CIA's most senior officer in Pakistan 'unmasked' by Imran Khan's party

[Shah-i-Kot]

CIA's most senior officer in Pakistan 'unmasked' by Imran Khan's party | World news | theguardian.com


CIA's most senior officer in Pakistan 'unmasked' by Imran Khan's party

PTI party names man in letter to police demanding he be nominated as one of those responsible for drone strike

• Jon Boone in Islamabad
• theguardian.com, Wednesday 27 November 2013 13.52 GMT

Supporters of Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party protest in Karachi against drone strikes at the weekend. Photograph: Fareed Khan/AP

The political party led by the former cricket star Imran Khan claims to have blown the cover of the CIA's most senior officer in Pakistan as part of an increasingly high-stakes campaign against US drone strikes.
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party named a man it claimed was head of the CIA station in Islamabad in a letter to police demanding he be nominated as one of the people responsible for a drone strike on 21 November, which killed five militants including senior commanders of the Haqqani Network.
John Brennan, the CIA director, was also nominated as an "accused person" for murder and "waging war against Pakistan".
The US embassy said it could not comment but was looking into the matter. The CIA spokesman Dean Boyd would not confirm the station chief's name and declined to immediately comment, AP reported.
If his identity is confirmed it will be the second time anti-drone campaigners have unmasked a top US spy in Pakistan.
In 2010 another CIA station chief, Jonathan Banks, was named in criminal proceedings initiated after a drone strike. Banks was forced to leave the country.
As with the Banks case, questions will be raised about how the PTI came to know the identity of the top US intelligence official in the country.
Although nearly all foreign spies in Pakistan use diplomatic cover stories to hide their occupation, many, including station chiefs, are declared to the country's domestic spy agency.
The letter signed by the PTI spokeswoman Shireen Mazari demanded the named agent be prevented from leaving the country so that he could be arrested. The PTI said it hoped he would reveal "through interrogation" the names of the remote pilots who operated the drone.
"CIA station chief is not a diplomatic post, therefore he does not enjoy any diplomatic immunity and is within the bounds of domestic laws of Pakistan," the letter said.
The accusation comes at a time when drones have once again become a matter of intense controversy in Pakistan.
The country's interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar, denounced a drone strike in early November. Although the attack killed the much hated chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, Nisar said it had wrecked the government's efforts to hold peace talks with militant groups.
And it infuriated Khan, who has built much of his political platform around opposition to drones, which he claims are largely responsible for the upsurge of domestic terrorism in Pakistan in recent years – a suggestion disputed by many experts.
The 21 November strike was even more provocative as it was one of the first ever strikes outside the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where nearly all attacks by the unmanned aircraft have taken place in the past.
The attack on a religious seminary associated with the Haqqani Network was in Hangu, an area in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province where Khan's PTI leads a coalition government.
Khan responded with a massive rally in the provincial capital of Peshawar and ordered PTI activists to block vehicles carrying supplies to Nato troops in Afghanistan.
However, party workers have struggled to identify Nato cargo amid all the sealed containers plying the roads to Afghanistan. The exercise has received no support from the national government and the police have tried to stop PTI workers blocking lorries.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/wo...hief.html?_r=0


Party Claims It Identified Top C.I.A. Spy in Pakistan

By DECLAN WALSH

Published: November 27, 2013

The political party of the former cricket star Imran Khan on Wednesday identified a man it described as the C.I.A.’s top spy in Pakistan, in an escalation of Mr. Khan’s campaign to end American drone strikes in the country.




In a letter to the Pakistani police, Mr. Khan’s information secretary, Shireen Mazari, accused the C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, along with a man identified as the agency’s Islamabad station chief, of “committing murder and waging war against Pakistan.”
In Washington, a C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment on the case.
Ms. Mazari demanded that the authorities prevent the station chief, whose identity has not yet been confirmed, from leaving the country so that he could face prosecution in a Pakistani court.
That seems unlikely, but the move is expected to infuriate American officials, who had to recall a previous C.I.A. station chief in 2010 after he was identified in the local news media, also in relation to a legal suit brought by anti-drone campaigners.
But while blame for that outing was placed on smoldering tensions between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, this time it appears to be driven more by Mr. Khan’s increasingly confrontational stance against drone strikes.
In an appearance on a television talk show on Wednesday evening, Mr. Khan said he had named the station chief essentially to punish the C.I.A. for a deadly drone strike this month in the province his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party controls, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Now, he said, it was up to the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to take the next step against the American spy agency.
He has vowed to block NATO supply lines into Afghanistan in retaliation for the Nov. 1 drone strike that killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud. On Saturday, his supporters moved to deliver on that promise by searching trucks and roughing up drivers as they passed through Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa on the way to Afghanistan.
In her letter on Wednesday, Ms. Mazari claimed that the station chief did not enjoy diplomatic immunity, and suggested that if interrogated by the police he might divulge the names of the pilots who fly the drones.
The high-profile attempt to obstruct C.I.A. operations in Pakistan was said to be a response to the Nov. 21 drone strike that struck a seminary linked to the Haqqani network, a Taliban-affiliated militant group at the center of American security concerns in Afghanistan. The strike, which killed the Haqqanis’ spiritual leader and five others, occurred in the Hangu district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, in a rare drone strike outside Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Mr. Khan has been a leading advocate of ceasing military action against the Pakistani Taliban, even though Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa has been the region hardest hit by Islamist violence this year, with hundreds killed in attacks. The Taliban also broke out many prisoners in an embarrassing and well-organized jailbreak in July.
Mr. Khan has used the drone issue to leverage his popularity against Mr. Sharif, who is his main electoral competitor in Punjab Province, and indeed has largely succeeded in framing the political debate on drones in recent years.
Some Sharif supporters criticized Mr. Khan for trying to score political points by outing the station chief. “This a thoughtless move,” said Siddiqul Farooq, a central leader of the governing Pakistan Muslim League party. “It is selfish and compromises the national interest.”
Since the escalation of the C.I.A.’s drone war in Pakistan in 2008, the Islamabad station has grown to become one of the spy agency’s largest outposts in the world. The agency’s expansion in Pakistan has been an irritant to America’s relations with Pakistan.
The influence of the C.I.A.’s Islamabad station chief has sometimes eclipsed even that of the American ambassador in Pakistan. A previous station chief clashed repeatedly in 2011 with Cameron Munter, the ambassador at the time, over the intensity of the drone campaign. The Obama administration ended up siding with the C.I.A., and Mr. Munter’s tenure was cut short.
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.