WHEN THE BARBARIANS OVERRUN THE STREETS

By Anthony Spaeth

The giveaway was the yellow diplomatic license plate with the number 64: it announced that the white Toyota Hiace van, making its morning run along Karachi's Shara-e-Faisal Boulevard, was registered to the U.S. consulate. At a red light, two men jumped out of a stolen taxi, and as one stood watch, another fired at the van with an AK-47 rifle. Sixteen gunshots later, Gary C. Durell, 45, a CIA communications technician, was dead, and Jackie Van Landingham, 33, a consulate secretary, was fatally wounded. A third employee, postal clerk Marc McCloy, 31, was shot in the ankle. The gunmen spared the Pakistani driver and sped away. Said a stunned Karachi resident, Mohammad Ismail Said, an office clerk: "The barbarians have arrived."

In fact, the barbarians are well established in Karachi, Pakistan's biggest city (pop. 10 million). The town is torn by conflict between rival factions of Mohajir Muslim migrants from India, between the terrorists and the government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and between rival groups of Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. Add to that a booming heroin trade, a kidnap-for-ransom industry and a mountain of weapons left over from the 1979-89 Afghanistan war. The result: 1,200 murders in the past year, making Karachi one of the deadliest cities in the world. (In New York City, where 7.5 million live, 1,600 people were murdered last year.) "You've got people with all kinds of reasons to kill each other," says a State Department official in Washington. "And they are merrily going about it."

The killings of the consular workers were the first in recent memory that both involved foreigners in Karachi and were not connected directly with crime or sectarian strife. That led some diplomats in Karachi to speculate that the attackers were Islamic militants angry at Pakistan's extradition to the U.S. in February of Ramsi Yousef, suspected mastermind of New York City's 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Others suggest it may have been a deliberate attack on CIA employee Durell, pointing out that only he was directly fired upon. Van Landingham died because she was sitting beside Durell and came in the line of fire. Yet another theory is that Prime Minister Bhutto's Mohajir opponents may have planned the killings to disrupt a recent warming in U.S.-Pakistani relations: the Prime Minister will visit Washington next month, and Hillary and Chelsea Clinton are expected to arrive in Pakistan-though not in Karachi-on March 26 at the beginning of a 10-day Asian trip.

The U.S. sent security experts and FBI agents to Karachi to gather evidence and offered a $2 million reward for help in finding the killers, unlikely as that is. "It could be anybody," says a U.S. intelligence official in Washington. The only certainty is that the Americans made very easy targets. Unlike U.S.-owned vehicles in other trouble spots around the globe, the van did not have armor plating or bulletproof glass, it appeared to follow the same route every morning, and the driver was not trained in ambush-escape techniques. "These folks didn't need to die like this," says Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism official who now heads a security consulting firm. "This was avoidable."

--Reported by Gerald Bourke/Islamabad and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by GERALD BOURKE/ISLAMABAD AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON