Pakistan Will Continue Busting Private CIA Rings

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Pakistan Will Continue Busting Private CIA Rings, Pasha to Tell US

Submitted by Aurangzeb on July 17, 2011 – 6:17 pm



ISLAMABAD:Pakistan’s top spy chief is purportedly going to give the following message to his American counterpart in Washington: yes to formalised anti-terror cooperation, no to private CIA network.

Chief of Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Lt-Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha was due to meet acting CIA Director Michael Morell on Wednesday.

The decision to send Pasha to Washington was reportedly taken at the corps commanders’ meeting on Wednesday, a day after US central command head Gen James Mattis met with top military officials, including the Army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

Sources add that the new US head for international forces in Afghanistan Lt-Gen John Allen is arriving in Islamabad on Thursday.

The flurry of meetings between top military and intelligence officials from Pakistan and the US are seen as fresh efforts to salvage their ‘shaky’ war on terror alliance after a series of setbacks in recent months.

Hectic efforts are being undertaken both in Islamabad and Washington to rescue their relations from the brink of collapse.

No to ‘private network’

The back-to-back meetings of military and intelligence officials follow the US administration’s decision earlier this week to withhold $800 million in military aid to punish Pakistan’s security establishment for expelling several dozen alleged American spies operating in the country.

Top Pakistani military commanders on Wednesday said they would use their own resources to carry forward the war on terror in what appeared to be a ‘mild but defiant’ snub to Washington’s move.

According to senior intelligence officials here, Pasha would tell the American spy chief that the ISI has no objection to anti-terror cooperation between the two agencies but would never tolerate a private ‘network’ the CIA is secretly maintaining in Pakistan.

“We are willing to cooperate with CIA in war on terror … but there is no room for a private network. That is our position and we are going to stick to that,” said an official, giving a hint of what would be discussed during Pasha’s interaction with the Americans.

The Pakistani military has been in the process of busting what is described as an underground human network the US established over the past decade.

These local individuals associated with the CIA are believed to have played a critical role in a secret manhunt that led up to the unilateral raid in which bin Laden was killed.

The US administration has been pushing Pakistani spy agencies to release at least several hundred people who were part of the CIA network and the issue is likely to feature during Pasha’s meetings as well.

But officials here said they believed the decision to dismantle these private clusters was final and there won’t be any second thoughts.

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Salvaging US support

The decision to send Pasha to the US was apparently taken at the corps commanders’ meeting on Wednesday because the military still considers American financial support vital for their war on terror campaign.

Experts believe Pakistani military’s policy of still continuing the war on terror cooperation with the US emanates from fears that Washington might keep them out of the loop on any endgame in Afghanistan.

American troops start their partial withdrawal from Afghanistan in a month’s time.

There were already signs of Pak-US cooperation getting back on track when Gen Kayani visited the embattled Mohmand tribal region on Wednesday where more than a thousand terrorists surrendered to political authorities.

Local operational commanders also informed the army chief that seven factories of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in the border area were destroyed by troops after being tipped of by US intelligence.

Releasing the doctor

Washington is pressing Islamabad to release a doctor – said to have helped in tracking Bin Laden using DNA samples – in the wake of bitter diplomatic relations, the Guardian reported.

Dr Shakir Afirdi is being held by ISI after it discovered that he was recruited by the CIA for carrying out a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad, trying to track down al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

According to the report published earlier in the Guardian, Afridi, a senior government employee, was initially taken into custody in Peshawar but may have been transferred to Islamabad.

Pakistani and US officials say that American authorities are trying to rescue the Pakistani doctor, his wife and children, and take them to the US.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 14th, 2011.

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Breaking Open CIA’s embrace

Submitted by Aurangzeb on August 10, 2011 – 4:49 pm


By Momin Iftikhar

“CIA recruits agents and mercenaries, it bribes and blackmails foreign officials to carry out its most unsavoury tasks. It does whatever is required to achieve its goals without any consideration of the ethics involved or the moral consequences of its actions.” -Excerpt from ‘The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence’ by Victor Marchetti

The exposure of Raymond Davis as a CIA agent who killed two Pakistanis in cold blood (his colleagues in a brazen bid to rescue him crushed to death a motorcyclist, seldom spoken about in the US media), followed by Operation Geronimo that yielded the prized catch of Osama bin Laden (OBL) in Abbottabad on May 2, has left no doubt in public perception about the extent of penetration made by CIA into Pakistan’s troubled landscape. The realisation that the CIA has sunk its tentacles deep inside Pakistan , to a degree, whereby it has become capable of circumventing the agencies who own the turf, has generated shockwaves that are reverberating among the public opinion in Pakistan.

To make matters worse, the brouhaha raised in the US over the detention of CIA’s five Pakistani collaborators by Pakistan’s agencies has further strengthened the impression that the American intelligence agency is not only running amok in the country, but also has the arrogance (or naiveté) to assume that its stepping on our toes will continue to go unchallenged. The US media fusillade, launched in the wake of CIA Director Leon E. Panetta’s unsuccessful visit that was undertaken to secure the release the local agents, who provided the ground information that facilitated the Navy SEALs raid on Osama’s compound in Abbottabad, is quite instructive to understand the US policy framework in which the agency clandestinely operates in foreign countries.

So, it is evident that the CIA enjoys full and multidimensional support of the US establishment. To build up pressure on Pakistan, to make it relent in the case of the detention of its collaborators, the US legislators provided ample ammunition to their powerful media organs to launch broadsides at Pakistan with telling effects.

The Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, after expressing the standard Washington fare of claiming that ‘elements’ from the Pakistani military and the ISI establishment provided some level of assistance to OBL before he was killed, laid out what was expected of Pakistan in the context of the detention of the CIA informers. “They [Pakistan] could have said, ‘we are going to redouble our efforts with the US, we are going to fight extremism, we are going to fight terrorism, we are going to join with you as partners to try to remove the extremists and dangerous elements in Pakistan that we know have targeted the US in the past,” he said. Mr Rogers, in his fit of oratory, had made it sound like as if the detention of the CIA’s Pakistani informers had washed out the country’s entire effort of bagging the maximum number of Al-Qaeda big fish as a partner of the US. His lament; when the American sailors who ditched Osama’s body in sea, returned to a heroic welcome in the US, the five Pakistanis who had collaborated with the CIA had been left out in the cold to undergo interrogation about their role in the operation. Emotional outbursts aside, the exposure of CIA’s asset in Pakistan has implications which are substantive enough to have triggered such an impassioned outcry from the intelligence and political establishment in Washington.

First, despite claiming partnership with Pakistan, the US has provided no details about the Abbottabad raid, which violated the national sovereignty of Pakistan with a devil-may-care abandon. Given the sensitivity of the issue, Pakistan is fully justified in initiating actions to reconstruct the sequence of events that would point to the lapses in the system, which enabled the US Special Forces to violate its air and ground vigil. The CIA collaborators make the best available sources to help fill in the missing pieces in the jigsaw puzzle and also help comprehend the circumstances in which OBL was able to remain hidden in his craftily laid hideout for five years without attracting attention. These are vital questions and the US collaborators are legitimate sources of intelligence; a fact that should not be grudged by the US legislators nor the CIA bosses.

Second, much like the Raymond Davis affair, there may be consternation among the CIA agents operating within Pakistan that the questioning of the five detainees may lay bare the clandestine network that CIA has painstakingly laid out in Pakistan. This may necessitate reconfiguring the intricately laid web of espionage leading to the wastage of assets and slowing down or even temporarily shutting off certain vital operations. There will also be fears that despite placing necessary cut-outs, to save the entire network from exposure, the questioning may lead on to more local CIA agents serving the US interests in Pakistan.

Third, it is a question of the morale of the locals working for the US intelligence, who are assured that in case of compromise of their cover they would not be left alone to face the music. Resettlement abroad, as a reward for their work and services rendered to the CIA, is always dangled by the recruiters as an inducement. That they could be exposed and interrogated in Pakistan, despite assurances must have sent chills down the spine of many other CIA local agents, who are willing to sell their loyalties for the lure of money or other elusive attractions. Netting of the CIA collaborators will certainly dampen the spirit of their cohorts, who may realise that behind fake promises and polished exteriors of the CIA recruiters are cynical, brutal characters whose word, invariably, is absolutely worthless.

Fourth, with tangible evidence in hand, Pakistan is in a position to question the presence of a large CIA footprint in Pakistan, where the turf is exclusively claimed by the local agencies. Being a partner in war against terrorism does not imply that CIA has a franchise to operate at will in the country. There is no reason as to why CIA’s untrammelled liberty of action in Pakistan should not be curtailed and calibrated in deference to the country’s priorities and sensitivities. The US legislators and the CIA should not arrogate to themselves the right to tell Pakistan how to safeguard its vital security interests within the confines of its own borders.

The writer is a freelance columnist.