Zia And Bhutto How Zia Throw Bhutto Government

hen and how General Zia imposed Martial Law

When and how General Zia imposed Martial Law

In a democracy, it is your vote that is count. In feudalism, it is your count that votes. Moreover, in a dictatorship, nobody votes at all. We know that politicians like high buildings because they seek high offices. So, what had been the high office General Zia desired? A politician with a bad back needs a lot of support. Apparently, General Zia had no bad back, and did not get any support either. History is a proof of how unsatisfactory and unwelcome is any nation’s acceptance for a dictator. Dictators are, as a rule, perceived as nasty, brutal tyrants. Hitler is only one of the rotten examples from History. Why then, would General Zia choose to earn an ill-reputed fame?
Politicians tend to double cross bridges when they come to any. So, what was the bridge that had stood in General Zia’s way? A bridge strong enough to compel him into becoming a dictator and imposing a martial law? Zia was Pakistan’s longest serving head of state, ruling for eleven years. How did Zia, went from being the Chief of Army Staff to the longest serving head in Pakistan? How indeed!
To start with the scratch, it was Prime Minister Bhutto who had appointed Zia in this position, unfortunately for him, followed an overabundance of ill luck. The incessantly welling criticism and unpopularity of Bhutto gave birth to dissidence within the people’s party. The bereavement of a principal rebel, moreover, was fire to Bhutto’s wounds, resulting in Bhutto being accused of being the instigator behind the scene.

Amidst all this chaos, Zia saw his golden chance to strike while the iron was red-hot. Therefore, he struck, quick, lightening and deafening as thunder in the eventful year of 1977. Fakhruddin Ebrahimin this manner describes the overthrow staged by Zia:
General Zia and his military government rendered the coup as a “spontaneous response to a difficult situation.” The entire thing was planned with a keen and witty hindsight, for Zia knew well how loyal some of the political heads were to Bhutto. Thenceforth, In the July of 1977, Bhutto was arrested by orders of General Zia.
One has to say, Zia’s design was foolproof and well planned. He knew what he was doing and why it has to be done. He knew the public outrage and PPP’s dispute with Bhutto had brought him in a crucial situation and he knew that that was the best time to strike. He struck like a cobra, for deadly he definitely was. Bhutto was ultimately executed two years from then and so ended his chapter, and gave rise to General Zia’s rule.
Such were the matters of how and when Zia rose to power and imposed martial law for the third time in the country’s history.

WHO KILLED ZIA-UL-HAQ(PART-3)

General (R) Hamid Gul

When I got to Pakistan in February and called upon General Hamid Gul, the Director General of the ISI, I found out that political events had apparently overtaken this mandate. He told me that his agency had called off its investigation at the request of the government and had transferred the responsibility for it to a "broader based" government authority headed by a civil servant called F.K. Bandial. It was not using the resources of his intelligence service and, as far as he knew that committee had not begun the work. His tone suggested that, he did not expect any immediate resolution of the crime.

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But it was still possible to come to some reasonable conclusions about what happened to Pak One, if not the precise cause. And there were still outstanding, however, disturbing pieces of evidence. A crucial piece missing in the puzzle was what had happened to the pilots during the final minutes of the flight because the accident investigators found that there was no black box or cockpit recorder on Pak One to recover. Yet, there were three other planes in the area tuned to the same frequency for communications-- General Beg's turbojet, which was waiting on the runway to take off next, Pak 379, which was the backup C-130 in case anything went wrong to delay Pak One, and a Cessna security plane that took off before Pak One to scout for terrorists. I managed to locate pilots of these planes-- all of whom were well acquainted with the flight crew of Pak One and its procedures-- who could listen to the conversation between Pak One and the control tower in Bahawalpur. They independently described the same sequence of events. First Pak One reported its estimated time of arrival in the capital. Then, when the control tower asked its position, it failed to respond. At the Same Time Pak 379 was trying unsuccessfully to get in touch with Pak One to verify its arrival time. All they heard from Pak One was "stand by" but no message followed. When this silence persisted, the control tower got progressively more frantic in its efforts to contact Zia's pilot, Wing Commander Mash'hood. Three or four minutes passed. Then, a faint voice in Pak One called out "Mash'hood, Mash'hood". One of the pilots overhearing this conversation recognized the voice. It was Zia's military secretary, Brigadier Najib Ahmed who apparently, from the weakness of his voice, was in the back of the flight deck (where a door connected to the VIP capsule.) What this meant that the radio was switched on and was picking up background sounds; in this sense, it was the next best thing to a cockpit flight recorder. Under these circumstances, the long silence between "stand bye" and the faint calls to Mash'hood, like the dog that didn't bark, was the relevant fact. Why wouldn't Mash'hood or the three other members of the flight crew spoken if they were in trouble? The pilots aboard the other planes, who were fully familiar Mash'hood, and the procedures he was trained in, explained that if Pak One's crew was conscious and in trouble they would not in any circumstances have remained silent for this period of time. If there had been difficulties with controls, Mash'hood instantly would have given the emergency "may day" signal so help would be dispatched to the scene. Even if he had for some reason chosen not to communicate with the control tower, he would have been heard shouting orders to his crew or alerting the passengers to prepare for an emergency landing. And if there had been an attempt at a hijacking in the cockpit or scuffle between the pilots, it would also be overheard. At the minimum, if the plane was crashing towards earth, screams or groans would have been heard. The radio must have been working since it picked up the brigadier's voice. In retrospect, the pilots had only one explanation for the prolonged silence: Mash'hood and the other pilots were either dead or unconscious while the microphone had been kept opened by the clenched hand of one of the pilots' on the thumb switch that operated.

I could not be ascertain if such tapes actually existed. If they did, the clarity could possibly enhanced to separate other background sounds from the static. Although one witness claimed that he had listened to recordings of these conversations after the crash to identify Mash'hood's voice, the control tower operators at Bahawalpur denied having recorded the conversations although they suggested it might have been taped by the Multan airport forty miles away.In any case, the account of the eyewitnesses at the crash site dove-tailed with the radio silence. They had seen, it will be recalled, the plane pitching up and down as if it were on a roller coaster. According to a C-130 expert I spoke to at Lockheed, C-130's characteristically go into a pattern known as a "phugoid" when no pilot is flying it. First, the unattended plane dives towards the ground, then the mechanism in the tail automatically over-corrects for this downward motion, causing it to head momentarily upwards. Then, with no one at the controls, it would veer downward. Each swing would become more pronounced until the plane crashed. Analyzing the weight on the plane, and how it had been loaded on, this expert calculated the plane would have made three roller-coaster turns before crashing, which is exactly what the witnesses had been reported. He concluded from this pattern that the pilots had been conscious, they would have corrected the "phugoid"-- at least would have made an effort, which would have been reflected in the settings of the controls. Since this had not happened, he concluded, like the pilots in the other planes, that they were unconscious. He suggested that this could be accomplished be planting a gas bomb in the air vent in the C-130, triggered to go off, when the plane took off and pressurized air was fed into the cockpit.

My investigations at the Bahawalpur airport showed that planting a gas bomb on the plane that day would not have entailed any insurmountable problems. Instead of following prescribed procedures and flying to the nearby air base at Multan where it could be guarded, Pak One had remained at the air strip that day. According to one inspector there, a repair crew, which included civilians, had worked on adjusting the cargo door of Pak One for two hours that morning. Its workers entered and left the plane without any sort of search. Any one of them could dropped a gas bomb into the air vent.

I also spoke to an American chemical warfare expert about poison gases that could have been used. He explained that Chemical agents capable of knocking a flight crew, while extremely difficult to obtain, are not beyond the reach of any intelligence service, or underground group with connections to one. He also pointed out that a gas capable on insidiously poisoning a whole flight crew (and leaving the pilot's fingers locked on the radio switch) had been used in neighboring Afghanistan. According to the State Department's special report 78 on "Chemical Warfare in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan," which he sent me, corpses of rebel Muejadeen guerrillas were found still holding their rifles in firing positions after being gassed. This showed that they had been the victims of "an extremely rapid acting lethal chemical that is not detectable by normal senses and that causes no outward physiological responses before death." This gas manufactured by the Soviet would have done the trick. But so would American manufactured "VX" nerve gas, according to a scientist at the U.S. Army chemical warfare center in Aberdeen, Maryland. "VX" is odorless, easily transportable in liquid form, and a soda-sized can full would be enough, when vaporized by a small explosion, and inhaled, to causes paralyzes and loss of speech within 30 seconds. According to him, the residue it would leave behind would be phosphorous. And, as it turned out, the chemical analyzes of debris from the cockpit showed heavy traces of phosphorous.

Such an act of sabotage would probably leave other detectable traces. The chemical agent that killed or paralyzed the pilots could probably be determined through an autopsy of their bodies. If it was a sophisticated nerve gas, it had to be obtained from one of the few countries that manufactures it, transported across international borders, and packaged with a detonator and fuse mechanism into bomb that would burst at the right moment after take off. All this could be trace back, just as the bomb on Pan Am 103 in Scotland was eventually identified and traced. Moreover, in Pakistan, the device had to be delivered to an agent capable of planting it on Pak One at a military air base. And someone had to supply him with intelligence about Zia's movements, the operations of Pak One, and the gaps in its security. Since access was limited to a few dozen persons, these people were vulnerable to discovery through an ordinary police investigation. Access to American intelligence resources, such as the technical labs of the FBI, the counter-terrorist profiles of the CIA, and the electronic eavesdropping archives of the National Security Agency, might also have helped locate the source of the intelligence (especially if it had been broadcast). But I found no such determined investigation took place.

To begin with, as noted by the Board of Inquiry, autopsies were never performed on the bodies of the flight crew. The explanation told to me by the Pentagon official, and apparently given in the secret report, was that Islamic law requires burial within 24 hours. But this could not been the real reason since the bodies were not returned to their families for burial until two days after the crash, as relatives confirmed to me. Nor were they ever asked permission for autopsy examinations. And, as I learned from a doctor for the Pakistan Air Force, Islamic law not withstanding, autopsies are routinely done on pilots in cases of air crashes. I further determined from sources at the military hospital in Bahawalpur that parts of the victims' bodies had been brought there in plastic body bags from the crash site on the night of August 17, and stored there, so that autopsies could be performed by team of American and Pakistani pathologists. On the afternoon of August 18,however, before the pathologists had arrived, the hospital received orders to return these plastic bags to the coffins for burial. The principal evidence of what happened to the pilots was thus purposefully buried.

The police investigation of those who had access to Pak One at the airport and were involved in its security, also appeared to be similarly curtailed. According to a security officer who was there that day, the ground personnel was not methodically questioned. Instead, they said in interviews almost uniformly that they were amazed that no one was interrogated. The only inquiry that they saw taking place was the inquiry by the American team. The questions by the Americans, which had to go through a Pakistani translator, were largely confined to the aircraft's maintenance and movements prior to take off. Other activities that day were not explored. For example, according to a police inspector at Bahawalpur, a policeman at the airstrip that day was found murdered shortly thereafter, but it was not connected to the air crash or, for that matter, resolved.

For its part, Pakistani military authorities attempted to foist a explanation that Shi'ite fanatics were responsible for the crash. The only basis for this theory was that the co-pilot of Pak One, Wing Commander Sajid, happened to have been a shi'ite (as are more than ten per cent of Pakistan's Moslems). The pilot of the back-up C-130, who also was a shi'ite, was then arrested by the military and kept in custody for more than two months while military interrogators tried to make his confess that he had persuaded Sajid to crash Pak One in a suicide mission. Even under torture, he denied this charge and insisted that, as far as he knew, Sajid was a loyal pilot who would not commit suicide. Finally, the army abandoned this effort the Air Force demonstrated that it would have been physically impossible for the co-pilot alone to have caused a C-130 to crash in the way it did. And if he had attempted to overpower the rest of the flight crew, the struggle certainly would have been heard over the radio. But why had the military attempted to cook up this shi'ite red herring?

There were other indications of efforts to limit or divert from the investigation, such as the destruction of telephone records of calls made to Zia and Rehman just prior to the crash, the reported disappearances of ISI intelligence files on Murtaza Bhutto, and the transfer of military personnel at Bahalapur, which, taken together, appeared to add up to a well-organized cover up. If so, I was persuaded that it had to be an inside job. The Soviet KGB and Indian R.A.W. Might have had the motive, and even the means, to bring down Pak One but neither had the ability to stop planned autopsies at a military hospital in Pakistan, stifle interrogations or, for that matter, kept the FBI out of the picture. The same is true of anti-Zia underground, such as Al-Zulfikar, although its agents, like the shi'ite, would provide plausible suspects ( or even, if provided convenient access to Pak One, fall guys.) Nor would any foreign intelligence service which was an enemy of Zia's have much of a motive for making it look like an accident rather than an assassination. Only elements inside Pakistan would have an obvious motive for making it the death of Zia, Rehman and 28 others look like something more legitimate than a coup d' etat.

The most eerie aspect of the affair was the speed and effectiveness with which it was consigned to oblivion. Even it involved the incineration of the principal ally of the U.S. in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the abrupt end of the American Ambassador and the head of its military mission in Pakistan were killed in the course of discharging their duties, and the government of one of the few remaining allies of the U.S. In Asia was abruptly changed; there little occurred in the way of repercussions. No outcries for vengeance, no efforts at counter coups, no real effort to find the assassins. In Pakistan, Zia and Rehman's names disappeared within days from television, newspapers and other media-- except on a few monuments in Afghan refugee camps that had not yet been painted over. In the United States, the State Department blocked any FBI interest in investigating the death of its Ambassador and, through press "guidance", distorted the event into just another foreign plane accident. The one uncounted casualty of Pak One was the truth.

WHO KILLED ZIA-UL-HAQ(PART-2)

The Soviets were not, as it turned out, the only nation to pointedly threaten Zia. In Delhi, Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister of India, informed Pakistan on August 15 it would have cause "to regret its behavior" in covertly supplying weapons to Sikhs terrorists in India. The Sikhs, who were attempting to secede from India and create an independent nation called Khalistan, were a crucial problem for Gandhi. They had assassinated his mother when she was prime minister and, with some 2000 armed guerrillas located mainly around the Pakistan border, the death toll from this civil war was approaching 200 a month. Zia had been meeting with top Sikh leaders, according to Gandhi, and providing guerrillas with AK-47 assault rifles, rocket launchers and sanctuary across the Pakistan border. In response, India had organized a special unit in its intelligence service, known by the initials R.A.S., to deal with Pakistan.

It was not unlike Agatha Christie's thriller Murder on the Orient Express, in which, if one looked hard enough, every aboard the train had a motive for the murder. When Zia's eldest son, Ijaz ul Haq, a soft-spoken, impeccably dressed man now living in Bahrain, described to me how his father was persuaded to go to the tank demonstrations that day by his generals, despite his misgivings, and then General Rehman's sons told me how their father was manipulated into going on the same plane, it raised the possibility that the assassination was the work of a faction in the army. After all, as I learned from Zia's son, Zia had planned to make imminent changes in the military.

Zia's great game had also even offended the United States. It was explained to me at the Pentagon that the CIA had become concerned that Zia was diverting a large share of the weapons being supplied by America to an extreme fundamentalist Muejadeen group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Not only was this group anti-American but its strategy appeared to be aimed at dividing the rest of the Afghan resistance so that it could take over in Kabul-- with Zia's support. American anxiety was also increasing over the progress Zia was making in building the first Islamic nuclear bomb. His clandestine effort included attempts to smuggle the Kryton triggering mechanism and other components for it out of the U.S., which had only added to the tensions.

In any case, with Zia death, the U.S. could foresee an amenably alternative: the replacement of the Zia dictatorship, with all its cold war intrigues, with an elected government head by the attractive Harvard-educated Benazir Bhutto. With this prospect, the State Department had little interest in rocking the boat by focusing on the past, as the new American Ambassador, Robert Oakley, told me in Islamabad. This decision was apparently made just hours after the charred remains of Zia were buried. Flying back from the funeral, Secretary of State Schultz recommended that the FBI keep out of the investigation. Even though the FBI had the statutory authority for investigating crashes involving Americans, and its counter-terrorism division had already assembled a team of forensic experts to search for evidence in the crash, it complied with this request.

During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relation Committee, Oakley explained "the judgment of the State Department and the Defense Department was that [the FBI forensic experts] would not add any expertise to the team and that it might create complications because we had already obtained something rather extraordinary, that is, the permission of the government of Pakistan to have U.S. investigators fully involved, with full access to everything which had occurred, involving the death under mysterious circumstances of the President of Pakistan." The result was that the U.S. team assigned to Pakistan's Board of Inquiry included only seven air force accident investigators-- and excluded any criminal, counter-terrorist or sabotage experts.

An unrestricted investigation by the FBI also could have opened up a potential Pandora's box of geo-political troubles. What if, for example, it pointed towards a superpower, a neighbor, or Pakistan's military itself? It could undermine everything the United States was striving to achieve by damaging detente, leading to armed confrontation on Pakistan's borders or even de-stabilize the new and shaky Pakistan government. Why chance such uncontrollable consequences when the change in power could be attributed to an "accident" or "act of god?

The State Department evidently decided to work to control media and public perception of what had caused the crash. Just before a summary of the Board of Inquiry' findings was to be released to the press, Oakley sent a classified telegram from Islamabad providing "press guidance." He advised in a follow-up telegram "It is essential that U.S. Government spokespersons review and coordinate on proposed guidance before commenting to the media on the GOP [Pakistan] release".

This spin control effectively deflected press attention from the report's conclusion actual conclusion that the probable cause of the crash was sabotage. On October 14th, 72 hours before that release, the State Department leaked a pre-emptive story to theNew York Times headlined "Malfunction Seen as Cause of Zia Crash". It began " Experts sent to Pakistan ... have concluded that the crash was caused by a malfunction in the aircraft". But on October 17, when the summary was released, the headline had to be changed to "Pakistan Points to Sabotage in Zia crash". TheTimes now correctly reported that Pakistan's Board of Inquiry had concluded "the accident was most probably caused through the perpetuation of a criminal act or sabotage". But unnamed administration spokespersons, continuing with their pre-prepared press guidance, added to the story that "the Pakistani findings were not the same as findings by American experts." They even suggested a psychopathological explanation for the Board's finding, saying that it reflected a"mind set" among Pakistan military officers who wanted instability so they had an excuse for continuing their military rule.

The problem with this press guidance was that it was misinformation. There was no such divergence between the American and Pakistanis experts involved in the investigation, and no separate American conclusion of a "malfunction". Nor was it a conspiratorial Pakistani "mind set" that had ruled out a malfunction as the cause of the crash. This was the conclusion the six American Air Force experts, headed by Colonel Daniel E. Sowada, that comprised the U.S. Assistance and advisory team, which was supported by laboratories in the United States. They, not the Pakistani, had actually written the sections of the report that investigated all possible mechanical failure of the aircraft that led the Board to state it had been " unable to substantiate a technical reason for the accident." This was confirmed to me by both the head of the Pakistan investigating team and an American assistant secretary of defense. Colonel Sowada himself gave secret testimony before the subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs that acknowledged that no evidence of a mechanical failure had been found.

The conclusion of sabotage became inescapable after the accident investigators eliminated virtually all other causes. Sherlock-Holmes like detective work is contained in a red-bound 365 secret investigation report, which the relevant sections of were read to me by a Pentagon official in his office. Like Sherlock Holmes, it used on a process of elimination. First, they were able to rule out the possibility that the plane had been blown up in mid air. If it had exploded in this manner the pieces of the plane, which had different shapes and therefore resistance to the wind, would have been strewn over a wide area-- but that had not happened. By re-assembling the plane in a giant jigsaw puzzle, and scrutinizing with magnifying glasses the edges of each broken piece, they could established that the plane was in one piece when it had hit the ground. They thus concluded structural failure--ie. The breaking up of the plane-- was not the cause.

Nor had the plane been hit by a missile. That would have generated intense heat which in turn would have melted the aluminum panels and, as the plane dived, the wind would have left tell-tale streaks in the molten metal. But there were no streaks on the panels. And no missile part or other ordinance had been found in the area.

They could also rule out the possibility that there was an inboard fire while the plane was in the air since, if there had been one, the passengers would have breathed in soot before they died. Yet, the single autopsy performed, which was on the American general seated in the VIP capsule, showed there was no soot in his trachea, indicating that he had died before, not after, the fire ignited by the crash.

The next possibility they considered was that the power had somehow failed in flight. If this had happened, the propellers would not have been turning at their full torque when the plane crashed, which would have affected the way their blades had broken off and curled on impact. But by examining the degree of curling on each broken propeller blades, they determined that in fact the engines were running at full speed when the propellers hit the ground. They also ruled out the possibility of contaminated fuel by taking samples of the diesel fuel from the refueling truck, which had been impounded after the crash. By analyzing the residues still left in the fuel pumps, they could also tell that they had been operating normally at the time of the crash.

They deduced that the electric power on the plane had been working because both electric clocks on board had stopped at the exact moment of impact, which they determined independently from eye witnesses and other evidence.

The crash had occurred, moreover after a routine and safe take off in perfectly clear daytime weather. And the pilots were experienced with the C-130 and in good health. Since the plane was not in any critical phase of flight, such as take off or landing, where poor judgment on the part of the pilots could have resulted in the mishap, the investigators ruled out pilot error as a possible cause.

They thus came down to one final possibility of mechanical failure: the controls did not work. But the Hercules C-130 had not one but three redundant control system. The two sets of hydraulic controls were backed up, in case of a leak of fluid in both of them, by a mechanical system of cables. If any one of them worked, the pilots would have been able to fly the plane. By comparing the position of the controls with the mechanisms in the hydraulic valves and the stabilizers in the tail of the plane (which are moved through this system when the pilot moves the steering wheel), they established that the control system was working when the plane crashed. This was confirmed by a computer simulation of the flight done by Lockheed, the builder of the C-130. They also ruled out the possibility that the controls had temporarily jammed by a microscopic examination of the mechanical parts to see if there were any signs of jamming or binding. (The only abnormality they found, which led to a long separate appendix, was that there were brass particles contaminating the hydraulic fluid. Although they could not explain this contamination, they found that it could have accounted only for gradual wear and tear on the parts, not a sudden loss of control).

Having ruled out all the mechanical malfunctions that could cause a C-130 to fall from the sky in that manner, the American team left it to the Board to conclude "the only other possible cause of the accident is the occurrence of a criminal act or sabotage leading to the loss of control of the aircraft".

This conclusion was reinforced when an analysis of chemicals found in plane's wreckage, done by the laboratory of Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco in Washington, found foreign traces of pentaerythritol tertranitrate (PNET), a secondary high explosive commonly used by saboteurs as a detonator, as well as antimony and sulfur, which in the compound antimony sulfide is used in fuses to set off the device. Using these same chemicals, Pakistan ordinance experts reconstructed a low-level explosive detonator which could have been used to burst a flask the size of a soda can which, the Board suggested, probably contained an odorless poison gas that incapacitated the pilots.

But this was as far as the Board of Inquiry could go. It had not had autopsies done on the remains of the crew members to determine if they were poisoned. It acknowledged in its report that it lacked the expertise to investigate criminal acts. What was needed was criminal investigators and interrogators. It thus recommended that the task of finding the perpetrators by turned over to the competent agency, which meant, as one of the investigators explained to me, Pakistan's intelligence service--the ISI.

who killed zia-ul-haq '(part-1)

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On August 17 1988, Pak One, an American built Hercules C-130b transport plane, took off from the military air base outside of Bahawalpur, Pakistan at 3:46 p.m, precisely on schedule. The passengers in the air-conditioned VIP capsule, which included Mohammad Zia ul-haq, the Army Chief of Staff and President of Pakistan. were returning to the capital city of Islamabad after a hot, dusty tank demonstration.

This was General Zia's first trip on Pak One since May 29. He had reluctantly gone to Bahawalpur that morning to witness a demonstration of the new American Abrams tank. Although he himself saw little point in going at a time of national crises to see a lone tank fire off its cannon, the commander of the armored Corp, who had been his former military secretary, was extraordinarily insistent in his phone calls. He argued that the entire Army command would be there that day, implying that if Zia was absent it might be taken as a slight. As it had turned out, the tank demonstration was a fiasco. After helicopters flew him from the airport to the desert site, the much vaunted American tank missed its target ten out of ten times. So much for the tank. Zia went on to the lunch at the officers' mess, eating ice cream, and joking with his top generals. Back at the air strip, he prayed to Mecca, then, before reboarding the plane, he warmly embraced those of the generals that stayed.

Seated next to him on the flight back to Islamabad was his close friend, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, after Zia, the second most powerful man in Pakistan. He had headed Inter Service intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's equivalent of the CIA, for ten years. There he had been Zia's architect for the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets. It was his ISI that had organized the Muejadeen into combat units, trained them, distributed weapons to them, provided them with intelligence and even selected their targets. And now the Mujuedeen was on the verge of winning; the first time the Soviet Union had been defeated since the second world war.

Like Zia, Rehman had not wanted to come to this tank demonstration. He indeed had another appointment in Karachi. He decided to go only when a former deputy of his at the ISI advised him that Zia was on the verge of making major changes in his the army and intelligence high command and suggested that Zia needed his counsel. Rehman had been aware that ever since a huge arms depot for Afghan weapons had blown up in the suburbs of Islamabad that April, killing at least 93 people, Zia had become increasingly uneasy about what might be done to undermine his control in the closing days of the Afghan war. Zia blamed the Soviet trained Afghan intelligence service, WAD, for the blast, but Pakistan politicians criticized him and Rehman for locating the arms depot where it endangered civilians. Zia reacted by precipitously firing his own prime minister, dissolving the parliament and local government on May 29. He had expected changed to be made in the military. So, canceling his meeting in Karachi, he joined Zia on Pak One that morning. He reboarded the plane, wearing his familiar peaked general's hat, with General Mohamed Afzal, Zia's chief of the General Staff.

The remaining two seats in the capsule were given to Zia's American guests: Ambassador Arnold L. Raphel, an old Pakistan hand who had known Zia for twelve years and General Herbert M. Wassom, the head of U.S. Military aid mission to Pakistan. They had also witnessed the dismal tank demonstration, then, Ambassador Raphel found time to pay a condolence call at a convent in Bahawalpur where an American nun had been murdered the week before. Behind them, Eight other Pakistan generals packed the two benches in the rear section of the VIP capsule.

Lt. General Aslam Beg, the Army's vice chief of staff, waved goodbye from the runway, the only top general in the chain of command not aboard Pak One that day. He would fly back in the smaller Turbo Jet, waiting to take off as soon as Pak One was airborne.

A Cessna security plane completed the final check of the area-- a precaution taken ever since terrorists had unsuccessfully fired a missile at Pak One eight years earlier. Then, the control tower gave Pak One the signal to take off.

In the cockpit, which was separated from the VIP capsule by a door and three steps, was the four man flight crew. The pilot, Wing Commander Mashhood Hassan, had been personally selected by Zia. And the co-pilot, the navigator and the engineer had been cleared by Air Force security. Just the day before, they had flown Pak One back and forth on the exact route as a trial run so there would be no surprises. The trip was expected to take an hour.) After Pak One was airborne, the control tower at Bahawalpur routinely asked Mashood his position. He said "Pak One, stand bye" . But there was no response. The efforts to contact Mashood grew more desperate by the minute. Pak One was missing only minutes after it had taken off.

Meanwhile, at a river about 18 miles away from the airport, villagers, looking into the sky, saw Pak One lurching up and down in the sky, as if were on an invisible roller coaster. After its third loop, it plunged directly towards the desert, burying itself in the soil. Then, it exploded and, as the fuel burnt, became a ball of fire. All 30 persons on board were dead. It was 3:51 p.m.

General Beg's turbojet circled over the burning wreckage for a moment. Then the vice chief of stall, realizing what had happened, ordered his pilot to head for Islamabad. That evening, acting as if a coup might be underway, army units moved swiftly to cordon off official residences, government buildings, television stations, and other strategic locations in the capital.

The crash altered the face of politics in Pakistan in a way in which no simple coup d'etat could have done. Pakistan is the only country named after an acronym: "P" stands for Punjab, "A" for Afghanistan, and the "K" for Kashmir. It reflected a dream at best of an Islam state; only the "P" actually became part of Pakistan when it was carved out of British India in 1947 as a haven for Moslems. But it was a dream that Zia taken advantage of after he seized power in a bloodless military coup in 1977. Mindful that the Shah was unable to control his empire in Iran because he had underestimated the power of Islam, Zia moved almost immediately to placate the mullahs in his country by pursuing a policy of "islamization" and reinstalling the law of the Koran. Public flogging was made the penalty for drinking alcohol, amputation of a hand the penalty for robbery, and being stoned to death the penalty for adulatory. Women, if they were teachers, students or government employees, to cover their head with a chador. While he used thousand-year old Koran law to help maintain control over a population of over 99 million people in Pakistan, he strove to build an ultra-modern military machine, complete with state of the art F-16 fighters, Harpoon missiles, and nuclear arms, and to make Pakistan the leading ally of the United States in Asia. It had been an extraordinary balancing act.

Now, the sudden end of Zia and his top generals dead, with no civilian government in place, left a conspicuous void. There was of course still the Army, which General Beg had now assumed command of--which was and always had been the dominant power in Pakistan. There was also the opposition party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, which no longer prevented by Zia from participating in the elections scheduled for that November, could back the candidacy of his arch enemy, Benazir Bhutto. This, in turn, made possible her election-- which was inconceivable if Zia had been in power.

But this still left opened the question of what had happened to make Pak One to fall from the sky at this opportune moment? Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto offered perhaps the most convenient explanation: divine intervention. In the epilogue to her book, Daughter of Destiny (which before Zia's death had been entitled more modestly "Daughter of the East"), Mrs. Bhutto notes "Zia's death must have been an act of god". Zia was, as far she was concerned, the incarnation of evil. When she first met him in January 1977, she saw him only as a " short, nervous, ineffectual-looking man whose pomaded hair was parted in the middle and lacquered to his head". She could not understand why her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan, had passed over six more senior generals to pick him as head of the Army . Eighteen months later, Zia had usurped power from him and then committed "judicial murder," as she saw it, by allowing her father to be hanged like a common criminal on a trumped up charge. He also banned her father's political party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, imprisoned her and her mother (even though she was suffering from lung cancer) and had both her brothers in exile, Shah Nawaz and Mir Murtaza, tried and convicted of high crimes in absentia. When Shah Nawaz was killed by poison in France in 1986, she suspected it was done by Zia's agents. Zia had decimated her family. She took particular satisfaction that Zia's body was burnt beyond recognition in the plane fire, noting, "Zia had exploited the name of Islam to such an extent, people were saying that when he died, God didn't leave a trace of him."

But there also existed less divine sources of retribution. There was, for example, Mrs. Bhutto's own 34 year old brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto. For the past nine years, he headed an anti-Zia guerrilla group, which shared offices with the PLO in Kabul, Afghanistan (and later operated out of Damascus, Syria) called Al Zulfikar or "the sword". Its proclaimed mission was to destroy the Zia regime, and the means it used included sabotage, highjackings and assassination in Pakistan. It had demonstrated that it had the capacity to carry out complex international terrorist operations when it hijacked a Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 727 with 100 passenger aboard in 1981, flew it first to Kabul, where it executed one passenger and refueled, and then to Damascus, where, with the assistance of the Syria government, it forced Zia to exchange 55 political prisoners for the passengers. It originally had taken credit for the destruction of Pak One in a phone call to the BBC although subsequently, after it was announced that the American Ambassador was aboard it, Mir Murtaza Bhutto retracted this claim. But Mir Murtaza admitted that he had attempted to assassinate Zia on five previous occasions. And one of these earlier Al-Zulfikar assassination attempts involved attempting to blow Pak One out of the sky with Zia aboard it by firing a Soviet-built SAM 7 missile at it. On that occasion, the missile missed, and when the terrorists who fired it were capture they admitted that they had been trained for the mission in Kabul by Mir Murtaza Bhutto and his advisers. Now, with his sister in a position to win the elections if Zia could be removed, Mir Murtaza had an added reason to pursue his mission. But he was not the only one with a motive.

Another suspect was the Soviet Union. Zia had offended Moscow to such a degree that it had declared publicly, only a week before the crash, that Zia's "obstructionist policy cannot be tolerated". In Washington, I was told by a top official in the Pentagon, who was directly responsible for assessing the political consequences of military activity, that his initial concern was that the Soviet Union might have been involved in bringing down Pak One. Earlier that month the Soviet had temporarily suspended its troop withdrawals from Afghanistan to protest Zia's violations of the Geneva Accords that had been signed in May. According to the Soviets, Zia not only was continuing to arm the Afghan Mujuedeen in blatant disregard of the agreement but was directing the sabotage campaign in Kabul that was adding to the Soviet humiliation. After protesting to the Pakistan Ambassador, the Soviet foreign ministry then took the extraordinary step of calling in the American Ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock, and informing him that it intended "to teach Zia a lesson".

Soviet intelligence certainly had the means in place in Pakistan to carry out this threat. It had trained, subsidized and effectively ran the Afghan intelligence service, WAD, which had in its campaign of covert bombings in the past year killed and wounded over 1400 people in Pakistan, according to a State Department report released the week of the crash. It had also demonstrated that Spring it could recruit Pakistani accomplices inside military installations. Had Pak One been another of its targets?

After weighing this possibility, the relevant officials in the Pentagon and State Department rejected, according to the official I was interviewing. What persuaded them that the Soviet leadership would not permit such a move, he further elaborated, was the presence of the Ambassador on the plane. They simply did not believe that the Soviets would not have jeopardized Glastnost by assassinating an American of this rank. But later while we were having lunch in his office he mentioned that neither Ambassador Raphel or General Wassom were supposed to fly back on Zia's plane. Both men, at least the day before, had been scheduled to return from the tank exhibition on the U.S. military attache's jet (which General Wassom had flown down on). If so, the perpetrators might not have necessarily reckoned on the American presence aboard the plane.

”Success of Jinnah and Zia in Pakistan and Failure of Others – A Perspective”

In view of present scenario, when Pakistan is suffering from violent conflict between Pakistan army and Islamic Fighters and both are cutting throats of each other and killing each other mercilessly, and no one is there to stop them from this bloody madeness, In fact some ethnocentric parties and India are enjoying this bloody film continuously, and are trying to pour more fuel on this fire. In such condition it is the responsibility of Intellectuals of Pakistan to try to stop this blood shed and to analyze the past history of Pakistan and find out that why Pakistan was stable in the era of Quaid-e-Azam and General Zia, and was a most stable and strong country of the region in spite of all adversaries and enemity of British Empire, India and Soviet Union and why it has become so much unstable in the era of General Musharaf and Mr.Zardari in spite of support of World Super power USA,NATO and other nations..

Pakistan Needs Leader Like Quaid-e-Azam.
Quaid-e-Azam was a leader who united whole the populations of Muslims of subcontinent on one platform in spite of all their weaknesses due to illiteracy, ethnocentrism, regionalism, provincialism and conspiracies of Indian National Congress and British rulers, From each sentence of his speeches it is evident that he was the most caring and sincere leader for Muslims and for their interests. His speeches are full of words like Muslims, Musalamans and Islam, He very strongly proved that he is a well wisher of Muslims and will never compromise against the best interests of Muslims.
This was the reason that Muslims of subcontinent have thrown all their differences and were united under his leader ship without any reservation. For the cause of Muslims his family life was destroyed, his sister never married, her daughter was separated from him, For the cause of Muslims he lost his personnel home in Bombay, India, For the cause of Muslims he refused to accept the Premier ship of India and due to his hard work for the Muslims his health was destroyed but till his death he continued to work for welfare of his peoples. These were the characteristics of Quaid-e-Azam due to which even his enemies like him and have praise for him.

Pakistan Needs Leader Like General Zia-ul-Haq.

After separation of East Pakistan in 1971 a critical change occurred in the demography of Pakistan and ratio of Muslims Population increased from 85% to 98%.General Zia was the first leader who comprehended this change and used this phenomena for the strength and stability of Pakistan. Due to his apparent commitment with Islam and Muslims, he was able to rule the country like an Iron Man till his death. During his era Pakistan was the Island of piece in whole region, his devotion for Islam and Pakistan made him the most successful ruler of Pakistan, Although he was a military dictator he was having a very effective influence both socially and religiously on people of Pakistan, and people were having trust on him, due to his policies there was no anti state or separation activities except that of Al-Zulfiqar by brother of Mrs.Benazir Bhutto.
Islamization of Society:
General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization policy also proved to be extremely influential, and has continued to affect the political and sectarian situation in Pakistan till the present day. Zia’s Islamizing policies restored a sense of dignity and religious integrity back to the country.There was no extremism and separation movements in the era of Jinnah and there were no Talibans and Extremist in the era of General Zia-ul Haq,

While recent non-religious and ethnocentric rulers such as Musharaf and Zardari nor have any Ideology and neither have any courage to go in masses and are even unable to control the affairs of the Capital of Pakistan,Islamabad and the city of Rawalpindi where the General Head Quarter of Pakistan Army is located, because these rulers have chronically failed in proving their sincerity with Islam, Muslims and the people of Pakistan ,Which was proved on the day of Death of Benazir Bhutto,when workers and supporters of these non-religious leaders committed each and every crime against the innocent and peaceful citizens of Pakistan, both Musharaf who was in power at that time and Zardari who was the successor of Benazir chronically failed in protecting the assets and citizens from their violent supporters, therefore now how people of Pakistan can support and trust such selfish and deceptive leaders.
while secular rulers such as Musharaf and Zardari even are not aware with the teachings of Islam,which is a religion of 97% population of Pakistan, how these rogue secular rulers will be able to successfully run the affairs of a country without having any expertise about their religion and sensitivities..

Industrial Development.
Although General Zia was supporting Afghan Jihad against Soviet Union his relations with Soviet Union were surprisingly good, and Pakistan Steel Mill in Karachi was completed with the help of Soviet Union. While secular leader like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was using that project as a job bank for members of his party, and other two secular leaders Pervez Musharaf and Zardari were found by courts of Pakistan guilty of abusing and selling this mill less than the price of land of this Mill.
General Zia greatly favoured egalitarianism and industrialisation. Between 1977 and 1986, the country experienced an average annual growth in the GNP of 6.8%, one of the highest in the world at that time.
While in the era of Secular leaders like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Pervez Musharaf Pakistan became one of the most poor nation of the world.

Strengthening Defense of Pakistan.
Zia brought the Pakistan Army up on modern weaponry using the money that US gave for fighting in Afghanistan- so that in 1986 when Indira Gandhi was ready to invade Pakistan–(Operation Brass Tacks) she was informed as to what waited for her soldiers and she withdrew from the borders. It was his commitment with the nation that he lost his life when observing performance of Abrahm Tank for defense forces.
In the era of Zia,30 years ago Pakistan was having F-16 fighters,and Pakistan was able to have Nuclear arms. While after 30 years secular leaders like Benazir, Pervez Musharaf and Zardari were unable to gain such fighters but infact capped Pakistan nuclear program and kept Pakistan nuclear scientist under arrest, and were found with allegations of taking bribes and commissions in defense equipment deals such as Augusta submarine from France.

Collapse of Super Power Soviet Union:
Due to General Zia support for Afghan Jihad Soviet Union was broken into pieces of more than dozen countries and Pakistan was able to take the revenge of separation of East Pakistan from Soviet Union in which Soviet Union was nakedly involved .
Due to General Zia policies so many countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia were liberated from the claws of Soviet Union and both East and West Germany were reunited.He refused to accept any pressure with reference to Nuclear Program from USA.

India:
In the era of General Zia ,India was highly frightened from stability and progress of Pakistan and lost all its credibility and diplomatic respect due to support for Soviet Union for invasion in Afghanistan and Indira Gandhi a foolish leader of India who was involved in aggression and terrorism for taking the advantage of foolish acts of General Yahya Khan in 1971 in East Pakistan , was totally failed in controlling the affairs of East Punjab due to her foolish policies and in fact lost her life in that crisis.

Service to Humanity:
In the era of Quaid-e-Azam Millions of Indian refugees took shelter in Pakistan as a safe heaven and in the era of General Zia-ul-Haq three millions Afghan refugees took shelter in Pakistan and Bihai faith religious Minority of Iran,and Rohingya people of Burma were also given shelter in Pakistan.While in the era of secular leaders General Yahya Khan and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,Ten millions citizens in East Pakistan were forced to take shelter in India, and in the era of Musharaf and Zardari millions of Pakistanis were displaced internally in Pakistan, and were also humiliated fby preventing them from going to safer places,and situation is so much alarming that each and every citizen of Pakistan want to flee out of Pakistan in the era of these non religious and secular leaders.Success of Jinnah and Zia was witnessed by their smile and satisfaction and their body language while those secular and non religious leaders such as Musharaf, Zardari are having no smile in any of their Photographs their failures are just evident from their faces.
Reasons for Success of Religious Leaders and Failure of others:
In this article a comparison has been made between Two Ideologies on one side Pro-Islamic Democratic leader Quaid-e-Azam and another Pro-Islamic Dictator General Zia-ul-Haq have been compared with non-religious Democratic leader Mr.Zardari and another non-religious leader Dictator Pervez Musharaf.
Both pro-Islamic leader ruled the country till their death and also mysteriously Quaid-e-Azam defeated to British Empire and United India,Another pro-Islamic leader Zia-ul-Haq defeated world Super power Soviet Union where as non-religious leaders like Zardari and Pervez Musharaf were even struggling to control and safeguard the capital Islamabad and GHQ in Rawalpindi.

All success of Quaid-e-Azam and General Zia-ul-Haq were due to trust of Pakistani Nation on them due to their commitment with Islam, Muslims and Pakistan, in proving that commitment both were very proactive while present rulers are devoid of such characteristics, due to which today tribal people who have helped Pakistan in liberating 1/3 of Kashmir, and Mujahideen who helped Pakistan in Afghan Jihad are now attacking Pakistan security forces and national assets.
Due to Quaid-e-Azam commitment and support for Islam and Muslims,he was able to compete both British Empire a World Super of that time and India second largest country of the world. In the same manner General Zia was able to give the defeat to Soviet Union a world super power, just by sensing the psychology and religious culture of people of Pakistan.
While recent non-religious and ethnocentric rulers such as Musharaf and Zardari nor have any Ideology and neither have any courage to go in masses and are even unable to control the affairs of the Capital of Pakistan, Islamabad and the city of Rawalpindi where the General Head Quarter of Pakistan Army is located, because these rulers have chronically failed in proving their sincerity with Islam, Muslims and the people of Pakistan ,Which was proved on the day of Death of Benazir Bhutto,when workers and supporters of these non-religious leaders committed each and every crime against the innocent and peaceful citizens of Pakistan, both Musharaf who was in power at that time and Zardari who was the successor of Benazir chronically failed in protecting the assets and citizens from their violent supporters, therefore now how people of Pakistan can support and trust such selfish and deceptive leaders.
It is the responsibility of world leaders specially western nations to analyze the situation scientifically, because even for Western Nations Jinnah and Zia , were more beneficial while it is quite obvious that Musharaf and Zardari who are just using guns to gain their objective will just fail, and Musharaf already had failed and the situation is highly volatile at present, therefore it is the need of time to encourage those people to come forward who can solve the crisis of Afghanistan and Pakistan peacefully with Ideological Warfare and not with deceptive politics and Guns.

ZIA-UL-HAQ he achieved a feat even the Americans could not dream of with their money and military might.

Is it not an irony of history that high-profile assassinations of most powerful people almost always remain shrouded in mystery for decades despite enormous resources at state’s disposal to unveil and identify the killers? The real handlers  of assassin of JFK, and their motives, are yet to be known. Pakistan’s first prime minister,Liaquat Ali Khan, like PPP leader Benazir Bhutto, was killed in broad day light but the real assassins are yet to be identified and brought to books. The most powerful Pakistani president and military dictator, Gen Zia-ul-Haq, was killed in a mysterious air crash nearly a quarter of a century ago while he was in power but his assassins are yet to be identified. It is very clear that these assassinations were never made for personal reasons; there were powerful strategic motives behind these murders but the governments, who benefited in his life and also those who benefited in his death, are unable to point fingers.

General Zia may be the most unpopular military dictator, if viewed from the prism of Pakistani democracy but historians can not deny the fact that he has left most indelible marks on Pakistan’s political, social and religious landscape. He fought Soviets, using Afghans, of course with American dollars and Wahhabi mercenaries and pushed the world into dreadful unipolar era. His gifts are drugs, Kalashnikovs, Wahhabi extremism and Afghan refugees, if we assess his achievements from the present-day standards. But those living in the world of 70s and 80s would shrug off this criticism saying he achieved a feat even the Americans could not dream of with their money and military might.

Leaving aside the deeds or misdeeds of Zia, it is very unfortunate that he was killed in a mysterious air-crash along with 31 other passengers including members of his top-brass, air crew and American diplomats, right in a garrison town which he was visiting under the arrangements of the army he was commanding at that time. It was a clear case of killing by powerful political players in connivance with Zia’s own comrades.

The immediate spin given to this high-profile assassination was interesting. The New York Times, in its October 19, 1988 edition reported that the United States and Pakistan were destined to reach different conclusions about the cause of the crash. Although the technical investigation by a joint American-Pakistani team proceeded without much difficulty, it was complicated by the fact that Washington and Islamabad viewed the problem through starkly different political and cultural prisms. Pakistani officials pointed to Soviet-inspired sabotage as the likeliest explanation, citing intercepted conversations between Pakistani nationals and members of the Afghan secret service that suggested a plot against some senior Pakistani figures.

The crash occurred against the backdrop of stepped-up Afghan and Soviet cross-border raids into Pakistani territory apparently in protest of Pakistan’s continuing support for the Afghan guerrillas. In a meeting in Moscow less than two weeks before the crash, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, sternly warned Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, that this support would ”not go unpunished. Struggling to establish stable relations with USSR, American officials expressed reluctance to embrace a Soviet conspiracy theory, and worried aloud that Pakistani military investigators might come up with unacceptable conclusions that the United States would be forced to denounce. The United States stressed the lack of evidence to support a sabotage theory and leaned toward mechanical failure.

A year after the crash, The New York Times Op-ed column of August 23, 1989, however, made startling analysis. According to this analysis, and contrary to common perception, the assassination has not helped the Soviet Union; and if anyone has benefited, it’s the U.S. A report on the technical causes of the disaster by the Pakistan Government’s Board of Inquiry – aided by six U.S. Air Force specialists – indicated that the crash was not an accident. Explosives were found in the wreckage, the investigators said, and the plane was likely brought down by the deliberate contamination of the main hydraulic system and its back-up, which would have made the plane almost impossible to control. The board concluded that ”the use of ultra-sophisticated techniques would necessitate the involvement of a specialist organization well versed with carrying out such tasks and possessing all the means and abilities for its execution.”

Only three foreign organizations active in Pakistan at the time against the Government fit that description: the K.G.B., the K.G.B.-created Afghan intelligence group, WAD, and the research and analysis wing of Indian intelligence (RAW). TheState Department blamed WAD for many terrorist bombings in Pakistan’s cities in 1987 and 1988. In a few cases, Radio Kabul even announced the bombings before they occurred. Every WAD section reportedly has a K.G.B. adviser at the top. There are reports that as many as 1,500 Soviet personnel have been working at WAD’s Kabul headquarters.

The analysis discounts India’s involvement in the air crash saying President Zia was certainly not India’s friend, but his actions as an adversary were relatively predictable. And there was no consensus among the experts about who would succeed him in the event of his death. Even Indian involvement would not get the K.G.B. off the hook. Indian and Soviet intelligence services were assumed by Western diplomats to be cooperating in Pakistan. Moreover, India’s strategic motives for such cooperation were well-founded: President Zia was bent not just on evicting the Soviets from Afghanistan but on establishing Afghanistan as his satellite.

And in that lies the irony that his death best served U.S. interests.

There was another theory implicating Mossad, the Israeli secret agency, and by implication the US. This was presented by John Gunther Dean, who was the American ambassador to India in 1988, according to an article in World Policy Journal by Barbara Crossette, who was the South Asia Bureau Chief of the New York Times from 1988 to 1991. When Mr. Dean expressed his views to the State Department at the time and insisted on a thorough investigation of the Israeli-Indian axis, he was accused of mental imbalance and relieved of his duties.

Dean believes that the Israelis wanted to stop Pakistan’s military from making nuclear weapons. They had attacked Iraq’s nuclear facilities at Osirak in 1981 and believed Gen Zia when he declared in 1987 that Pakistan was a “screwdriver’s turn away from the bomb”. Dean was declared mentally unfit for demanding an investigation into the crash. He lost his medical clearance and security clearance because of his views and was forced to seek retirement in 1988. After he made the charge following the air crash in which the then US ambassador to Pakistan, Arnie Raphel was also killed, he was sent to Switzerland to “rest” for six weeks and only then allowed to return to New Delhi to pack his bags and quit. It is interesting that the US did not allow the FBI or any other agency to carry out a full-fledged investigation into the crash.

The state may have forgotten, or lost interest in, this unfortunate incident but family of Zia, and those of other victims have not forgotten and they keep on trying to unveil the mystery. Zia’s son, and a former minister, Ijaz-ul-Haq, keeps reminding the government about this unfinished task. According to one of his many articles, published in an online paper, the elimination of Pakistan’s top military hierarchy suggests, as does the report of the inquiry, that it was a clear case of sabotage. The mystery, says Ijaz, was that the Vice Chief of the Army Staff General Aslam Beg, having himself hovered over the crash site, preferred to fly back to Rawalpindi and Major General Mehmud Durrani, the host of the entire episode, moved to Multan for a comfortable sleep. He lists some other mysterious developments, such as:

• The mortal remains were shifted to military hospital at Multan where doctors performed a post-mortem on Brig-Gen Wassom, which revealed that he had died before the plane hit the ground. Doctors were stopped from conducting post-mortems on the rest of the victims. If done, it could have determined their cause of death.
• The Board of Inquiry had confirmed the presence of sulphur, antimony and other lethal chemical agents in the wreckage. It is also suspected that odorless poisonous gases were leaked inside the cockpit, rendering the crew unconscious or paralyzed. This is why, it is deduced, no May Day signals were received at the control tower.
• US law requires mandatory FBI investigation into the killing of any US national in any part of the world. In this case, when an FBI team was about to leave for Pakistan, mysteriously, it was stopped by the US secretary of state. It was also surprising that the team that had already arrived to assist in the investigation had done so without any formal request by the government of Pakistan.
• Ten months after the crash, an FBI team arrived, comprising only three members and without any assistance from an air-accident or forensic expert. The team only recorded verbal statements of a few concerned individuals without any worthwhile effort to conduct a detailed investigation.

When someone asked about the outcome of crash investigation, the then minister of state for defense who was supposed to have pushed for investigations, callously responded that anyone interested in the outcome of the investigations should make a direct telephone call to Allah, who alone can reveal the outcome of the investigations.

Ijaz also makes a mention of al-Zulfikar, an anti-Zia terrorist outfit founded by Mir Murtaza Bhuuto. But the evidence available so far suggests that al-Zulfikar was not capable to carry out sabotage at this scale, though they are reported to have accepted the responsibility but backtracked immediately fearing American backlash as those killed also included two American diplomats. Ijaz also quotes from the outcome of some unnamed judicial investigations. A young officer of the Pakistan Air Force, Pilot Officer Akram Awan, arrested May 1988, was under investigation by the ISI for being an agent of RAW and Mossad. This officer was working in collaboration with enemy agencies to plan and execute an air strike on the Kahuta Nuclear Plant. He was arrested a few months before the C-130 crash and was in perfect incommunicado custody. He had not known anything about the Bahawalpur crash.

Awan was shown footage of the C-130 crash. When he came to know that among those killed with General Zia-ul Haq was Maj-Gen MH Awan, he suffered an emotional breakdown and started crying. It is mentioned that General Awan had helped Akram Awan in his education and career. He had thus developed a deep emotional attachment. Experts confirmed that this reaction was instant, genuine, natural and unfeigned. In this instant reaction, he uttered, “Sir, I never knew these bastards would do it.”

Akram Awan stated that he had been handed over some matchbox-like device of chemical material by a Mossad operative in New Delhi to be delivered to Air Marshall Zulfiqar Ali Khan in Pakistan. The device once placed in the cockpit would render the crew incapacitated in less than 25 seconds. He deposed that meetings took place at the residence of the said retired air marshal and were attended by an Indian envoy, a US Army colonel and a Mossad agent who had travelled to Pakistan on an American passport.

The above excerpts, carefully selected from Ijaz’s article say a lot about who might have killed Zia. If Zia, and his top-brass, was the target, then all others who died were a collateral loss for the killers. But their innocent blood will not go waste. The system of administration of Almighty’s justice is very ruthless and the killers and their handlers will have to pay very dearly.

ZIA-UL-HAQ Who killed the most powerful military dictator?

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 attachŽ, 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 conclusiveÑsome would say, less than seriousÑ 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 officersÑ" 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 incidentsÑI think there were 19 or 20 of themÑwhere 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, ÔWe 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 heavy- handed 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 French- born 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 RaphelÑand 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 full- scale 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 ZiaÑif that is what happenedÑwas 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.