learned, to his surprise, that Zia would be aboard the plane. If so, Zia, like Rahman, had been misled by his advisors.

The level of orchestration necessary to bring about this regime change, both before the crash and in effecting the cover-up after the crash, persuades me that this was an inside job by a Pakistani military cabal. The journalistic lesson in the Zia
case is that even when a government officially embargoes a subject, such as the Pakistan government did in this case, in a relatively porous country such as Pakistan, it is possible to get answers from low-level civil servants, such as air tower controllers, mortuary officers, and police officials.

CHAPTER 14
THE SUBMERGED SPY

On September 24, 1978, the
Brillig
, a thirty-one-foot sloop, was found off the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. No one was aboard the vessel. Its owner, and last known passenger, was John Arthur Paisley, a fifty-five-year-old former deputy director of the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research, who had worked on ultra-secret assessments of the CIA, such as “B Team,” a unit of the president’s foreign intelligence advisory board. In his last known communication from the boat, Paisley informed a friend, Mike Yohn, over the ship-to-shore radio that he had an important report to write. Aboard the
Brillig
, which Paisley had named from the “Jabberwocky” poem in Lewis Carroll’s book
Through the Looking Glass
, was a telephone directory from the CIA and other documents.