‘I was left to dead in Pakistan prison’; CIA contractor Raymond Davis tells his story

KARACHI: Raymond Davis, the spy contractor who worked for the CIA, has penned down his side of the story of killing two men in broad daylight on Lahore's busy thoroughfare thus triggering a diplomatic crisis between the two ‘War on Terror’ allies in January 2011.

The book titled, "The Contractor: How I Landed in a Pakistani Prison and Ignited a Diplomatic Crisis" has been published amid a controversy that the CIA had censored the book to protect Hillary Clinton, who was then the Secretary of State.

The Amazon.com introduction of the book reads, ‘Davis offers an up-close and personal look at the 2011 incident in Lahore, Pakistan, that led to his imprisonment and the events that took place as diplomats on both sides of the bargaining table scrambled to get him out’.

‘How did a routine drive turn into front-page news? Davis dissects the incident before taking readers on the same journey he endured while trapped in the Kafkaesque Pakistani legal system. As a veteran security contractor, Davis had come to terms with the prospect of dying long before the January 27, 2011 shooting, but nothing could prepare him for being a political pawn in a game with the highest stakes imaginable.’

The author also accused CIA of political bias. According to a report in Daily Mail UK, the CIA held the book manuscript for several months before demanding a swathe of redactions - even on information that is publicly available - pushing the publication of the book from September 2016 to March 2017.

Davis had 'zero trust' in Clinton as a potential president and believes she would have abandoned him in a Pakistani prison, facing possible execution, book's co-author Storms Reback revealed to the newspaper. 'He thinks that had it not been for the U.S. military's plans to kill Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil, Davis would still be languishing in prison - or worse still, dead.'

Davis spent nearly two months in detention after a settlement was reached with the heirs of the victims and he was set free under a legal provision that allows the family of pardoning the killer against a compensation amount.