Question 29e

On The Secret Intelligence Programs In Pakistan

In 2006, a major earthquake in Kashmir provided an opportunity for the intelligence community to fill a gap.  In an eBook I’ve co-authored with Atlantic correspondent D.B. Grady, we add:

——->”The U.S. intelligence community took advantage of the chaos to spread resources of its own into the country. Using valid U.S. passports and posing as construction and aid workers, dozens of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives and contractors flooded in without the requisite background checks from the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Al-Qaeda had reconstituted itself in the country’s tribal areas, largely because of the ISI’s benign neglect. In Afghanistan, the ISI was actively undermining the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai, training and requiting for the Taliban, which it viewed as the more reliable partner. The political system was in chaos. The Pakistani army was focused on the threat from India and had redeployed away from the Afghanistan border region, the Durand line, making it porous once again. To some extent, the Bush administration had been focused on Iraq for the previous two years, content with the ISI’s cooperation in capturing senior al-Qaeda leaders, while ignoring its support of other groups that would later become recruiting grounds for al-Qaeda.”

———>”A JSOC intelligence team slipped in alongside the CIA. The team had several goals. One was prosaic: team members were to develop rings of informants to gather targeting information about al-Qaeda terrorists. Other goals were extremely sensitive: JSOC needed better intelligence about how Pakistan transported its nuclear weapons and wanted to penetrate the ISI. Under a secret program code-named SCREEN HUNTER, JSOC, augmented by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and contract personnel, was authorized to shadow and identify members of the ISI suspected of being sympathetic to al-Qaeda. It is not clear whether JSOC units used lethal force against these ISI officers; one official said that the goal of the program was to track terrorists through the ISI by using disinformation and psychological warfare. (The program, by then known under a different name, was curtailed by the Obama administration when Pakistan’s anxiety about a covert U.S. presence inside the country was most intense.)”

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In a piece that Jeffrey Goldberg and I wrote for the Atlantic last year, we hinted at, but did not describe in detail these intelligence programs.  Our concern was that U.S. aid workers in Pakistan would become immediately suspect in the eyes of the ISI and we worried that we could place their lives in danger.

Subsequent to the publication of the piece, I sat down with a senior official who was familiar with JSOC operations and asked about practice of using disasters as pretexts for intelligence operations.

From that official I learned that Pakistan was aware that we had done this, which is one reason why we have visa trouble to this day.  But the US official told me that the practice was a legacy of past commands and that basically “everyone has turned over since then.”

The official meant to say that the heads of the CIA, the station chiefs, the leadership of the ISI and the Pakistani Army, as well as the governments of the U.S. and Pakistan, were different now.  New relationships had been formed and new understandings had been worked out.  Holding up visas for U.S. citizens remains a favorite way for the ISI to gum up the efficient operation of even acknowledged US activities in the country, like those that allow the resupply of ISAF forces in Afghanistan.  (A second official told this author that director David Petraeus has been successful in getting some of the backlogs processed.)

The official would not discuss the subject further.

A point to bear in mind: one reason why the U.S. was able to put intelligence personnel on the ground in Pakistan using passports marked for aid workers was because the civilian bureaucracy in the country compromised the process that the ISI had been using to vet Americans.  The constitutional crisis inside the country right now did not develop out of thin air.  The army and ISI have longed believed that civilians in Islamabad quietly welcome American intelligence assets inside the country precisely they provide a backstop against a military coup.

As of 2012, U.S. and foreign aid workers in Pakistan are subject to intrusive surveillance by the ISI, as are foreign nationals associated with companies like Xe (formerly Blackwater) and Dyncorps, both of which have presences inside the country.  At the beginning of the Obama administration, the use of “sheep-dipping” — the tactic of temporarily obscuring the cover identity of a military or intelligence officer — has been curtailed, and since the Raymond Davis incident, every U.S. person inside Pakistan who works for the U.S. government is tracked by the National Security Agency as a precaution,  How this tracking occurs is probably best kept secret, though I am reliably informed that the ISI is well aware of the tracking and tries to hack the system.