“Zennies love that story,” chuckled Pickard. “It speaks of remembering the right target: the ocean of mind.”
For Pickard’s ordination, roshi Kōbun had crafted a special gift.
“Kōbun spent days writing a lineage chart in Kanji, four inches by seventy-two inches, with my name at the end, above which was his name, above which were a series of teachers dating back through 1200 AD, and into the distant past to 2500 BC,” said Pickard. “He gave me the dharma name of Eihei Shunko, meaning ‘Eternal Dharma, Bright Spring (or Spring Light).’ In monastic settings, I may use Shunko as my name.”
Having witnessed his non-monastic behavior in Amsterdam and Berlin, Savinelli remained unconvinced.
“Some Buddhist,” he said. “I don’t know how you go from taking vows to budding sex fiend.”
Nonetheless, Shunko Pickard sat zazen that day without Kōbun chastising his wandering eye or the drifting thoughts that Zennies term “monkey mind.” Leonard Pickard had many a worry tangling his brain. One of them involved Afghan heroin, international prisoner exchange, and Stinger missiles.
In an effort to put his Kennedy School connections to practical use, Pickard recalled Terminal Island conversations he’d once had with Afghan drug dealer Mohammed Akbar Bai.
“We sat together on a prayer rug in prison, sipping sweet black tea from crudely fired handmade cups beneath the only tree—a wretched little birch with few leaves for shade,” Pickard recalled in The Rose. “We watched as disoriented inner-city crack addicts stumbled in circles nearby.”
A fine fellow with two wives and ten children, Akbar had taken the fall for an opium wholesaler back home in Kabul—a powerful warlord named Abdul Rashid Dostum whom Leonard described as “diminutive and comfortably plump.” While Akbar cooled his heels in US prisons during the eighties and nineties, Dostum rose to the rank of General in the Afghan Army. In one of his many overseas junkets, Pickard made a point of meeting Dostum on his own turf. Together, they planned ways that they might repatriate Akbar.
“I began connecting Akbar Bai weekly through Cambridge to Dostum on his satellite phone in the far deserts or in his compounds in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Mazar-i-Sharif, occasionally greeting Dostum and listening in on their long conversations in Dari,” recalled Pickard. “Their hypnotic exchanges recalled the old burnished faces of Central Asia, the crushing poverty and beauty of the royal city of Mazar, and Kabul itself—an anus mundi whose outskirts were littered with the whitening bones of its exiles.”
In his exalted new role, General Dostum6 controlled much of the arsenal left behind during the CIA’s secret war against Russian invaders in the eighties. His munitions included thirty shoulder-fired, heat-seeking Stingers worth $400,000 each. Pickard understood the General would be willing to return four of them to the US in exchange for Akbar’s freedom.
Operation Infrared commenced.
In the first real world test of the diplomatic skills he’d acquired at Harvard, Pickard brokered a Washington, DC, meeting with US Customs officials. He arranged for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to act as intermediary. Aside from seeking Akbar’s freedom, the General was equally intent on warning the US against the rise of the Taliban, but his entreaties fell on deaf ears.
“Dostum asked for US consular presence in Mazar-i-Sharif, but was refused,” said Pickard. “In retrospect, he turned out to be right.”
Pickard angled for a more modest and pragmatic deal: removing deadly Stingers from the volatile Afghan civil war. With serial numbers that Dostum provided, he was able to verify the missiles’ existence.
“The CIA liaison confirmed the authenticity of three of them, saying the fourth had already been returned,” said Pickard. “At the time, CIA had $60 million for the return of thousands of missiles, but didn’t want to get involved.”
In the lead up to their meeting, US Customs still doubted Dostum.7
“I replayed this information to Ambassador Gelbard, who said the Customs response was nonsense; that arrangements could indeed be made for the return,” said Pickard. “I volunteered to escort the Stingers across the Uzbek border into the American consulate. Just as Gelbard was about to act on the Stingers, he was appointed envoy to Bosnia for the Dayton Accords, and that was that.”
Leonard’s first crack at diplomacy fizzled.
“I thought about running over to Bosnia and asking Gelbard for a job at State,” he said. “At the time, he likely would have hired me.”
When the Stinger deal failed, Pickard and Dostum tried a different tack for springing Akbar.
According to courtroom testimony delivered years later, Dostum and Pickard planned to swap Akbar for an Afghan peasant whom they intended to set up with eight hundred kilograms (1,760 pounds) of contraband heroin before he entered the US:
“This guy was going to go to jail,” testified the prosecution’s star witness. “Initially, Leonard told me that the man’s family was being paid off and it was $1 million US dollars, and that he would . . . the man would voluntarily do this.”
The witness said that Pickard wavered on the details of his story over time, but not the central idea. Dostum would “give” the US an Afghan peasant plus the heroin he muled out of the Middle East in exchange for Akbar’s freedom.
“And I said, ‘Leonard, do you realize this man has no concept of what it is to do life in prison in the United States?’ He said, ‘It doesn’t make any difference because it’s better than what life (he has) currently,’” testified the witness.8
His name was Gordon Todd Skinner.
1. Microsoft’s ninth employee, Wallace coined the term “shareware.” In 1996, Wallace and wife Megan Dana-Wallace opened Mind Books in Berkeley where Nick Sand re-emerged in his first public appearance following his years underground. Wallace died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 2002. He
