C L I N T O N C R I S I S JFK wannabe By Camille Paglia Is Clinton that reckless? By Andrew Ross Unsinkable Bill By Alexander Cockburn What's on the tapes By Jonathan Broder Horowitz: It's his character, stupid D A I L Y+Q U O T E Exit laughing R E C E N T L Y Revolutionary suicide? By Scott Corey Mad or not, there is a logic to Theodore Kaczynski's actions. (01/21/98) Where's the beef? By Erik Marcus What's wrong with Oprah Winfrey swearing off hamburgers? It's libelous, according to rich Texas cattlemen who are suing her for $12 million (01/20/98) The odd couple By Richard Rodriguez Castro and the pope have more in common than the West thinks (01/19/98) The end By Jonathan Broder Benjamin Netanyahu's meeting with President Clinton will likely sink the Middle East peace process altogether (01/16/98) The worst show on earth By Ros Davidson Ted Kaczynski should be in a mental hospital. Instead, he's about to become the star in a grotesque courtroom circus (01/15/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		S A L O N+E X C L U S I V E Convicted assassin: "I wanted to shoot the CIA director" In letters to Salon's correspondent, Pakistani terrorist Mir Aimal Kasi -- who faces the death penalty for killing two CIA employees -- explains why he did it, recounts his life on the lam and says his only regret is that he didn't kill higher-ranking CIA officials. BY JEFF STEIN | he wanted to assassinate the head of the CIA but couldn't find him, settling instead for a rush-hour attack on the spy agency's employees outside their front gate. He acted alone, and traveled freely in Afghanistan afterward -- even going to religious services with the country's prime minister. And, during the more than four years that Pakistani gunman Mir Aimal Kasi eluded a global manhunt, he dreamed of slipping back into the United States and doing it all over again. Those are some of the revelations in a series of letters the 33-year-old Kasi has written from his jail cell in Fairfax County, Va., where a judge Friday sentenced him to death by lethal injection. Five years ago this Sunday, Kasi sprayed a line of cars outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., with AK-47 rifle fire, killing two agency employees and wounding three other people. He pleaded not guilty but was convicted last November, with a jury recommendation that he be put to death. Kasi did not testify in his trial and has never spoken to the media. But in a series of 10 letters Kasi began writing to this reporter in December, he described his bitterness at the United States government for bombing Iraq and his life on the lam after the Jan. 25, 1993, shootings and said his only regret today is that he didn't kill some CIA higher-ups instead. "I am not proud of what happened. I feel sad (that) the people who came under attack were not powerful people ... I wish powerful people would have come under the attack, then it would have been better," he wrote. "I wanted to shoot [then-CIA Director) James Woolsey but was not able to find him, or his timing of coming or going to CIA. If I had found (former CIA Director Robert) Gates I would have attacked him, as these are people who make up policies for CIA or U.S. government." The Washington Post reported last year that CIA security agents had detected someone stalking Gates' suburban Virginia house a few weeks before the 1993 killings, with some speculating that it might have been Kasi. But the defendant said it wasn't him. "I never went to his house," he wrote. Kasi also rejected the allegation by Gen. Hamid Gul, the retired head of Pakistani intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), that he had once worked for the CIA and had perhaps turned on the agency in an act of fury. Gul, who worked closely with the CIA during the Afghan War, insisted to this reporter in an interview in Rawalpindi last August that "Aimal Kasi was an agent of the CIA ... He was working inside of Pakistan and outside of Pakistan." Kasi, however, declared, "I did not work for CIA." During the war in Afghanistan, he wrote, "I had mujahedeen (Afghan guerrilla) friends who worked with the ISI people in bringing (CIA-supplied) arms from military bases in Pakistan to the mujahedeen arms depot (in Afghanistan). I sometimes used to go with them. That was all." Kasi got into the United States after buying false papers in Karachi and altering his name to "Kansi," he said. He later bought a fake green card in Miami. Kasi denied he had any contacts with Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian or any other foreign terrorists, as has been alleged. He wrote that he was surprised that he hadn't been killed during his assault, which started when he stepped out of his car in morning rush-hour traffic and started firing at cars waiting to turn into the CIA's main gate in Langley, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. "I used to pass this area almost every day and knew these two left-turning lanes (were) mostly people who work for CIA," he wrote me. "The attack on CIA was my idea alone ... Nobody in Pakistan knew about it. I alone planned everything and did it." Kasi says the idea for the attack "started coming into my mind" after he purchased an AK-47 from a local Virginia gun dealer. After that, the planned attack was "more important than any other thing to me." N E X T+P A G E+| Why Kasi shot up the CIA