The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

their work – swapping notes about their findings, showing off personal photos taken from phones or email accounts and chortling about anything strange or compromising. The Counter-Intelligence detachment, Section 9341, was charged with surveilling foreigners. Quetta was a city of secrets, and their job was to ensure that snooping visitors didn’t expose them. At the Serena, Ashraf explained, ISI officers posed as waiters, hovering near tables in the lobby, or listened through the walls of adjoining bedrooms at night. United Nations officials, Western diplomats, aid workers and foreign correspondents were the typical targets; hotel management, with little choice but to cooperate, pleaded with the spies for discretion. In 2006 those pleas were ignored, when the journalist Carlotta Gall was assaulted in her room at the Serena by presumed ISI goons. But during the visit that Ashraf described in 2012, their methods were more subtle and invasive than I had imagined.