Intel Wars

by Matthew M. Aid

  In recent interviews, Pakistani intelligence officials made clear that they have been aware for some time that the CIA station in Islamabad spent as much time spying on the activities of the Pakistani government and military as it did trying to find Osama bin Laden and his followers in northern Pakistan. According to Pakistani officials, they know that the CIA station has been operating a network of agents inside the Pakistani government and military since well before 9/11. A senior Pakistani official related how a few years ago a newly arrived U.S. Army intelligence officer, whose cover was as a military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, approached a member of his paramilitary security unit and tried to recruit him by offering him a briefcase full of brand-new one-hundred-dollar bills. ISI officials were also certain that the CIA had installed highly sophisticated communications intercept gear inside the U.S. embassy in Islamabad and the American consulates in Peshawar, Lahore, and Karachi to intercept Pakistani government radio and telephone communications traffic.

  So at some point after 2004, the ISI decided to treat the CIA station in Pakistan just like any other hostile intelligence presence operating in their country. The CIA’s intelligence-gathering efforts inside Pakistan suddenly became much more challenging. CIA counterintelligence officers noticed that all U.S. diplomatic establishments in Pakistan were under twenty-four-hour-a-day video and electronic surveillance, and ISI surveillance teams were keeping close tabs on the movements of all CIA operatives in Pakistan. The home phones and personal cell phones of U.S. diplomats and CIA operatives in Pakistan were being tapped, their mail was opened, and their movements were closely watched. Even their personal cooks, maids, and porters were widely believed to be on the ISI payroll. Pakistani government and security officials who had cooperated with the United States were harassed, some even receiving anonymous death threats. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad complained about the hostile and obstructive behavior of Pakistani intelligence and security officials, but no remedial action was ever taken by the Pakistani government.

  One CIA case officer just returned from a tour of duty in Pakistan recalled going with his family for a weekend drive in the hills outside Islamabad to escape the oppressive heat in the city. For the entirety of their day-long excursion they were followed by a black SUV with two ISI operatives inside watching their every move. When they stopped at a roadside stop to take in a scenic vista, the ISI surveillance vehicle parked a short distance behind them. The CIA man looked over, and both of the ISI agents were sitting inside their vehicle scanning the horizon with their binoculars trying to figure out what the Americans were looking at. The CIA officer and his wife laughed themselves silly all the way back to Islamabad.

  In addition, ISI counterintelligence officers began systematically detaining the CIA’s agents inside Pakistan, especially those individuals who were passing the CIA information from the al Qaeda and Taliban stronghold of the FATA in northern Pakistan. With the liberal application of less than gentle forms of persuasion, these individuals were coaxed, prodded, or cajoled into becoming double agents, feeding the CIA’s Islamabad station with whatever material the ISI counterintelligence officers gave them.

  It was not until late 2009 that the CIA became suspicious of the material they were getting from these agents and began an internal investigation. CIA counterintelligence officers discovered that at least fifteen of the agency’s agents in the FATA were almost certainly under the “positive control” of the ISI, and that the reporting from another dozen or so operatives was sufficiently suspicious that the assets were “put on ice” for fear that they too were being controlled by ISI.

  By the end of General Kayani’s tenure at the helm of the ISI in the fall of 2007, the relationship between the Pakistani intelligence service and the CIA had deteriorated to the point that senior CIA officials were convinced that the ISI was penetrated by pro-Taliban sympathizers at all levels of command, leading Michael J. Sulick, then the head of the National Clandestine Service, to comment that “they are going to cooperate [with the CIA] to the least extent that they can get away with … That doesn’t bode well in the search for Bin Laden.”

  If the CIA’s experiences with General Kayani were trying, the agency’s problems with his successor, Lt. General Nadeem Taj, who was director-general of ISI from September 2007 to October 2008, were far worse.

  By the time General Taj took over the helm of ISI, the joint CIA-ISI intelligence effort against al Qaeda in northern Pakistan was in trouble. Reporting from the CIA station and the U.S. embassy in Islamabad confirmed that al Qaeda had succeeded in regenerating itself in the sanctuaries afforded it in northern Pakistan. Despite the fact that there were fewer than a thousand al Qaeda militants in the FATA, the CIA and the Pakistani military and ISI could not get at them because the terrorists were protected by thousands of Pakistani Taliban fighters who had essentially cleared North and South Waziristan of all Pakistani military forces except for a few isolated garrisons, which the militants kept bottled up.

  Beginning in the fall of 2007, several of the joint CIA-ISI intelligence operations in the FATA went horribly wrong. Sensitive intelligence information that the CIA was giving to the ISI on al Qaeda and Taliban activities in the FATA was found to be somehow leaking to the enemy, resulting in a number of CIA clandestine intelligence collection operations being compromised and agents either being killed or disappeared without a trace. Among the casualties were a number of important tribal chiefs and village elders in the FATA, who had been providing the CIA with intelligence on al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban activities in their regions for some time.

  Then in June 2008, the CIA station in Islamabad gave the ISI advance notice that it was going to use its unmanned drones to attack a compound in North Waziristan where a number of high-level Afghan Taliban commanders belonging to a faction known as the Haqqani Network had just been located. What the CIA did not know at the time was that the Haqqani Network and its chief, Jalaluddin Haqqani, had been on the ISI payroll for years. Not only was the ISI secretly bankrolling the Haqqanis, but according to a former CIA official, the Pakistani military was also covertly providing the organization with training, equipment, and logistical support. So not surprisingly, the ISI worked feverishly to delay the drone attack until they could get their clients out of harm’s way. According to the CIA officer, the Pakistani Air Force officials at Shamsi Air Base in northwestern Pakistan, where the CIA Predator drones were based, were ordered by Islamabad to delay the takeoff of the drones because of “technical difficulties.” While the drones idled in their hangers at Shamsi, the Haqqani officials disappeared from the target locations, with intercepted cell phone calls revealing that they had been warned that they were about to be attacked just before they fled.

  A few days later, on June 14, 2008, the CIA thought they had found the hideout of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, and told the Pakistanis they were going to hit the location with a drone strike. According to the CIA official, Mehsud mysteriously disappeared from the house shortly before three Hellfire missiles leveled it.

  CIA officials were convinced that the targets of the strikes had been compromised from the inside, with the leaks appearing to come from the very top of the ISI. According to a former senior U.S. intelligence official now associated with a private security contractor, not only were General Taj and some of his deputies leaking sensitive information to the Haqqani Network, as well as elements of the Pakistani Taliban, about ongoing CIA operations in northern Pakistan; sensitive intelligence showed that these same Pakistani intelligence officials also were fully cognizant of the fact that ISI officers in the FATA were providing weapons and logistical support to the Taliban.

  The leaks emanating from the top of the ISI forced the U.S. intelligence community to take what some in Washington at the time considered to be extreme measures. A few days after the July 7, 2008, suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, which killed forty-one people, CIA director General Michael Hayden gave President Bush a target l
ist of the several dozen al Qaeda and Taliban operatives that the agency had located inside northern Pakistan and wanted to kill. Near the top of the list was the entire senior leadership of the Haqqani Network, which was widely suspected by the CIA of being behind the Indian embassy bombing.

  A few mid-level American intelligence officials opposed the new policy, arguing that instead of killing al Qaeda operatives, some effort should be made to try to capture these men if and when the opportunity presented itself. According to two former CIA counterterrorism officials, because no senior or even mid-level al Qaeda official had been captured for several years prior to the initiation of the policy, the CIA’s knowledge of al Qaeda’s internal organizational structure and management dynamics, as well as the group’s plans and intentions, remained very spotty. But their appeals were rejected on purely utilitarian grounds. According to a senior U.S. intelligence official interviewed in 2009, “Capturing al Qaeda officials is a bother. It is so much easier just to kill ’em when you find them.”

  Without consulting the Pakistani government or military, President Bush approved Hayden’s request to use both military commando raids and CIA Predator drone strikes to kill the individuals on the list, which CIA officials refer to privately as either the “Kill List” or the “Murder List.” Within hours of President Bush signing the top secret authorization, the CIA operations center at Langley sent a “flash” precedence message giving the go order to the Predator drones based in Pakistan. In a 2010 interview, Hayden said that “by the time I left office (in January 2009), more than a dozen of those people [on the list] were dead.”

  But the new round of CIA attacks also produced some particularly horrific collateral damage. For example, shortly before dawn on the morning of September 3, 2008, a twenty-five-man U.S. Special Forces team was landed inside Pakistan by helicopters near the remote border village of Angoor Ada to capture or kill the occupants of what was believed to be an al Qaeda safe house. No one seems to know for sure who the al Qaeda target of the raid was, but whoever it was he seems to have escaped. The local villagers were not so lucky. According to Pakistani officials, at least nineteen civilians were killed in the raid, including women and children.

  Five days later, on September 8, 2008, a CIA drone attack on a building in the town of Dande Darpa Khel in northern Pakistan killed twenty-three people, but not its intended targets. The missiles were supposed to kill the leader of the Haqqani Network, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and his son Siraj, who ran the day-to-day operations of the organization. Neither man was at the headquarters complex at the time of the attack. Instead, the missiles killed one of Jalaluddin Haqqani’s wives, one of his sisters, his sister-in-law, two nieces, and eight grandchildren.

  The one factor that has done the most to poison the U.S. intelligence community’s relationship with Pakistan is that for almost a decade the Pakistani military and ISI have not only protected all three major factions of the Afghan Taliban but also secretly provided them with military hardware, training, and financial support. According to an American military intelligence analyst who formerly served on the ISAF intelligence staff in Kabul, “We know that the Pakistanis help the Taliban. We know it. And they know we know it. But we put up with it in the hope that one day the Taliban will bite the hand that feeds it,” a reference to the Pakistani government.

  Only in the past three years has the U.S. intelligence community somewhat reluctantly come to the conclusion that the Pakistani government’s unwillingness to help the United States combat the Taliban was a deliberate act of national policy. It took an extraordinarily long time for the U.S. intelligence community to reach this conclusion.

  The first inkling that there was a problem surfaced in 2002, shortly after the Battle of Tora Bora, when, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials, the ISI began to refuse to share any intelligence information about the Afghan Taliban presence in Pakistan. And when the CIA and the Afghan intelligence service, the NDS, gave the ISI information concerning the whereabouts of senior Taliban officials hiding in Pakistan, the ISI refused to do anything about it. According to a recently retired CIA official, “I held regular meetings in Islamabad with the ISI and gave them the latest intelligence we had on the whereabouts of senior Taliban commanders in his country. And at every meeting they found new ways of politely telling me that their hands were tied … No matter what I said, they just would not budge.”

  Over the next four years (2002 to 2005), the U.S. intelligence community came to believe, based on low-level clandestine agent reporting, that certain “rogue elements” of the ISI were secretly collaborating with the Taliban, but the belief was that this relationship was conducted without the knowledge or consent of President Musharaf. As late as 2005, there were still lingering doubts about the nature and extent of the ISI-Taliban relationship, with a 2005 paper sent to Vice President Dick Cheney reporting that the Taliban “may still enjoy support from the lower echelons of the ISI.”

  By the end of 2006, all doubts had been cast aside, with a Pentagon report stating unequivocally that “Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI) elements have an ongoing relationship with the Taliban.” The 2006 National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan was also quite clear in its judgment. According to a copy of the estimate shown to the author, the report stated that “available evidence strongly suggests that the Pakistani intelligence service maintains an active and ongoing relationship with certain elements of the Taliban.”

  According to a former DNI official, at some point in 2006 the intelligence community got its first “hard” evidence from what were deemed to be reliable clandestine sources (there were also some incriminating radio intercepts) that the ISI was providing material and financial support to two of the top Afghan Taliban commanders in northern Pakistan: Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose Haqqani Network was based in North Waziristan in the FATA; and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose forces operated from a series of Afghan refugee camps situated around the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

  The consensus opinion within the intelligence community at the time was that the principal form of assistance that the Pakistani military and ISI were providing to the Taliban was training, which according to American military intelligence analysts helped to explain the dramatic improvement in the Taliban’s fighting skills in 2006. But a restricted-access 2008 Marine Corps intelligence briefing concluded that Pakistani support for the Taliban went far beyond training. According to the briefing papers, the ISI was providing the Taliban not only with training but also with money and logistical support; while the Pakistani military was providing the Taliban with communications equipment and advanced combat training.

  Proof of Pakistani complicity with the Taliban came in July 2008, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and the deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, went to Islamabad to try to pressure the Pakistani government to go after the Taliban in their country. The Pakistani reaction was to arrest a single Taliban commander in Quetta named Mullah Rahim, who was picked up because he was leading such a lavish lifestyle that even local newspapermen knew where to find him. But when it came to going after the “big fish” Taliban leaders living out in the open, the Pakistanis followed form and did nothing. And when the Americans complained that the ISI was refusing to go after the top Taliban commanders, the Pakistanis still refused to fire ISI director Nadeem Taj, whom the CIA widely suspected of being “pro-Taliban.”

  The city of Quetta in northwestern Pakistan, located only fifty miles from the Afghan border, is widely believed to be the headquarters-in-exile and military command center for Mullah Mohammed Omar and his fellow Taliban commanders. Despite ten years of fierce denials from senior Pakistani government officials, it is clear from declassified documents and interviews that the Taliban remain omnipresent in Quetta’s sprawling Pashtun slums of Pashtunabad, Satellite Town, Kharotabad, Nawakili, Kachlogh, and Eastern Bypass. The city’s Gulshan District, home to tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, remains a hub of Taliban activity, with one
major thoroughfare in the neighborhood being dubbed “Taliban Road” by local merchants and taxi drivers. Even lowly reporters have been able to periodically interview senior Taliban officials in Quetta, with the Qasr-e-Gul Hotel downtown being the preferred venue for these assignations.

  According to intelligence sources, Quetta serves many other important roles in facilitating the Taliban insurgency inside Afghanistan. It is where senior Taliban field commanders in Afghanistan go once a year for rest and recuperation, as well as to meet with Mullah Omar to plot strategy for the coming year. Money and weapons destined for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are clandestinely transported to Quetta, then sent across the border via infiltration routes known as “ratlines.” In years past, ambulances openly ferried Taliban fighters wounded in Afghanistan from the border crossing at Chaman to a number of hospitals and private clinics in Quetta. The slums in and around Quetta remain an important source of recruits for the Taliban. Taliban officials used to openly recruit volunteers and solicit donations in the local mosques and the eight major religious schools (madrassas) in Quetta without any interference from Pakistani police or security officials.

  How the Pakistani military and police have over the past decade failed to even accidentally discover the Taliban’s substantial presence in Quetta is a mystery, given the fact that some of the Taliban’s training and recruitment centers in the city operate literally within steps of Pakistani military facilities and police stations. One building widely reputed by local government officials and journalists to be the Taliban’s ex officio headquarters in Quetta is less than a mile from the headquarters compound of the Pakistani Army’s XII Corps.