Who Killed Zia? Edward Jay Epstein Vanity Fair, September
1989 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 31 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.
The Soviets were not, as it turned out, the only nation
to pointedly threaten Zia. In Delhi, Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister
of India, informed Pakistan on August 15 it would have cause "to regret
its behavior" in covertly supplying weapons to Sikhs terrorists in India.
The Sikhs, who were attempting to secede from India and create an independent
nation called Khalistan, were a crucial problem for Gandhi. They had assassinated
his mother when she was prime minister and, with some 2000 armed guerrillas
located mainly around the Pakistan border, the death toll from this civil
war was approaching 200 a month. Zia had been meeting with top Sikh leaders,
according to Gandhi, and providing guerrillas with AK-47 assault rifles,
rocket launchers and sanctuary across the Pakistan border. In response,
India had organized a special unit in its intelligence service, known
by the initials R.A.S., to deal with Pakistan.
It was not unlike Agatha Christie's thriller Murder
on the Orient Express, in which, if one looked hard enough, every aboard
the train had a motive for the murder. When Zia's eldest son, Ijaz ul
Haq, a soft-spoken, impeccably dressed man now living in Bahrain, described
to me how his father was persuaded to go to the tank demonstrations that
day by his generals, despite his misgivings, and then General Rehman's
sons told me how their father was manipulated into going on the same plane,
it raised the possibility that the assassination was the work of a faction
in the army. After all, as I learned from Zia's son, Zia had planned to
make imminent changes in the military.
Zia's great game had also even offended the United
States. It was explained to me at the Pentagon that the CIA had become
concerned that Zia was diverting a large share of the weapons being supplied
by America to an extreme fundamentalist Muejadeen 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. American anxiety was also increasing
over the progress Zia was making in building the first Islamic nuclear
bomb. His clandestine effort included attempts to smuggle the Kryton triggering
mechanism and other components for it out of the U.S., which had only
added to the tensions.
In any case, with Zia death, the U.S. could foresee
an amenably alternative: the replacement of the Zia dictatorship, with
all its cold war intrigues, with an elected government head by the attractive
Harvard-educated Benazir Bhutto. With this prospect, the State Department
had little interest in rocking the boat by focusing on the past, as the
new American Ambassador, Robert Oakley, told me in Islamabad. This decision
was apparently made just hours after the charred remains of Zia were buried.
Flying back from the funeral, Secretary of State Schultz recommended that
the FBI keep out of the investigation. Even though the FBI had the statutory
authority for investigating crashes involving Americans, and its counter-terrorism
division had already assembled a team of forensic experts to search for
evidence in the crash, it complied with this request.
During his confirmation hearings before the Senate
Foreign Relation Committee, Oakley explained "the judgment of the State
Department and the Defense Department was that [the FBI forensic experts]
would not add any expertise to the team and that it might create complications
because we had already obtained something rather extraordinary, that is,
the permission of the government of Pakistan to have U.S. investigators
fully involved, with full access to everything which had occurred, involving
the death under mysterious circumstances of the President of Pakistan."
The result was that the U.S. team assigned to Pakistan's Board of Inquiry
included only seven air force accident investigators-- and excluded any
criminal, counter-terrorist or sabotage experts.
An unrestricted investigation by the FBI also could
have opened up a potential Pandora's box of geo-political troubles. What
if, for example, it pointed towards a superpower, a neighbor, or Pakistan's
military itself? It could undermine everything the United States was striving
to achieve by damaging detente, leading to armed confrontation on Pakistan's
borders or even de-stabilize the new and shaky Pakistan government. Why
chance such uncontrollable consequences when the change in power could
be attributed to an "accident" or "act of god?
The State Department evidently decided to work to
control media and public perception of what had caused the crash. Just
before a summary of the Board of Inquiry' findings was to be released
to the press, Oakley sent a classified telegram from Islamabad providing
"press guidance." He advised in a follow-up telegram "It is essential
that U.S. Government spokespersons review and coordinate on proposed guidance
before commenting to the media on the GOP [Pakistan] release".
This spin control effectively deflected press attention
from the report's conclusion actual conclusion that the probable cause
of the crash was sabotage. On October 14th, 72 hours before that release,
the State Department leaked a pre-emptive story to theNew York Times headlined
"Malfunction Seen as Cause of Zia Crash". It began " Experts sent to Pakistan
... have concluded that the crash was caused by a malfunction in the aircraft".
But on October 17, when the summary was released, the headline had to
be changed to "Pakistan Points to Sabotage in Zia crash". TheTimes now
correctly reported that Pakistan's Board of Inquiry had concluded "the
accident was most probably caused through the perpetuation of a criminal
act or sabotage". But unnamed administration spokespersons, continuing
with their pre-prepared press guidance, added to the story that "the Pakistani
findings were not the same as findings by American experts." They even
suggested a psychopathological explanation for the Board's finding, saying
that it reflected a"mind set" among Pakistan military officers who wanted
instability so they had an excuse for continuing their military rule.
The problem with this press guidance was that it was
misinformation. There was no such divergence between the American and
Pakistanis experts involved in the investigation, and no separate American
conclusion of a "malfunction". Nor was it a conspiratorial Pakistani "mind
set" that had ruled out a malfunction as the cause of the crash. This
was the conclusion the six American Air Force experts, headed by Colonel
Daniel E. Sowada, that comprised the U.S. Assistance and advisory team,
which was supported by laboratories in the United States. They, not the
Pakistani, had actually written the sections of the report that investigated
all possible mechanical failure of the aircraft that led the Board to
state it had been " unable to substantiate a technical reason for the
accident." This was confirmed to me by both the head of the Pakistan investigating
team and an American assistant secretary of defense. Colonel Sowada himself
gave secret testimony before the subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs
that acknowledged that no evidence of a mechanical failure had been found.
The conclusion of sabotage became inescapable after
the accident investigators eliminated virtually all other causes. Sherlock-Holmes
like detective work is contained in a red-bound 365 secret investigation
report, which the relevant sections of were read to me by a Pentagon official
in his office. Like Sherlock Holmes, it used on a process of elimination.
First, they were able to rule out the possibility that the plane had been
blown up in mid air. If it had exploded in this manner the pieces of the
plane, which had different shapes and therefore resistance to the wind,
would have been strewn over a wide area-- but that had not happened. By
re-assembling the plane in a giant jigsaw puzzle, and scrutinizing with
magnifying glasses the edges of each broken piece, they could established
that the plane was in one piece when it had hit the ground. They thus
concluded structural failure--ie. The breaking up of the plane-- was not
the cause.
Nor had the plane been hit by a missile. That would
have generated intense heat which in turn would have melted the aluminum
panels and, as the plane dived, the wind would have left tell-tale streaks
in the molten metal. But there were no streaks on the panels. And no missile
part or other ordinance had been found in the area.
They could also rule out the possibility that there
was an inboard fire while the plane was in the air since, if there had
been one, the passengers would have breathed in soot before they died.
Yet, the single autopsy performed, which was on the American general seated
in the VIP capsule, showed there was no soot in his trachea, indicating
that he had died before, not after, the fire ignited by the crash.
The next possibility they considered was that the power
had somehow failed in flight. If this had happened, the propellers would
not have been turning at their full torque when the plane crashed, which
would have affected the way their blades had broken off and curled on
impact. But by examining the degree of curling on each broken propeller
blades, they determined that in fact the engines were running at full
speed when the propellers hit the ground. They also ruled out the possibility
of contaminated fuel by taking samples of the diesel fuel from the refueling
truck, which had been impounded after the crash. By analyzing the residues
still left in the fuel pumps, they could also tell that they had been
operating normally at the time of the crash.
They deduced that the electric power on the plane
had been working because both electric clocks on board had stopped at
the exact moment of impact, which they determined independently from eye
witnesses and other evidence.
The crash had occurred, moreover after a routine and
safe take off in perfectly clear daytime weather. And the pilots were
experienced with the C-130 and in good health. Since the plane was not
in any critical phase of flight, such as take off or landing, where poor
judgment on the part of the pilots could have resulted in the mishap,
the investigators ruled out pilot error as a possible cause.
They thus came down to one final possibility of mechanical
failure: the controls did not work. But the Hercules C-130 had not one
but three redundant control system. The two sets of hydraulic controls
were backed up, in case of a leak of fluid in both of them, by a mechanical
system of cables. If any one of them worked, the pilots would have been
able to fly the plane. By comparing the position of the controls with
the mechanisms in the hydraulic valves and the stabilizers in the tail
of the plane (which are moved through this system when the pilot moves
the steering wheel), they established that the control system was working
when the plane crashed. This was confirmed by a computer simulation of
the flight done by Lockheed, the builder of the C-130. They also ruled
out the possibility that the controls had temporarily jammed by a microscopic
examination of the mechanical parts to see if there were any signs of
jamming or binding. (The only abnormality they found, which led to a long
separate appendix, was that there were brass particles contaminating the
hydraulic fluid. Although they could not explain this contamination, they
found that it could have accounted only for gradual wear and tear on the
parts, not a sudden loss of control).
Having ruled out all the mechanical malfunctions that
could cause a C-130 to fall from the sky in that manner, the American
team left it to the Board to conclude "the only other possible cause of
the accident is the occurrence of a criminal act or sabotage leading to
the loss of control of the aircraft".
This conclusion was reinforced when an analysis of
chemicals found in plane's wreckage, done by the laboratory of Bureau
of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco in Washington, found foreign traces of
pentaerythritol tertranitrate (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 the device.
Using these same chemicals, Pakistan ordinance experts reconstructed a
low-level explosive detonator which could have been used to burst a flask
the size of a soda can which, the Board suggested, probably contained
an odorless poison gas that incapacitated the pilots.
But this was as far as the Board of Inquiry could
go. It had not had autopsies done on the remains of the crew members to
determine if they were poisoned. It acknowledged in its report that it
lacked the expertise to investigate criminal acts. What was needed was
criminal investigators and interrogators. It thus recommended that the
task of finding the perpetrators by turned over to the competent agency,
which meant, as one of the investigators explained to me, Pakistan's intelligence
service--the ISI.
When I got to Pakistan in February and called upon
General Hamid Gul, the Director General of the ISI, I found out that political
events had apparently overtaken this mandate. He told me that his agency
had called off its investigation at the request of the government and
had transferred the responsibility for it to a "broader based" government
authority headed by a civil servant called F.K. Bandial. It was not using
the resources of his intelligence service and, as far as he knew that
committee had not begun the work. His tone suggested that, he did not
expect any immediate resolution of the crime.
But it was still possible to come to some reasonable
conclusions about what happened to Pak One, if not the precise cause.
And there were still outstanding, however, disturbing pieces of evidence.
A crucial piece missing in the puzzle was what had happened to the pilots
during the final minutes of the flight because the accident investigators
found that there was no black box or cockpit recorder on Pak One to recover.
Yet, there were three other planes in the area tuned to the same frequency
for communications-- General Beg's turbojet, which was waiting on the
runway to take off next, Pak 379, which was the backup C-130 in case anything
went wrong to delay Pak One, and a Cessna security plane that took off
before Pak One to scout for terrorists. I managed to locate pilots of
these planes-- all of whom were well acquainted with the flight crew of
Pak One and its procedures-- who could listen to the conversation between
Pak One and the control tower in Bahawalpur. They independently described
the same sequence of events. First Pak One reported its estimated time
of arrival in the capital. Then, when the control tower asked its position,
it failed to respond. At the Same Time Pak 379 was trying unsuccessfully
to get in touch with Pak One to verify its arrival time. All they heard
from Pak One was "stand by" but no message followed. When this silence
persisted, the control tower got progressively more frantic in its efforts
to contact Zia's pilot, Wing Commander Mash'hood. Three or four minutes
passed. Then, a faint voice in Pak One called out "Mash'hood, Mash'hood".
One of the pilots overhearing this conversation recognized the voice.
It was Zia's military secretary, Brigadier Najib Ahmed who apparently,
from the weakness of his voice, was in the back of the flight deck (where
a door connected to the VIP capsule.) What this meant that the radio was
switched on and was picking up background sounds; in this sense, it was
the next best thing to a cockpit flight recorder. Under these circumstances,
the long silence between "stand bye" and the faint calls to Mash'hood,
like the dog that didn't bark, was the relevant fact. Why wouldn't Mash'hood
or the three other members of the flight crew spoken if they were in trouble?
The pilots aboard the other planes, who were fully familiar Mash'hood,
and the procedures he was trained in, explained that if Pak One's crew
was conscious and in trouble they would not in any circumstances have
remained silent for this period of time. If there had been difficulties
with controls, Mash'hood instantly would have given the emergency "may
day" signal so help would be dispatched to the scene. Even if he had for
some reason chosen not to communicate with the control tower, he would
have been heard shouting orders to his crew or alerting the passengers
to prepare for an emergency landing. And if there had been an attempt
at a hijacking in the cockpit or scuffle between the pilots, it would
also be overheard. At the minimum, if the plane was crashing towards earth,
screams or groans would have been heard. The radio must have been working
since it picked up the brigadier's voice. In retrospect, the pilots had
only one explanation for the prolonged silence: Mash'hood and the other
pilots were either dead or unconscious while the microphone had been kept
opened by the clenched hand of one of the pilots' on the thumb switch
that operated.
I could not be ascertain if such tapes actually existed.
If they did, the clarity could possibly enhanced to separate other background
sounds from the static. Although one witness claimed that he had listened
to recordings of these conversations after the crash to identify Mash'hood's
voice, the control tower operators at Bahawalpur denied having recorded
the conversations although they suggested it might have been taped by
the main airport at Muelton forty miles away.In any case, the account
of the eyewitnesses at the crash site dove-tailed with the radio silence.
They had seen, it will be recalled, the plane pitching up and down as
if it were on a roller coaster. According to a C-130 expert I spoke to
at Lockheed, C-130's characteristically go into a pattern known as a "phugoid"
when no pilot is flying it. First, the unattended plane dives towards
the ground, then the mechanism in the tail automatically over-corrects
for this downward motion, causing it to head momentarily upwards. Then,
with no one at the controls, it would veer downward. Each swing would
become more pronounced until the plane crashed. Analyzing the weight on
the plane, and how it had been loaded on, this expert calculated the plane
would have made three roller-coaster turns before crashing, which is exactly
what the witnesses had been reported. He concluded from this pattern that
the pilots had been conscious, they would have corrected the "phugoid"--
at least would have made an effort, which would have been reflected in
the settings of the controls. Since this had not happened, he concluded,
like the pilots in the other planes, that they were unconscious. He suggested
that this could be accomplished be planting a gas bomb in the air vent
in the C-130, triggered to go off, when the plane took off and pressurized
air was fed into the cockpit.
My investigations at the Bahawalpur airport showed
that planting a gas bomb on the plane that day would not have entailed
any insurmountable problems. Instead of following prescribed procedures
and flying to the nearby air base at Muelton where it could be guarded,
Pak One had remained at the air strip that day. According to one inspector
there, a repair crew, which included civilians, had worked on adjusting
the cargo door of Pak One for two hours that morning. Its workers entered
and left the plane without any sort of search. Any one of them could dropped
a gas bomb into the air vent.
I also spoke to an American chemical warfare expert
about poison gases that could have been used. He explained that Chemical
agents capable of knocking a flight crew, while extremely difficult to
obtain, are not beyond the reach of any intelligence service, or underground
group with connections to one. He also pointed out that a gas capable
on insidiously poisoning a whole flight crew (and leaving the pilot's
fingers locked on the radio switch) had been used in neighboring Afghanistan.
According to the State Department's special report 78 on "Chemical Warfare
in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan," which he sent me, corpses of rebel
Muejadeen guerrillas were found still holding their rifles in firing positions
after being gassed. This showed that they had been the victims of "an
extremely rapid acting lethal chemical that is not detectable by normal
senses and that causes no outward physiological responses before death."
This gas manufactured by the Soviet would have done the trick. But so
would American manufactured "VX" nerve gas, according to a scientist at
the U.S. Army chemical warfare center in Aberdeen, Maryland. "VX" is odorless,
easily transportable in liquid form, and a soda-sized can full would be
enough, when vaporized by a small explosion, and inhaled, to causes paralyzes
and loss of speech within 30 seconds. According to him, the residue it
would leave behind would be phosphorous. And, as it turned out, the chemical
analyzes of debris from the cockpit showed heavy traces of phosphorous.
Such an act of sabotage would probably leave other
detectable traces. The chemical agent that killed or paralyzed the pilots
could probably be determined through an autopsy of their bodies. If it
was a sophisticated nerve gas, it had to be obtained from one of the few
countries that manufactures it, transported across international borders,
and packaged with a detonator and fuse mechanism into bomb that would
burst at the right moment after take off. All this could be trace back,
just as the bomb on Pan Am 103 in Scotland was eventually identified and
traced. Moreover, in Pakistan, the device had to be delivered to an agent
capable of planting it on Pak One at a military air base. And someone
had to supply him with intelligence about Zia's movements, the operations
of Pak One, and the gaps in its security. Since access was limited to
a few dozen persons, these people were vulnerable to discovery through
an ordinary police investigation. Access to American intelligence resources,
such as the technical labs of the FBI, the counter-terrorist profiles
of the CIA, and the electronic eavesdropping archives of the National
Security Agency, might also have helped locate the source of the intelligence
(especially if it had been broadcast). But I found no such determined
investigation took place.
To begin with, as noted by the Board of Inquiry, autopsies
were never performed on the bodies of the flight crew. The explanation
told to me by the Pentagon official, and apparently given in the secret
report, was that Islamic law requires burial within 24 hours. But this
could not 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 they ever asked permission for autopsy examinations. And,
as I learned from a doctor for the Pakistan Air Force, Islamic law not
withstanding, autopsies are routinely done on pilots in cases of air crashes.
I further determined from sources at the military hospital in Bahawalpur
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 team of American and Pakistani
pathologists. On the afternoon of August 18,however, before the pathologists
had arrived, the hospital received orders to return these plastic bags
to the coffins for burial. The principal evidence of what happened to
the pilots was thus purposefully buried.
The police investigation of those who had access to
Pak One at the airport and were involved in its security, also appeared
to be similarly curtailed. According to a security officer who was there
that day, the ground personnel was not methodically questioned. Instead,
they said in interviews almost uniformly that they were amazed that no
one was interrogated. The only inquiry that they saw taking place was
the inquiry by the American team. The questions by the Americans, which
had to go through a Pakistani translator, were largely confined to the
aircraft's maintenance and movements prior to take off. Other activities
that day were not explored. For example, according to a police inspector
at Bahawalpur, a policeman at the airstrip that day was found murdered
shortly thereafter, but it was not connected to the air crash or, for
that matter, resolved.
For its part, Pakistani military authorities attempted
to foist a explanation that Shi'ite fanatics were responsible for the
crash. The only basis for this theory was that the co-pilot of Pak One,
Wing Commander Sajid, happened to have been a shi'ite (as are more than
ten per cent of Pakistan's Moslems). The pilot of the back-up C-130, who
also was a shi'ite, was then arrested by the military and kept in custody
for more than two months while military interrogators tried to make his
confess that he had persuaded Sajid to crash Pak One in a suicide mission.
Even under torture, he denied this charge and insisted that, as far as
he knew, Sajid was a loyal pilot who would not commit suicide. Finally,
the army abandoned this effort the Air Force demonstrated that it would
have been physically impossible for the co-pilot alone to have caused
a C-130 to crash in the way it did. And if he had attempted to overpower
the rest of the flight crew, the struggle certainly would have been heard
over the radio. But why had the military attempted to cook up this shi'ite
red herring?
There were other indications of efforts to limit or
divert from the investigation, such as the destruction of telephone records
of calls made to Zia and Rehman just prior to the crash, the reported
disappearances of ISI intelligence files on Murtaza Bhutto, and the transfer
of military personnel at Bahalapur, which, taken together, appeared to
add up to a well-organized cover up. If so, I was persuaded that it had
to be an inside job. The Soviet KGB and Indian R.A.W. Might have had the
motive, and even the means, to bring down Pak One but neither had the
ability to stop planned autopsies at a military hospital in Pakistan,
stifle interrogations or, for that matter, kept the FBI out of the picture.
The same is true of anti-Zia underground, such as Al-Zulfikar, although
its agents, like the shi'ite, would provide plausible suspects ( or even,
if provided convenient access to Pak One, fall guys.) Nor would any foreign
intelligence service which was an enemy of Zia's have much of a motive
for making it look like an accident rather than an assassination. Only
elements inside Pakistan would have an obvious motive for making it the
death of Zia, Rehman and 28 others look like something more legitimate
than a coup d' etat.
The most eerie aspect of the affair was the speed
and effectiveness with which it was consigned to oblivion. Even it involved
the incineration of the principal ally of the U.S. in the war against
the Soviets in Afghanistan, the abrupt end of the American Ambassador
and the head of its military mission in Pakistan were killed in the course
of discharging their duties, and the government of one of the few remaining
allies of the U.S. In Asia was abruptly changed; there little occurred
in the way of repercussions. No outcries for vengeance, no efforts at
counter coups, no real effort to find the assassins. In Pakistan, Zia
and Rehman's names disappeared within days from television, newspapers
and other media-- except on a few monuments in Afghan refugee camps that
had not yet been painted over. In the United States, the State Department
blocked any FBI interest in investigating the death of its Ambassador
and, through press "guidance", distorted the event into just another foreign
plane accident. The one uncounted casualty of Pak One was the truth.
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