How Aimal Kasi was betrayed

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Mir Aimal Kasi was betrayed by the same people who had sheltered him for over four years, according to a new book.

James Bamford, one of the best informed American writers on intelligence matters confirms reports, which surfaced after Kasi’s capture in Pakistan and his clandestine removal by US government agents to the United States, that Kasi who had shot dead two CIA personnel outside the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was betrayed by one or more of his tribal friends.

According to Bamford’s new book A Pretext for War, American agents kept looking for Kasi in Afghanistan for years because they believed him to be living there. And although their suspicions were well founded, they were unable to locate him. However, on May 1997 a tribal person walked into the US consulate in Karachi and offered to lead the Americans to Kasi in return for the reward announced by the US government earlier for information resulting in the fugitive’s capture. When the US official asked the man – whose name and particulars are not given – for proof, he showed them the copy of a driving licence application that bore Kasi’s picture though not his real name. He said the tribals who had sheltered Kasi all those years were now willing to have the Americans capture him so that they could win the generous several million dollar reward that had been on offer from Washington.

Earlier, the Americans had spent much time and effort looking for Kasi in Afghan areas adjacent to Pakistan. The Americans had re-engaged some of the Afghans they had used during the war against the Soviet Union in order to intensify the search on the ground. This group of Afghans was codenamed “FD-Trodpoint.” So certain were the Americans of finding Kasi in Afghanistan that they had earmarked an old airstrip outside Kandahar from where Kasi was to be flown out after capture. Satellite pictures had confirmed that the airstrip was long enough for a plane to land and take off. What was not so certain was how hard the surface of the airstrip was. To test the solidity of the strip, a party of American agents was infiltrated into the area from Pakistan. The airstrip was found to be capable of handling both landing and takeoff.

With the arrival of the informant, the picture changed. The CIA station chief in Islamabad, a man by the name of Gary Schroen, was put in charge and an FBI veteran named Brad Garret was flown in from Washington along with a number of agents and operatives for the execution of the mission. The tribal informer was asked to lure Kasi to a place from where he could be more easily picked up. The man tempted Kasi with a lucrative business offer, namely smuggling Russian goods into Pakistan, and brought him to Dera Ghazi Khan where he put up at Shalimar Hotel. The raiding party landed in Multan by helicopter and from there it drove to Dera Ghazi Khan along with their Pakistani counterparts from the ISI and perhaps some other agencies. Kasi was captured in his room as he slept, his door having been smashed open. He was pinned to the ground, his fingerprints taken and matched on the spot. Satisfied that they had their man, the party drove back to Multan with Kasi from where they took off. Though the book is silent on what happened next, Kasi, according to one account, was brought to Islamabad and kept in the American embassy till he was flown out to America. Kasi, the book says, confessed that he was the man who had carried out the killings outside CIA headquarters in protest against the treatment of Muslims by the United States.

Kasi was tried in Virginia, sentenced on 10 November 1997 and executed by lethal injection on 14 November 2002.

In a series of letters, Kasi wrote from his death cell, to the online site Salon.com, he rejected the allegation by Gen. Hamid Gul, a former ISI chief, that he had once worked for the CIA and had perhaps turned on the agency in an act of fury. Gen. Gul, who worked closely with the CIA during the Afghan War, insisted to an American reporter in an interview in Rawalpindi that “Aimal Kasi was an agent of the CIA ... He was working inside of Pakistan and outside of Pakistan.”

Kasi told Salon.com, “The attack on CIA was my idea alone ... Nobody in Pakistan knew about it. I alone planned everything and did it.” Kasi also painted a rosy picture of his four-and-a-half-year stay in Afghanistan after the killings, saying he was welcomed as a “hero” by the those who took power in May 1992, including then-Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. “Would you believe I rode with the prime minister in his black Mercedes to a place of worship … I did!” Kasi wrote. “I was respected by the people there as a hero, and in the four years there not a single person told me you did a wrong thing by attacking the CIA. They all said you did a great job.”

He also said, “I want to make it clear (that) the people who tricked me ... were Pushtuns, they were owners of land in the Leghari and Khosa clan areas in Dera Ghazi Khan,” but “I will never name them.”

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