On August 17 1988, Pak One, an American
built Hercules C-130b transport plane, took off from the
military air base outside of Bahawalpur, Pakistan at 3:46
p.m, precisely on schedule. The passengers in the air-conditioned
VIP capsule, which included Mohammad Zia ul-haq, the Army
Chief of Staff and President of Pakistan. were returning
to the capital city of Islamabad after a hot, dusty tank
demonstration.
This was General Zia's first trip on
Pak One since May 29. He had reluctantly gone to Bahawalpur
that morning to witness a demonstration of the new American
Abrams tank. Although he himself saw little point in going
at a time of national crises to see a lone tank fire off
its cannon, the commander of the armored Corp, who had been
his former military secretary, was extraordinarily insistent
in his phone calls. He argued that the entire Army command
would be there that day, implying that if Zia was absent
it might be taken as a slight. As it had turned out, the
tank demonstration was a fiasco. After helicopters flew
him from the airport to the desert site, the much vaunted
American tank missed its target ten out of ten times. So
much for the tank. Zia went on to the lunch at the officers'
mess, eating ice cream, and joking with his top generals.
Back at the air strip, he prayed to Mecca, then, before
reboarding the plane, he warmly embraced those of the generals
that stayed.
Seated next to him on the flight back
to Islamabad was his close friend, General Akhtar Abdur
Rehman, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, after
Zia, the second most powerful man in Pakistan. He had headed
Inter Service intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's equivalent
of the CIA, for ten years. There he had been Zia's architect
for the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets. It was his
ISI that had organized the Muejadeen into combat units,
trained them, distributed weapons to them, provided them
with intelligence and even selected their targets. And now
the Mujuedeen was on the verge of winning; the first time
the Soviet Union had been defeated since the second world
war.
Like Zia, Rehman had not wanted to come
to this tank demonstration. He indeed had another appointment
in Karachi. He decided to go only when a former deputy of
his at the ISI advised him that Zia was on the verge of
making major changes in his the army and intelligence high
command and suggested that Zia needed his counsel. Rehman
had been aware that ever since a huge arms depot for Afghan
weapons had blown up in the suburbs of Islamabad that April,
killing at least 93 people, Zia had become increasingly
uneasy about what might be done to undermine his control
in the closing days of the Afghan war. Zia blamed the Soviet
trained Afghan intelligence service, WAD, for the blast,
but Pakistan politicians criticized him and Rehman for locating
the arms depot where it endangered civilians. Zia reacted
by precipitously firing his own prime minister, dissolving
the parliament and local government on May 29. He had expected
changed to be made in the military. So, canceling his meeting
in Karachi, he joined Zia on Pak One that morning. He reboarded
the plane, wearing his familiar peaked general's hat, with
General Mohamed Afzal, Zia's chief of the General Staff.
The remaining two seats in the capsule
were given to Zia's American guests: Ambassador Arnold L.
Raphel, an old Pakistan hand who had known Zia for twelve
years and General Herbert M. Wassom, the head of U.S. Military
aid mission to Pakistan. They had also witnessed the dismal
tank demonstration, then, Ambassador Raphel found time to
pay a condolence call at a convent in Bahawalpur where an
American nun had been murdered the week before. Behind them,
Eight other Pakistan generals packed the two benches in
the rear section of the VIP capsule.
Lt. General Aslam Beg, the Army's vice
chief of staff, waved goodbye from the runway, the only
top general in the chain of command not aboard Pak One that
day. He would fly back in the smaller Turbo Jet, waiting
to take off as soon as Pak One was airborne.
A Cessna security plane completed the
final check of the area-- a precaution taken ever since
terrorists had unsuccessfully fired a missile at Pak One
eight years earlier. Then, the control tower gave Pak One
the signal to take off.
In the cockpit, which was separated
from the VIP capsule by a door and three steps, was the
four man flight crew. The pilot, Wing Commander Mashhood
Hassan, had been personally selected by Zia. And the co-pilot,
the navigator and the engineer had been cleared by Air Force
security. Just the day before, they had flown Pak One back
and forth on the exact route as a trial run so there would
be no surprises. The trip was expected to take an hour.)
After Pak One was airborne, the control tower at Bahawalpur
routinely asked Mashood his position. He said "Pak One,
stand bye" . But there was no response. The efforts to contact
Mashood grew more desperate by the minute. Pak One was missing
only minutes after it had taken off.
Meanwhile, at a river about 18 miles
away from the airport, villagers, looking into the sky,
saw Pak One lurching up and down in the sky, as if were
on an invisible roller coaster. After its third loop, it
plunged directly towards the desert, burying itself in the
soil. Then, it exploded and, as the fuel burnt, became a
ball of fire. All 30 persons on board were dead. It was
3:51 p.m.
General Beg's turbojet circled over
the burning wreckage for a moment. Then the vice chief of
stall, realizing what had happened, ordered his pilot to
head for Islamabad. That evening, acting as if a coup might
be underway, army units moved swiftly to cordon off official
residences, government buildings, television stations, and
other strategic locations in the capital.
The crash altered the face of politics
in Pakistan in a way in which no simple coup d'etat could
have done. Pakistan is the only country named after an acronym:
"P" stands for Punjab, "A" for Afghanistan, and the "K"
for Kashmir. It reflected a dream at best of an Islam state;
only the "P" actually became part of Pakistan when it was
carved out of British India in 1947 as a haven for Moslems.
But it was a dream that Zia taken advantage of after he
seized power in a bloodless military coup in 1977. Mindful
that the Shah was unable to control his empire in Iran because
he had underestimated the power of Islam, Zia moved almost
immediately to placate the mullahs in his country by pursuing
a policy of "islamization" and reinstalling the law of the
Koran. Public flogging was made the penalty for drinking
alcohol, amputation of a hand the penalty for robbery, and
being stoned to death the penalty for adulatory. Women,
if they were teachers, students or government employees,
to cover their head with a chador. While he used thousand-year
old Koran law to help maintain control over a population
of over 99 million people in Pakistan, he strove to build
an ultra-modern military machine, complete with state of
the art F-16 fighters, Harpoon missiles, and nuclear arms,
and to make Pakistan the leading ally of the United States
in Asia. It had been an extraordinary balancing act.
Now, the sudden end of Zia and his top
generals dead, with no civilian government in place, left
a conspicuous void. There was of course still the Army,
which General Beg had now assumed command of--which was
and always had been the dominant power in Pakistan. There
was also the opposition party, the Pakistan Peoples Party,
founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, which no longer prevented
by Zia from participating in the elections scheduled for
that November, could back the candidacy of his arch enemy,
Benazir Bhutto. This, in turn, made possible her election--
which was inconceivable if Zia had been in power.
But this still left opened the question
of what had happened to make Pak One to fall from the sky
at this opportune moment? Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto
offered perhaps the most convenient explanation: divine
intervention. In the epilogue to her book, Daughter of Destiny
(which before Zia's death had been entitled more modestly
"Daughter of the East"), Mrs. Bhutto notes "Zia's death
must have been an act of god". Zia was, as far she was concerned,
the incarnation of evil. When she first met him in January
1977, she saw him only as a " short, nervous, ineffectual-looking
man whose pomaded hair was parted in the middle and lacquered
to his head". She could not understand why her father, Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan, had passed
over six more senior generals to pick him as head of the
Army . Eighteen months later, Zia had usurped power from
him and then committed "judicial murder," as she saw it,
by allowing her father to be hanged like a common criminal
on a trumped up charge. He also banned her father's political
party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, imprisoned her and her
mother (even though she was suffering from lung cancer)
and had both her brothers in exile, Shah Nawaz and Mir Murtaza,
tried and convicted of high crimes in absentia. When Shah
Nawaz was killed by poison in France in 1986, she suspected
it was done by Zia's agents. Zia had decimated her family.
She took particular satisfaction that Zia's body was burnt
beyond recognition in the plane fire, noting, "Zia had exploited
the name of Islam to such an extent, people were saying
that when he died, God didn't leave a trace of him."
But there also existed less divine sources
of retribution. There was, for example, Mrs. Bhutto's own
34 year old brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto. For the past nine
years, he headed an anti-Zia guerrilla group, which shared
offices with the PLO in Kabul, Afghanistan (and later operated
out of Damascus, Syria) called Al Zulfikar or "the sword".
Its proclaimed mission was to destroy the Zia regime, and
the means it used included sabotage, highjackings and assassination
in Pakistan. It had demonstrated that it had the capacity
to carry out complex international terrorist operations
when it hijacked a Pakistan International Airlines Boeing
727 with 100 passenger aboard in 1981, flew it first to
Kabul, where it executed one passenger and refueled, and
then to Damascus, where, with the assistance of the Syria
government, it forced Zia to exchange 55 political prisoners
for the passengers. It originally had taken credit for the
destruction of Pak One in a phone call to the BBC although
subsequently, after it was announced that the American Ambassador
was aboard it, Mir Murtaza Bhutto retracted this claim.
But Mir Murtaza admitted that he had attempted to assassinate
Zia on five previous occasions. And one of these earlier
Al-Zulfikar assassination attempts involved attempting to
blow Pak One out of the sky with Zia aboard it by firing
a Soviet-built SAM 7 missile at it. On that occasion, the
missile missed, and when the terrorists who fired it were
capture they admitted that they had been trained for the
mission in Kabul by Mir Murtaza Bhutto and his advisers.
Now, with his sister in a position to win the elections
if Zia could be removed, Mir Murtaza had an added reason
to pursue his mission. But he was not the only one with
a motive.
Another suspect was the Soviet Union.
Zia had offended Moscow to such a degree that it had declared
publicly, only a week before the crash, that Zia's "obstructionist
policy cannot be tolerated". In Washington, I was told by
a top official in the Pentagon, who was directly responsible
for assessing the political consequences of military activity,
that his initial concern was that the Soviet Union might
have been involved in bringing down Pak One. Earlier that
month the Soviet had temporarily suspended its troop withdrawals
from Afghanistan to protest Zia's violations of the Geneva
Accords that had been signed in May. According to the Soviets,
Zia not only was continuing to arm the Afghan Mujuedeen
in blatant disregard of the agreement but was directing
the sabotage campaign in Kabul that was adding to the Soviet
humiliation. After protesting to the Pakistan Ambassador,
the Soviet foreign ministry then 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".
Soviet intelligence certainly had the
means in place in Pakistan to carry out this threat. It
had trained, subsidized and effectively ran the Afghan intelligence
service, WAD, which had in its campaign of covert bombings
in the past year killed and wounded over 1400 people in
Pakistan, according to a State Department report released
the week of the crash. It had also demonstrated that Spring
it could recruit Pakistani accomplices inside military installations.
Had Pak One been another of its targets?
After weighing this possibility, the
relevant officials in the Pentagon and State Department
rejected, according to the official I was interviewing.
What persuaded them that the Soviet leadership would not
permit such a move, he further elaborated, was the presence
of the Ambassador on the plane. They simply did not believe
that the Soviets would not have jeopardized Glastnost by
assassinating an American of this rank. But later while
we were having lunch in his office he mentioned that neither
Ambassador Raphel or General Wassom were supposed to fly
back on Zia's plane. Both men, at least the day before,
had been scheduled to return from the tank exhibition on
the U.S. military attache's jet (which General Wassom had
flown down on). If so, the perpetrators might not have necessarily
reckoned on the American presence aboard the plane.
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