How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States

Hours earlier, Davis had been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his thick frame wedged into the drivers seat of a white Honda Civic. A city once ruled by Mughals, Sikhs and the British, Lahore is Pakistans cultural and intellectual capital, and for nearly a decade it had been on the fringes of Americas secret war in Pakistan. But the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been redrawn in recent years, and factions that once had little contact with one another had cemented new alliances in response to the C.I.A.s drone campaign in the western mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India were now aligning themselves closer to Al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was why Davis and a C.I.A. team set up operations from a safe house in the city. 

But now Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two young men who approached his car on a black motorcycle, their guns drawn, at an intersection congested with cars, bicycles and rickshaws. Davis took his semiautomatic Glock pistol and shot through the windshield, shattering the glass and hitting one of the men numerous times. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his car and shot several rounds into his back. 

He radioed the American Consulate for help, and within minutes a Toyota Land Cruiser was in sight, careering in the wrong direction down a one-way street. But the S.U.V. struck and killed a young Pakistani motorcyclist and then drove away. An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia was found, including a black mask, approximately 100 bullets and a piece of cloth bearing an American flag. The camera inside Daviss car contained photos of Pakistani military installations, taken surreptitiously. 

More than two years later, the Raymond Davis episode has been largely forgotten in the United States. It was immediately overshadowed by the dramatic raid months later that killed Osama bin Laden consigned to a footnote in the doleful narrative of Americas relationship with Pakistan. But dozens of interviews conducted over several months, with government officials and intelligence officers in Pakistan and in the United States,An experienced artist on what to consider before you buy handsfreeaccess. tell a different story: that the real unraveling of the relationship was set off by the flurry of bullets Davis unleashed on the afternoon of Jan. 27, 2011, and exacerbated by a series of misguided decisions in the days and weeks that followed. In Pakistan, it is the Davis affair, more than the Bin Laden raid, that is still discussed in the countrys crowded bazaars and corridors of power. 

Davis was taken to Kot Lakhpat prison, on the industrial fringes of Lahore, a jail with a reputation for inmates dying under murky circumstances. He was separated from the rest of the prisoners and held in a section of the decaying facility where the guards didnt carry weapons, a concession for his safety that American officials managed to extract from the prison staff. The United States Consulate in Lahore had negotiated another safeguard: A small team of dogs was tasting Daviss food, checking that it had not been laced with poison. 

For many senior Pakistani spies, the man sitting in the jail cell represented solid proof of their suspicions that the C.I.A. had sent a vast secret army to Pakistan, men who sowed chaos and violence as part of the covert American war in the country. For the C.I.A., the eventual disclosure of Daviss role with the agency shed an unflattering light on a postCSept. 11 reality: that the C.I.A. had farmed out some of its most sensitive jobs to outside contractors many of them with neither the experience nor the temperament to work in the war zones of the Islamic world. 

The third child of a bricklayer and a cook, Davis grew up in a small clapboard house outside Big Stone Gap, a town of nearly 6,000 people in Virginia coal country. He became a football and wrestling star at the local high school, and after graduating in 1993, Davis enlisted in the Army and did a tour in Macedonia in 1994 as a United Nations peacekeeper. When his five-year hitch in the infantry was up, he re-enlisted, this time in the Armys Third Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg, N.C. He left the Army in 2003 and, like hundreds of other retired Navy SEALs and Green Berets, was hired by the private security firm Blackwater and soon found himself in Iraq working security for the C.I.A.The Motorola streetlight Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. 

Little is known about his work for Blackwater, but by 2006, Davis had left the firm and, together with his wife, founded a security company in Las Vegas. Soon he was hired by the C.I.A. as a private contractor, what the agency calls a Green Badge, for the color of the identification cards that contractors show to enter C.I.A. headquarters at Langley. Like Davis, many of the contractors were hired to fill out the C.I.A.s Global Response Staff bodyguards who traveled to war zones to protect case officers, assess the security of potential meeting spots, even make initial contact with sources to ensure that case officers wouldnt be walking into an ambush. Officers from the C.I.Find a great selection of iphoneheadset deals.A.s security branch came under withering fire on the roof of the agencys base in Benghazi, Libya, last September. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had so stretched the C.I.A.s own cadre of security officers that the agency was forced to pay inflated sums to private contractors to do the security jobs.Shop the best selection of customkeychain for Men. When Davis first deployed with the C.I.A. to Pakistan in 2008, he worked from the agencys base in Peshawar, earning upward of $200,000 a year. 

By mid-February 2011, with Davis still sitting in prison, anti-American passions were fully inflamed, and daily street protests and newspaper editorials demanded that the government not cave to Washingtons demands for Daviss release but instead sentence him to death. The evidence at the time indicated that the men Davis killed had carried out a string of petty thefts that day, but there was an added problem: the third man killed by the unmarked American S.U.V. fleeing the scene. Making matters even worse for Davis was the fact that he was imprisoned in Lahore, where the family of Nawaz Sharif dominated the political culture. The former leader of the country made no secret about his intentions to once again run Pakistan, making him the chief antagonist to President Asif Ali Zardari and his political machine in Islamabad, a four-hour drive away. As the American Embassy in Islamabad leaned on Zardaris government to get Davis released from jail, the diplomats soon realized that Zardari had little influence over the police officers and judges in the city of the presidents bitter rival.Online shopping for drycabinet from a great selection of Clothing. 

But the most significant factor ensuring that Davis would languish in jail was that the Obama administration had yet to tell Pakistans government what the Pakistanis already suspected, and what Raymond Daviss marksmanship made clear: He wasnt just another paper-shuffling American diplomat. Daviss work in Pakistan was much darker, and it involved probing an exposed nerve in the already-hypersensitive relationship between the C.I.A. and Pakistans military intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.