The ISI — Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency — was the CIA’s principal counterterrorism partner during John Kiriakou’s 2002 posting as chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan.
Two parallel ISIs
Per Kiriakou, the ISI was really two organizations. One was the counterterrorism units he worked with directly — “these guys were heroes. They were all trained at Sandhurst in the UK. They had taken classes in the US sponsored by the FBI. Their English was as good as mine.” The other was “another ISI made up of people with long beards who gave you a dirty look when you were walking the halls” — the elements that had created Kashmiri terrorist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed, blew up Shia mosques, and attacked Americans.[1][2][3] Kiriakou has drawn the same distinction in other interviews: the counterterrorism officers he dealt with, educated in the US and UK, cooperated well, while a separate faction at ISI headquarters — long beards, “stink eye” — were the ones who had built and armed the Taliban and Kashmiri separatist groups.[4] He also says he believes the ISI knew where Osama bin Laden was the entire time and was effectively protecting him — a belief consistent with, though distinct from, his account of hiding Abu Zubaydah’s identity from ISI below.[5]
”Mr. Fish”
Because of this divided loyalty, the CIA never told the ISI the identity of its high-value targets, fearing word would leak back to al-Qaeda. When hunting Abu Zubaydah, they referred to him only as “a big fish,” which became “Mr. Fish”: “We believe that Mr. Fish is at this location. Let’s send teams and snatch him.”[6][1]
The Mumbai attacks
Kiriakou says the ISI’s links to Kashmiri separatist groups were behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks. He went on the air as the only commentator to attribute the attacks to Pakistani Kashmiri separatist groups supported by the ISI — which proved correct, to the point that ABC News ran commercials noting it had been the only outlet to get it right.[7]
Working with a service that is also the adversary
Kiriakou states the problem of the liaison relationship as a plain contradiction. He became genuine friends with his Pakistani counterparts, he says, “as crazy as that might sound” — because you cannot really trust anybody in Pakistan, since they are working both sides of the fence: helping you capture these people while having created the Taliban themselves.[8]
The full list of simultaneous commitments is what he uses to make the point. The Pakistanis created the Taliban; they help capture Taliban and al-Qaeda; and they fund and arm Kashmiri separatist groups at the same time. His conclusion is operational rather than moral: “so who do you trust? You can’t trust anybody. You just have to hope that they’re going to be the good guys on the operation with you, and then what they do in their spare time, just hope that it doesn’t cause you any damage.”[9]
The generals’ houses
The friendship was real enough that he was invited home to dinner and met his counterparts’ wives and children. What he noticed was the housing. The homes were very small — “the only big homes were the generals’ homes” — and he attributes the difference to Pakistani generals taking money from the Taliban, who were growing poppy and selling heroin.[10][11]
Who was actually being caught
He gives the mix from the raids as overwhelmingly al-Qaeda, with Taliban prisoners only occasionally — several, “not a lot but a handful” — a whole house full of men from Jaish-e-Mohammed, which he identifies as the Kashmiri separatist group, and a substantial number from Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The latter had merged into al-Qaeda but kept a separate ethnic identity, he says, because they were all Egyptians, and had come to Pakistan to see Ayman al-Zawahiri — the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, by then the head of al-Qaeda, who had taken the entire organisation with him when he pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden. Kiriakou dates the Sadat assassination, in which he says Zawahiri was one of the masterminds, to 1978.[12][13]