More to Fai, Pak uses threats to keep tabs on US diaspora

MARK MAZZETTI, ERIC SCHMITT & CHARLIE SAVAGE

FBI agents hunting for Pakistani spies in the US last year began tracking Mohammed Tasleem, an attache in the Pakistani Consulate in New York and a clandestine operative of Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence.

Tasleem, they discovered, had been posing as an FBI agent to extract information from Pakistanis living in the US and was issuing threats to keep them from speaking openly about Pakistan’s government. His activities were part of what government officials in Washington, along with a range of Pakistani journalists and scholars, say is a systematic ISI campaign to keep tabs on the Pakistani diaspora inside the US.

The FBI brought Tasleem’s activities to Leon E Panetta, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and last April, Panetta had a tense conversation with Pakistan’s spymaster, Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha.

Within days, Tasleem was spirited out of the US — a quiet resolution typical of the spy games among the world’s powers.

But some of the secrets of that hidden world became public last week when two Pakistani-Americans working for a charity that the FBI believes is a front for Pakistan’s spy service were indicted. Only one was arrested; the other is still in Pakistan.

The investigation exposed one part of what American officials say is a broader campaign by the ISI to exert influence over lawmakers, stifle public dialogue critical of Pakistan’s military and blunt the influence of India.

American officials said that compared with countries like China and Russia — whose spies have long tried to steal American government and business secrets — the ISI’s operations here are less extensive and less sophisticated. And they are certainly far more limited than the CIA’s activities inside Pakistan.

Even so, officials and scholars say the ISI campaign extends to issuing both tacit and overt threats against those who speak critically about the military.

At the same time, the Pakistani spy agency remains a close ally of the CIA in the hunt for operatives with al-Qaeda. It is a relationship that often complicates the ability of the US to put pressure on Pakistan to alter its tactics.

According to one American law enforcement official,the FBI had originally hoped to arrest the two men working for the charity, the Kashmiri American Council, several times earlier this year but was told each time by the State Department or the CIA that the arrests would only aggravate the frayed relations between the US and Pakistan.

The indictments came as the CIA was trying to negotiate the release of a Pakistani doctor who was jailed by the ISI on accusations that he had helped the Americans track down Osama bin Laden before his killing.

Several Pakistani journalists and scholars in the US interviewed over the past week said that they were approached regularly by Pakistani officials, some of whom openly identified themselves as ISI officials. The journalists and scholars said the officials cautioned them against speaking out on politically delicate subjects like the insurgency in Baluchistan or accusations of human rights abuses by Pakistani soldiers. The verbal pressure was often accompanied by veiled warnings about the welfare of family members in Pakistan, they said.

One Pakistani journalist recalled an episode in December 2006 in which a Pakistani man filmed a public discussion about Pakistan’s tribal areas at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The event’s organisers later learned the man was from the ISI.

A second Pakistani author said that at several conferences and seminars in recent years, representatives from the spy agency made their presence known by asking threatening questions.

“The ISI guys will look into your eyes and will indirectly threaten you by introducing themselves,” the author said. “The ISI makes sure that they are present in every occasion relating to Pakistan, and in some cases they pay ordinary Pakistanis for attending events and pass them information.”

Before the Kashmiri American Council case, little had been said publicly about the ISI’s operations in the US. In recent years, the Justice Department has brought several cases against defendants charged with supporting terror groups that have historically had ties to the ISI, including the Lashkar-e-Toiba, that carried out the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. But those cases too involved no allegations that the defendants were agents of the ISI.