Former US ambassador says Mossad may have knocked off Pakistani President in ’88 over the fear of Pakistan Nuclear Program. He has also showed suspicion that elements of India’s Research and Analysis Wing and its equivalent of the CIA, along with Israeli Mossad may have played a part too.
A curious report in the Nation by Barbara Crossette who tantalizingly speaks of the role of “an Israeli lobby” (gosh, dear, what’s that!?) in the destruction of former ambassador Chas Freeman’s career, and says the lesson is underlined by a forthcoming memoir, Danger Zones, by 82-year old former ambassador to India, and child of Holocaust survivors, John Gunther Dean:
It was in the midst of this Soviet endgame in Afghanistan that Dean fell afoul of the State Department for the last time. After the death of [Pakistani President] General Zia in August 1988, in a plane crash that also killed the American ambassador in Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, Dean was told in New Delhi by high-ranking officials that Mossad was a possible instigator of the accident, in which the plane’s pilot and co-pilot were apparently disabled or otherwise lost control. There was also some suspicion that elements of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, its equivalent of the CIA, may have played a part. India and Israel were alarmed by Pakistan’s work on a nuclear weapon–the “Islamic bomb.”
Dean was so concerned about these reports, and the attempt by the State Department to block a full FBI investigation of the crash in Pakistan, that he decided to return to Washington for direct consultations. Instead of the meetings he was promised, he was told his service in India was over. He was sent into virtual house arrest in Switzerland at a home belonging to the family of his French wife, Martine Duphenieux. Six weeks later, he was allowed to return to New Delhi to pack his belongings and return to Washington, where he resigned.
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