The Duel (18 page)

In June 1977, on the verge of being toppled by the military, Bhutto told parliament, “I know the bloodhounds are after my blood,” and denounced the U.S. secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, for interfering in
the internal affairs of Pakistan. In his death-cell memoir,
If I Am Assassinated,
he alleged that Henry Kissinger had warned him, during one of his visits to Pakistan in August 1976, that unless he desisted on the nuclear question, “We will make a horrible example out of you.” Both Kissinger and Bhutto could be economical with the truth, but the remark has recently been confirmed. A journalist in the Pakistan financial paper
Business Recorder
cites a senior Pakistani foreign official (on condition of anonymity) present on the occasion:

. . . Kissinger waited for a while, and said in a cultured tone, “Basically I have come not to advise, but to warn you. USA has numerous reservations about Pakistan’s atomic programme; therefore you have no way out, except agreeing to what I say.” Bhutto smiled and asked, “Suppose I refuse, then what?” Henry Kissinger became dead serious.

He locked his eyes on Bhutto’s and spewed out deliberately, “Then we will make a horrible example of you!” Bhutto’s face flushed. He stood up, extended his hand towards Kissinger and said, “Pakistan can live without the US President. Now your people will have to find some other ally in this region.” Bhutto then turned and went out.
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If this is accurate, then we have to ask, what happened between February and August 1976? On February 26 that year, while Bhutto was in New York attending the United Nations, a meeting was organized with the secretary of state. The declassified memorandum of conversation offers some interesting insights. Bhutto’s attempts to offer ultraloyal advice on how the United States should have dealt with the Cuban intervention in Angola (via a firm military riposte) and related matters clearly irritated Kissinger, who asked if Bhutto had been speaking to Brzezinski. A rambling discussion on world politics and U.S. strategy follows in which the satrap expresses concern that the imperial power is seen as weak by its enemies, which is disorienting for its
friends. Détente is viewed by Bhutto as having gone too far when “pipsqueak countries like Cuba” can score wins with ten thousand troops in Angola. “There were twelve thousand Cubans,” corrects Kissinger as he deftly parries each thrust. It’s obvious that for him the main reason for the meeting, apart from humoring Bhutto, is the nuclear issue. As the following extract reveals, each side was aware of the other’s position, but the tone here is friendly (if occasionally servile on Bhutto’s side) and far removed from any threats:

BHUTTO: Mr. Secretary, I am sure you like the role we played in the Middle East debate.

THE SECRETARY (KISSINGER): Yes. That was appreciated. If I spoke vehemently on the topic of détente, Angola, and the erosion of central authority, I did so because I believe you were one of the world leaders who understands us.

BHUTTO: After that remark I don’t want to provoke you by mentioning nuclear reactors.

THE SECRETARY: . . . What concerns us is how reprocessing facilities are used at a certain point. I told you last year that we appreciated that you were forgoing a nuclear capability. This placed us in a good position and gave us arguments to assist you in other ways.

The discussion continues with Kissinger stressing his concern that once a nuclear reprocessing plant was built it could easily develop in another direction, and Bhutto pleading disingenuously that in such a case the West could easily bring pressure to bear that could stop that. Kissinger remains unconvinced. When Bhutto explains that Pakistan had pledged never to misuse the reprocessing facilities, his interlocutor points out that he is not interested in “words, but concerned with realities.” The country with the facilities could easily abrogate a binational agreement whenever it wished.

Earlier Bhutto had been informed that the United States was quite happy to provide Iran with nuclear reprocessing plants that could be used by Pakistan and other states in the region. This brilliant idea had matured in the heads of two senior officials in the Ford administration
who would resurface in a later Republican administration: Dick Cheney, then chief of staff at the White House, and Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. Cheney is a keen advocate today of bombing Iran’s nuclear energy stations, an idea that has, till now, been vetoed by the Pentagon. That Cheney and Rumsfeld’s plan might not have been entirely determined by U.S. strategic needs is mentioned in a recent study, whose authors point out that “the first proposed US nuclear deal with Iran would have been extremely lucrative for US corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric, which stood to earn $6.4 billion from the project.”
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Cheney and Rumsfeld were never great believers in self-renunciation. Strategic and business interests could never be separate for them.

Bhutto was not interested in playing second fiddle to Iran and rejected the idea, but he was also not seriously interested in a reprocessing plant. All he wanted was the bomb. That was the instruction he had given to Pakistani scientists. Clearly, between the two meetings with Kissinger the latter was informed by U.S. intelligence of what was really going on. Kissinger’s realization that he was being lied to so blatantly prompted him to start playing the godfather. His rage was not just imperial, but also personal. From 1973 onward Kissinger had spear-headed a campaign to lift the U.S. arms embargo on Pakistan and had dispatched Henry Byroade as U.S. ambassador to accelerate the process and control the nuclear ambitions. Byroade later confirmed this in an interview with historian Niel M. Johnson:

JOHNSON: . . . So you left there in ’73 and went to Pakistan.

BYROADE: That’s right. I planned to retire, and Henry Kissinger talked me into going to Pakistan. I went there for one specific purpose, and I planned to stay about eighteen months. We’d had an arms embargo on Pakistan for about ten years, growing out of the India-Pakistan war. This had worked out in the long term to be, I thought, very unfair to Pakistan, because India turned to the Soviet Union for their armament needs, primarily,
but also to a lot of other countries.... Kissinger said, “This is unfair, and we’ve got to lift that embargo, but it’s not easy with the India lobby and all of that.” So he said, “You go out there and stay long enough to be credible and come back and talk to people on the Hill about it, and see if we can lift that thing.”

. . . You know, it’s very easy to impose these things; India and Pakistan get into a war, our weapons are involved, so “bingo, embargo!” It was very proper, but when it came around to lifting it, it’s something else. But we did during Bhutto’s visit, and we did get a little flak from the Hill but not very much. So we lifted that and were able for the first time to start replenishing some of their equipment. I was then ready to come home, but Pakistan got involved in the nuclear business, which upset me no end. I stayed and struggled, trying to keep that from being a problem between us for two more years. I was there about four years.

JOHNSON: Four years, and Bhutto was still in power?

BYROADE: Bhutto was in trouble, deep trouble when I left, but he was still in power.

JOHNSON: General Zia, was he the one that was...

BYROADE: When I left, he was chief of staff, with, I think, no idea of taking over at that point.
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In 1976, Zia had been made chief of staff by Bhutto. It is possible, but unlikely, that Byroade, whose links with the U.S. military stretched back to the Second World War, had no idea of DIA/Pentagon contacts with Zia, which went back to his time in Fort Leavenworth and had been renewed in Jordan in 1970. Military coups in Pakistan are rarely, if ever, organized without the tacit or explicit approval of the U.S. embassy. Bhutto’s “treachery” on the nuclear issue was the principal reason why the United States gave the green light for his removal.

On the night of July 4–5, 1977, to preempt an agreement between Bhutto and the opposition parties that would have entailed new general
elections, General Zia struck. Having reached an agreement with the United States that Bhutto’s rule was intolerable, Zia was not prepared to tolerate a rapprochement between the two rival political groups. He proclaimed martial law, declared himself chief martial law administrator, promised new elections within ninety days, and placed Bhutto “under protective custody.” Bhutto was stunned. In January 1977 I had visited Pakistan and on my return written a series of three short articles for the
Guardian
predicting a military takeover. This was considered fantastical and the articles were not published. I had repeated the argument to Benazir Bhutto in Oxford, to which she had replied that her father might well be assassinated, but that there could never be a coup “since Zia was in our pocket.” I told her to let her father know that in Pakistan no general was ever in the pocket of a civilian politician.

The army had assumed there would be large public protests and had been prepared to crush them, but was encouraged by the muted response. As a result, Bhutto was released on July 28, 1977. He immediately embarked on a political tour of the country and was greeted by large crowds. In Lahore, half a million people came out to receive him, thus destroying the military’s illusions that he was a discredited and spent force. “Two men, one coffin” is what Zia’s colleagues now told him. Zia realized that Bhutto would win any election that was not heavily rigged. Were this to happen, Zia’s own future would be truncated. This time he made sure that Bhutto would never be free again.

On September 3, 1977, Bhutto was arrested in Lahore and charged with “conspiracy to murder Ahmed Raza Kasuri,” a former PPP member who had joined the opposition. In November 1974, a group of gunmen had opened fire on a car carrying Kasuri and his father. The latter died. Kasuri had accused Bhutto of being responsible, but a special inquiry tribunal had looked into the allegations and rejected them. Kasuri then rejoined the Peoples Party and remained a member from April 1976 to April 1977, but was refused a party nomination to contest the ill-fated March 1977 general elections. This rejection went deep. After Zia’s coup, Kasuri embarked on a private prosecution of Bhutto, and this was now used by the military as a motive in a case of
alleged murder. On September 13, 1977, Bhutto was released on bail by two senior High Court judges—K. Samdani and Mazharul Huq. Four days later he was rearrested in Karachi by commandos under martial law regulations.

The trial for murder began in September 1977 before the Lahore High Court. The two judges who had granted bail were excluded from the bench. The acting chief justice, Maulvi Mushtaq, was a close personal friend of Zia’s and his conduct at the trial was a travesty. Even journalists who disliked Bhutto were shocked by Mushtaq’s vindictiveness. He had been ordered to insult and humiliate Bhutto, and he did so throughout the trial, which lasted till March 1978. Only hearsay evidence implicated Bhutto. One of the state witnesses was Masood Mahmood, a former boss of the Federal Security Force. He had been promised immunity, but ended up with a new identity, a great deal of money, and a luxury apartment in California, where he died in the late nineties. Foreign observers attending the trial included John Mathew, QC, and Ramsey Clark, former attorney general of the United States. Both agreed that in Britain and the United States such a case would never have come to trial since it was based on the uncorroborated evidence of pardoned accomplices.
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Bhutto and four others were sentenced to death on March 18, 1978. An appeal against the judgment was heard in the Supreme Court on May 20, 1978, and continued for several months. Bhutto’s appearance before the court shocked observers. He had lost a great deal of weight and looked haggard. His speech lasted three hours. He defended his political honor, refused to take the charge of murder seriously, and pointed the finger at Zia and his generals, who had decided to do away with him. He concluded by looking at the judges with contempt and saying, “Now you can hang me.” The Supreme Court rejected the appeal by a 4–3 vote. One judge who was considered unreliable by the military was retired during the trial; a second was denied sick leave and a delay in the trial. He had to withdraw from the bench. Chief Justice Anwarul Haq was in communication with the military dictator every single day. A detailed two-hundred-page
dissenting opinion by Justice Safdar Shah provided a devastating rebuttal of the case brought forward by the state. Shah, with whom I spent many hours in London, revealed that he had been threatened before and during the case and told that his relations in the army would suffer unless he behaved himself. He told me, “I was ashamed to belong to a Supreme Court which did the bidding of the military.”

Bhutto was hanged at 2 a.m. on April 4, 1979, in the district jail, Rawalpindi. The day before, he had been visited by his wife, Nusrat, and daughter, Benazir, for the last time. Both women had courageously been campaigning against the dictatorship and had been in and out of prison themselves. He told them how proud he was of his family. Neither woman was allowed to attend his funeral. Some years later the prison where Bhutto was hanged was demolished on Zia’s orders.

Zia had the support of the military high command (with only a single general against) and, of course, the United States.
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The notion that Zia would have gone through with the hanging had it been opposed by Washington is risible. U.S. operatives in the region (including the “anthropologist” and Afghan expert Louis Dupree) had told a number of senior Pakistani officials that Bhutto was dispensable and would soon be out of the way.

The Pakistani leader’s judicial assassination transformed him into a martyr and ensured that his legacy would endure. Washington had assumed that with Bhutto out of the way the Pakistan army would abandon all notions of acquiring a nuclear identity. Here they miscalculated badly. In fact, Bhutto had retained political control of the nuclear facility, keeping the generals at a safe distance. One of Zia’s first instructions was to authorize a total military takeover of Kahuta. Since 1971, the military had become obsessed with revenge. In return for the loss of Bangladesh, they were now going to make a determined effort to destabilize and capture Kashmir, a long-disputed territory to which both India and Pakistan laid claim and which is discussed in a subsequent chapter. It was almost as if they believed their own propaganda according to which “Hindus and traitors” had been responsible for the
Bengali defection. The trauma of military defeat had left a permanent scar on the psyche of many officers unaccustomed to thinking for themselves. A debilitated military apparatus was prepared to take risks to restore its pride.