The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

next morning, with the wreckage of Zia’s C-130 still smoldering and under guard, I received a cable from Langley suggesting I consider sending the team of technicians salvaging the Su-25 to the crash site to search for clues, before the site became cold and contaminated. The technicians were experienced in the examination of air crashes, the cable had said. I took the suggestion under consideration, and after consulting with my deputy, Jim Morris, and the embassy air attaché, I advised Langley it would be a mistake to use the visiting technicians. Whatever good they might be able to do would be outweighed by the fact that the CIA had people poking around in the rubble of Zia’s plane a day after it went down. Questions would linger eternally as to what we were doing at the crash site and what we’d added or removed to cover up our hand in the crash. Langley sent me a short cable seconding that position. Later, I would be glad that our technicians had not been dispatched to the crash site, as more and more people became convinced that the crash had been engineered by the CIA, with me as the executioner.

There was an impeccable South Asian logic in the suggestion that the United States was involved in Zia’s death. According to the growing conspiracy theory, the elaborate U.S. endgame in Pakistan and Afghanistan had begun with the destruction of Ojhri camp in the spring, followed by the killing of the president and his generals in August, as they were now “in the way of bigger things.” As the story went, the United States wanted to be certain that the mujahideen would not hamper the Soviet withdrawal, and thus the CIA had arranged for the destruction of the ordnance depot at Ojhri. And to be sure that the plans Zia and Akhtar had put in place for a post-Soviet Afghanistan a decade earlier failed, both men had to be liquidated. Then, per secret agreement, the Soviets would be able to withdraw with honor, and the fundamentalist resistance parties would be unable to complete their victory in Afghanistan. The Soviets would be given their “decent interval” from the time of their withdrawal and the collapse of the Najibullah regime. Ambassador Raphel and General Wassom had simply been unexpected and unfortunate collateral damage, but in the end, they were acceptable losses.

It made a wonderful yarn, but it was sheer hallucination. Nevertheless, once the story gained momentum, it would never again be fully discounted, only improved upon.

The sad fact was that the Pakistan Air Force had probably put its president and many of his generals on an aircraft with mechanical problems. But the Pakistan military establishment couldn’t accept such a reality and, despite a complete lack of evidence of a conspiracy, stuck to its guns on the assassination theory. General Gul later told me that he was convinced the Indians were behind the crash, and when I said that there was no evidence to support his claim, his response explained it all.

“Milton, you still don’t understand the Indians. They would never leave any evidence that they had been involved. That, Milton, is the evidence of their involvement.” Hamid Gul eventually gave up on the Indian plot and would in later years tell anyone who would listen that he was convinced the CIA had killed Zia.

A few days after the crash, I was faced with a macabre problem. A team of pathologists dispatched from Washington to make a positive identification of the remains of Ambassador Raphel and General Wassom had come up with human remains that belonged to neither man. As testimony to the intensity of the fire and the tremendous impact of the crash, positive identification of the men in the VIP module proved challenging for the American team and close to impossible for Pakistani pathologists. The Americans ultimately succeeded in their task, however, and arrangements were made for the remains of the two fine public servants to be flown home on Secretary Shultz’s plane. But what to do with the unidentifiable remains?

I contacted friends in the Pakistani Army, and we arranged for a solemn transfer of the remains of the unknown officer resting in a hand-rubbed rosewood chest draped with a Pakistani flag. The handover took place at sundown, and the remains were buried the next morning in the military cemetery, giving a final salute to the unknown shaheed.

Secretary of State George Shultz led the American delegation to Pakistan to attend President Zia’s funeral and to take Arnie Raphel’s and Herb Wassom’s remains back home. He was accompanied by Robert Oakley, who at the time was responsible for the region on the National Security Council. Oakley would stay on as ambassador as we wound down this phase of war in Afghanistan and as we stood by and watched the next phase begin.

Charlie Wilson and Annelise Ilschenko also attended Zia’s funeral, and Annelise’s powder blue floral shalwar kameez ended up attracting far more attention in the large American procession than the craggy, solemn face of George Shultz. Before the secretary’s delegation departed with the flag-draped coffins, a small ceremony was held in the embassy compound in Islamabad, with taps being played by the teenage son of one of the embassy staff.

Islamabad, October 1988

The snows came early in 1988, drawing down to winter dormancy the last fighting season of the USSR’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The commander of the Soviet Union’s 40th Army, General Boris Gromov, had on his way out of Afghanistan finally shown that the Red Army could perform as a superpower should. Six months after the withdrawal began, Gromov had pulled out the bulk of his garrisons without mishaps serious enough to interrupt the process or create a diplomatic crisis. Despite counsel from both Pakistan and the United States to leave the Soviet forces alone as long as they were heading for home, there were a number of harassing attacks by the mujahideen. The hatred ran deep in a country where every family had