by Shuja Nawaz
In his presentation of evidence to the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Ijaz appended the covering email 9 from him on Monday 10 May 2011 to Jones with which he had attached two versions of the memo, one in Word format and the other a pdf. He referred to earlier telephone discussions of that day on Pakistan and its relations with the US.
I am attaching herewith a document that has been prepared by senior active and former Pakistani government officials, some of whom served at the highest levels of the military intelligence directorates in recent years, and as senior political officers of the civilian government. This document has the support of the president of Pakistan, I have been informed one hour ago.
Ijaz also stated in the covering memo to Jones that he was considering the use of two alternative channels to convey the same message to Mullen—Senator Tom Daschle and Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, to ensure that Mullen had the document in time before Mullen was to meet ‘certain key Pakistani officials at the White House on Wednesday’. Ijaz did not name Haqqani nor refer to his role in the drafting of the memo at the time. Ijaz maintains that his reference to ‘senior political officers of the civilian government’ was an oblique reference to Haqqani. He referred to two Pakistani officials in the past tense as having ‘served’. Ijaz explained to me that reference to these officials who had served in past positions in the Pakistani government and military was based on information Haqqani had allegedly provided to him when Ijaz pressed him about the source of certain points to be included in the memorandum. He also explained to me that by mentioning others were part of the effort, he was helping camouflage Haqqani’s direct role in the drafting of the memorandum as Haqqani had told Ijaz he was under constant ISI surveillance and they knew when he met senior US officials and would connect any event, such as a call from Mullen to Kayani warning against a coup, to any of his prior meetings with Mullen. 10 Haqqani described this as evidence that Ijaz decided to blame him as an afterthought, once the ISI got interested in his memo.
The case took on added import once the DG-ISI Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha entered the picture and proceeded to meet Ijaz on 22 October at the Park Lane Intercontinental Hotel, room 210, in London, a room arranged by the ISI. Pasha and Ijaz followed safety protocols by removing the batteries of their cell phones and putting them in a drawer near the table where they sat. Pasha had brought a notepad to the meeting, as had Ijaz. Ijaz also brought his computers and BlackBerry device containing the exchanges with Haqqani.
Haqqani questioned the very occurrence of the meeting between Pasha and Ijaz as suspicious. ‘Why did Ijaz write about something he had agreed to do in secret, if indeed he had been asked to do it? Why was he so ready to meet with the ISI, which he had described as the font of evil, to spill the beans about a “plot” of which he had become part to stop that evil?’ asked Haqqani. Ironically, both protagonists were on record as being suspicious and critical of the ISI and its role in Pakistani politics. Both favoured civilian supremacy.
According to Ijaz’s witness statement for the Supreme Court Commission:
After being seated face to face at a small dining table, Gen. Pasha opened the meeting by stating his purpose in asking to meet me. He made clear he was not there to interrogate but rather to understand with evidence supporting my statements what exactly had happened in the days in question. He made clear he was in London with the consent of the army chief, Gen. Kayani. 11
Over the next four hours, Ijaz states, Pasha asked questions or looked at the BlackBerry messages exchanged with Haqqani and other material that Ijaz provided, or showed on his laptop. Pasha also read the memorandum that had been sent to Mullen via Jones. According to Ijaz:
Gen. Pasha read the Memorandum itself in about three or four minutes, demonstrated surprise and dismay—at times disgust and disappointment—over the content of the document. He did not ask a single question about the content of the document other than if I was willing to divulge the names of the others besides Haqqani that he had told me were to be part of the new national security team. I did so with the caveat that I did not believe either [Gen. Jehangir] Karamat [the former army chief and ambassador to the US] or [Maj. Gen. Mahmud Ali] Durrani [the former ambassador to the US and NSA] knew anything about the plan to deliver the Memorandum, the contents of the Memorandum or the mindset of Haqqani and those behind him in dreaming up the scheme. 12
President Zardari asked Haqqani to return to Islamabad amidst media furore over the alleged memo and turned down Haqqani’s offer to resign, saying, in Haqqani’s recollection, ‘If you don’t come, that will make our government look weak, and the government will be dispensed with.’ Haqqani initially stayed with Zardari and was taken to a meeting at the prime minister’s house on 22 November 2011, where Zardari, Gilani, Kayani and Pasha were present. Haqqani’s presence in the meeting ‘lasted no more than 10 minutes’. And he says he was asked to explain what had happened. ‘It’s all untrue,’ said Haqqani. Kayani, who did most of the talking, according to Haqqani, then asked him if he would sue Ijaz. Haqqani says he explained that he was not mentioned in the memo and a defamation suit would mean that all Haqqani’s ‘relations, and documentation . . . about the military etcetera, could be subject to discovery requirement under law’. Haqqani says he was talking about the conviction a few weeks earlier of the president of the Kashmiri American Council (KAC), Ghulam Nabi Fai, who had been accused by the FBI of working as an unregistered agent of the ISI. 13 (Fai pleaded guilty on 7 December 2011 and exposed a wider scheme involving other ‘straw donors’ who allegedly helped him funnel money acquired from the government of Pakistan and the ISI to influence US politicians.) 14 Ijaz maintains that a secret fund that his lawyer later brought up in the proceedings of the Supreme Court’s inquiry commission was separate from the ISI’s funds and came under the ambassador’s purview.
Haqqani was asked to wait for the group’s decision. An hour after the group meeting, Zardari came back and said to him: ‘We have decided that you should resign.’ Haqqani says he had a resignation already drafted since 16 November 2011 and handed it over.
The matter did not end there, however. The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, accepted petitions by Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and several others, barred Haqqani from leaving the country, and decided to investigate the entire affair. It took some time after that for Haqqani to get permission to exit Pakistan on 31 January 2012, that too after then US Senator John Kerry’s intercession, among others, on his behalf. He has not gone back since then. The ISI has not shared its findings, nor has there been any public investigation of the other senior retirees mentioned in the discussions surrounding Memogate.
An interesting side plot to the Memogate saga emerged, surrounding the dismissal of Lt. Gen. (retired) Naeem Lodhi, the defence secretary, at the time that Memogate reached the Supreme Court. 15 Lodhi was still serving as a three-star in the army in late 2011, when he describes a visit to him, before the Memogate issue and the resulting civil–military spat erupted in public view via the Supreme Court’s proceedings in Pakistan. His visitor was a course mate from the 50th PMA Long Course and Lodhi’s fellow Army Engineers officer, Lt. Col. Hassan Saleem Haqqani. The colonel was the elder brother of Amb. Husain Haqqani. Col. Haqqani passed him a message from his brother to the effect: ‘Husain says I’m sorry and I want to come and call on GHQ [army headquarters]. I am ready to accept whatever they say. We’ll do whatever they say.’ Lodhi says he had no idea what this was about, not having been briefed about the details of the Memogate issue. He says he called Gen. Kayani’s office and asked if he could see him that afternoon and also asked if Gen. Pasha of ISI could be invited to the army chief ’s office in Rawalpindi for the same meeting. ‘I delivered the message. They both exchanged a glance, thanked me’, but did not say anything further about the cryptic message from Ambassador Haqqani. So, Lodhi says he left Kayani’s office. Little did he know how he would be drawn later into the vortex of the Memogate inquiry.
Haqqani categorically d
enies that he sent a message to Gen. Kayani: ‘No message was sent by me to K. None whatsoever. And there was no question of an apology. I met K and P only at the PM House in the presence of PM and President. That was all. I have no idea what Lodhi sb. [sahib] is referring to.’ 16 Gen. Pasha did not respond to a request to confirm this incident. Indeed, this was not brought up in the subsequent proceedings related to this case in Pakistan. Lodhi later became a caretaker minister in 2018. Surprisingly, this information did not figure in any of the public investigation of Memogate.
The Parliamentary Committee on National Security had been charged on 28 November 2011 by the prime minister to investigate the Memogate issue at the ‘highest level’. 17 The Supreme Court via a judicial commission set up a month later also asked for statements from Kayani and Pasha. Those statements were sent to Lodhi, in his role as the defence secretary, in sealed envelopes. He said that he sent those sealed envelopes via a dispatch rider to the Attorney General with the instructions that if the Attorney General was not available, to hand them to the Registrar of the Supreme Court. That was indeed the final outcome, and the statements from Kayani and Pasha ended up directly in the Supreme Court’s hands.
That became the basis of the complaint of the civilian government against its defence secretary. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani wanted to know why Lodhi had passed the statements directly to the court instead of via the government. The parliamentary committee asked for his views on the Memogate issue. Though he had not read the Kayani or Pasha statements, Lodhi says he responded that he had nothing to add to what the two senior military officers had conveyed. He was then summoned to the prime minister’s camp office (attached to the PM’s residence), at 8 a.m. on 12 January 2012, an unusual hour for a meeting. He informed Pasha of the invitation. At the PM’s camp office, he saw the Secretary of the Ministry of Interior, the Secretary, Law and Justice, the Secretary, Foreign Affairs, and the Principal Secretary to the PM, Khushnood Akhtar Lashari. Lashari gave him a legal stamped paper that had been pre-typed with a statement for the Supreme Court. Lodhi began to read the document. Lashari said to him there was no need to read the document. Lodhi says he responded that he needed to know what he was being asked to sign. That document said in effect: ‘Now that a high-powered Parliamentary Committee has been formed, no other forum should investigate Memogate.’ Lodhi says, ‘I refused to sign. Lashari said to me, “Do you know the consequences of not signing?” They [then] connected me via telephone to the Attorney General, who wanted to know why I was not signing. I told him that I came from the army, where even a captain would refuse to sign a document that was not his personal statement.’
Lodhi left the PM’s office and informed both Kayani and Pasha of the incident. Later that evening, he heard on the news that he had been relieved of his position as defence secretary. Having only taken over on 28 November the previous year, he had one of the shortest tenures in that post. His replacement was Nargis Sethi, who had served in various important positions in government and in the PM’s office.
Lodhi’s firing prompted an exchange of verbal fire between the government and the military. The ISPR Directorate, the publicity arm of the military, denied that the army chief and the DG-ISI acted ‘unconstitutionally and illegally’ while filing their replies in [the] memo issue, and noted that Mr Gilani’s allegations [of misconduct by the military and the Defence Secretary] could have ‘very serious ramifications with potentially grievous consequences for the country’.
Beyond that, ISPR said:
The responses by the respondents [Kayani and Pasha] were sent to the Ministry of Defence for onward submission to the Honourable Supreme Court, through Attorney General (Law Ministry) . . . Responsibility for moving summaries and obtaining approvals of competent authority thereafter lay with the relevant ministries and not with the respondents. 18
On 30 December 2011, a Judicial Commission of Inquiry had been set up to determine the origins of the memo based on Mansoor Ijaz’s assertions. The Commission’s hearings continued until the middle of 2012 and it issued a detailed report generally upholding Ijaz’s version of events, citing him as a ‘credible witness’ whose credibility Haqqani had sought unsuccessfully to undermine. 19 The Commission refused to accept Haqqani’s testimony by video link from overseas, the means by which Ijaz had offered his account. It wanted him to appear in person in Islamabad.
Haqqani reportedly had agreed to return to Pakistan if asked to do so by the Supreme Court when he was allowed to leave in January 2012. Later, he refused to do so, citing concerns about his safety in Pakistan.
According to Haqqani,
My lawyer conveyed our decision to boycott the Commission’s proceedings in May 2012, having cooperated with it until then, after it refused to let me record my evidence by videolink and refused to accept any of the documents and material submitted by us.
We did not participate in the forensic examination even though the Secretary of the Commission wrote to us two days before the examination informing us of his choice of forensic examiner. We also objected to the examination being conducted at the Pakistan High Commission instead of a Forensic lab or research facility. 20
Some months into the Commission’s proceedings, in May 2012, Ijaz’s lawyer, Akram Sheikh, a former president of Pakistan’s Supreme Court Bar Association alleged that a secret fund of approximately $8 million had been created at the National Bank of Pakistan’s DC branch under Ambassador Haqqani’s control at the Pakistan embassy in Washington. This funding, it was alleged, came from the Pakistani treasury, and was being used to pay certain Americans for unknown reasons and services. According to Ijaz’s lawyer, the fund was reportedly authorized by President Zardari.
Ijaz believes that the political fund could have been used to undermine the integrity of the US political system. This secret fund was subsequently the subject of an in-camera session of the Commission. In the Commission proceedings, it is alleged that cash withdrawals were made from this National Bank of Pakistan (Washington DC branch) account in amounts just less than the $10,000 US Treasury reporting threshold. The Commission found that only some $1.7 million was left in this account when the Memogate affair exploded on the scene and Haqqani was recalled. Ijaz’s lawyer spoke publicly of this operation and after reports in the media at least one of the non-Pakistanis challenged his assertions publicly. 21 A number of simultaneous articles in US media defended Haqqani and challenged Ijaz’s credentials and claims of past activities in resolving conflicts around the globe.
Haqqani says the so-called secret fund was a perfectly legal Special Service account with different auditing requirements and Ijaz’s lawyer invoked it only to justify the testimony presented to the Commission. Haqqani challenged Ijaz’s claims as a secret, private negotiator in official matters, referring, among others to a CNN article against Ijaz. 22 Ijaz presented me with correspondence authored by leaders of Sudan and Kashmiri separatists which were transmitted by him to US legislators, President Bill Clinton and others, as well as other material to support his claim of having attempted to bring Sudan and the US together in the fight against terrorism and specifically against Al-Qaeda, as well as his efforts to bring India and Pakistan together on Kashmir. These included, among other things, an article co-authored with a former US ambassador to Sudan.
The Commission completed its work regardless and submitted its findings. No legal cases emerged from this imbroglio nor was there any evidence of an official US government inquiry into the matter of the secret fund and its operation in a US-based bank on the part of the US Treasury or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 23
Weighing all the conflicting evidence and attacks by the protagonists on each other’s credibility, the Supreme Court Commission concluded that the ‘Memorandum’ ‘was authentic and Mr Haqqani was the originator and architect . . . [He] sought American help, he also wanted to create a niche for himself making himself indispensable to the Americans.’ It then proceeded to criticize his behaviour and the motives of the
government. Specifically, the Commission characterized Haqqani’s actions as ‘acts of disloyalty to Pakistan that contravened the Constitution of Pakistan’. And it criticized the government for appointing him ambassador, when he had
. . . chosen not to live in Pakistan . . . held no property or asset in Pakistan, held no money (save a paltry amount) in a Pakistani bank, but despite having no obvious ties to Pakistan was appointed to the extremely sensitive position of Pakistan’s ambassador to the USA, and in addition to being paid a salary and accompanying emoluments was handed a largesse of over an amount of two million dollars a year. 24
Haqqani described the Commission’s findings as ‘one-sided and politically motivated’, and wondered why, if its findings were true, no legal or criminal proceedings were initiated against him or anyone else. According to him, the army had overreacted to Ijaz’s claims and the Commission helped close the matter without further embarrassment. The Supreme Court later described the Commission’s report as an ‘opinion’ that required further adjudication. 25 Haqqani, who had left the country with a pledge to return if needed by the court, refused to do so because of security concerns. It appears that none of the institutions at the centre of this affair wished to pursue the matter further. As a legal footnote, Haqqani’s lawyers pleaded with the Supreme Court to recognize that the commission of inquiry had been set up outside the pale of the law since the law invoked by the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice to set it up had expired some years earlier! That plea was never heard. In 2018, the Government of Pakistan began attempting to issue an Interpol Red Warrant for the arrest and repatriation of Haqqani. That effort stalled.
