The Great Game in Afghanistan: Rajiv Gandhi, General Zia and the Unending War

By Kallol Bhattacherjee

At the height of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a complex multinational diplomacy had proposed setting up a coalition government in Kabul as a solution to the 'Afghan problem'. Even as all sides worked on the coalition, the US took steps that India considered a 'stab in the back'. With the help of the official papers collected by US ambassador John Gunther Dean and conversations with Ronen Sen, Rajiv Gandhi's diplomatic aide during those crucial years, the author recreates the falling apart of the India-US cooperation and the catastrophic effect it had on South Asian history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9789352644407

Kallol Bhattacherjee

Tripura-born Kallol Bhattacherjee grew up in the hills of Northeast India, where he had his first glimpse of India's relentless interaction with the world. In the mid-1990s, on a summer day, he boarded the Kalka Mail from Calcutta (now Kolkata) - a move that eventually led him to the classrooms of the University of Delhi and subsequently to Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he studied political theory, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history of modern Lebanon. He began his journalistic career writing for Mainstream, Seminar, The Jerusalem Post, The Indian Express and the Iranian News Agency. Over the past two decades, he has worked at The Week and The Hindu, where he is currently a senior assistant editor, reporting and writing on international affairs. Over the years, he has reported from conflict zones around the world, including Libya, Tunisia, Syria and Iraq at the height of the Arab Spring, and from India's neighbourhood. He is the author of The Great Game in Afghanistan: Rajiv Gandhi, General Zia and the Unending War (2017) and A Baloch Militant in Delhi (2018). His social media handle at X/Twitter is @janusmyth, and he can be reached on email at [e-mail].

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Introduction:

An Undiplomatic Question

ON 17 AUGUST 1988, President Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan died in an air crash. Was the crash an accident? John Gunther Dean, then the US ambassador to India, did not think so. He raised the question: ‘Who killed Zia?’¹ The question was something that the US government did not want aired at that time. Dean, an outstanding diplomat, was silenced. He was declared mentally deranged and recalled to the United States². But the story of John Gunther Dean did not end with his dramatic departure from Delhi.

Dean could have acted like a sad victim after 1988. Instead, in 2016 at the age of ninety, he celebrated his life as if he had been a winner all along. Dean remains deeply hurt over the controversies of 1988. But he has no regrets because the prophecies that he made in 1988 came true and shaped the world, proving that Dean’s apprehensions about South Asia and the world were right.

For over a quarter-century, John Gunther Dean has been synonymous with conspiracy theories. A long trail of articles and essays emerged after he questioned the circumstances surrounding the violent death of President Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan in an air crash. Dean’s question – ‘Who killed Zia?’ – was the reason for many a doomsday theory. It was impossible to answer, not just for himself, but even for those who probed it.

A large part of those closest to Zia died in the air crash with him. As a result, the story of Zia remains incomplete. But Dean’s question raised the possibility of taking the story forward but at an inconvenient time.³

In an extremely rare move, the US State Department withdrew Dean’s ‘mental health clearance’ and subjected him to a series of bizarre psychiatric tests between September and October 1988. As a result, Dean has come to be remembered only for asking that question. Indeed, the withdrawal of health clearance and the slur of psychiatric instability on John Gunther Dean appear like a conspiracy as it muffled the larger diplomatic meltdown around the time Zia’s aircraft crashed.

The phony diagnosis of a personality change, being declared ‘mentally deranged’, however, did not stop John Gunther Dean from becoming a successful international consultant for multinational projects in the 1990s, and a great friend to many, including this writer. What was shocking was that the punishment came from the government, which he had served for forty-two years. The tense relations between Dean and his employers in 1988 are sufficient to conclude that the allegation of mental ailment was perhaps the only way to stop Dean from raising some embarrassing questions. Despite those bitter memories, Dean has maintained his curious mind and his personal chutzpah.

Dean was not interested in a forensic investigation. He wanted to place before the world the larger drama,⁴ and the diplomatic failure, behind the meltdown of August 1988. Dean indeed had known what diplomatic and political conditions led to the violent death of Zia and triggered the age of terror. But the world, more importantly the US leadership, were not willing to listen.

Dean blamed Israel for the crash. But the final act of pulling the trigger, whether by a divine act or through human machinations, was not the most important issue. What was important for him was the number of events of 1988 that could have been avoided if a better plan was followed regarding Afghanistan’s future and Pakistan’s nuclear ambition – especially since a better plan indeed existed but was not tried out sincerely.

In the pages that follow, I have tried to explain the flow of events largely based on the John Gunther Dean collection of papers, which is now with the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta. Dean collected the papers to vindicate his position over a period of more than four decades of his diplomatic career. He did not have a long-term plan to assist in writing a book with his collection. In fact, collecting the papers was a mere private pursuit for the ambassador who became controversial during the concluding period of his career.

Dean had distinguished himself as ambassador before the India window opened up. He was the US ambassador to Cambodia (1974–75), Denmark (1975–78), Lebanon (1978–81) and Thailand (1981–84).⁵Out of the four ambassadorial assignments, two were exceptionally tough, given the unfolding civil wars in Cambodia and Lebanon. The third assignment was in Thailand, the centre of a serious narcotic trade with cross-border ramifications. Apart from having the unique distinction of having served as ambassador in four locations one after the other, Dean had served abroad with a break of one year (1969–70) since 1965. During 1969–70 Dean served as a fellow of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs and participated in the anti-Vietnam war protests. But his two big appointments were in civil war conditions.

Dean had become a legend after his exploits in Cambodia and Lebanon, and he obviously loved the adulation he received when Newsweek put him on the cover on 21 April 1975, which was then carried all over the world. The Newsweek cover showed Dean, the last American ambassador to Cambodia before its final takeover by the Khmer Rouge. The US embassy staff were evacuated by helicopters from the embassy compound in Phnom Penh and Dean distinguished himself by being the last to be evacuated risking his life. Before leaving, he packed the American flag of the embassy in a plastic sheet and took it along. The image of the American ambassador holding the folded flag despite obvious hardships became iconic – it went viral, in today’s parlance.⁶

By December 1984, when India was moving towards having a new prime minister after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Dean’s long foreign stint made him a great candidate for a home posting, but Dean was aware of his stature and expected more from his life and career. He was aware that retirement was near, but he probably was ready for one last big assignment to boast of. Dean never acknowledged it, but it’s known that he perhaps made a few telephone calls to friends on the Capitol Hill to be Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Rajiv’s India.

The appointment of John Gunther Dean as the US ambassador to India was, therefore, rather unusual as it was made directly by the White House without the express support of the State Department, which wanted to send someone else.⁷ Eventually, Dean was sent in as a coordinator of India–US ties as Rajiv Gandhi’s government went all out for a technology revolution in India. Though Dean remains appreciative of his former bosses in the State Department, at the end, as the story will show, he had no reason to be supportive of either the State Department or the White House. The differences over the appointment were, however, a minor hiccup compared to the developments in South Asia that he was witness to.

After the chill of the 1970s, restarting India–US ties was difficult, but Dean’s presence in Delhi helped bilateral ties. He provided crucial diplomatic support as the two nations began a new round of technological partnerships, which finally brought India and the Silicon Valley closer. In fact, Dean’s role in promoting Indo-US technological cooperation was strong enough to turn him into Rajiv Gandhi’s personal friend.

Dean also made friends with the new entrepreneurs as well as traditional Indian business houses. He travelled to San Francisco to lecture the first generation of Indian IT entrepreneurs to support the changing India of the 1980s. His friendship covered the Modis of Modi-Olivetti fame as well as the Hindujas. Cultivating industrialists in India, who were eager to tap into the coming technology and capital boom in India, and politicians in the US and India, Dean started a trend that would later be known as ‘economic diplomacy’. Economic diplomacy also gave him some early troubles.

A controversy erupted in 1985, when former White House deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver – known as a powerful member of the Reagan White House due to his proximity to the president himself – visited New Delhi.⁸ He had by then quit the White House and launched the successful lobbying firm Michael K. Deaver & Associates. Though Deaver left the White House, he retained his influence with the Reagan staff. The unofficial access to the administration that he enjoyed made Deaver controversial. After Deaver arrived in New Delhi, the New York Times wrote a story alleging that Dean had broken rules by hosting Deaver in the ambassadorial residence. Dean did not deny the allegation even as he helped Deaver with local contacts.

Deaver played a constructive role by meeting industrialists in Delhi who were allowed to benefit from the widespread technological exchanges between India and the United States that began from the early months of Rajiv Gandhi’s term. Dean obviously supported the engagements. Delhi was going to be the biggest and the ultimate posting of his career, and Dean was willing to risk criticism to make it a success.

The skirmishes over his appointment and the Deaver episode were soon forgotten, and Dean got down to prepare for Rajiv Gandhi’s official visit to the US. Dean’s stint in New Delhi saw India, the US and Pakistan attempting to rearrange South Asian affairs. But the brief window of cooperation was shut following bilateral problems between India and Pakistan and their respective dynamics with the United States. By August 1988, Dean would become a convenient scapegoat for this diplomatic failure.

After his Delhi assignment, Dean chose a career with a mix of leisure and business. But he continued to remain of interest to diplomats and journalists who often dropped by at his Paris apartment.

John Gunther Dean turned ninety on 24 February 2016. His dramatic life as a diplomat, author, soldier, adventurer and high-power business consultant was celebrated by his family and friends in Geneva, Paris and elsewhere. The telephone rang throughout the day with best wishes from friends all over the world. But the phone call that stayed with Dean was the one from Ronen Sen, the former Indian ambassador to the US and the former joint secretary in charge of intelligence and nuclear issues under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

It was a rare phone call, as Sen and Dean had connected after a gap of almost two decades. It brought back so many memories for both Dean and Sen. After the two spoke, Sen put down the phone; he was struck by the fact that Dean had no bitterness over the way his diplomatic career ended in a storm of controversy in 1988–89.⁹

The Deans have lived in a lavish but lonesome house in Jules Sandeau near the Eiffel Tower. There were no dearth of friends, except in the initial few months after the crisis erupted. But Dean and his wife Martine have no regrets about asking the uncomfortable question and about blaming Israel for the assassination of President Zia.

Apart from Dean, President Zia’s ambassador to the United States, Jamsheed Marker, too believes that President Zia was assassinated.¹⁰ Interestingly, everyone connected to Zia through friendship or hostility has had to pay a price. Zia’s main partner in the Afghan jihad, Akhtar Abdur Rahman, the former chief of Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), perished with him in the same air crash. Mohammed Najibullah, the president of Afghanistan was executed in 1996. The price that Dean paid was equally steep. He had to pay the price despite the fact that at the time of the controversy around ‘Who killed Zia?’ Dean was one of the most distinguished diplomats of the United States.

The following pages attempt to examine the conspiracy theories and bring out the truth around the violent incidents of 1988, based upon the John Gunther Dean collection and interviews with several diplomats associated with the events of the Rajiv Gandhi years in Delhi. The papers of this unique collection reflect the global politics, American diplomatic practice and the unique cold war era diplomacy that is now part of diplomatic history.

Dean served in various locations in Asia and Africa which gave him a vantage point to observe the historic developments of these countries during the second half of the twentieth century. Every Asian posting coincided with tumultuous developments and he was duty-bound to send political reports to the American foreign policy team. As a diplomat, writing long political notes for the State Department and the White House came easily to him. But unlike many of his colleagues, Dean preserved copies of whatever diplomatic notes he sent out. The John Gunther Dean Papers – stored in eighteen containers in the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library – contain a formidable collection of diplomatic correspondence, from 1974 to 1989, that Ambassador Dean built up in the privacy of his office and home. These letters and official cables tell the tale without the twists and turns that political autobiographies and biographies often imparted to the issues.

Copying diplomatic documents is a prerogative of a serving diplomat as long as the papers are not used for non-official purposes. In Dean’s case, the paper collection began in the late 1960s, more specifically when Dean served in the US embassy in Paris and chronicled the nascent peace process for the resolution of the Vietnam War.¹¹

Each part of his massive collection tells the tale of a particular part of the history of Lebanon, Cambodia, France, India, Laos and even Africa. This book relies, however, solely on papers having a bearing on the India–Pakistan–Afghanistan relations. Each of the country-specific segments of these papers was placed on the ‘Declassification Schedule’ (DS) annually. While the papers on Cambodia were the first to be on the DS, his papers on India, being the last and most sensitive, were the last to be placed on the DS.

As a result of the delay in declassifying the India papers, they were not available to Dean when he was writing his autobiography. Some of the cables immediately following the air crash of President Zia remain under the supervision of the ‘powers that be’ (language used by the library staff in a humorous way) and are unlikely to be ever declassified.

In his autobiography Danger Zones, Dean did mention India–US attempts at working together on Afghanistan and the ultimate disagreement between the two over Afghanistan’s future and Pakistan’s nuclear status, but he did not deal with the story exclusively as his focus was on essaying his own life. The section of the biography dealing with his India stint was also hampered as the documents from his personal collection had not been, as per rule, declassified by then. The rule book of the National Archives of the United States stipulates a mandatory period of twenty-five years before official documents can be declassified.

So, a major chunk of history in Af–Pak affairs was missing in Dean’s autobiography, something that became clear to me as I went through the papers in the Dean collection at the Jimmy Carter Library in 2014. The lack of complete documentary understanding of what happened between India, the US, Pakistan and Afghanistan in the cusp years of the cold war egged me on to further study and this has resulted in the present book.

This is based on the impression that I gathered from the India-specific parts of the collection, after the library released them to me following support from Dean and his family. Though India’s disagreement with the US on Afghanistan has been commented upon, it takes the papers of the Dean collection to highlight the vast impact that the disagreement, and the dumping of the Geneva Accords by President Zia-ul-Haq, generated. The aftershocks of the India–US disagreement over arming Pakistan with American weapons and President Zia’s betrayal of the Geneva Accords of April 1988 continue to rock South Asia well into the twenty-first century.

Diplomats who worked during these difficult years told me that the story of Afghanistan of the 1980s cannot be complete without going into how the United States, India and Pakistan worked on a peace plan and how the plan finally failed to take off due to differences among the stakeholders.

Since 9/11, Af–Pak has grown as a discipline, producing the impression that Afghanistan’s affairs can be better understood by the hyphenated discipline. A wide array of literature has been built on the narrow Af–Pak focus, as if the destiny of Afghanistan was drawn by keeping Pakistan in focus and vice versa. This book is the counter-narrative of the narrow Af–Pak project to show that the focus of the crisis was much broader.

The papers consulted for this book begin with Box 5 of the John Gunther Dean collection. Box 5 covers 1985–88 executive-level cooperation and provides insights into the relations between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and President Ronald Reagan. The box, divided into Part 1 and 2 by Dean himself, is remarkable because it contains exchanges of letters on Afghanistan, Pakistan, narcotics, and the regional order of South Asia. The papers had been held in a digital format in the CIA computers stored in the library, an archivist told me when I first contacted the library. But after several attempts, the papers finally began arriving on my laptop. Needless to say, Dean’s own eagerness to declassify the papers had been the secret support that I received while trying to access the papers. Accessing the papers was made easier by the professionalism of the archivists at the Jimmy Carter Library, but on one occasion at least, the archivist at the library told me that given the importance of the papers, ‘the powers that be’ had noticed my interest in the collection. However, Dean felt that having served the required twenty-five-year classified period, the entire India-specific part of the collection had to be released, and so they were for me.

Boxes 5, 6 and 7 are chronologically arranged from 1985 to 1988, with handwritten citations by John Gunther Dean. The papers begin with an early letter for Rajiv Gandhi from Vice-President George H.W. Bush following the June 1985 visit to Washington DC by Rajiv Gandhi and include every bilateral issue till the immediate aftermath of the air crash that killed President Zia-ul-Haq. The issues discussed cover how to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, India–Pakistan nuclear rivalry, India’s military exercises, diplomatic exchanges between India and the US, and high-technology exchange. The most interesting aspect of these letters and diplomatic cables is the tone of the communication.

The early cables show warmth and a commonality of purpose, but towards the end of the collection, bitter disagreements, personal disappointments, terms like ‘stab in the back’,¹² suspicion and unhappiness stand out to show the diplomatic meltdown that surrounded the violent incidents of 1988. While exchanges between Indian and American diplomats and ministers got shriller, an internal fight broke out within the American diplomatic community as well, of which Dean was a collateral victim.

Ronen Sen, who handled most of the letters when they were exchanged between Gandhi and Reagan, told me that in his opinion, these are the most important letters exchanged ever between an Indian prime minister and an American president. Given the wide variety of issues – Afghanistan, Pakistan’s growing nuclear status and military sales to Pakistani military, disarmament, Sri Lanka, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), technological cooperation, agriculture – these letters appear to be of timeless importance.

The executive communications contained in Box 5 are important, but perhaps more important are the diplomatic cables that show Sen, Dean, Arnold Raphel, Stephen Solarz, Peter Galbraith, A.P. Venkateswaran and K. Natwar Singh participating in the flow of events, in New Delhi, Islamabad, Rome and Washington DC. While the executive communication set the boundaries of the arena, diplomatic exchanges by these crucial figures added to the full frame.

It is interesting to note that while Ambassador Dean preserved priceless communications between Indian, American and in some cases even comments from Pakistani officials on Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, he also took care to preserve communications that could refocus light on the difficult moments in India–US ties, especially on Pakistan–Afghanistan and Pakistan’s policy on nuclear weapons. Though executive communications were conducted in a courteous tone, Dean’s own notes and political cables preserved the intelligence ‘incidents’ that broke out repeatedly between the American and Indian sides during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure. The 1980s were the period when intelligence acquired a new strategic dimension due to intelligence about nuclear issues becoming highly prized in South Asia.

Two incidents took place in 1988 in quick succession. The first was the detection of an American intelligence asset in the US consulate in Madras, which led to the evacuation of an official posted in the US mission in Madras. The second involved the ‘Dr Subbarao incident’, an alleged attempt by a retired Indian naval scientist to flee with classified nuclear documents. In both the cases, Rajiv Gandhi personally confronted Dean illustrating the sad state of affairs that prevailed in India–US relations in 1988.

The case of Subbarao especially became a widely recounted one, due to the fact that it erupted at a time of considerable tension in India–US relationship in May and June 1988. Years later, Subbarao told a news magazine about the unverifiable grounds of his detention by the law enforcement authorities. The arrest made little immediate sense as Subbarao, at the time of his arrest, was not carrying nuclear secrets, but his PhD thesis. The arrest and the twenty-month detention of Subbarao remains unexplained till date given the flimsy grounds on which it was conducted. However, it appears that Subbarao, who was one of the individuals with some knowledge of India’s nuclear submarine project, was also tracked by the American intelligence agents working from the US embassy in New Delhi.

In both the cases, Dean ensured the speedy departure of the concerned American personnel from India while personally absorbing the blowback from Rajiv Gandhi. Upon reading the entire India-related classified papers, it appears that at least the Subbarao incident was partly precipitated by the downturn in the overall India–US strategic relationship from the great heights during January–June 1985 to the alarming depths during June–August 1988. Similar intelligence-related incidents were brushed under the carpet in the early months of Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure as India–US ties were on the ascendance, but relatively smaller incidents like the two mentioned, prompted the prime minister of India to personally intervene in 1988.

By 1988, as a result of India’s pro-US tilt, technology cooperation began to thrive, but the heart of it all, the strategic understanding between India and the US over Pakistan and Afghanistan, had crumbled. Once Rajiv Gandhi felt that India was not getting any benefits on Pakistan and Afghanistan from the United States, there was little else to retain the India–US relations at the euphoric 1985 levels. At the end of the cold war, as the US appeared triumphant against Soviet might, India’s top decision makers appeared deeply upset about the American lack of cooperation over Pakistan’s nuclear and Afghanistan-related ambitions.

In one of the last letters to be exchanged between Reagan and Rajiv, the former invited Rajiv to discuss the India–US relationship on the sidelines of the annual General Assembly session of the United Nations. The letter was sent to India on 30 August 1988, a fortnight after the air crash that killed President Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan.

‘I plan to be in New York on September 27, and would welcome an opportunity to meet with you or your representatives that morning,’ Reagan wrote.

Rajiv Gandhi responded on 3 September 1988:

Dear Ronald,

On August 15, in your address at the Republican Party’s national convention, something you said struck me as particularly apt to relations between India and the United States. You spoke of the need ‘to keep the fire so that when we look back at the time of choosing we can say that we did all that could be done. Never less.’¹³

After counting the achievements in India–US cooperation, Rajiv Gandhi conveyed his inability to a meeting on the morning of 27 September and chose instead to visit Bhutan that day.

After starting a spectacular cooperation between India and the United States, the core of that cooperation had frozen and India’s political leadership had little political incentive to revive the warmth of India–US ties. These pages aim to portray how over four years of India–US diplomacy, Af–Pak affairs led to the ultimate falling out between India and the United States. Rajiv Gandhi had extended a personal invitation to Ronald Reagan to visit India during his first visit to the US in 1985. But Reagan did not visit India during his presidency.

1

‘Who Killed Zia?’

ON 17 AUGUST 1988, US ambassador John Gunther Dean was alone in his office in Delhi when the phone rang. Dean’s office was usually full of fun and people, stories and gossip. Guests were welcomed freely. Yet that mid-monsoon afternoon, all activity ceased as Dean listened carefully. His staff knew that the call was important, as it was not channelized through the operator.

The phone call was from Joint Secretary Ronen Sen who handled all sensitive communications and intelligence in the office of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Ronen and Dean worked closely, often coordinating on issues of interest on a daily basis. On that day in August 1988, Dean did not expect anything untoward to happen between India and the US, and a call or meeting with Ronen was not on the cards. But across the border, nearly 680 kilometres from Delhi, inside Pakistan, dramatic developments were taking place that were to change South Asia and Dean’s life forever.

Ronen Sen was calm as he told the American ambassador to New Delhi that he had just been informed that Pak One, the presidential aircraft of Pakistan, had crashed. He had no further information and the brief phone call ended with Ronen promising to call back shortly.

Dean trusted his source but felt the news was incredible, because he knew well that an air crash killing the Pakistani president in suspicious circumstances could immediately trigger another India–Pakistan war.¹ Ties between India and Pakistan had been tense for months and now the unthinkable had happened. But did the aircraft crash with Zia on board? Or was it flying without VVIP passengers? Doubt and fear crowded Dean’s mind. A war of vengeance could quickly turn nuclear, Dean worried.

Within minutes Sen was back with confirmation: Zia’s aircraft had crashed. And Zia was not alone in that aircraft. He was accompanied by almost the entire top brass of the intelligence and armed forces of Pakistan. Dean says that during those calls, Sen also told him that Indian satellites had filmed the final moments of the air crash.²

A torrent of questions rushed through Dean’s mind as he listened to Sen. It was clear to him that the air crash represented a doomsday scenario. He put the phone down and walked out of the office to inform his staff to remain on the alert.

Dean immediately began writing points for reports on the day’s developments for the White House and the Secretary of State.

Despite nearly two decades between them, Dean had reasons to trust Sen. Indian officials usually addressed him as Ambassador Dean, but Sen was a friend and the informality was part of the working relationship between the American ambassador and Rajiv Gandhi’s most trusted aide. It was this rapport between the two men that kept India and the US aware of the meltdown across the border. It also turned out to be a day of personal loss for both as one of the intercepts revealed that the American ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, had also gone down with Zia.

Sen had the resources to eavesdrop on Pakistan’s sensitive communications in ‘real time’. He was the coordinator of India’s secret agencies, who had to go through his office whenever the prime minister wanted a briefing. In the first four years of Rajiv Gandhi’s premiership, India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Military Intelligence underwent extensive changes³ and Pakistani leaders did not know that listeners across the border could get ‘live’⁴ inputs on the developments inside Pakistan.

Ronen Sen, in August 1988, was arguably the most powerful information manager in South Asia, and a single misstep or inaccurate diagnosis from him could trigger disaster. He was checking the details through all possible channels. The intercepts were revealing a fast-paced chain of events in Pakistan.

‘All my diplomatic life I worked with the CIA and found that they were often better informed than the diplomats of the State Department because the CIA always worked harder and did great fieldwork,’ Dean told me later when I asked him about his friendship with Ronen Sen.⁵ Dean felt that a diplomat who could balance diplomacy with intelligence gathering and spy craft was always the best in the business. As a diplomat who began in the field of military intelligence during World War II, Dean had that mix of spy craft and diplomacy. In Sen’s nuanced and sanitized briefings, he often saw that mix of strategic communication as well as diplomatic utility.

As electronic surveillance intercepted communications at the Pakistan military establishment’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, Sen received updates every minute. He called Dean every few minutes to give the latest update on the Zia air crash.

In those initial moments, Dean and probably his long-time personal secretary Leona Niemann were the only Americans to know that President Zia’s aircraft had fallen from the sky.

With each phone call, a clearer picture of President Zia’s last day emerged. Earlier that morning, Zia had travelled to Khairpur Tamewali field firing range near Bahawalpur in the Lockheed C-130B Hercules christened Pak One. The firing range was to host field tests of the US-made M1 Abrams tank the Pakistan Army was evaluating for induction into service. US ambassador Arnold Raphel accompanied Zia. The American team also included Brigadier General Herbert Wassom, the chief of the US military mission in Pakistan. Apart from the Americans, an entire top rung of the Pakistani power elite were with Zia, including General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, the brain behind Zia’s jihad in Afghanistan.

At 4:30 p.m. on 17 August 1988, Pak One, the VVIP aircraft with thirty-one passengers⁶ led by President Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, took off from Bahawalpur airport.

For two minutes and thirty seconds, the aircraft flew normally, gaining height rapidly, while maintaining contact with the

Reviews for The Great Game in Afghanistan

[Rohit Revo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very engrossing. Gives a realistic view about Rajiv Gandhi’s efforts to lift indian diplomacy game.