It is not an exaggeration to say that many of the CIA’s greatest intelligence successes and failures since 9/11 stem directly from its inordinately convoluted relationship with the ISI. Even in the best of times, the U.S.-Pakistani intelligence relationship has been dogged by mutual suspicion and even open animosity, fueled to a certain degree by the strong undercurrent of anti-Americanism that pervades the ranks of the Pakistani military and intelligence services. This should come as no surprise, since the U.S. government and its policies in the Muslim world are extremely unpopular in Pakistan, with recent State Department polling data showing that 68 percent of all Pakistanis have a decidedly unfavorable view of the United States.
This has meant that every CIA chief of station in Pakistan since 9/11 has worked hard to improve their personal relationships with the director of ISI and his senior staff. The CIA chief of station spends much of his time during the workweek commuting back and forth between the fortresslike U.S. embassy in Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave (one former CIA staff officer sarcastically referred to the heavily protected area as the “ghetto of the damned”) to ISI’s headquarters, located just four miles away at the intersection of Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy Road and Service Road East.
In keeping with its penchant for secrecy, everything about the ISI is hidden from public view. The ISI’s 40-acre headquarters complex is surrounded by a ten-foot-high wall and guarded twenty-four hours a day by a contingent of elite Pakistani Army troops who not only shoo away unwanted visitors but have orders to shoot anyone foolish enough to try to enter the compound without authorization. Beyond the main gate is a circular driveway, which leads to a white multistory office building where most of ISI’s senior officials have their offices. Most of ISI’s staff work in a series of drab multistory office buildings that extend back several hundred yards from the ISI headquarters building.
But according to a Western European intelligence source, most of the ISI’s really sensitive intelligence-gathering and covert action activities, including all activities relating to Afghanistan, are run from two military bases eight miles to the south called the Hamza Camp and the Ojri Camp, both of which are hidden away behind high walls and guard towers in the city of Rawalpindi. “We’ve been trying to find out what goes on in those camps for years,” a former CIA case officer revealed in a 2010 interview, “but without much success. Everything they [the ISI] did not want us to see or hear about they hid in ’Pindi.”
The chief of ISI on 9/11, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, had been the bête noire of the U.S. intelligence community for years because of his overtly pro-Taliban views. At the request of the U.S. government, after 9/11 Ahmed went to Afghanistan and met with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar to try to stave off the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. But evidence suggests that Ahmed instead urged the Taliban to fight. After his return from Afghanistan, CIA officials privately told Pakistani president Pervez Musharaf in no uncertain terms that they did not trust Ahmed, and that the general had to go as part of the price tag for Pakistan joining the U.S.-led war on terror. It came as no surprise to intelligence insiders when General Ahmed was abruptly and unceremoniously forced to take early retirement on October 7, 2001, only three weeks before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began.
His replacement, Lt. General Ehsan ul Haq, ran the ISI for three years from October 2001 until he was promoted to the position of chief of staff of the Pakistani armed forces in October 2004. General ul Haq was handpicked for the post not because he was an intelligence professional but rather because he was a close personal friend and confidant of President Musharaf.
During General ul Huq’s tenure, the top task for the CIA and ISI was to hunt down and capture or kill the remnants of al Qaeda that had fled into the wilds of northern Pakistan after the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. According to a half-dozen retired and current-serving CIA officials, the ISI aggressively collaborated with the CIA in going after the remnants of al Qaeda. Almost all of the senior al Qaeda officials captured since 9/11 and now biding their time behind bars at the military-run Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba were captured in Pakistan during General ul Haq’s tenure in office, including Abu Zubaydah (captured March 28, 2002), Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan (July 11, 2002), Ramzi Bin al-Shibh (September 11, 2002), Abu Umar and Abu Hamza (January 9, 2003), and the biggest capture of them all, al Qaeda’s operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, on March 1, 2003. “We would not have gotten any of these guys without the help of ISI,” a former senior CIA official said in an interview.
As a reward for this assistance, the CIA has secretly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars every year since 2002 to the ISI, with senior American intelligence officials confirming media reports that until 2009 the agency was directly subsidizing about one third of ISI’s annual budget, which did not include the tens of millions of dollars of training, equipment, and logistical support that the agency also provided to Pakistan. According to author Bob Woodward, in 2008 the annual CIA subsidy to the ISI amounted to a staggering $2 billion.
~~Intel Wars -by- Matthew M. Aid
No comments:
Post a Comment