Pakistan’s spy agency keeping tabs on diaspora in US

July 24, 2011|By Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times

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

Tasleem, they found, had been posing as an FBI agent to extract information from Pakistanis in the United States and was issuing threats to keep them from speaking 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 campaign to keep tabs on the Pakistani diaspora inside the United States.

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

Within days, Tasleem was spirited from the United States, a quiet resolution typical of 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 thinks is a front for Pakistan’s spy service were indicted. Only one was arrested; the other remains in Pakistan.

The investigation exposed part of what US officials say is a broader campaign by the Pakistani spy agency to exert influence over lawmakers, stifle public dialogue critical of Pakistan’s military, and blunt the influence of India, Pakistan’s longtime adversary.

US officials said that compared with powers such as China and Russia - whose spies have long tried to steal US government and business secrets - the operations by Pakistan’s spy agency in this country 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 campaign extends to issuing both tacit and overt threats against those who speak critically of the military.

The spy agency is widely feared in Pakistan because of these tactics. For example, US intelligence officials think that some of the agency’s operatives ordered the recent killing of a journalist there, Saleem Shahzad.

At the same time, the Pakistani spy agency remains a close ally of the CIA in the hunt for Al Qaeda operatives. It is a relationship that complicates the ability of the United States to pressure Pakistan to alter its tactics.

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