Free 88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary by Robert L. Grenier Page A

to. I would have to start thinking about the problem in a different way, and come up with a new way to solve it.

Chapter 4
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WARNINGS AND FOREBODINGS
    FEBRUARY 2000
    A MBASSADOR BILL MILAM WAS on one of his rants. The complaint was a familiar one—his weight. “You’re so damned abstemious,” he complained. “I wish I could do that. I just can’t stop eating. I ought to have my damned jaws wired shut.” Cantankerousness was one of Milam’s most notable traits, and for me, an endearing one. I couldn’t help but like the man, though he did have a habit of trying to make my life harder than it should be just to show he could. He had his reasons for doing so.
    Some weeks before, Milam had been at Sunday breakfast at a local sporting club with a colleague, an administrative officer who was a notorious gadfly. He looked around the dining room at the large number of unattached males having breakfast alone or in small groups. “Who the hell are all these people?” he grumbled. “I don’t know any of them.” His companion saw his opportunity, and seized it.
    “They’re all Grenier’s people,” he said. He paused for effect. “You know, he runs this place.” The ambassador said nothing for some minutes, seemingly concentrating on his eggs. At length, he stood to leave.
    “ I run this place,” he snapped.
    I was in no doubt myself as to who ran the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. As chief of station, I technically answered to the director of Central Intelligence; Milam, as the U.S. “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary,” technically reported directly to the president. Ourrelative places in the federal pecking order were clear, and I was best advised to remember it. I depended on the ambassador’s support, or at least on his forbearance. My push to increase our capabilities in Afghanistan was bringing an ever-growing stream of temporary staffers (“TDYers,” as they were called) to town, and their mysterious activities were no doubt exciting considerable sotto voce commentary among my colleagues. I needed their silent cooperation to keep a low profile on the comings and goings of my people, and it just wouldn’t do to alienate them. That was particularly true of the ambassador. I knew that if some of my station’s activities were to come to the unfavorable attention of the Pakistani authorities, it was to the ambassador that I would have to turn for political support. “Remember,” he told me shortly after my arrival, “if you want me with you at the crash landing, make sure I’m with you at the take-off.” I took that to heart, and went out of my way to bring him as much into the picture as possible about what I was doing. Still, I had rather more independent authority than Milam was comfortable with, and he sometimes went out of his way to demonstrate who was in charge.
    Now, as we hurtled southward through the night in the back of his BMW limousine, ambassadorial flags snapping, toward the nearby army town of Rawalpindi, I felt the need of his support acutely. I was hoping Milam would be able to get for me something I hadn’t been able to get on my own: some level, at least, of consistent Pakistani support against al-Qa’ida.
    A few weeks before, the security authorities in Jordan had uncovered the so-called “Millennium Plot.” Al-Qa’ida-linked operatives had been caught secretly storing a huge quantity of explosives for use in a coordinated series of planned bombings of hotels and other tourist attractions frequented by foreigners along the Jordan River Valley. If there were any doubts regarding al-Qa’ida’s intention to mount another terrorist strike on the scale of the East Africa embassy bombings of 1998, this had put such doubts to rest.
    Among those implicated in the Jordan plot were a pair of expatriate Palestinians: One of them, Khalil Deek, a Palestinian-American resident in Peshawar, in Pakistan’s far northwest, had recently been arrestedby the Pakistani intelligence