Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
On the Grand Trunk Road (19 page)
That night we got back to the hotel and I flipped on the BBC. A military coup attempt was underway in Kabul, the Afghan capital. News flash! Awwoooooogah! Awwooooogah! We had to check out and drive through the night to Multan so I could file a story by telex. The next morning, I had to fly off for the Afghan border. Kamran agreed to keep working his Pakistani sources and to start looking for some of the other army doctors who had been on duty at the Bahawalpur hospital that night.
But as the weeks drifted by, we kept hitting dead ends. We couldn’t find the doctors. The Pakistan army wasn’t saying anything. The Americans were saying less. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and suddenly I was in the Persian Gulf. I called Kamran every now and then to see what else we could do. We worked a few other stories together in the meantime. And then Kamran got a break.
A well-placed source of his in the Pakistan government told him that on October 19, 1988, two months after the C-130 crash, a man holding an American passport had been arrested in Quetta, the mud-rock provincial capital of tribal Baluchistan province. The American was a black man and he had visas in his passport indicating recent visits to Iran. Kamran’s source said the American had been detained at the airport for possession of a small amount of hashish. Later, the police discovered in his luggage and at his hotel what they described—in writing, at the time—as the manual of a C-130 aircraft, a hand-drawn sketch of a military airfield, a map of the airports at Islamabad and Istanbul, Turkey, photographs of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the names and telephone numbers of pro-Iranian Shia activists in Pakistan. In addition, the American possessed unidentified radio equipment, possibly transmitters. The police were so alarmed by these materials that the chief martial-law bureaucrat in Baluchistan—this was prior to the restoration of democracy—flew to army headquarters in Rawalpindi and demanded a meeting with the chief of the Pakistan intelligence service, ISI. The intelligence chief at the time was a general named Hamid Gul, an Islamic hard-liner who between 1987 and 1989 was the principal liaison between the CIA and the Afghan mujaheddin rebels in the United States-funded secret Afghan war. Gul, informed of the case, dispatched a plane to Quetta to pick up the arrested American. Five days after his arrest, the American was turned over to the army and flown to Rawalpindi. The officials in Quetta never heard what happened to the American. They were ticked off now and willing to talk to Kamran because they had thought they were going to get medals and reward money for detecting and arresting Zia’s assassin, but instead the army now refused to answer their queries about the case.
Kamran flew to Quetta to check out the story. Three sources in the civilian government told the same tale independently of one another. One produced a contemporaneous memo recording the materials found in the American’s possession.
As soon as the Gulf War was over I flew to Karachi to meet again with Kamran. We went over the details. It wasn’t clear what we had, but it sure was interesting. There were radical black American Muslims scattered all around the Islamic world, fighting in holy wars such as the one in Afghanistan. Some were U.S. Army veterans. It seemed plausible enough that one might be recruited by Iran or otherwise volunteer to carry out an assassination. Tehran and its allied Shias in Pakistan had plenty of reason to be angry at Zia at the time of the crash. They also had a proven track record of assassinations, although none involving anything nearly as sophisticated as pressurized mildly exploding poisonous gas bombs, if such things even existed. Anyway, even if this particular American had nothing to do with the crash, his case sounded intriguing.
We didn’t know if the American was alive or dead. Kamran had taken the Quetta sources about as far as he could. We agreed that the American government must have known about this case and decided, for whatever reasons, to keep it quiet. I had working relationships with the senior American officials in Pakistan. After thinking about it and talking at length with Kamran, I decided the best way to pull the trigger on this was to go see the Americans and ask for answers, trying not to let on how little I knew. If there was something to it, the Americans might react defensively and give us some sense of direction.
I flew to Islamabad, checked into the Holiday Inn, and called for an appointment with senior diplomats at the American embassy. I had had some problems with a particular diplomat, exceptionally knowledgeable, who had lied to me on a story in the past. After that incident, we made up and agreed there would be no more lies. Particularly, we agreed that if there was something that he didn’t want to talk about, he would just decline to discuss it, rather than spin some disinformation tale. This time I invoked that agreement in advance. I said I had something highly sensitive related to the Zia crash. I didn’t want to be lied to about it, so if the diplomat found he couldn’t discuss it for whatever reason, I wanted him to just say so, and not make something up. I was told by the chief embassy public relations officer that this proposal had been transmitted and agreed upon. A naive deal, you might say, but it was the best I could come up with.
While I was waiting for the appointment, Kamran called. He had talked again to Quetta and clarified the name of the American. He was Mark Alphonzo Artis, of 733 Watson Street, Aurora, Illinois. (Originally, we had merely been given the name Alphonzo, no address.) I called the Post’s Chicago bureau. A researcher checked out the address. It was in a middle-class, mostly black neighborhood. When the researcher went there, the man who came to the door laughed and said he knew of no such person, but the researcher had doubts about the encounter, so she went back. This time a woman told her that she was the mother of Mark Alphonzo Artis’s wife. From the Islamabad Holiday Inn I made calls all over Illinois and found a few people who knew Artis well. They described him variously as “mentally sick” and suffering from “manic depression.” He lied a lot and traveled in strange circles. He went abroad frequently and called home from places such as Turkey, Iran, and Sudan. After his arrest in Quetta in October 1988 he had disappeared for nearly six months.
During this time, relatives who were worried about him had contacted the U.S. State Department. Months passed. Finally, in March or April 1989, the State Department reported that they had found Artis. He had been held in a Pakistani prison for six months without notification to the U.S. government, Artis’s relatives were told. The Pakistanis were now letting him go and he was being put on a plane back to the United States, the State Department said. Artis himself did not say much to his friends in the United States about what happened to him in Pakistan, these people said.
“We have no idea about what went on over there,” said one person who knew Artis well. “When he came back he was in the worst condition, physically and mentally. They said it was drug charges. Later, I heard about the rest of it, the plane crash.... Only Mark and whoever he was involved with can tell you what happened. And nobody knows if he’s telling the truth.”
The next morning I went to the embassy. Surely the Americans knew about this, one of their own citizens held incommunicado by the Pakistani intelligence service on suspicion of blowing up Zia’s plane, with the U.S. ambassador aboard.
“I was not aware of it,” said the senior diplomat. He had brought along a man he described as a “security officer” to take notes about our conversation. My inquiry was “the first time we had heard about being involved,” the diplomat said. “They’re supposed to notify you if they arrest one of your citizens. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.... We wouldn’t have any reason to believe they would withhold information from us on something like this.” He seemed to be shocked, shocked to hear about it.
I asked about the crash investigation. He said the American government side was “very strongly inclined” to think it was all an accident caused by hydraulic problems on the C-130. I asked about General Gul, the Pakistani spy chief who had held Artis in jail on suspicion of killing Zia, apparently without telling the U.S. embassy that he held the prisoner, all the while meeting with the CIA daily to run the secret Afghan war. The diplomat said Gul “was pretty cooperative, as a matter of fact, fairly frank about things.”
The diplomat and the security officer made a big show of concern about this new information I was bringing to their attention. The diplomat stood up, went to his desk, and said, in effect, Doggone it, I’m going to call over to General Gul right away and ask what this is all about. I asked for a check of the embassy files on Artis. They agreed to look immediately.
I went back to the hotel and waited. The public relations officer called and said they had checked the files and had come up with a “total blank.” There was no record of the name, nothing. I said this couldn’t be possible. I was absolutely certain that relatives of Artis had put through a request to the State Department and that the embassy had eventually gotten Artis out of jail and sent him home on a plane. There had to be something. Check again. He did. I called back and he said he had found a single file card. The card made reference to “illegal activities” and “mental instability.” There were no other details, no indications of contact between Artis and the embassy.
I called my boss in Washington, who was by now getting nearly as sucked into this whole thing as I was. I said there were two possibilities. One was that the embassy did not know about Artis’s arrest and detention by ISI, and that therefore I had just told them about the case for the first time. The second possibility was that the American embassy had just staged an elaborate drama to deceive me. I was not yet prepared to succumb to all the conspiratorial implications that would arise if I accepted the second hypothesis. So if the information about Artis was brand-new to them, that meant the government might now go looking for Artis to sort the case out. I wanted to find Artis before the government did. My boss agreed. Within eight hours I was in the air, flying Islamabad-Lahore-Delhi-Frankfurt-Chicago, to hit the streets and find our man.
Dazed and jet-lagged, I checked into a Marriott Hotel beside a freeway south of O’Hare airport the next afternoon, took a nap, and then drove to Aurora to drop in on some of the people I had been talking to on the phone from Islamabad. I got more details on Artis’s erratic travels and apparently schizoid personality. Evidently Artis professed to be a Muslim, an enthusiast of the Iranian revolution. But nobody had a lead on where he might be now. On the telephone, I reached one person who had previously been especially helpful. This person mentioned a new name, that of a white woman, Josephine Viecelli, who allegedly did a lot of deals with Artis and funded his travels abroad. Viecelli was Italian, my informant thought. Had a son. I asked where she lived.
“I don’t want to tell you any more. Let’s see how good a reporter you are.”
Great. I asked whether I was at least in the right part of the country to look for her. I was.
Got a spelling of Viecelli?
Not really. My source tried out of a few phonetic possibilities. I tried for more, but this was as much as I was going to get.
The next morning, a Saturday, I drove in to the Loop and parked myself beside a pile of Chicago-area phone books in the Post’s downtown bureau. I listed every possible spelling of Viecelli I could think of and then went through the phone books, copying down all the numbers I could find. There were about 150 Viecellis of various spellings. No Josephine, but a couple of initial Js. I started calling. I had the usual weird and semihostile conversations you have with strangers when you bother them at home looking for somebody they don’t know. By sunset I had scratched off about 135 of the listings and was looking at a dead end. Only one of the initial Js was not a confirmed washout. That phone number had been disconnected. The street address was listed in Des Plaines, Illinois, near the airport. I got out my Chicago-area street atlas, traced a route to the address, and drove out. I was starting to feel a little ragged.
The place was a lower-middle-class garden-apartment complex with trash blowing through the parking lots and at least fifty units in identical two-story buildings. I had no apartment number, so I started knocking on doors, asking if anybody knew a Josephine Viecelli. The residents appeared to be mainly elderly immigrants from Eastern Europe. I spotted the building manager in one of the parking lots, a huge man in a T-shirt with his belly hanging over his belt of keys. I approached and asked if he had a tenant named Josephine Viecelli. He asked who I was. I told him.
“Vuck you! Vuck you!”
The screaming drew about half the residents to their screen doors. Some came outside and pretended to sweep their walkways to get a better look at what was happening. I was pissed off at this guy for yelling at me just because I was a reporter, so I yelled back a little, but then I shrugged and walked away. I approached the sweepers, elderly women. They were sympathetic. The building manager yelled at everybody, they said. One of them mentioned that they had been afraid to tell me when I knocked, but, yes, there was a Josephine who had lived in the building.
Josephine Viecelli? Not so sure. But Josephine, definitely.
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