Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

45. The Curious Case of Raymond Davis: Act I

PAKISTAN, 2011—The burly thirty-six-year-old American would have blended in perfectly in his small hometown of Big Stone Gap, nestled in the mountainous countryside of rural southwest Virginia. With his checkered flannel shirt and blue jeans and scruffy, graying stubble, perhaps the only unusual thing about him would have been his choice of vehicle: a white Honda Civic rather than a pickup truck. But on January 27, 2011, Raymond Davis was not driving around Big Stone Gap, Virginia. He was half a world away, stuck in traffic in the chaotic streets of Pakistan’s second-largest city, Lahore. There, the Honda Civic blended in perfectly. It was a local rental car and bore a Lahore plate registered as LEC-10/5545.

The full details of what happened at the Mozang Chowk intersection that day may never be known. And who exactly Raymond Davis is and what he was doing in Lahore—or in Pakistan in general—is even murkier. Within moments of Davis’s vehicle coming to a stop, three people would be dead, the American would be on his way to a notorious Lahore jail, mobs of angry Pakistanis would be calling for his death and the most significant diplomatic crisis between the Pakistani and American governments since the 1979 burning and ransacking of the US Embassy in Islamabad would be in full swing.

If the official version of that day’s events, as provided by Davis and senior US officials all the way up to President Obama, is to be believed, then Raymond Davis was working at the US Consulate in Lahore, a bureaucrat who stamped passports and performed administrative duties—essentially, a pencil pusher—who found himself at the wrong place at the wrong time in a very dangerous city. According to this version of the story, Davis was the victim of an attempted armed robbery by two assailants who trailed him after Davis made a withdrawal from an ATM. As Davis sat in traffic, the would-be robbers pulled in front of him on a motorbike, one of them brandishing a weapon. Davis, fearing for his life, pulled out his .9mm semiautomatic Glock pistol and shot the men through the front windshield of his car in self-defense. After a brief car chase, Davis was arrested by the Punjab police. He held in his possession a diplomatic passport, entitling him to diplomatic immunity. President Obama called Davis “our diplomat.” Under the Vienna Conventions, no criminal charges could lawfully be filed against him in Pakistan, and Davis should have been handed back to US custody. Case closed.

To accept this version of the story would require believing that an administrative staffer at the consulate would, by chance, be so cool-headed and so skilled with a Glock that he would react with an assassin’s precision to an attempted robbery, deftly taking down two assailants by firing his weapon from behind the steering wheel through the windshield of his car. That would be a remarkable feat for a “technical adviser” or a member of the “administrative staff,” as US officials characterized Davis. Never mind that US diplomats in Pakistan are not authorized to carry weapons.

This, of course, is not the full story. In fact, the official version may actually be void of any substantial truth—save the obvious: that an American named Raymond Allen Davis shot dead two Pakistanis in broad daylight at an intersection in Lahore. The most vital pieces of this story are not Raymond Davis’s diplomatic passport, what type of visa he possessed or that the United States publicly owned him as a diplomat once he was arrested. Those are details of a cover story, part of which was preconceived and part of which was cobbled together on the fly.

The Kot Lakhpat Jail on the outskirts of Lahore is home to scores of suspected militants and accused terrorists—men who would love nothing more than to have a chance in the dark of night to slit the throat of a suspected American spy. It was this jail where Raymond Davis was ultimately taken after a brief car chase through Lahore that ended in his apprehension by local police at the Old Anarkali Bazaar. Davis was not placed in the general population, but rather in an isolation cell in the jail’s “high security zone.” Some twenty-five suspected “jihadis” were transferred out of the jail once Davis arrived. For extra measure, the paramilitary Punjab Rangers were brought in to ring the wing of the jail. Although it was portrayed as a safety measure to protect Davis, it also served another purpose—ensuring that no one could break the American free. Pakistani intelligence knew things about Davis that inspired fears of that happening.

Soon after his arrest, Davis was brought into an interrogation room. His interrogation was captured in a grainy film shot by someone in the room. “I need to tell the embassy where I am,” Davis insisted. “Just tell me the street.” “You’re from America?” someone shouted. “Yeah,” Davis responded. Still wearing his US government ID badges around his neck, Davis lifted them one by one to show his interrogators. “You belong to American embassy?” one of them asked. “No. It’s [the] Consulate General. It’s not an ambassador—in here, Lahore. I just work as a consultant there,” Davis responded, adding that he worked with the Regional Affairs Office, the RAO. They offered Davis a glass of water and Davis instead asked for a bottle of water. “Oh, pure water!” one of his interrogators exclaimed, sparking laughter in the room. “No money, no water,” the man added, inspiring more laughs. The questioning continued. Davis eventually signed a statement affirming his story that the shooting was in self-defense and the dead men were robbers. Davis repeatedly asked for his passport, which he claimed would show he was a diplomat. “Can you search the car for my passport?” Davis asked, adding that it might be under the seat or might have fallen on the road when he was arrested.

The Pakistani authorities were indeed searching Davis’s car, but his passport would be the least interesting item they’d discover. They had already recovered Davis’s Glock .9mm with a stock of ammunition, including five magazines. In the vehicle, they also found two empty clips of ammo for the .9mm and another semiautomatic weapon, also with ammo. As the search continued of Davis and his car, they uncovered a cache of supplies that would seriously undermine the credibility of claims that Davis was a diplomat or a mere technical staffer at the consulate. Among the items: night-vision equipment, multiple IDs, several ATM cards, masks, a makeup kit used for disguising identity, a survival kit, a telescope, a sophisticated GPS device, a forehead-mounted flashlight, infrared equipment, a satellite phone and various wire cutters and knives. He also had an airline ticket. A check of the numbers on his multiple mobile phones revealed calls to twenty-seven militants from the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Tehrik-e-Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, according to Pakistani law enforcement sources quoted by the Express Tribune. On the memory card of Davis’s camera, investigators found photos of religious schools and government and military institutions near the Indian border. They also found an ID showing Davis as a US Department of Defense contractor.

Meanwhile, reporters in the United States tracked down Davis’s wife, Rebecca, at their home in Highlands Ranch outside Denver, Colorado. She directed them to a phone number provided to her by the US government. It was a number at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

During his interrogation, Davis told his inquisitors that he had come from the American Consulate when the attempted robbery took place. But according to the GPS device in his car, he had come from a private residence in the upscale Scotch Corner Upper Mall in eastern Lahore. “The accused has concealed the fact,” a police report later noted. “He refused to reply to any question during investigations, saying the American consulate had forbidden him to answer any question.” The house from which Davis departed earlier that day, if the recovered GPS data can be trusted, was well known to Pakistan’s spy agency.

“BOY, WE’RE IN A WORLD OF HURT!” Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer recalled thinking the moment he heard of Davis’s arrest. “The spy game between the ISI and CIA has gotten much worse.” Shaffer, a veteran clandestine operator who had worked for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency on highly classified operations, coordinated the Human Intelligence program in Afghanistan in the early stages of the war there and planned covert incursions into Pakistan. He knew how high the stakes were when Davis was taken into custody by the Pakistanis. “The Obama Administration, senior level, probably didn’t know all of the details of what was going on,” Shaffer said.

Long before the shooting at Mozang Chowk, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency knew Raymond Davis was not a diplomat and that he wasn’t sweating it out in the US Consulate stamping passports.

Davis had arrived in Pakistan a week before the Lahore shooting, but that was not his first time in the country. He was a seasoned Special Forces operator, an ex–Green Beret who served as a Special Operations weapons sergeant. His last assignment in the military was with the 3rd Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg, where JSOC is headquartered. In 2003, as the Iraq occupation was swinging into full gear, Davis left the military to become a private contractor, a move that would send him straight to the heart of US covert and clandestine operations. His first known trip to Pakistan was in December 2008, when he began working for the notorious private security firm Blackwater on a secret CIA contract. His job as a contractor for the Agency’s Global Response Staff (GRS) was to provide protection for CIA operatives deployed to Pakistan as part of the ever-widening presence of Agency personnel coordinating Washington’s covert war there. The gig often put him in direct proximity to case officers meeting with secret sources or preparing sensitive operations. His official cover, as a regional affairs officer at the embassy, was a common cover for CIA operatives and contractors.

While Davis was working for Blackwater, the company was at the center of the CIA’s most sensitive covert operations in Pakistan, helping to run its drone bombing campaign and targeted killing and capture operations. Blackwater, which had long been used by the Bush administration as an “unattributable” force that could conduct off-the-books operations cloaked in secrecy and layers of subcontracts, had its tentacles in almost every aspect of US covert ops. Not only was the company working for the CIA on its assassination program, but it also worked closely with the Joint Special Operations Command. While at Blackwater, Davis was at the nexus of the key organizations running the covert campaign.

Assigned to the company’s CIA security detail, Davis moved between Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar. According to a former JSOC staffer who worked on its classified operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Davis was working as a contractor for the CIA, he was approached by JSOC and asked to simultaneously work on its operations in Pakistan, utilizing his more palatable CIA cover. “Davis was ‘vanilla’ Special Forces, not a black ops guy,” said the source. “There is nothing cooler for those guys than being approached by JSOC and being asked to do something for them. It was like a pro bono side gig for JSOC.”

It was the beginning of Davis’s foray into the muddiest realm of covert US operations in Pakistan. Davis had worked with Blackwater in Pakistan until August 2010. In September of that year, he became a free agent and signed a contract worth $200,000 for “Overseas Protective Services.” As a contract vehicle, he used a company called Hyperion Protective Services, LLC, which described itself as providing “loss and risk management professionals.” It was registered at an address in Las Vegas. Davis and his wife were listed, along with one other person, as its officers. The address was actually a post office box in a UPS store in a strip mall next to a Super Cuts barbershop. Davis returned to Pakistan.

The former JSOC staffer said that Davis helped to “wash” money and to establish safe houses for JSOC personnel, in addition to his work for the CIA. “All over the world we have people that, literally, are peripheral to policy and are just in-country to collect human intelligence or to facilitate special ops or espionage,” he said. That is, at least in part, what Davis was doing in Pakistan. His various roles, some legit, some covers and some covers within covers—diplomat, technical adviser, Blackwater contractor, CIA bodyguard, Green Beret, JSOC asset—suggest that his story and that of the secret US war in Pakistan are far more complicated, and less benign, than official accounts have led us to believe.

That someone like Davis would end up working with JSOC is hardly a stretch. Many Blackwater operatives—quite a few of whom were former Special Ops or Special Forces—who originally went to Pakistan as security contractors eventually started working with JSOC on its targeted kill and capture operations. “The Blackwater individuals have the experience. A lot of these individuals are retired military, and they’ve been around twenty to thirty years and have experience that the younger Green Beret guys don’t,” said retired lieutenant colonel Jeffrey Addicott, a well-connected military lawyer who served as senior legal counsel for US Army Special Forces. “They’re known entities. Everybody knows who they are, what their capabilities are, and they’ve got the experience. They’re very valuable.”

Special Ops veterans “make much more money being the smarts of these operations, planning hits in various countries and basing it off their experience in Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia,” said a US military intelligence source. “They were there for all of these things, they know what the hell they’re talking about.” He added: “They hire back people that used to work for them and had already planned and executed these [types of] operations.”

When exactly this began in Pakistan is unclear. Blackwater had a presence along the Afghan-Pakistan border dating back to April 2002, when it won its first “black” contract to protect CIA operations in Afghanistan in the early stages of the US war. It also held diplomatic security, logistical and CIA contracts in Pakistan. According to a former senior Blackwater executive and the military intelligence source, the relationship with JSOC intensified after President Bush authorized an expansion of Special Ops activities in Pakistan.

I asked the former senior Blackwater executive, who had extensive experience in Pakistan, for confirmation of what the military intelligence source told me—that Blackwater forces were not actively killing people in Pakistan, but rather supporting JSOC and the CIA in doing so. “That’s not entirely accurate,” he replied. He concurred with the military intelligence source’s description of the JSOC and CIA programs, but he pointed to another role he said Blackwater played in Pakistan, not for the US government but for Islamabad. He said Blackwater worked on a subcontract for Kestral Logistics, a powerful Pakistani firm that specialized in military logistical support, private security and intelligence consulting. It was staffed with former high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. Although Kestral’s main offices were in Pakistan, it also had branches in several other countries. Kestral did a robust business in defense logistics with the Pakistani government and other nations, as well as top US defense companies. Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, had a “pretty close relationship” with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. “They’ve met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another.” Working with Kestral, the former executive said, Blackwater provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan.

According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrated with Kestral’s forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they worked in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry’s paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as “frontier scouts”). The Blackwater personnel were technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line was often blurred in the field. Blackwater was “providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral’s folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they’re having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they’re executing the job,” he said. “You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas.” He said that when Blackwater personnel were out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engaged in operations against suspected terrorists. “You’ve got BW guys that are assisting…and they’re all going to want to go on the jobs—so they’re going to go with them,” he said. “So, the things that you’re seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that—in some of those cases, you’re going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not in the house.” Blackwater, he said, was paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. “That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, ‘Hey, no, we don’t have any Westerners doing this. It’s all local and our people are doing it.’ But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work.” The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater worked with the Frontier Corps, saying, “There’s no real oversight. It’s not really on people’s radar screen.”

A spokesperson for the US State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), which is responsible for issuing licenses to US corporations to provide defense-related services to foreign governments or entities, would neither confirm nor deny that Blackwater had a license to work in Pakistan or to work with Kestral. “We cannot help you,” said department spokesperson David McKeeby after checking with the relevant DDTC officials. “You’ll have to contact the companies directly.” Blackwater’s spokesman said the company had “no operations of any kind” in Pakistan other than one employee working for the DoD. Kestral did not respond to inquiries about its relationship with Blackwater.

According to federal lobbying records, Kestral had hired former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues “regarding [Kestral’s] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States.” Noriega was hired through his firm, Vision Americas, which he ran with Christina Rocca, a former CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 2001 to 2006 and was deeply involved in shaping US policy toward Pakistan. In October 2009, Kestral paid Vision Americas $15,000 and gave a Vision Americas–affiliated firm, Firecreek Ltd., an equal amount to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues.

IN NOVEMBER 2009, as I worked on an investigative report for the Nation magazine on JSOC’s targeted killing operations in Pakistan, I received an unprompted call on my cell phone the day before publication from Captain John Kirby, the spokesperson for Admiral Michael Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Obama’s most senior military adviser. Kirby wouldn’t explain how he got my number or how he had heard about the story. “Let’s just leave it at: we heard about it,” he told me bluntly. Kirby told me that my story was false but would not go on record saying that. Instead, he told me, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.” He told me bluntly that if we published the story, which connected Blackwater to JSOC’s operations in Pakistan, I would be “on thin ice.”

We had confidence in our sources, so despite this clear attempt at intimidation, the Nation ran the story. The next day, when the article, titled “The Secret US War in Pakistan,” was published, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell called it “conspiratorial” and explicitly denied that US Special Operations Forces were doing anything other than “training” in Pakistan. Morrell told reporters: “We have basically, I think, a few dozen forces on the ground in Pakistan who are involved in a train-the-trainer mission. These are Special Operations Forces. We’ve been very candid about this. They are—they have been for months, if not years now, training Pakistani forces so that they can in turn train other Pakistani military on how to—on certain skills and operational techniques. And that’s the extent of our—our, you know, military boots on the ground in Pakistan, despite whatever conspiratorial theories that, you know, magazines…may want to cook up. There’s nothing to it.”

In fact, there was a lot to it.

A year after my story in the Nation, WikiLeaks released a series of classified cables showing that a month before Morrell denounced my report, the US Embassy was aware that US military Special Operations Forces had been conducting offensive operations inside Pakistan, helping direct US drone strikes and conducting joint operations with Pakistani forces against al Qaeda and Taliban forces in North and South Waziristan and elsewhere in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. According to an October 9, 2009, cable classified by US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson, the operations were “almost certainly [conducted] with the personal consent of [Pakistan’s] Chief of Army Staff General [Ashfaq Parvez] Kayani.” The operations were coordinated with the US Office of the Defense Representative in Pakistan. A US Special Operations source told me that the US forces described in the cable as “SOC(FWD)-PAK” (Special Operations Command-Forward Pakistan) were “forward operating troops” from JSOC.

In the fall of 2008, the US Special Operations Command asked top US diplomats in Pakistan and Afghanistan for detailed information on refugee camps along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and a list of humanitarian aid organizations working in those camps. On October 6, Ambassador Patterson, sent a cable marked “Confidential” to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the CIA, US Central Command and several US embassies saying that some of the requests, which came orally and in the form of e-mails, “suggested that agencies intend to use the data for targeting purposes.” Other requests, according to the cable, “indicate it would be used for ‘NO STRIKE’ purposes.” The cable, which was issued jointly by the US Embassies in Kabul and Islamabad, declared: “We are concerned about providing information gained from humanitarian organizations to military personnel, especially for reasons that remain unclear. Particularly worrisome, this does not seem to us a very efficient way to gather accurate information.” What this cable said in plain terms is that at least one person within the US Special Operations Command actually asked US diplomats in Kabul and/or Islamabad point blank for information on refugee camps, information that was to be used in a targeted killing or capture operation.

The cable also revealed that in addition to the requests from SOCOM and the US defense attaché, a SOCOM contractor had also asked US diplomats for “information on camps along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border which are housing Afghan refugees and/or Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).” Specifically, the cable added, SOCOM and its “contractor” have “requested information on camp names and locations, camp status, number of IDS/refugees and ethnic breakdown, and NGO/humanitarian relief organizations working in the camps.”

From the October 2008 cable, it is evident that US diplomats in Kabul and Islamabad were disturbed by the requests, asking various US military, intelligence and government entities for “clarification of the origin and purpose of this tasker.” At the same time the cable suggested that if the CIA or Special Operations Forces wanted such information, they “should send a front channel cable to the appropriate Embassy” or a representative of the director of national intelligence rather than by e-mailing or orally requesting the information from embassy personnel. Clearly, the back-channel approach was used for a reason.

So close was Blackwater to the most highly classified, sensitive operations the CIA was conducting that its members were among the casualties in one of the deadliest known attacks against the Agency in its history, the December 2009 suicide bombing at a CIA outpost at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan. Blackwater operatives were serving as the security team for the Agency’s second-highest-ranking officer in Afghanistan. They were meeting with a source, someone traveling by car from Pakistan, whom they believed knew the whereabouts of Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number-two man. Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al Balawi, it turned out, was a double agent whose true allegiance was to the Pakistani Taliban. In all, seven CIA personnel and a Jordanian intelligence officer were killed when Balawi walked onto the base and blew himself up. Two of those killed were Blackwater operatives.

In addition to working on covert action planning and drone strikes, Blackwater also provided private guards to perform the sensitive task of security for secret US drone bases, JSOC camps and Defense Intelligence Agency facilities inside Pakistan, according to the military intelligence source.

THE ABILITY OF US SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES to operate in Pakistan was clearly viewed as a major development by the US Embassy. “Patient relationship-building with the military is the key factor that has brought us to this point,” according to an October 2009 US diplomatic cable. It also noted the potential consequences of the activities leaking: “These deployments are highly politically sensitive because of widely-held concerns among the public about Pakistani sovereignty and opposition to allowing foreign military forces to operate in any fashion on Pakistani soil. Should these developments and/or related matters receive any coverage in the Pakistani or US media, the Pakistani military will likely stop making requests for such assistance.”

Such statements might help explain why ambassador Richard Holbrooke, at the time the top US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, misled the world when he said bluntly in July 2010: “People think that the US has troops in Pakistan; well, we don’t.”

In late 2010, relations between the United States and the ISI began to rapidly deteriorate. In November, a civil lawsuit filed in New York accused the ISI’s chief, Ahmad Shuja Pasha, of involvement in the 2008 Mumbai bombings carried out by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. In December, the CIA scrambled to whisk its Islamabad station chief out of Pakistan after local media blew his cover and reported his name, Jonathan Banks. The top spy’s identity was first revealed in a lawsuit filed in Pakistan by a man from North Waziristan who alleged that two of his relatives had been killed in a drone strike. US officials accused the ISI of leaking the name in retaliation for the lawsuit that named Pasha. A US intelligence official said that Banks had to be removed because “terrorist threats against him in Pakistan were of such a serious nature that it would be imprudent not to act.”

A month later, on January 20, 2011, Raymond Davis returned to Pakistan.