OPC members helped pack the house at the beautiful Society of the Americas building on Park Avenue to listen to Heraldo Muñoz discuss the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as she was campaigning in Pakistan. Muñoz, a Chilean diplomat who was appointed by the U.N. to lead an international inquiry into Bhutto’s murder, was discussing his new book, Getting Away With Murder.
Under questioning by Lally Weymouth, senior associate editor The Washington Post and the last U.S. writer to interview Bhutto extensively, Muñoz outlined a list of suspects while admitting investigators have never cracked the crime. With telling details, Munoz told the crowd of diplomats, journalists and foreign policy specialists about the sloppy and lackadaisical police work that preceded Bhutto’s killing. He raised a series of questions about whether her assassination was practically inevitable, if not planned by those in charge, since the authorities in Pakistan ignored pleas from Bhutto, from the U.S. and elsewhere, for topflight security preparations to insure her protection.
As in any good mystery story, Muñoz tried to unravel the many potential motives by suspects inside and outside of Pakistan. He marched through Benazir’s political rivals, the Taliban, factions of the military and Pakistani intelligence service, agents from other countries, among others. His conclusion, reached delicately with the Pakistan ambassador to the U.N. in the crowd, seemed to be that Pakistan was — and remains — a pretty treacherous and mysterious place.