The Way of the Knife (22 page)

The gist of the cable was, according to Keller, “This guy is involved in al Qaeda logistics, is definitely a courier, and maybe this is our guy. How else are we going to find out until we start watching him?” But with the South Waziristan peace deal in place, the ISI refused to allow Predator flights.

The dynamics in South Waziristan were giving Keller a glimpse of the byzantine apparatus of the ISI, where wheels turning clockwise have no contact with wheels going in the other direction. Operatives inside the ISI’s Directorate C, the division of the spy agency responsible for counterterrorism operations, often helped CIA officers hunt al Qaeda operatives. Asad Munir, the ISI’s former station chief in Peshawar, had been an officer from Directorate C. But these officers were sometimes at odds with the Pakistani spies of Directorate S, which had long been responsible for nurturing groups like the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which Pakistan has seen as
critical proxies for its defense against India
. It was Directorate S that helped arm the mujahedeen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, helped navigate the Taliban’s rise to power during the 1990s, and in the years since 2001 has worked to see that various militant groups keep the focus of their violence inside Afghanistan, rather than turning their fury against Pakistan.

Almost nothing is written publicly about Directorate S, and even though the CIA worked with Directorate S operatives during the Soviet war, American spies have only an impressionistic portrait of its operations. Some inside the CIA have spent years obsessively gathering nuggets of information about Directorate S, and what American analysts generally agree on is that, since 2001, Directorate S has been at the vanguard of the ISI’s quiet strategy to maintain ties with militant groups that could serve Pakistan’s interests in the future.

Whether Directorate S routinely ordered lethal attacks against American and NATO troops in Afghanistan is still a matter of some debate, but the American electronic-surveillance net over Pakistan—and, more specifically, ISI headquarters—frequently intercepted
phone calls between Pakistani spies and Haqqani
Network operatives. Pakistani officials usually either deny the evidence or say it is the work of rogue elements in the spy service, but in private have made a case that the spy agency needed to work with groups like the Haqqani Network to protect Pakistan’s western flank. American spy agencies even intercepted one telephone call in 2008 during which General Kayani referred to the Haqqani Network as a “
strategic asset
.” While “so many people inside the CIA say, ‘The ISI is dirty,’ and others say, ‘The ISI can help us,’” said Keller. “It’s actually both at the same time, and that’s the problem.”

Compared with South Waziristan, the dynamic between American and Pakistani spies during the summer of 2006 was only marginally different in North Waziristan, where the government had not yet signed a peace deal with militants. The CIA and ISI worked more closely together, and shared a base in an abandoned schoolhouse in Miranshah, less than a mile from the Haqqani Network’s primary madrassa in the town. From there, American and Pakistani spies gathered intelligence to find another senior al Qaeda figure, Khalid Habib.

As the hunt for Habib gained momentum, the CIA reassigned Keller to North Waziristan. Even with the move, he remained in charge of the operations in South Waziristan and continued to run his sources via computer messages. He had been doing the same thing while stuck inside the base at Wana, so it mattered little if he was, in effect, telecommuting. Keller and other CIA officers directed Predators to monitor truck convoys and mud compounds outside of Miranshah in the hope of getting enough information to call in a strike on Khalid Habib. The ISI collected its own intelligence from human sources, which was combined with the information from the Predators and electronic eavesdropping.

But the cooperation had its limits. When Keller arrived at Miranshah, he was given a piece of advice from the base chief.

“Don’t tell anything to Pakistani army intelligence you don’t want to get back to the Taliban,” he said.

Pakistani army intelligence, a unit distinct from the ISI, was thought to have even deeper ties to the Taliban and the Haqqani Network than the ISI’s Directorate S. Weeks before Keller had arrived in Miranshah, the ISI and CIA had raided the Haqqani madrassa but had come up with nothing. CIA officers later learned from sources that Pakistani spies had warned Haqqani militants that the raid was about to take place.

Though frustrated, Keller understood perfectly why Pakistan was so wary of dismantling the Haqqani Network. The United States was not going to be in Afghanistan forever, and turning the Haqqanis into enemies might lead to two possible outcomes for Islamabad, both horrible. The best case would be that Pakistani troops would find themselves bogged down in an endless war in the mountains against a group that could be a far more useful ally in the effort to blunt Indian influence in Afghanistan. The worst case was that the war could spread east, with the Haqqanis carrying out violence in Pakistan’s settled territories.

Scared of either prospect, Pakistani military officers in mid-2006 quietly began discussing a peace deal in North Waziristan, similar to the one already in place in South Waziristan. Keller and his CIA colleagues warned their ISI counterparts that the deal could have disastrous consequences. Their views, though, had little impact. Pakistan’s government brokered a cease-fire agreement in North Waziristan in September 2006. And it came about because of the secret negotiations of a familiar figure to many in Washington, Lt. General Ali Jan Aurakzai, the man President Musharraf had appointed as military commander in the tribal areas after the September 11 attacks and who had long believed that the hunt for al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan was a fool’s errand.

Aurakzai had since retired from the military, and Musharraf had appointed him as the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, which gave him oversight over the tribal areas. Aurakzai believed that appeasing militant groups in the tribal areas was the only way to halt the spread of militancy into the settled areas of Pakistan. And he used his influence with Musharraf to convince the president on the merits of a peace deal in North Waziristan.

But Washington still needed to be convinced. President Musharraf decided to bring Aurakzai on a trip to sell the Bush White House on the cease-fire. Both men sat in the Oval Office and made a case to President Bush about the benefits of a peace deal, and Aurakzai told Bush that the North Waziristan peace agreement should even be replicated in parts of Afghanistan and would
allow American troops to withdraw
from the country sooner than expected.

Bush administration officials were divided. Some considered Aurakzai a spineless appeaser—the Neville Chamberlain of the tribal areas. But few saw any hope of trying to stop the North Waziristan peace deal. And Bush, whose style of diplomacy was intensely personal, worried even in 2006 about putting too many demands on President Musharraf. Bush still admired Musharraf for his decision in the early days after the September 11 attacks to assist the United States in the hunt for al Qaeda. Even after White House officials set up regular phone calls between Bush and Musharraf designed to apply pressure on the Pakistani leader to keep up military operations in the tribal areas, they usually were disappointed by the outcome: Bush rarely made specific demands on Musharraf during the calls. He would thank Musharraf for his contributions to the war on terrorism and pledge that
American financial support to Pakistan would continue
.

The prevailing view among the president’s top advisers in late 2006 was that too much American pressure on Musharraf could bring about a nightmarish scenario: a popular uprising against the Pakistan government that could usher in a radical Islamist government. The frustration of doing business with Musharraf was matched only by the fear of life without him. It was a fear that Musharraf himself stoked, warning American officials frequently about his tenuous grip on power and citing his narrow escape from several assassination attempts. The assassination attempts were quite real, but Musharraf’s strategy was also quite effective in maintaining a steady flow of American aid and keeping at bay demands from Washington for democratic reforms.

The North Waziristan peace deal turned out to be a disaster both for Bush and Musharraf. Miranshah was, in effect, taken over by the Haqqani Network as the group consolidated its criminal empire along the eastern edge of the Afghanistan border. As part of the agreement, the Haqqanis and other militant groups pledged to cease attacks in Afghanistan, but in the months after the deal was signed cross-border
incursions from the tribal areas into Afghanistan
aimed at Western troops rose by 300 percent. During a press conference in the fall of 2006, President Bush declared that al Qaeda was “on the run.” In fact, the opposite was the case. The group had a safe home, and there was no reason to run anywhere.

—

ART KELLER LEFT PAKISTAN
just before the North Waziristan deal took effect, his five-month tour of duty having ended. Before he left, he took care of one last piece of unfinished business: buying a gift for his best Pakistani agent in South Waziristan, a man he had never met. The man was an avid sportsman, and he wrote to Keller that surely the CIA could find a way to buy some American sports equipment for one of its few human sources in the tribal areas. After a flurry of cables between Wana, Islamabad, and Langley about the propriety of the request, the CIA finally relented and put the sports equipment on a flight to Pakistan, stored in the cargo hull with other sensitive material bound for the American embassy in Islamabad.

Two years later, after President Bush signed a secret order to escalate the CIA’s covert war in Pakistan, Abu Khabab al-Masri was killed in a CIA drone strike, just twelve miles from the CIA base in Wana. Three months later, a missile fired from
a CIA drone killed Khalid Habib
as he sat in a parked Toyota station wagon in the village of Taparghai in South Waziristan. When the strikes occurred, Art Keller was back in the United States, retired from the CIA and living in Albuquerque. When he heard the news he had no idea whether any of the work he did in Pakistan in 2006—from spying at the Wana bazaar to sifting through bits of information at a schoolhouse in Miranshah—was at all helpful in bringing about the deaths of the two men.

Likely, he would never know.

10:
GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS

“
A Mighty Wurlitzer
”

—Frank Wisner

F
or all the public’s fascination with the coups, assassination attempts, and gunrunning that the CIA carried out during the first four decades of its existence, a far larger fraction of the spy agency’s budget for covert-action programs during the Cold War was devoted to subtler tools of warfare. Black propaganda and psychological operations had once been a cornerstone of CIA covert action: from spreading money around Europe after World War II to sway elections to setting up CIA-funded radio stations in the Eastern Bloc and Southeast Asia. Frank Wisner, an OSS veteran who rose to become head of CIA clandestine operations, said that propaganda missions needed to be run by a deft, mature organization that could conduct several different influence campaigns at once—what he called a “mighty Wurlitzer” playing the martial music in a war of ideas. When the Cold War ended, the CIA no longer saw a need to invest heavily in black propaganda, or to train its officers in psychological warfare, and the programs became victims of the drastic budget cuts of the 1990s.

But it wasn’t just about money. The advent of the Internet and the globalization of information had made all propaganda campaigns legally dicey for the CIA. United States law prohibits the spy agency from carrying out propaganda operations against American media outlets and from running influence campaigns against American citizens. Before the Internet the CIA could put foreign journalists on its payroll and plant phony stories in newspapers without worrying about the potential for these operations infiltrating the American media. But by the midnineties, Web surfers in New York and Atlanta could read news Web sites from Pakistan and Dubai. American news outlets began paying greater attention to foreign news, and citing the foreign press in their reports. As a result, it became harder for the CIA to convince congressional overseers, who have final approval for all covert actions by the agency, that a planned propaganda campaign wouldn’t “blow back” to the United States.

But when the CIA let its propaganda efforts atrophy, the Pentagon sought to fill the void. The military faces similar restrictions against conducting propaganda operations on American citizens, but Congress has generally given the Defense Department wide latitude to carry out psychological-operations missions as long as they can be shown—however tangentially—to be supporting American troops in combat. The Pentagon’s leash grew even longer after the September 11 attacks, when Congress in effect defined the world as a battlefield, and military leaders were confronted with the disorienting reality that America’s enemies mostly lived in countries where the Army and Marine Corps couldn’t go. The Defense Department assumed control of the “mighty Wurlitzer,” spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence opinion in the Muslim world, far from the shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Which is how, in the spring of 2005, a beefy man with a box of Marlboros tucked into his breast pocket came to be walking among the booths set up by technology vendors at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. He was posing as an office-supplies salesman, but it was a thin cover for a onetime Army psychological-operations officer who had spent a decade thinking of ways to wage warfare inside other people’s heads.