The World Was Going Our Way (64 page)
Read The World Was Going Our Way Online
Authors: Christopher Andrew
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #True Accounts, #Espionage, #History, #Europe, #Ireland, #Military, #Intelligence & Espionage, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #20th Century, #Russia, #World
At the same time corruption and hypocrisy are eating away at our society. Crime is increasing. The reason is not only a lack of true belief, but the increasing gap between the rich and poor. As All-powerful Allah teaches us: ‘A man will only receive when he is zealous.’ Our prophet Muhammad, may Allah bless him, called on us Muslims to work honestly and hard in respect of the Almighty. This means that a Muslim must only receive what he has earned by his own labours. But Zia ul-Haq and his clique are unlawfully making themselves rich from other people’s work. Even the Zekat [obligatory alms to the needy - one of the pillars of Islam] has become a thing of personal gain to them. Taking advantage of the fact that no one can control them, they award a large part of the Zekat. But the Most High ordered us that: ‘Charity is for the poor and beggars, for the deliverance of slaves, for those in debt, for actions in the name of Islam and for travellers as declared by Allah. He is knowing and wise.’ And our prophet Muhammad, and may He rest in peace, taught us that the Zekat must all be used for the needs of the poor, orphans and widows. Ask our poor people whether they have received much charity from the Zekat. Collecting the Zekat by force, Zia ul-Haq and his clique are not only insulting true Muslims. They are shamelessly ignoring the teachings of Islam. And they manage to hide their own money from the Zekat. All Muslims should know that Zia ul-Haq recently stole millions. He keeps his riches abroad as did the former Shah of Iran, knowing that sooner or later he will be forced to flee. He is hoping that Satan will protect him from the anger of the people. Meanwhile he is serving Satan faithfully by ensuring favourable conditions for the dominance of non-believers. He knows that this will lead to further theft from Muslims.
The clique of Zia ul-Haq has carried out a census of the population and its housing. This was also inspired by Satan as a way to introduce new taxes and labour conditions in contradiction of the teachings of Muhammad, may Allah bless him, for he said that anyone who oppresses a Muslim is not his follower.
Zia ul-Haq is leading the country to disaster. He wants to ride on the atomic devil and become a despot over all Muslims.
But Allah is great and just. Only dust remains from the enemies of Islam, but the warriors for the true faith are remembered for ever.
Everyone must join the fight in the name of Islam against the bloody dictator Zia ul-Haq.
Allah is great!
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101
Other Service A leaflets purported to come from dissident Islamic officers, condemning Zia as a hypocritical traitor who, while professing friendship for Iran, was secretly plotting with the Americans to bring down the Islamic Republic. The Service A forgers threatened Zia with assassination. ‘Next time’, they told him, ‘you will pay for it as Sadat did.’
102
102
Murtaza Bhutto, meanwhile, with the assistance of Najibullah, acting as a KGB surrogate, was preparing a real plot to assassinate Zia. Though the evidence comes exclusively from former Al-Zulfikar sources, it appears that Zia narrowly escaped two assassination attempts early in 1982. The weapon in both cases was a Soviet SAM-7 (surface-to-air) missile. On the first occasion, in January, two Al-Zulfikar terrorists carried a SAM missile in the boot of a car to a deserted hillside in sight of Islamabad airport and awaited the arrival of a Falcon jet bringing Zia home from a visit to Saudi Arabia. But the poorly trained terrorist who fired the SAM did not wait for the red signal in his viewfinder to turn green, indicating that the missile had locked on to its target, and the attack failed. A few weeks later the Pakistani press revealed that on the morning of 7 February Zia would be arriving at Lahore aboard his personal plane. The two terrorists drove to a public park beneath Zia’s flight path with another SAM in their boot, waited for the Falcon jet to come into view and fired the missile. Once again, however, they ignored some of the instructions in the SAM-7 manual. This time the terrorist who fired the missile waited for the green signal but failed to follow the manual’s advice that the aircraft should be watched through the viewfinder until it was hit. The missile missed its target, though on this occasion the Falcon pilot saw the SAM-7 being launched and took what turned out to be unnecessary evasive action. The strict censorship imposed by Zia’s regime prevented any mention of the assassination attempt appearing in the Pakistani press. The two terrorists escaped back to Kabul.
103
Two more SAM-7 missiles smuggled into Pakistan for a further attempt on Zia’s life later in the year were seized by the police before they could be used. As Murtaza’s paranoid strain became more pronounced, he suspected a bizarrely improbable plot between the Afghan regime and Zia to exchange him for the
mujahideen
leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and moved to New Delhi.
104
103
Two more SAM-7 missiles smuggled into Pakistan for a further attempt on Zia’s life later in the year were seized by the police before they could be used. As Murtaza’s paranoid strain became more pronounced, he suspected a bizarrely improbable plot between the Afghan regime and Zia to exchange him for the
mujahideen
leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and moved to New Delhi.
104
Without any credible strategy to bring Zia down, the Centre could do little more than continue to publicize imaginary plots against him, chiefly from a supposedly secret Islamic opposition within the Pakistani armed forces. Some of Service A’s fabrications appear to have deceived the Indian press. In 1983, for example, the Delhi
Patriot
published a text allegedly prepared by a clandestine cell calling itself the Muslim Army Brotherhood (Fauji Biradiri), which denounced the Zia regime as ‘a despicable gang of corrupt generals . . . more interested in lining their own pockets than in defending the nation’, who had ‘betrayed the ideas of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and were leading the country to ruin’. A recent history of Pakistan concludes: ‘Nothing resembling the Muslim Army Brotherhood materialized in the more than ten years that Zia remained at the helm of state affairs, and it would appear to have been the invention of fertile minds in the neighbouring state [India].’
105
Patriot
published a text allegedly prepared by a clandestine cell calling itself the Muslim Army Brotherhood (Fauji Biradiri), which denounced the Zia regime as ‘a despicable gang of corrupt generals . . . more interested in lining their own pockets than in defending the nation’, who had ‘betrayed the ideas of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and were leading the country to ruin’. A recent history of Pakistan concludes: ‘Nothing resembling the Muslim Army Brotherhood materialized in the more than ten years that Zia remained at the helm of state affairs, and it would appear to have been the invention of fertile minds in the neighbouring state [India].’
105
In all probability, however, the ‘fertile minds’ were those not of the Indians but of Service A. Allegations of the Zia regime’s corruption were also a regular theme in KGB disinformation. Zia was said to have large amounts of money in Swiss bank accounts, into which American arms manufacturers paid 10 per cent commission on their sales to Pakistan. KGB disinformation also claimed that Zia had a special plane in continual readiness in case he and his family had to flee the country.
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In Pakistan, as in India, some of the most effective active measures were based on fabricated evidence of US biological and chemical warfare.
107
Operation TARAKANY (‘Cockroaches’) centred on the claim that American specialists in this field had set up a base in the US bacteriological laboratory at the Lahore medical centre, which was secretly experimenting on Pakistani citizens. Outbreaks of bowel disease in the districts of Lishin, Surkhab and Muslim Bag and the neighbouring areas of Afghanistan, as well as epidemics and cattle deaths in Punjab, Haryana, Jammu, Kashmir and Rajasthan in western India were alleged to be the result of the movement across the Pakistani border of people and cattle infected by American germ-warfare specialists. On 11 February 1982 the Karachi
Daily News
reported that Dr Nellin, the American head of a research group at the Lahore medical centre, had been expelled by the Pakistani authorities. The Pakistani newspaper
Dawn
reported on 23 February:
107
Operation TARAKANY (‘Cockroaches’) centred on the claim that American specialists in this field had set up a base in the US bacteriological laboratory at the Lahore medical centre, which was secretly experimenting on Pakistani citizens. Outbreaks of bowel disease in the districts of Lishin, Surkhab and Muslim Bag and the neighbouring areas of Afghanistan, as well as epidemics and cattle deaths in Punjab, Haryana, Jammu, Kashmir and Rajasthan in western India were alleged to be the result of the movement across the Pakistani border of people and cattle infected by American germ-warfare specialists. On 11 February 1982 the Karachi
Daily News
reported that Dr Nellin, the American head of a research group at the Lahore medical centre, had been expelled by the Pakistani authorities. The Pakistani newspaper
Dawn
reported on 23 February:
Following the expulsion from Pakistan of Dr Nellin for dangerous experiments on the spread of infectious diseases, an American delegation of doctors is paying an urgent visit to Islamabad. Their aim is to hush up the scandal over the work of the Lahore medical centre and to put pressure on Pakistan not to make known the work which was carried out at the centre . . . The fact that a group of American doctors has made such an urgent visit to Pakistan confirms that Washington is frightened that the dangerous experiments on new substances for weapons of mass destruction might be revealed. It supports the conclusion that Pakistan intends to allow the Americans to continue to carry out dangerous experiments, probably because these new weapons could be used against India, Iran and Afghanistan.
In May 1982 the KGB succeeded in taking the story a stage further by planting reports in the Indian press, allegedly based on sources in Islamabad, that the United States had stockpiled chemical and bacteriological weapons in Pakistan:
According to information received from local military sources, chemical reagents have recently been sent to Pakistan from the American chemical weapons arsenals on Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean and in Japan. They will be positioned in areas not far from Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Quetta and Peshawar. According to the sources, these reagents are the same as those used by the Americans during the Vietnam War. According to the same reports, the reserve of American chemical and bacteriological weapons in Pakistan is intended for possible use by American rapid-deployment forces throughout South and South-West Asia. Agreement on the stationing of chemical and bacteriological weapons in Pakistan was reached between Washington and Islamabad as early as August 1980 when the agreement on the stationing of the American bacteriological service on Pakistani territory was officially prolonged. Point 2 of Article 5 of this agreement gives the Americans, in the form of the International Development Agency of the USA, the right to evaluate periodically the work and make suggestions for its improvement. In practice this means that the Americans have full control over all aspects of the work in Pakistan on new forms of chemical, bacteriological and biological weapons. This makes it possible for the USA independently to establish how chemical reagents must be stored and used in Pakistan. Confirmation of this is the well-known work in the medical centre in Lahore where American specialists have invented new forms of bacteriological and chemical weapons.
Within the Centre, Operation TARAKANY was considered such a success that Andropov made a special award to the resident in Pakistan.
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Anti-American black propaganda, however, failed to disrupt the increasing co-operation between Zia and Washington. Though Zia spurned the offer in 1980 of a $400-million economic and military aid package from the Carter administration as ‘peanuts’ (a mocking metaphor doubtless derived from Carter’s background as a peanut farmer), in 1981 he accepted an offer from the incoming Reagan administration of $3.2 billion spread over six years.
109
During the war in Afghanistan the CIA supplied over $2 billion of covert assistance to the
mujahideen
through the Pakistani ISI. There was close liaison between the CIA and ISI with a series of exchange visits by their chiefs, Bill Casey and General Akhtar Abdul Rahman.
110
KGB active measures had no discernible effect in undermining either Zia or ISI support for the
mujahideen
. Until Zia’s death in 1988 in an air crash whose cause has never been convincingly explained, his regime proved one of the most stable in Pakistani history.
111
109
During the war in Afghanistan the CIA supplied over $2 billion of covert assistance to the
mujahideen
through the Pakistani ISI. There was close liaison between the CIA and ISI with a series of exchange visits by their chiefs, Bill Casey and General Akhtar Abdul Rahman.
110
KGB active measures had no discernible effect in undermining either Zia or ISI support for the
mujahideen
. Until Zia’s death in 1988 in an air crash whose cause has never been convincingly explained, his regime proved one of the most stable in Pakistani history.
111
When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, became Prime Minister after Zia’s death in 1988, she showed little enthusiasm for
mujahideen
operations in the final stages of the war.
112
Had she become Prime Minister earlier or Zia been assassinated in 1982, the history of the war in Afghanistan would have been significantly different. The KGB had been right to identify Zia’s personal commitment to opposing the Soviet invasion as crucial to Pakistan’s covert role in Afghanistan but had failed in its attempts to put effective pressure on him to diminish or end it.
mujahideen
operations in the final stages of the war.
112
Had she become Prime Minister earlier or Zia been assassinated in 1982, the history of the war in Afghanistan would have been significantly different. The KGB had been right to identify Zia’s personal commitment to opposing the Soviet invasion as crucial to Pakistan’s covert role in Afghanistan but had failed in its attempts to put effective pressure on him to diminish or end it.
20
Islam in the Soviet Union
5
5
During the Cold War the Soviet Union contained the fifth largest Muslim population in the world - less than Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, but more than Egypt, Turkey or Iran.
1
Tsarist Russia’s imperial expansion into the Muslim world had begun four centuries earlier with the conquest of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible’s ‘Soldiers of Christ’. The multicoloured onion domes on St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square supposedly represent the severed, turbaned heads of eight Muslim leaders killed during the conquest. Russia’s occupation of Muslim territory continued at intervals for the next three and a half centuries. The Bolshevik Revolution, however, brought with it the promise of liberation for the Muslim peoples of the Tsarist Empire. Lenin and Stalin, then Commissar for Nationalities, jointly declared on 3 December 1917:
1
Tsarist Russia’s imperial expansion into the Muslim world had begun four centuries earlier with the conquest of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible’s ‘Soldiers of Christ’. The multicoloured onion domes on St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square supposedly represent the severed, turbaned heads of eight Muslim leaders killed during the conquest. Russia’s occupation of Muslim territory continued at intervals for the next three and a half centuries. The Bolshevik Revolution, however, brought with it the promise of liberation for the Muslim peoples of the Tsarist Empire. Lenin and Stalin, then Commissar for Nationalities, jointly declared on 3 December 1917:
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