Episode 5: Near Misses

January 24, 2018·22 min·1 clip

Benazir Bhutto's old friend describes embracing her just hours after suicide bombers nearly killed her on her first day back in Pakistan.

The episode opens with Victoria Schofield, a friend of Benazir Bhutto's, recalling their reunion after the October 2007 Karachi suicide bombing that killed more than 150 people on Benazir's return to Pakistan. Host Owen Bennett-Jones, who was in Karachi as a BBC correspondent, describes the immediate aftermath and notes that the attack made clear how precarious Benazir's survival would be. He introduces the episode's two main threads: additional assassination attempts in the weeks after Karachi, and US government deliberations about whether to provide Benazir with security. A US diplomatic cable shows Benazir asking the American ambassador for personal protection; the ambassador declined, citing that such arrangements were not consistent with a political campaign. Benazir visited her family mausoleum near Karachi, where her two brothers and her father — former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, hanged in 1979 — are buried. In early November, Musharraf declared a state of emergency, which Bennett-Jones describes as aimed at curtailing Benazir's campaign. Musharraf hoped Benazir, who was visiting her family in Dubai, would stay there; she immediately flew back to Pakistan. Bennett-Jones conducted a live BBC interview with Benazir upon her return, during which she said she could be arrested but had returned to encourage democratic resistance. US cables document the Pakistani government's effort to stop a planned Benazir rally: Musharraf's National Security Advisor asked the US ambassador to persuade Benazir to cancel it. When the ambassador called her, Benazir said she expected an attack but would proceed. Police and armoured vehicles then surrounded her home, placing her under house arrest. Despite confinement, her visibility through global media boosted her poll numbers, as Ron Susskind recounts. Susskind describes meeting Benazir in Quetta at the fortified compound of a local warlord, Raisani, where she felt safe enough to speak candidly for the first time. She told Susskind she was fearful because her rising success had made her a target for the entire Musharraf power structure. She asked Susskind to contact Vice President Dick Cheney, arguing that freezing the overseas accounts of thirty Musharraf loyalists would cause their families in London and Washington to pressure them. Susskind never made the call. Susskind and Benazir also discussed Martin Luther King and Gandhi as she reflected on civil disobedience. On a separate occasion, while travelling through Quetta with Raisani, a walkie-talkie warning came that six suicide bombers had been spotted at a checkpoint — three captured, three not. Benazir decided to continue because the mayor of Quetta had assured her the signal jammers were working. Bennett-Jones notes that the Bhutto family attributed failures to deliberately defective jammers from Musharraf, but official documents suggest the batteries simply ran out during long processions. In the final segment, Bennett-Jones draws on classified documents describing jihadi planning in the two weeks before Benazir's assassination on 27 December 2007. A scout conducted a dry run at a rally in northwest Pakistan and filed a report noting that security slackened after events and that Benazir consistently stood through her vehicle's sunroof to wave — and he had touched her vehicle.

As heard by us

A sharp look at how an attack changed a political comeback.

After the Karachi bombing, the episode tracks Benazir Bhutto back into a campaign that is already under strain. It moves through warnings, leaked US cables, police cordons, and house arrest, so the comeback starts to look less like momentum than a fight over who gets to set the…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

When a rally becomes a survival test, every move matters.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Assassination