PAKISTAN'S INTER-SERVICES INTELLIGENCE (ISI)
by B. Raman
The intelligence community of Pakistan, which was once
described by the "Frontier Post" of Peshawar (May 18,1994) as
its "invisible government" and by the "Dawn" of
Karachi (April 25,1994) as "our secret godfathers" consists of
the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the ISI. While the IB comes under
the Interior Minister, the ISI is part of the Ministry of Defence
(MOD). Each wing of the Armed Forces has also its own intelligence
directorate for tactical MI.
The IB is the oldest dating from Pakistan's creation in
1947. It was formed by the division of the pre-partition IB of
British India. Its unsatisfactory military intelligence (MI)
performance in the first Indo-Pak war of 1947-48 over Jammu & Kashmir
(J & K) led to the decision in 1948 to create the ISI, manned by
officers from the three Services, to specialise in the collection,
analysis and assessment of external intelligence, military and
non-military, with the main focus on India.
Initially, the ISI had no role in the collection of
internal political intelligence except in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK)
and the Northern Areas (NA--Gilgit and Baltistan). Ayub Khan,
suspecting the loyalty and objectivity of the Bengali police officers in
the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau (SIB) of the IB in Dacca, the capital
of the then East Pakistan, entrusted the ISI with the responsibility for
the collection of internal political intelligence in East Pakistan.
Similarly, Z.A.Bhutto, when faced with a revolt by
Balochi nationalists in Balochistan after the liberation of Bangladesh in
1971, suspected the loyalty of the Balochi police officers of the SIB in
Quetta and made the military officers of the ISI responsible for internal
intelligence in Balochistan.
Zia-ul-Haq expanded the internal intelligence
responsibilities of the ISI by making it responsible not only for the
collection of intelligence about the activities of the Sindhi nationalist
elements in Sindh and for monitoring the activities of Shia organisations
all over the country after the success of the Iranian Revolution in 1979,
but also for keeping surveillance on the leaders of the Pakistan People's
Party (PPP) of Mrs.Benazir Bhutto and its allies which had started the
Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) in the early 1980s.
The ISI's Internal Political Division had Shah Nawaz Bhutto, one of the
two brothers of Mrs.Benazir Bhutto, assassinated through poisoning in the
French Riviera in the middle of 1985, in an attempt to intimidate her into
not returning to Pakistan for directing the movement against Zia, but she
refused to be intimidated and returned to Pakistan.
Even in the 1950s, Ayub Khan had created in the ISI a
Covert Action Division for assisting the insurgents in India's North-East
and its role was expanded in the late 1960s to assist the Sikh Home Rule
Movement of London-based Charan Singh Panchi, which was subsequently
transformed into the so-called Khalistan Movement, headed by Jagjit Singh
Chauhan. A myriad organisations operating amongst the members of the
Sikh diaspora in Europe, the US and Canada joined the movement at the
instigation and with the assistance of the ISI.
During the Nixon Administration in the US, when Dr.Henry
Kissinger was the National Security Adviser, the intelligence community of
the US and the ISI worked in tandem in guiding and assisting the so-called
Khalistan movement in the Punjab. The visits of prominent Sikh Home Rule
personalities to the US before the Bangladesh Liberation War in December,
1971, to counter Indian allegations of violations of the human rights of
the Bengalis of East Pakistan through counter-allegations of violations of
the human rights of the Sikhs in Punjab were jointly orchestrated by the
ISI, the US intelligence and some officials of the US National Security
Council (NSC) Secretariat, then headed by Dr.Kissinger.
This covert colloboration between the ISI and the US
intelligence community was also directed at discrediting Mrs.Indira
Gandhi's international stature by spreading disinformation about alleged
naval base facilities granted by her to the USSR in Vizag and the Andaman
& Nicobar, the alleged attachment of KGB advisers to the then
Lt.Gen.Sunderji during Operation Bluestar in the Golden Temple in Amritsar
in June, 1984, and so on. This collaboration petered out after her
assassination in October,1984.
The Afghan war of the 1980s saw the enhancement of the
covert action capabilities of the ISI by the CIA. A number of
officers from the ISI's Covert Action Division received training in the US
and many covert action experts of the CIA were attached to the ISI to
guide it in its operations against the Soviet troops by using the Afghan
Mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan and Arab volunteers.
Osama bin Laden, Mir Aimal Kansi, who assassinated two CIA officers
outside their office in Langley, US, in 1993, Ramzi Yousef and his
accomplices involved in the New York World Trade Centre explosion in
February, 1993, the leaders of the Muslim separatist movement in the
southern Philippines and even many of the narcotics smugglers of Pakistan
were the products of the ISI-CIA collaboration in Afghanistan.
The encouragement of opium cultivation and heroin
production and smuggling was also an offshoot of this co-operation.
The CIA, through the ISI, promoted the smuggling of heroin into
Afghanistan in order to make the Soviet troops heroin addicts. Once the
Soviet troops were withdrawn in 1988, these heroin smugglers started
smuggling the drugs to the West, with the complicity of the ISI. The
heroin dollars have largely contributed to preventing the Pakistani
economy from collapsing and enabling the ISI to divert the jehadi hordes
from Afghanistan to J & K after 1989 and keeping them well motivated
and well-equipped.
Even before India's Pokhran I nuclear test of 1974, the
ISI had set up a division for the clandestine procurement of military
nuclear technology from abroad and, subsequently, for the clandestine
purchase and shipment of missiles and missile technology from China and
North Korea. This division, which was funded partly by donations
from Saudi Arabia and Libya, partly by concealed allocations in Pakistan's
State budget and partly by heroin dollars, was instrumental in helping
Pakistan achieve a military nuclear and delivery capability despite its
lack of adequate human resources with the required expertise.
Thus, the ISI, which was originally started as
essentially an agency for the collection of external intelligence, has
developed into an agency adept in covert actions and clandestine
procurement of denied technologies as well.
The IB, which was patterned after the IB of British
India, used to be a largely police organisation, but the post of
Director-General (DG), IB, is no longer tenable only by police officers as
it was in the past. Serving and retired military officers are being
appointed in increasing numbers to senior posts in the IB, including to
the post of DG.
In recent years, there has been a controversy in
Pakistan as to who really controls the ISI and when was its internal
Political Division set up. Testifying before the Supreme Court on
June 16,1997, in a petition filed by Air Marshal (retd) Asghar Khan,
former chief of the Pakistan Air Force, challenging the legality of the
ISI's Political Division accepting a donation of Rs.140 million from a
bank for use against PPP candidates during elections, Gen. (retd) Mirza
Aslam Beg, former Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), claimed that though the
ISI was manned by serving army officers and was part of the MOD, it
reported to the Prime Minister and not to the COAS and that its internal
Political Division was actually set up by the late Z.A.Bhutto in 1975.
Many Pakistani analysts have challenged this and said
that the ISI, though de jure under the Prime Minister, had always been
controlled de facto by the COAS and that its internal Political Division
had been in existence at least since the days of Ayub Khan, if not
earlier.
The ISI is always headed by an Army officer of the rank
of Lt.Gen., who is designated as the Director-General (DG). The
present DG is Lt.Gen.Mahmood Ahmed. He is assisted by three Deputy
Directors-General (DDGs), designated as DDG (Political), DDG-I (External)
and DDG-II (Administration). It is divided into the following Divisions:
* The Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB)---Responsible for
all Open Sources Intelligence (OSINT) and Human Intelligence (HUMINT)
collection, inside Pakistan as well as abroad.
* The Joint Counter-Intelligence (CI) Bureau:
Responsible for CI inside Pakistan as well as abroad.
* The Joint Signals Intelligence Bureau (JSIB):
Responsible for all communications intelligence inside Pakistan and
abroad.
* Joint Intelligence North (JIN): Responsible for the
proxy war in Jammu & Kashmir and the control of Afghanistan through
the Taliban. Controls the Army of Islam, consisting of
organisations such as Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Al Badr and Maulana
Masood Azhar's Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM). Lt.Gen.Mohammad Aziz, presently a
Corps Commander at Lahore, is the clandestine Chief of Staff of the Army
of Islam. It also controls all opium cultivation and heroin
refining and smuggling from Pakistani and Afghan territory.
* Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous (JIM): Responsible
for covert actions in other parts of the world and for the clandestine
procurement of nuclear and missile technologies. Maj Gen (retd)
Sultan Habib, an operative of this Division, who had distinguished
himself in the clandestine procurement and theft of nuclear material
while posted as the Defence Attache in the Pakistani Embassy in Moscow
from 1991 to 93, with concurrent accreditation to the Central Asian
Republics (CARs), Poland and Czechoslovakia, has recently been posted as
Ambassador to North Korea to oversee the clandestine nuclear and missile
co-operation between North Korea and Pakistan. After completing
his tenure in Moscow, he had co-ordinated the clandestine shipping of
missiles from North Korea, the training of Pakistani experts in the
missile production and testing facilities of North Korea and the
training of North Korean scientists in the nuclear establishments of
Pakistan through Capt. (retd) Shafquat Cheema, Third Secretary and
acting head of mission, in the Pakistani Embassy in North Korea, from
1992 to 96. Before Maj.Gen. Sultan Habib's transfer to ISI
headquarters from Moscow, the North Korean missile and nuclear
co-operation project was handled by Maj.Gen.Shujjat from the Baluch
Regiment, who worked in the clandestine procurement division of the ISI
for five years. On Capt.Cheema's return to headquarters in 1996,
the ISI discovered that in addition to acting as the liaison officer of
the ISI with the nuclear and missile establishments in North Korea, he
was also earning money from the Iranian and the Iraqi intelligence by
helping them in their clandestine nuclear and missile technology and
material procurement not only from North Korea, but also from Russia and
the CARs. On coming to know of the ISI enquiry into his
clandestine assistance to Iran and Iraq, he fled to Xinjiang and sought
political asylum there, but the Chinese arrested him and handed him over
to the ISI. What happened to him subsequently is not known.
Capt.Cheema initially got into the ISI and got himself posted to the
Pakistani Embassy in North Korea with the help of Col.(retd) Ghulam
Sarwar Cheema of the PPP.
* Joint Intelligence X (JIX): Responsible for
administration and accounts.
* Joint Intelligence Technical (JIT): Responsible for
the collection of all Technical Intelligence (TECHINT) other than
communications intelligence and for research and development in
gadgetry.
* The Special Wing: Responsible for all intelligence
training in the Armed Forces in the Defence Services Intelligence
Academy and for liaison with foreign intelligence and security agencies.
Since 1948, there have been three instances when the
DG,ISI, was at daggers drawn with the COAS. The first instance was
during the first tenure of Mrs.Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister (1988 to
1990). To reduce the powers of the ISI, to re-organise the
intelligence community and to enhance the powers of the police officers in
the IB, she discontinued the practice of appointing a serving Lt.Gen,
recommended by the COAS, as the DG, ISI, and, instead appointed Maj.Gen. (retd)
Shamsur Rahman Kallue, a retired officer close to her father, as the DG in
replacement of Lt.Gen.Hamid Gul in 1989 and entrusted him with the task of
winding up the internal intelligence collection role of the ISI and
civilianising the IB and the ISI. Writing in the "Nation"
of July 31,1997, Brig.A.R.Siddiqui, who had served as the Press Relations
Officer in the army headquarters in the 1970s, said that this action of
hers marked the beginning of her trouble with Gen.Beg, the then COAS,
which ultimately led to her dismissal in August,1990. Gen.Beg made
Maj.Gen.Kallue persona non grata (PNG), stopped inviting him to the Corps
Commanders conferences and transferred the responsibility for the proxy
war in J & K and for assisting the Sikh extremists in the Punjab from
the ISI to the Army intelligence directorate working under the Chief of
the General Staff (CGS).
The second instance was during the first tenure of Nawaz
Sharif (1990-93), who appointed as the DG,ISI, Lt.Gen.Javed Nasir, a
fundamentalist Kashmiri officer, though he was not recommended by the COAS
for the post. Lt.Gen.Asif Nawaz Janjua, the then COAS, made
Lt.Gen.Nasir PNG and stopped inviting him to the Corps Commanders
conferences. Despite this, Lt.Gen.Janjua returned to the ISI the
responsibility for the proxy war in J & K and for assisting the Sikh
extremists.
During her second tenure (1993-96), Mrs. Bhutto avoided
any conflict with Gen.Abdul Waheed Kakkar and Gen. Jehangir Karamat, the
Chiefs of the Army Staff in succession, on the appointment of the DG,ISI.
Her action in transferring part of the responsibility for the operations
in Afghanistan, including the creation and the handling of the Taliban,
from the ISI to the Interior Ministry headed by Maj.Gen. (retd) Nasirullah
Babar, who handled Afghan operations in the ISI during the tenure of her
father, did not create any friction with the army since she had ordered
that Lt.Gen. Pervez Musharraf, then Director-General of Military
Operations, should be closely associated by Maj.Gen.Babar in the Afghan
operations.
However, sections of the ISI, close to Farooq Leghari,
the then President of Pakistan, had Murtaza Bhutto, the surviving brother
of Mrs.Benazir, assassinated outside his house in Karachi in
September,1996, with the complicity of some local police officers and
started a disinformation campaign in the media blaming her and her
husband, Asif Zirdari, for the murder. This campaign paved the way
for her dismissal by Leghari in November,1996.
The third instance was during the second tenure of Nawaz
Sharif (1997-99) when his action in appointing Lt.Gen. Ziauddin, an
engineer, as the DG,ISI, over-riding the objection of Gen.Musharraf led to
the first friction between the two. Gen.Musharraf transferred
Lt.Gen.Mohammad Aziz, the then DDG,ISI, on his promotion as Lt.Gen. to the
GHQ as the CGS and transferred the entire Joint Intelligence North (JIN),
responsible for covert actions in India and Afghanistan to the
Directorate-General of Military Intelligence (DGMI) to be supervised by
Lt.Gen.Aziz. It is believed that the JIN continues to function under
the DGMI even after the appointment of Lt.Gen.Mahmood Ahmed as the DG, ISI,
after the overthrow of Sharif on October 12,1999. Gen.Musharraf, as
the COAS, made Lt.Gen.Ziauddin PNG and stopped inviting him to the Corps
Commanders' conferences. He kept Lt.Gen.Ziauddin totally out of the
picture in the planning and implementation of the Kargil operations.
After the Kargil war, Nawaz Sharif had sent Lt.Gen.Ziauddin to Washington
on a secret visit to inform the Clinton Administration officials of his
concerns over the continued loyalty of Gen.Musharraf. After his
return from the US, Lt.Gen.Ziauddin went to Kandahar, as ordered by Sharif,
to pressurise Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Amir of the Taliban, to stop
assisting the anti-Shia Sipah Sahaba Pakistan and to co-operate with the
US in the arrest and deportation of bin Laden. On coming to know of
this, Gen. Musharraf sent Lt.Gen.Aziz to Kandahar to tell the Amir that he
should not carry out the instructions of Lt.Gen.Ziauddin and that he
should follow only his (Lt.Gen.Aziz's) instructions.
These instances would show that whenever an elected
leadership was in power, the COAS saw to it that the elected Prime
Minister did not have effective control over the ISI and that the ISI was
marginalised if its head showed any loyalty to the elected Prime Minister.
In their efforts to maintain law and order in Pakistan
and weaken nationalist and religious elements and political parties
disliked by the army, the ISI and the army followed a policy of divide and
rule. After the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979,
to keep the Shias of Pakistan under control, the ISI encouraged the
formation of ant-Shia Sunni extremist organisations such as the Sipah
Sahaba . When the Shias of Gilgit rose in revolt in 1988, Musharraf
used bin Laden and his tribal hordes from the North-West Frontier Province
(NWFP) and the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to suppress them
brutally. When the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM---now called the
Muttahida Qaumi Movement) of Altaf Hussain rose in revolt in the late
1980s in Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur in Sindh, the ISI armed sections of
the Sindhi nationalist elements to kill the Mohajirs. It then
created a split between Mohajirs of Uttar Pradesh origin (in Altaf
Hussain's MQM) and those of Bihar origin in the splinter anti-Altaf
Hussain group called MQM (Haquiqi--meaning real). In Altaf Hussain's
MQM itself, the ISI unsuccessfully tried to create a wedge between the
Sunni and Shia migrants from Uttar Pradesh.
Having failed in his efforts to weaken the PPP by taking
advantage of the exile of Mrs.Benazir and faced with growing unity of
action between Altaf Hussain's MQM and sections of Sindhi nationalist
elements, Musharraf has constituted a secret task force in the ISI headed
by Lt.Gen.Mahmood Ahmed, the DG, and consisting of Lt.Gen.(retd) Moinuddin
Haider, Interior Minister, and Lt.Gen.Muzaffar Usmani, Deputy Chief of the
Army Staff, to break the PPP, the MQM and the Sindhi nationalists.
This task force has encouraged not only religious
political organisations such as the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) of Qazi Hussain
Ahmed, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam (JUI) of Maulana Fazlur Rahman etc, but
also sectarian organisations such as the Sipah Sahaba and the
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi of Riaz Basra, living under the protection of the
Taliban and bin Laden in Kandahar in Afghanistan, to extend their
activities to Sindh.
These organisations have now practically got out of the
control of the ISI. Instead of attacking the PPP, the MQM and the
Sindhi nationalists and bringing them to heel as Musharraf had hoped they
would, they have taken their anti-Shia jehad to Sindh and have been
recruiting a large number of unemployed Sindhi rural youth for service
with the Taliban. Sindh, which was known for its Sufi traditions of
religious tolerance, has seen under Musharraf a resurgence of the street
power of the JEI and the JUI, which had been practically driven out of the
province in the 1980s, by the PPP, the MQM and the Sindhi nationalists,
and has seen in recent months anti-Shia massacres of the kind used by
Musharraf in Gilgit in 1988. Over 200 Shias have been gunned down,
including 30 doctors of Karachi, and the latest victims of the sectarian
Frankenstein let loose by Musharraf in Sindh have been Shaukat Mirza, the
Managing Director of Pakistan State Oil, and Syed Zafar Hussain Zaidi, a
Director in the Research Laboratories of the Ministry of Defence, located
in Karachi, who were gunned down on July 28 and 30,2001,
respectively. The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has claimed responsibility for
both these assassinations.
As a result of the policy of divide and rule followed in
Sindh by the ISI under Musharraf, one is seeing in Pakistan for the first
time sectarian violence inside the Sunni community between the Sunnis of
the Deobandi faith belonging to the Sipah Sahaba and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
and the Sunnis of the more tolerant Barelvi faith belonging to the Sunni
Tehrik formed in the early 1990s to counter the growing Wahabi influence
on Islam in Pakistan and the Almi Tanzeem Ahle Sunnat formed in 1998 by
Pir Afzal Qadri of Mararian Sharif in Gujrat, Punjab, to counter the
activities of the Deobandi Army of Islam headed by Lt.Gen.Mohammed Aziz,
Corps Commander, Lahore.
The Tanzeem has been criticising not only the Army of
Islam for injecting what it considers the Wahabi poison into the Pakistan
society, but also the army of the State headed by Musharraf for misleading
the Sunni youth into joining the jehad against the Indian army in J &
K and getting killed there in order to avoid the Pakistani army officers
getting killed in the jehad for achieving its strategic objective.
The ISI, which is afraid of a direct confrontation with the Barelvi
organisations, has been inciting the Sipah Sahaba and the
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi to counter their activities .
This has led to frequent armed clashes between rival
Sunni groups in Sindh, the most sensational of the incidents being the
gunning down of Maulana Salim Qadri of the Sunni Tehrik and five of his
followers in Karachi on May, 18,2001, by the Sipah Sahaba, which led to a
major break-down of law and order in certain areas of Karachi for some
days.
Musharraf, the commando, believes in achieving his
objective by hook or by crook without worrying about the means used.
In his anxiety to bring Sindh under control and to weaken the PPP, the MQM
and the Sindhi nationalists, he has, through the ISI, created new
Frankensteins which might one day lead to the Talibanisation of Sindh, a
province always known for its sufi traditions of religious tolerance and
for its empathy with India.
Musharraf is under pressure from sections of senior army
officers concerned over these developments to suppress the Sipah Sahaba
and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. He and Lt.Gen.Haider have been making the
pretence of planning to do so. It is to be seen whether they really
would and, even if they did, whether they would or could effectively
enforce the ban on them.
In India, there is a point of view in some circles that
the only way of effectively countering the ISI activities against India is
to have an Indian version of the ISI, with extensive powers for
clandestine intelligence collection, technology procurement and covert
actions and that the proposed Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) should be
patterned after Pakistan's ISI rather than after the DIA of the US and the
Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) of the UK, which are essentially agencies
for the analysis and assessment of military intelligence in a holistic
manner, with powers for clandestine collection only during times of war or
when deployed in areas of conflict and with no powers for covert action.
The principle of civilian primacy in the intelligence
community is widely accepted in all successful democracies and the
discarding of this principle in Pakistan sowed the seeds for the present
state of affairs there. In our anxiety for quick results against the
ISI, we should not sacrifice time-tested principles as to how intelligence
agencies should function in a democratic society.
In the 1970s,Indian policy-makers wisely decided that
the Indian intelligence should not get involved in clandestine procurement
of denied technologies since the exposure of any such procurement could
damage the credibility and trustworthiness of the Indian scientific and
technological community in the eyes of other countries.
This is what has happened to Pakistan. Its
intelligence community did some spectacular work in clandestine
procurement and theft of technologies abroad. But, once the details
of this network were exposed, post-graduate students of Pakistan in
scientific subjects, its academics, research scholars and scientists are
looked upon with suspicion in Western countries and find it difficult to
enter universities and research laboratories for higher studies and
research and get jobs in establishments dealing in sensitive technologies
and are less frequently invited to seminars etc than in the past. In
its anxiety to catch up with India in the short term, Pakistan has damaged
its long-term potential in science and technology.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For
Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com
)
