Unannounced settlement likely between Pak-US spy agencies
Monday, March 07, 2011
LAHORE: With the CIA rapidly expanding its covert operations in Pakistan and the ISI in no mood to surrender its dominant presence in the region, the arrest of an undercover CIA agent Raymond Davis has pushed the two spy agencies into an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, compelling both to review parameters of their cooperation.
One does not have to be a Sherlock Holmes fan to understand that the world of espionage and counter-espionage has rules of its own, with the most fundamental ones being: you don’t get caught, and you don’t get caught committing murders. These rules are even more critical if you happen to be an American spy working in Pakistan, a country already seething with anti-US sentiments. Raymond, who faces a double murder charge in Pakistan for killing two youngsters in Lahore on January 27, broke both these rules and eventually landed in jail to face a court trial, with the Americans scrambling to get him out.
The US, however, has a tough job in saving him, for his arrest has acquired dimensions that the ex-Army Special Forces soldier may not have dreamt of when he whipped out his Glock pistol and fired at two suspect-looking young men on a motorbike. For what Raymond’s arrest has achieved is to blow the lid off the scale and intensity of covert CIA operations on Pakistani soil — much of it without the knowledge or consent of the Pakistani intelligence establishment, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). This is also at the heart of the turf war between the CIA and ISI. Indeed, Raymond’s current predicament exemplifies this conflict.
Officials of the Obama administration have already tried both threats and persuasion to get Pakistan to release Raymond who, they claim, is a member of the American diplomatic mission, and hence immune from criminal prosecution under the Vienna Convention. But Pakistan’s refusal to accede to the American demand of granting diplomatic immunity to an undercover CIA agent has already led to a diplomatic row. Although, Raymond says he had killed both the boys in self-defence as they tried to rob him, some unconfirmed media reports say the victims were ISI operatives who had been tracking him. These reports were, however, vehemently rejected by the relevant quarters as baseless.
Even as the Raymond Davis fiasco raged, another suspected American was caught in Peshawar — Aaron Mark De Haven, who was arrested under Foreigners’ Act from Peshawar’s University Town. Aaron comes from Virginia and has been associated with a private firm called Catalyst Services, which rents buildings for US citizens in the area. The arrest of American nationals from Lahore and Peshawar point to the scale of American spy network in Pakistan, amidst media reports that thousands of ‘Raymonds’ live in posh localities of the four provincial capitals of Pakistan and the federal capital.
According to diplomatic sources in Islamabad, the number of American security contractors working for the US military and CIA in the region has exceeded the total strength of the US troops and CIA personnel. Furthermore, the presence of over 80,000 US military and intelligence contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan has taken the privatisation of the war to an unprecedented level. There have been reports that Blackwater Worldwide, the private security firm (now called Xe Services), has been working with US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) on American Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) in various parts of Pakistan, including Karachi, on sensitive operations such as ‘snatch-and-grabs’ of high-value targets inside and outside Pakistan.
As the American stakes became higher in Pakistan than in Afghanistan or Iraq, the strength of the US Mission in Islamabad also swelled from around 300 to about 1,000, including a good number of CIA personnel, but without any formal agreement between the two governments.
The Davis issue comes in the wake of a major setback in the Pak-US ties when in November 2010, a US federal court issued a summons to the current head of the ISI, Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, as well as to a number of senior office-bearers of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) for their alleged involvement in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. This episode deeply upset the Pakistani military establishment, which was of the view that the spy chief of a friendly country should not have been treated like this.
On December 16, 2010, almost a month after the November 19, 2010 issuance of the summons for the ISI chief and others, the Islamabad Police moved to register a murder case against the CIA station chief in Pakistan, Jonathan Banks, who was supervising the US drone campaign. The complainant was Kareem Khan, a resident of North Waziristan, who claimed his son and brother were killed in a drone attack on December 31, 2009. Jonathan Banks was charged with providing operational guidance for the drone strike. The Obama administration immediately withdrew Jonathan from Islamabad, citing security threats.
The US media then suspected ISI’s involvement in blowing the CIA station chief’s cover at a time Washington was pushing Islamabad to support the renewed American efforts to target al-Qaeda and Taliban militants on Pak-Afghan border.
The American agencies believe these militant groups, many of which are being backed by the ISI, are linked to anti-US elements, especially al-Qaeda and Taliban, which are quite active on either side of the Pak-Afghan border despite a decade-long American crusade against them.
The United States, therefore, wanted a bigger presence in Pakistan to pursue its strategic interests in the region, especially when an exit strategy for Afghanistan is already being chalked out. But as expected, the American reinforcement plans for Pakistan created ripples in the Khaki circles due to apprehensions that more and more US military and intelligence personnel would be brought to Pakistan under the cover of diplomatic assignments for covert operations. And just as the Americans were trying to allay the fears of the Pakistani establishment, Raymond Davis killed two youngsters in Lahore. But worse was to follow when the American media disclosed that he was in fact part of a covert intelligence network involving hundreds of contract spies, operating in Pakistan without the knowledge of the ISI.
Therefore, the Pakistani establishment is in no mood to free Raymond and apparently wants to use him as a bargaining chip to get the withdrawal of the civil lawsuit against the ISI chief. Well-informed diplomatic circles in Islamabad don’t rule out the likelihood of an unannounced settlement between the two spy agencies on both the cases — Raymond and Pasha — as they fully realise that the current stalemate is seriously affecting their counter terrorism cooperation against the common enemy i.e. al-Qaeda and Taliban.
Unannounced settlement likely between Pak-US spy agencies