Public Intelligence

Secret Government of India – Indian National Investigation Agency report on the interrogation of David Headley.

A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe. David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitring targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges. He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.

ISI chief Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha is reported to have asked the US to stop its drone strikes in Pakistan in a meeting between CIA deputy director Michael Morrell and senior ISI officials held in Islamabad on Saturday. Pasha, who faced tremendous criticism after the May 2 Abbottabad raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, is reported to have taken a firm stance with the US on the drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. “We will be forced to respond if you do not come up with a strategy that stops the drone strikes,” Pasha is reported to have told Morrell.

Documentation released by the Government of India’s Press Information Bureau with this description: “A report which appeared in the media today states that the Chicago trial of the 2008 Mumbai attacks will be held from the 16th of this month. The report also states that the federal prosecutors indicted some more suspects last week in this case. Information available with the Government of India on the five persons named as accused in the second charge-sheet filed by the United States Government in the case is given in the annexure.”

Amid bitter, recriminatory exchanges between the United States and Pakistan over the Osama bin Laden extermination, planned bilateral visits of President Asif Ali Zardari to Washington DC and a return trip of President Barack Obama to Islamabad are both in jeopardy. Ties between the two sides are expected to slide further following Pakistan’s “outing” of the CIA station chief in Islamabad on Saturday. In a sign of how bad ties are between the two countries, Pakistani media on Saturday once again publicly named the CIA station chief in Islamabad, a breach of both protocol and trust, that is bound to enrage Washington. A Pakistani TV channel and a newspaper considered mouthpieces of the country’s military said the ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha had met CIA station chief Mark Carlton to protest US incursion into Abbottabad to kill al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. CIA station chiefs remain anonymous and unnamed in public although the host government is told.

Pakistan’s powerful intelligence services were heavily involved in preparations for the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008, according to classified Indian government documents obtained by the Guardian. A 109-page report into the interrogation of key suspect David Headley, a Pakistani-American militant arrested last year and detained in the US, makes detailed claims of ISI support for the bombings. Under questioning, Headley described dozens of meetings between officers of the main Pakistani military intelligence service, the ISI, and senior militants from the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group responsible for the Mumbai attacks.

Elements in the Pakistan Government, in particular its intelligence establishment, know where Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, is hiding inside the country, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said, declaring America will not be satisfied till it gets the most wanted fugitive of the world. “I don’t want to put a proximity or timeline on it (getting bin Laden). As I’ve said, we have gotten closer because we have been able to kill a number of their trainers, their operational people, their financiers,” Clinton said in an interview to the Fox News channel in Islamabad.

India’s top security official has accused Pakistan’s intelligence agency of controlling and coordinating the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks that killed 166 people. In an interview with the Indian Express newspaper published Wednesday, Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai alleged that Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) played a much more significant role in planning and executing the attacks than was earlier known. Pillai said the level of Pakistan’s involvement became clear through last month’s interrogation of David Headley, a suspect being held in the United States.

The CIA has paid millions of dollars to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) since 9/11, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency’s annual budget, says a media report. The ISI also collected “tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA programme”, which pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday citing current and former US officials. An intense debate has been triggered within the US government due to “long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists who undermine US efforts in Afghanistan and provide sanctuary to al-Qaida members in Pakistan”.

A suicide truck bomb struck Pakistan’s main intelligence agency in the north-west of the country this morning, killing at least 10 people and signalling a fresh escalation in the war between security services and Taliban militants. The blast ripped through an office belonging to the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in Peshawar, destroying much of the three-story building as well as vehicles in the street outside. At least 60 people were injured.