The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

9,000-acre compound in rural Virginia. It was located on the edge of Rawalpindi, where the city bleeds into the suburbs of Islamabad, at a discreet compound where recruits had to surrender their mobile phones and computers. Next door was an ISI storage depot known as Ojhri Camp, which briefly hit the news in 1988 when a huge stockpile of rockets and other munitions, destined for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, exploded. A hail of flaming munitions fell across a wide area, killing dozens of civilians; despite a wealth of conspiracy theories about sabotage and infiltration, the cause of the disaster was never fully explained. Ashraf’s class was filled with small-town boys like him, from across Pakistan. Over six months, they learned rudimentary tradecraft – lock-picking, phone-tapping and surveillance; interrogation and infiltration; surreptitious entry, clandestine photography. How to divert the attention of an adversary if caught in the act. ‘If you caught me covering a target in here,’ Ashraf said, gesturing around the Pizza Hut, ‘I might pretend that I was stealing a pizza, to divert you from my true purpose.’ The trainee spies practised their skills on the streets of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Deploying in small groups to shopping malls and university campuses, often in disguise, they surveilled unsuspecting citizens and practised ‘dead drops’ – an espionage technique for secretly passing on messages in public. Other times, the instructors drove the students to towns mile...