GOING WITHOUT A PRAYER

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

When Mir Aimal Kansi heard a soft knock on his hotel-room door at 4 a.m. last Sunday, he thought it was a call to prayer. Like most observant Muslims, Kansi prays five times a day, beginning at around 4:30 a.m. And certainly Kansi had a lot weighing on his soul. An accused killer, he was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list, and had been on the run for four years. Now he was holed up in the Shalimar Hotel, a seedy establishment in Dera Ghazi Khan, a city in central Pakistan. He groggily opened his door.

Five Americans, dressed in the flowing cotton shirts and pants of the region, burst through the door: Jimmie Carter, second-in-command at the FBI's Washington metropolitan field office, agent Brad Garrett, and three members of the bureau's hostage rescue team. They shoved the slight, bearded, Pakistani-born Kansi, 33, to the floor, cuffed his hands behind his back and identified themselves as FBI agents. "Who are you?" one of them demanded. "F___ you," Kansi snapped in his lightly accented English, and began screaming for help in his native Pashto language. Garrett knelt beside Kansi and took a thumbprint. A Midwesterner with a Ph.D. in criminology and a powerful memory, Garrett recognized the ridges and whorls. "We got him," he said. The G-men hustled their captive out of the hotel and into a waiting four-wheel-drive vehicle. By that night, Carter was able to send out a brief report to Tom Pickard, head of the FBI's Washington field office and the man who had ordered the team in. The message: "The package has been delivered."

Thus ended the search for one of the most notorious accused terrorists in the world. On Jan. 25, 1993, during the morning rush hour, a lone gunman pulled out an AK-47 and opened fire on commuters outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., killing two CIA employees and wounding three other people. Kansi, whose prints were allegedly found on the spent shell casings, was identified as the prime suspect. However, the day after the shooting, he left the U.S. on a one-way ticket to Karachi. Soon he made his way to Quetta, Pakistan, capital of the province of Baluchistan, an area in which Kansi's Pashtun tribal clan has long exercised great political influence. Allegedly aided by family, friends and sympathizers, Kansi was initially hard to trace, and opportunities to apprehend him were nearly impossible to arrange. Locating and capturing Kansi became a high-priority project for FBI and CIA personnel in Pakistan, a rare joint venture by the rival agencies. Several times, when agents thought they were close to nabbing Kansi, President Clinton became directly involved, contacting leaders in southwestern Asia to obtain clearance to send in U.S. agents--only to have them fail to get their man.

Kansi, by many accounts, had long been a strange, haunted man. But exactly what haunted him is a matter of dispute among those who know him. The only son from his father's second marriage, Kansi comes from a privileged, well-educated and influential family. He attended private school and later earned a master's degree in English literature at the University of Baluchistan. "In high school and university he was a troublemaker," says his college and university friend Muhammed Kazim. "His teachers always felt uneasy in his presence. He used to hurl insults and didn't miss a single opportunity in harassing his teachers." Kazim recalls an incident when Kansi fired a gun into the air to frighten two visiting American professors. Others say Kansi always had a special interest in weaponry--even more than one might expect from a man who came of age in a region bordering on war-torn Afghanistan.

Quetta, which is near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, was a major intelligence hub during the Afghan war. Some townspeople say Kansi's father Abdullah Jan Kansi, a well-to-do businessman, was a CIA agent. Some speculate that his son too may have worked for the CIA and that the 1993 shooting was some sort of payback for a deal gone wrong. However, members of the Kansi clan dispute such claims. Says Kansi's brother-in-law Irfan Kansi: "He was rich and had a comfortable life at home. Why should a man with such a background work for the CIA?" Others say Kansi may have snapped when his father died of liver cancer in the 1980s.

The net began to close on Kansi this month. His whereabouts were betrayed to U.S. investigators by Afghans who appear to have been interested in collecting the $2 million reward offered by the U.S. State Department. Posters, paid newspaper ads, and tens of thousands of red matchbooks printed in Arabic, Baluchi and English and showing Kansi's photo spread the word about the reward in America, Europe, the Middle East and Pakistan. By early June, according to U.S. officials, the FBI-CIA team had made an agreement with some Afghans to bring Kansi to a place near enough to a population center to permit him to be arrested and easily transported away.

On June 4, the FBI's Pickard, a terrorism specialist who helped run the World Trade Center and TWA 800 investigations, summoned Carter, his second-in-command, and told him to take Garrett and a small crew and go to Pakistan. Pickard told Carter, "I don't know where this is going to take you or how long it's going to take you. You'd better say your goodbyes. I'll call your wife every night and tell her you're O.K." He added, "Don't get yourself killed. If it doesn't feel right, pull out. There's always another day."

The White House also played a role. Sources tell TIME that on the days leading up to the raid, both Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright personally contacted Pakistani President Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari to gain his government's approval of the operation. Islamabad's decision to let the U.S. in was politically risky; in 1995 Pakistani government officials, then led by Benazir Bhutto, suffered harsh criticism from local extremists for allowing the U.S. to extradite World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef. Now, however, "they recognize that it's in their own interest to be supportive on terrorism issues like this," says a senior Administration official. "Undoubtedly they are hoping for some improvement in bilateral relations as a result."

Conservative editorial writers in Pakistani newspapers are already criticizing the government for handing over Kansi to the Americans without following typical extradition procedures; in the suspect's hometown of Quetta a steady stream of well-wishers have come to the Kansi family home to express anger over the matter. "Kansi is a local hero," says Syed Talat Hussain, a newspaper columnist. "People praise him for the audacity of his crime. He took on the most dreaded intelligence agency in the world, and that gave him instant popularity." By contrast, in Washington there is only exultation. Kansi, who made incriminating statements on the plane ride to the U.S., is being held without bail in Fairfax County, Va., near CIA headquarters. Last Wednesday, when the FBI's Pickard and Carter went to meet with CIA employees in the agency's auditorium, they were given something FBI men rarely receive from their rivals: a standing ovation.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Ghulam Hasnain/Quetta, Elaine Shannon and Douglas Waller/Washington and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Peshawar

With reporting by HANNAH BLOCH/ISLAMABAD, GHULAM HASNAIN/QUETTA, ELAINE SHANNON AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON AND RAHIMULLAH YUSUFZAI/PESHAWAR