Who killed General Ziaul Haq-FIILE REDISCVERED-REPEAT FOR SOME

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Who killed General Ziaul Haq-FIILE REDISCVERED-REPEAT FOR SOME

Who killed General Ziaul Haq

 

Barbara Crossette was the New York Times bureau chief in South Asia from 1988 to 1991

Who Killed Zia?

Barbara Crossette

 

Of all the violent political deaths in the

twentieth century, none with such great interest

to the United States has been more

clouded than the mysterious air crash that

killed President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq

of Pakistan in 1988, a tragedy that also

claimed the life of a serving American ambassador

and most of General Zia's top commanders.

The list of potential malefactors

has grown as the years have passed, compounding

the mysteries buried in this peculiar,

unfinished tale.

The one unarguable fact is that no serious,

conclusive, or even comprehensive inquiry

into the crash has been undertaken in

the United States, although one of its top

diplomats, Arnold Raphel, and an American

general were killed—and in an Americanbuilt

aircraft. Congress held a few hearings,

but the FBI was kept away from the case for

a year. No official report was made public.

Indeed, a file in the National Archives containing

about 250 pages of documents on

the event is still classified secret.

The undisputed facts about the crash of

the Pakistani president's specially outfitted

Lockheed C-130 aircraft on August 17,

1988, are not many. Even some of those

"facts" are still in dispute and can be called

up to stoke suspicions of the United States

in South Asia.

General Zia was the steadfast ally of the

United States against the Soviet Union in

Afghanistan, and had willingly allowed

Pakistan to become the base of a holy war

by the self-styled mujahidin against the

Moscow-backed Afghan government. Zia

had seized power in 1977 after ousting

Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a

nonviolent coup. He later had Bhutto tried

and hanged for a political murder in a controversial

trial. He had been Bhutto's own

choice for army chief of staff.

Zia, who began his military career in

the British Army in India in 1943 and

moved to Pakistan after the partition of

colonial India at independence in 1947, remained

head of the Pakistani military and

president until his death. Although he had

toyed on and off with the idea of an elected

legislature, he kept the country under martial

law for 8 of his 11 years in power.

General Zia had ambitious hopes of

arming Pakistan with the most sophisticated

American tools: advanced F-16 fighter

planes, AWACS reconnaissance aircraft, and

field equipment to match or better India's

largely Soviet-supplied arsenal. He also promoted

the development of nuclear weapons,

as had Bhutto, after India's 1974 nuclear

test.

On August 17, 1988, General Zia and

five of his top generals had gone to a desert

test site to watch a demonstration of the

Abrams M-1/A-1 battle tank, which the

United States was pressing Pakistan to buy.

General Zia's armored battle experts were

not enthusiastic about the tank, and the

president was reported to be much more

interested in the AWACS. Nevertheless, he

wanted to watch the trials, and traveled to

the test range not far from Bahawalpur,

about 330 miles south of the Pakistani capital.

The C-130 was left on the Bahawalpur

airstrip, and the official party flew to the

test site by helicopter. With the tests over

by late morning, General Zia and his entourage

returned to Bahawalpur for lunch,

then took off for the return trip to Islamabad.

Within minutes, the plane had plummeted

without warning into a dusty wasteland

and all aboard were dead.

Conspiracy Theories

The wreckage of the doomed C-130 was

still smoldering on a barren patch of Pakistan

when the conspiracy theories began to

mushroom. Who could have plotted the

spectacular crash of Pakistan's Air Force

One, wiping out with one blow Zia, Ambassador

Raphel, his defense attaché, Brig.

Gen. Herbert M. Wassom, and most of

Pakistan's top military commanders?

From the beginning, reporters were

never short of theories to work with.

Surely it had to have been the Russians,

stung by their humiliating failure to subdue

the odd assortment of Afghan holy warriors

who had found safe haven and generous

support in Zia's Pakistan. Although Soviet

troops had begun their withdrawal from

Afghanistan, Moscow had just halted the

process to protest Pakistan's continued

arming of rebels.

No, it must have been the Indians,

Pakistan's traditional enemies, who were

friends of the Afghan Communist government

and very anxious about the potential

fallout of an Islamist victory in Kabul,

which General Zia was abetting. Indian intelligence

operatives had a record of undercover

meddling in virtually every country in

South Asia, most tragically in Sri Lanka,

where Indian agents initially trained and

supplied Tamil separatists who have killed a

generation of Sri Lankan political leaders.

What about the Afghans themselves, led

by the devious and ruthless Najibullah, a

former head of the secret police with a fearful

reputation for torture?

Another candidate might be found

among the American-backed Afghan holy

warriors fighting the Soviet-backed government.

This was Gulbadin Hekmatyar, perhaps

the most ruthless and self-serving of

seven mujahidin commanders. Hekmatyar,

an evil and violent conspirator and sower of

discord then and now (since he has swung

his support to the Taliban cause), was reported

to be fearful that he was about to

lose American money and military aid. He

had certainly offended influential officials in

both Pakistan and the United States.

Or the Iranians? Iran, a Shiite theocracy,

looked askance at the prospect of a Sunniled

(and pro-Pakistani) version of the same

next door. A homegrown version of this theory

blamed Pakistani Shias for the attack on

a Sunni president.

Could it be that dissatisfied, ambitious

elements in the Pakistani military—Shia or

Sunni—had pulled off a coup in disguise?

One top general who did not board the

doomed aircraft became military chief of

staff after the crash wiped out the Pakistani

high command.

Then, of course, there was the avowedly

violent anti-Zia group known as al-Zulfikar,

led by the late Murtaza Bhutto, the brother

of Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani politician

who would ultimately gain most from Zia's

departure. General's Zia's son Ijaz ul-Haq

told me a year after the crash that he was

"101 percent sure" that Murtaza was

involved.

Benazir Bhutto, who became prime

minister in November 1988, herself ventured

that the fatal crash might well have

been an "act of God."

But wait, what about the Central Intelligence

Agency? Some influential Pakistanis

and Indians peddled that suspicion immediately,

on the ground that Zia had become

an embarrassment to the United States on

several fronts, not least because of his uncertain

commitment toward a more democratic

government and his government's loyalty

to extremists among the Afghan rebels,

who seemed to have spun out of American

control.

 

Then, of course, maybe the aircraft just

malfunctioned. This plane had a checkered

history.

Accident or Sabotage?

Adding to the mystery of who or what

killed General Zia and fueling the "CIA did

it" theory in South Asia was the less than

conclusive—some would say, less than serious—

investigation that took place in the

wake of the crash. Pakistan was given the

lead in conducting a probe on the scene, but

U.S. Defense Department and aircraft experts

were part of the investigating team.

It was intended to be a joint investigation

with a joint conclusion, yet within two

months of the crash, the American government

was alone in promoting the idea,

without concrete material evidence, that

a mechanical malfunction had brought

down the plane. Most Pakistanis didn't see

it that way. From the start, they assumed

assassination.

Apparently to undercut Pakistan's conclusions

on the eve of the report's formal release

in October 1988, the mechanical malfunction

story was leaked to the New York

Times before rather different final results

were presented to reporters in Islamabad.

The Pakistanis declared the crash "a criminal

act or sabotage leading to the loss of aircraft

control."

Furthermore, although an American ambassador

and a high-ranking military officer

were among the dead, the State Department

and the Pentagon ruled that the Federal Bureau

of Investigation was not to investigate.

(The FBI got a chance to reopen the case a

year later, when it was too late to examine

crucial evidence.) A few members of Congress

squawked at the haste with which the

American government pulled down the

curtains and drew its conclusion, one apparently

not shared by American technical experts.

In the United States, the story was as

dead as Zia within a year.

For at least one American, however, the

issue is still painfully fresh. And he is now

adding one more theory to the list of potential

perpetrators.

When General Zia's VIP C-130 aircraft,

also known as Pak One, spiraled down at

Bahawalpur, near Multan in eastern Pakistan,

John Gunther Dean was the U.S. ambassador

in neighboring India. Dean, a distinguished

diplomat who had garnered more

ambassadorships than most envoys of his

generation, was also a person with strong

opinions drawn from years of experience

abroad, opinions he sharpened as he moved

from post to post. He had on numerous occasions

clashed with superiors or disagreed

with the American policies he was expected

to promote. He was a prickly independent

thinker, not a popular breed in diplomacy.

In New Delhi in August 1988, a lot

of history came together in Dean's mind.

He had an immediate suspicion about who

killed Zia, but his putative perpetrator was

not on the list of possible conspirators then

in circulation. Dean thought the plot to rid

the world of General Zia bore the hallmarks

of Israel, or specifically the Israeli intelligence

agency, Mossad.

Dean believed in "dissent through channels,"

not leaks. And, knowing what a controversy

such a public accusation would unleash,

and the effect it would have not only

in the United States and South Asia but also

in the wider Islamic world, he decided to

go back to Washington to explain his theory

in person to his superiors at the State Department.

That act cost him his diplomatic

career.

Poison Gas in the Mangoes?

Among the murkier circumstances surrounding

the August 1988 crash was the

presence of so many important officials and

military officers on one aircraft. The belief

persists to this day that Ambassador Raphel

and General Wassom flew separately to Bahawalpur

and were planning to return to

Islamabad on the military attaché's plane.

Thus, according to that story, a last-minute

decision by Raphel to board Zia's plane for

the return flight introduced a complication

for would-be plotters and an unnecessary

tragedy for the Americans.

Not true, says Gen. Mahmud Ali Durrani,

the (now-retired) commander of the armored

division in charge of the tank tests.

In a telephone interview in July from his

home in Rawalpindi, the site of Pakistani

military headquarters, General Durrani, who

had been General's Zia's military secretary

from 1983 to 1986, said that the guest list

for the flight on the presidential plane had

been fixed by August 13, and the Americans

were on it. There was an American embassy

plane also in service on the 17th, but

it brought other diplomats and officials

from General Dynamics, the maker of the

M-1 tank, he said.

The tank demonstration at a desert site

called Tamewali was a bust; all sides agree

on that. General Durrani said that the M-1

tank never performed well in the 90 days

that three of the vehicles, capable of desert

warfare, had been on loan for field trials in

Pakistan. "They performed very badly, actually,"

he said. "I don't remember a day when

all three were worthy of trials. One of the

problems with the tank was that they had

filters that got choked with our kind of

dust. Our dust was not just sand. It was

sand and clay mixed."

General Zia and his group left Bahawalpur

early, ahead of a storm. The president's

C-130, a turboprop workhorse of a

plane, had a comfortable, air-conditioned

VIP capsule inside, where Zia and his American

guests were seated. It was walled off

from both the four-member flight crew and

a passenger and baggage section in the rear

furnished only with benches.

The plane was packed with Pakistani officers—"

some who should have been there

and some who should not have been there,"

said General Durrani, who dismisses the

theory that the crash might have been a

military plot. Among those on board was

Gen. Akhtar Abdul Rehman, chairman of

the Pakistani joint chiefs of staff and an

architect of the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in

Afghanistan.

Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the deputy chief

of army staff, was scheduled to fly back in

another, smaller plane. His decision to return

alone fueled suspicion immediately, but

in the days and weeks that followed, he

made no attempt to take over the government

or to derail the national elections

planned for November of that year. And

when Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples

Party won those elections, the army did not

intervene to prevent her becoming prime

minister, a rare step for a woman in an Islamic

country.

Zia's plane took off from Bahawalpur at

3:46 P.M. Barely five minutes later, according

to witnesses on the ground, the plane

began to "porpoise" or "roller coaster" in the

sky before dropping into the barren desert

below with all its propellers still running at

full speed, drilling into the earth. It burst

into flames on contact.

There was agreement among Pakistani

and American experts that there was no

midair explosion and no evidence of hostile

fire on the plane. It seemed likely that

the pilot and copilot had simply lost control—

and lost consciousness?—minutes, if

not seconds, into the flight. In those last

doomed minutes, air traffic controllers

could not raise any response from the plane.

General Durrani, who by then had returned

to his home base at Multan and did not see

the crash, dismisses as "garbage" the report

that the copilot was heard shouting to the

pilot, "What are you doing?" There was

no flight data recorder or voice recorder on

the C-130.

Pakistan's official report on the crash

found traces of chemicals in the wreckage of

the plane, a lot of which was buried in the

sandy earth or scattered around the site by

the impact of the crash. Those chemicals,

the Pakistanis said, were phosphorous, chlorine,

potassium, antimony, and pentaaerythritol

tetranitrate. They were all viewed as

potential elements in explosives.

Of special interest to reporters as well

as conspiracy theorists at the time was the

phosphorous found on mango seeds or skins

in the wreckage. There had been instant

speculation when the C-130 went down that

mangoes loaded onto the plane at the last

moment may have contained explosives;

now it was possible to speculate that the

fruit was laced instead with a debilitating,

possibly fatal gas. Khalid Hasan, a Pakistani

analyst writing in the independent Pakistani

newspaper Friday Times in 2004, said that it

was VX gas. Ambassador Dean was also told

in New Delhi that there was VX gas, which

not many countries possessed.

General Durrani, who was at the Tamewali

test site when President Zia arrived in

a helicopter from Bahawalpur, said in July

that there were two sets of mangoes on the

plane when it went down. After the tank

test, he had sent two crates of the local

fruit on the helicopter back to Bahawalpur

with General Zia, to be transferred to the

C-130. That made him suspect in some

eyes. But his mangoes had been thoroughly

checked, one by one, by security, he says.

"I believe some mangoes were also loaded at

Bahawalpur, which were presented by the

local military and civilian leadership," he

said. He had no control over those, or other

baggage put on the plane.

Nonetheless, he thinks the mango theory

is "faulty," because Pakistani investigators

who focused on the mangoes did so

with explosives in mind, yet there was no

explosion in the air or on the ground.

"The aircraft did not explode," General

Durrani said, "It came down, hit the ground

at a steep angle of about 60, 70 degrees,

whiplashed the tail part forward [over the

front of the aircraft] then the plane burnt

exactly where it was. There were no explosions.

In fact, I went there the next morning

and visited that site and there was a complete

profile of the aircraft there on the

ground—the wingspan and the engines half

dug into the ground and the tail that had

whiplashed forward."

General Durrani did not address the

possibility of a nonexplosive but highly

toxic gas in the unchecked fruit or other objects.

No autopsies were performed on the

Pakistani crew to test for gas poisoning.

Various reasons were given, one being that

their bodies were too fragmented to be examined

effectively and/or that Muslim practice

required burial of remains within 24

hours, too soon for forensic work to be done.

General Durrani said that the bodies of the

passengers and crew were reduced to bits of

charred flesh, and that the victims were

identifiable only by clothing or pieces of

identification. Pakistan lacked the technical

expertise to deal with that.

Geopolitics Takes Over

Robert Oakley, a member of President Reagan's

National Security Council, was sent to

Pakistan immediately after the crash to take

charge of liaising with the Pakistanis in the

wake of the tragedy, and then stayed on as

ambassador, replacing Raphel. In an interview

in May, he said that his first task in Islamabad

was "to get into this question of

investigating this plane crash and who was

behind it and what was behind it." By then,

Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a former finance minister

and president of the Senate, had become

acting president.

"I talked to the president of the country

and the chief of the army staff and the head

of the air force and, with the support of the

State Department and Defense Department

in Washington, we agreed there would be a

joint report, not separate reports, and that

the report would be issued after everything

had been completed, and there wouldn't be

any interim reports," Oakley said. "This irritated

some people who wanted to know,

'What's going on?' But the Defense Department

and State Department were absolutely

firm, saying that this is the only way we

could do it." [They said,] 'If there are any

leaks and things it is going to upset the

Pakistanis no end. It's going to destroy the

likelihood that they are going to be honest

with us, and we won't end up with a credible

report.'" Ironically, the leaking was done

in Washington.

Oakley said he told the Pakistanis that

"with a joint report we avoid a lot of mutual

recriminations and undue suspicions." But

in a matter of weeks, Oakley added, Americans

could see a mechanical conclusion shaping

up. [From] "the U.S. team, which was

sent to do the investigation on the ground,

plus all the intelligence backup that we had

from all possible sources, our conclusion was

there was no evidence to support the idea of

any outside force, outside intervention, outside

involvement," he said. "There was no

indication on the plane that anything had

come from the outside to cause the crash.

There was also no indication of any explosives

or any explosion inside the plane.

"The conclusion of our technicians and

others who looked at it, including the

records of all C-130s—both the Air Force

records and the Lockheed Martin records—

[was] that this was a mechanical malfunction,"

Oakley said. "They said it was very,

very likely to be a mechanical malfunction,

although we can't prove it because we didn't

have enough pieces from the wreckage.

Everything that had happened to the plane

was consistent with previous incidents—I

think there were 19 or 20 of them—where

C-130s sort of porpoised [due to] malfunction

of the rudder—the hydraulic system."

The United States expected Pakistani

disagreement. "We believed that the Pakistanis

would not endorse this view," Oakley

said. "The Pakistanis said, 'We can't pinpoint

any specific evidence to show that

there was outside involvement, or that there

was an explosion of some kind from outside

the plane or inside the plane, but we believe

that in all probability some outside element

was involved somehow in the crash.' We

ended up with a split opinion, if you will,

in public."

In Washington, geopolitics had taken

over. "One of the first things that had to be

done after Zia's death to maintain a good

relationship between the United States

and Pakistan was to put this issue to bed,"

Oakley recalled. "They had their say and

we had our say, and we couldn't prove conclusively

that there was no outside conspiracy,

and they couldn't prove conclusively

that there was."

Pakistanis have suggested that Washington

didn't want to blame anyone at that

point, including the Russians, because their

goodwill was essential to completing the

Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan without

last-minute setbacks.

In Islamabad in the days and weeks after

General Zia's death, Oakley, anxious that relations

with Pakistan remain on an even

keel in the critical last months of the Soviet

presence in the region, heard all the rumors

and suspicions. The Israelis were not among

those held suspect, he said. But might Israel

have wanted to preempt a Pakistani nuclear

bomb, which Zia had not only promoted

but had also promised to share with other

Islamic nations? "The prospects for Pakistan

actually having a bomb were quite far off,

and removed, although there was a certain

amount of speculation that maybe eventually

something would happen," Oakley said.

"At that stage, 1988, that was not an imminent

prospect."

Yossef Bodansky, a strategic analyst with

close ties to Israel who is known for his long

shots—and a proponent of the theory that

the Soviet security service, the KGB, would

have been the most likely assassin of Zia—

wrote a decade later that Pakistan was, indeed,

capable of assembling nuclear weapons

by 1988. And South Asians, along with

everybody else, had recently seen what Israel

was willing to do to stop Islamic nations

from becoming nuclear powers. In June

1981, the Israelis had bombed Iraq's Osirak

nuclear facility to prevent Baghdad from

moving into weapons production.

Ambassador Dean's Suspicions

For almost two decades, John Gunther Dean

remained silent about what had led him to

suspect the Israelis in the Pakistani crash,

and about the price he feels he has paid for

trying to interest Washington in his suspicions.

But over the last few years, Dean, now

80 years old, has been collecting his papers

and his thoughts for public consumption.

He has been interviewed extensively for an

official oral history, part of the Foreign Affairs

Oral History Collection of the Association

for Diplomatic Studies and Training in

Arlington, Virginia. A large collection of his

diplomatic documents have been donated to

the National Archives and deposited in the

Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta.

He is also seeking to reopen the question

of his reputation within the State Department,

where he was, in effect, declared

mentally incompetent in 1988 on his visit

to Washington following the crash. In

diplomatic parlance, he lost his medical

clearance. His security clearance was also

lifted, and he ultimately resigned from the

Foreign Service. He was 62.

The State Department produced as evidence

that he was not in a fit mental state a

letter from the department's chief medical

officer for the South Asian region, Dr. David

Koch, who said that Dean appeared in late

August 1988 to be "under stress." Further

neurological tests were done on Dean, with

his cooperation, when he was in Washington.

He also had his own tests done and has

marshaled medical opinion to counter the

official diagnoses.

A former foreign service officer who

worked on the case said that it was Dean's

state of mind and not his suspicions of Israel

that were, at least officially, always the key

factor in the startling nonreception he received

in Washington. Stephen J. Solarz,

then a congressman who was a leading figure

on Asian affairs on Capitol Hill—and a

friend of both Israel and India—said he was

given to understand that Dean had suffered

a nervous breakdown.

In any case, Dean was ordered not to return

to India. He was sent to his country

home in Switzerland to "rest" for more than

six weeks and then allowed to travel to New

Delhi to pack and say his goodbyes. A successor

had already been chosen for the Delhi

ambassadorship well before Dean's ill-fated

trip to Washington, and he knew that there

were plans to replace him, perhaps several

months before Zia's death.

Policy issues were also a factor in the

way Dean was treated, other diplomats from

that era say. Among some policymakers

in the Reagan administration, Dean was

thought to be too close to India and its then

prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, and too willing

to accept and explain away India's persistent

support for the Najibullah government

in Kabul. (At one point, the Indian

government gave Najibullah the run of the

press center in Delhi to meet the international

press corps. His outrageously heavyhanded

performance could not have helped

his cause very much, however.) India, echoing

Moscow, wanted at the very least a

coalition in Kabul with a pro-Soviet faction

retaining some power in the capital. This

was not in the American plan at that point,

though there were proponents of a coalition

solution in Washington.

Still, this doesn't quite explain the timing,

or the suddenness with which Dean was

"drummed out" of the American diplomatic

corps—or how quickly his medical clearance

was reinstated before he retired formally and

irrevocably from the diplomatic service in

April 1989. "If I'm wrong," he said to me

recently, "I don't mind people telling me

I'm wrong. But don't say I'm mentally

deranged."

Dean is perhaps primarily interested in

clearing his own record, which culminated,

ironically, in a distinguished service award

for a career that included opening postcolonial

West Africa to the United States and

crafting an agreement in Laos that saved

that country from the kind of civil wars that

consumed Vietnam and Cambodia. Later, he

served as ambassador in Cambodia (where he

disagreed with Henry Kissinger about ruling

out negotiations with the Communists,

even the Khmer Rouge) as well as in Denmark,

Lebanon, Thailand, and finally India.

But in seeking to reopen the case of

what happened to General Zia, Dean also

wants to remind policymakers and the public

of the unanswered questions about the

deaths of Pakistan's president and an American

ambassador beloved by his foreign service

colleagues, deaths that should not so easily

be written off. Dean is eager to encourage

a new look at the events surrounding

the crash and more research into the possibility

of American-Israeli collusion in effectively

sinking the subsequent investigation.

Dean does not say that he believes Israel

was totally to blame for the crash of the

Pakistani C-130. Rather, he says that there

could have also been other familiar hands

sharing in the plot: India (whose relations

with Israel have improved dramatically

since then), the Afghans, perhaps some

Pakistanis, or the KGB. It was the sophistication

of the suspected plot's execution that

intrigues him, and points him to Israeli

planning. If it was an assassination, it was

a very neat job.

The only comprehensive American journalistic

investigation into the mystery was

written by Edward Jay Epstein and published

in Vanity Fair in September 1989.

(Epstein, who now writes mostly about

Hollywood, did not respond to e-mails

about whether he had continued to follow

the story.) His account does not mention

Israel, but does conclude that there was

much more to investigate.

Dean now lives in retirement in Paris

and Verbier, Switzerland, with his Frenchborn

wife, Martine. I had encountered him

first when he was ambassador in Bangkok

and later in New Delhi, where my assignments

as a New York Times correspondent

coincided with his diplomatic postings, and

I knew of his work in various other Asian

embassies. But we had been out of touch for

more than a decade.

In two days of conversations in May in

the Deans' apartment in the fashionable

16th arondissement of Paris, he spoke of

years of accumulated personal annoyances

with Israeli diplomats abroad, pro-Israeli

members of Congress, and the lobby group

AIPAC—the American Israel Public Affairs

Committee—who seemed to assume that

because he was a Jew born in Germany who

fled the Nazis with his family in 1939 he

would be an automatic supporter of Israeli

governments and policies. He was disturbed

that a small country like Israel seemed to

have so much power in Washington, among

both Democrats and Republicans. "I was

AIPAC's Peck's bad boy," he said.

Dean is on record as having blamed the

Israelis of trying to kill him in Lebanon in

1980, when he was the American ambassador

there and had been criticized in the

Knesset for being too pro-Palestinian. He

was dismayed to discover, with American

government help, that the ammunition that

struck his convoy of three cars coming down

from the hills near Beirut was American,

from a batch sold to Israel.

His ambassadorship in India appears to

have been fraught from the start. He said

that after arriving in New Delhi in 1986,

he was frequently lobbied by congressional

delegations or the State Department to intercede

with the Indians on Israel's behalf.

(For example, to have Israel's lone, low-level

consulate in India, in Bombay, upgraded

during a period when India fawned on Yassir

Arafat and made life miserable for Israeli

diplomats.)

Dean said he was also pressed to speak

up in South Asia about Israel's views on how

dangerous General Zia was becoming to the

region. Israel seemed intent on demonizing

Zia. But did that mean they would be willing

to eliminate him? "If you ask me," Dean

said, "do I have 100 percent proof? No. All

I know is I had people from Congress coming

to me and saying, John, a man of your

background, you have to go and help on the

Israeli issue. I said, What are you talking

about? I'm the American ambassador [in India].

Whatever my religious views are, are

between myself and my maker. I resent this.

Go and talk to Arnie Raphel—and Arnie

Raphel by the way was Jewish, and he got

along great with Zia. Why did these Congress

people come to me and say, John, you

gotta help curb the Pakistani ambitions for

a bomb? Why did they come to me to ask

the Indians to be more forthcoming with

Israel?"

Dean thus leaves the impression that

there is much personal baggage behind his

analysis of the Zia mystery. But that does

not diminish or change the widespread

shared sense among others who were there

at the time that the aircraft malfunction

theory was never really credible. And in

South Asia, where investigations too often

fizzle out inconclusively, no one but the

Americans could have worked methodically

through a case like this with any hope of

resolution.

General Durrani, who calls the Israeli

thesis "far-fetched" and to be expected to

have emerged in South Asia, "where we

have a habit of blaming the Jews for almost

all bad things," nevertheless agrees that it

was a bewildering decision and a serious

mistake in Washington not to field a fullscale

investigation of the 1988 crash while

material evidence still existed. "I don't

know why the U.S. didn't come into this

and do a proper investigation," he said. An

American investigation might well have

found undeniable evidence of a fatal mechanical

fault, helping to quash some, if

not all, of the conspiracy theories that continue

to flourish, among them the most persistent

and damaging of all to the United

States: that the CIA got rid of General Zia

and didn't care if it had to kill an American

ambassador in the process.

"This is not an infallible aircraft," General

Durrani said. "I had traveled many

times on it with the president and many

times we had mechanical, electrical problems.

On three, four occasions, we had to

abandon the aircraft for one reason or the

other. This is what I regret very deeply, that

a proper scientific investigation was not

done."

The Unfinished Story

The unfinished story of the sudden death of

General Zia is not without relevance today,

when the United States is dependent on the

support of another unpredictable Pakistani

general, Pervez Musharraf, in a new era of

involvement in Afghanistan and the search

for Osama bin Laden.

In the 1980s, General Zia was not only

amassing, or trying to purchase, a significant

arsenal of sophisticated American aircraft

and weaponry, but he was also suspected

of working on a nuclear weapon to match

India's. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had dubbed it

the "Islamic bomb," and Zia proclaimed

that he would be happy to share it with other

Muslim nations. This alarmed not only

India but also Russia and Israel, among others.

Since then, Pakistan has only upped the

level of anxiety with a now openly acknowledged

nuclear weapons program. Worse, the

country has been found to be a purveyor of

dangerous and illegal nuclear exports.

If getting rid of General Zia—if that

is what happened—was intended to solve

some of the problems in dealing with Afghanistan,

the record shows that that hope

was at best an illusion. But even if Zia died

in a genuine accident, both the Pakistanis

and Indians have refilled wells of cynicism

about the United States from what looked

like the American indifference to solving

the riddle of his death.

Given prolonged American involvement

with Pakistan, isn't it time to look back

with greater diligence and seriousness at

this mystery? The longer the tragedy goes

unexamined in any rigorous, if not conclusive,

way, the more internally contradictory

and bizarre this story becomes.

 

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