‘Triumph Turned into Tragedy’

The first time I saw Benazir Bhutto was in an exotic photograph in The New York Times Magazine. The story was about her 1986 return to Pakistan from self-exile in London to confront dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq and demand democratic elections. It was the photograph, however, that captivated. Young and beautiful, she was waving at impossibly dense crowds from a garishly painted truck amid a blizzard of rose petals. A short time later I got a call from a literary agent asking whether I'd be interested in helping her write her memoir. I was on the next plane to Karachi.

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was in August 2007. We had tea at the Pierre Hotel in New York with her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and their teenage son, Bilawal. "Look who I brought you," she said to me, beaming a mother's smile. I was happy to meet in person the young man whose birth had been a delicious political deceit. As we'd written in her 1989 memoir, "Daughter of Destiny" (Simon & Schuster), General Zia instructed his intelligence agents to determine her due date so he could time the elections to coincide with her confinement. But clever Benazir never let her medical records out of her sight, and the agents were off by a month. That gave her the time to recover before hitting the campaign trail. She won that election in 1988 and, at 35, became the first woman to head a Muslim nation.

I was very anxious about her return to Pakistan, this time to confront another dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. "I must," she said. "If democracy is not restored, Pakistan will slip into a radical Islamic State." I asked Asif, whom I'd gotten to know quite well over the years, if he was going back with her. "I want to," he said, "but we decided the children ought to have at least one parent at home." I turned to Bilawal, an Oxford undergraduate who'd sat quietly through the political discussion. "Are you going to go into politics, too?" I asked. He looked uncomfortable and shrugged. "I don't know," he said.

She e-mailed me the next day. "Was lovely to see u yesterday. U looked wonderful! Hard to now imagine we met before I had bilawal. I measure time by looking at trees and my children. Love to urs and to u."

Benazir left for Pakistan on Oct. 18. That night, as her motorcade inched through the masses who'd come to greet her, the first bomb went off. "It was simply terrible," she e-mailed. "The triumph turned into tragedy when the terrorists struck undetected due to the street lights which had been shut off to facilitate their approach. The police van blunted one attack we think and the human shield the second so we were saved but 140 others died and five hundred injured. But we can't let the terrorists deter us."

To my fury, I read that Musharraf's government had not only turned down her request for an international investigation into the attack but denied her request for armed guards and other security measures. They even decreed that she could no longer travel in a car with tinted glass! Why, I asked her. "Hidden hands within the govt, and some not so hidden, are behind the militants and behind the attack on me. That's why they don't want me to have tinted glasses etc. Under pressure they have now verbally allowed it but not in writing. Question: why is mush not cleansing his cabinet and intelligence bureau etc of such elements? What is he frightened of that a foreign investigated inquiry will show?"