Inter-Services Intelligence: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:43, 13 February 2006

Revision as of 18:02, 13 February 2006

Line 1:

{{Military Pakistan}}

The '''Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence''' (also '''Inter-Services Intelligence''' or '''ISI''') is the largest and most powerful of the three main branches of the Intelligence services of Pakistan.

The '''Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence''' (also '''Inter-Services Intelligence''' or '''ISI''') is the principal [[intelligence agency]] body of [[Pakistan]]. The ISI provided most of the operational and organizational leadership during the [[United States of America|U.S.]]-funded insurgency in [[Afghanistan]] against the [[USSR]]. Perhaps the most spectacular success of the ISI came in Afghanistan, where it engineered a takeover of the country by the hardline Islamic Taliban regime. Before that, it funneled US aid selectively to hardline Islamic mujahideen groups, most notably that of [[Gulbuddin Hekmatyar]].

==Overview==

ISI is one of the best and very well organized intelligence agencies in the world. It was founded in 1948 and in 1950 it was officially given the task to safe guard Pakistani interests and national security inside and outside the country.

ISI has been responsible for gathering information in and around Pakistan. Apart from gathering information, the ISI is also responsible for training spies, security of the Pakistan nuclear program and the security of top Pakistan army generals.

Prior to the imposition of Martial Law in 1958, ISI reported to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army (C-in-C). When martial Law was promulgated in 1958, all the intelligence agencies fell under the direct control of the President and Chief Martial Law Administrator.

==Controversies==

The ISI is tasked with collection of foreign and domestic intelligence; co-ordination of intelligence functions of the three military services; surveillance over its cadre, foreigners, the media, politically active segments of Pakistani society, diplomats of other countries accredited to Pakistan and Pakistani diplomats serving outside the country; the interception and monitoring of communications; and the conduct of covert offensive and wartime operations.

ISI has had it's share of controversies. [[India]] accuses the ISI for funding [[terrorist]] activities in [[Jammu and Kashmir]]. It is also alleged that the ISI has close links with several banned terrorist groups such as the [[Lashkar-e-Toiba]], [[Hizbul Mujahideen]] and the [[Jaish-e-Mohammed]]. According to a report published by India's [[Research and Analysis Wing]] (RAW), ISI along with [[Dawood Ibrahim]]'s [[D-Company]], masterminded [[1993 Mumbai bombings]] which killed more than 250 Indian civilians.

ISI is headquartered in Islamabad and works under a Director General, a serving Lieutenant General of the Pakistan Army. There are three Deputy Director Generals-designated DDG (Political), DDG (External) and DDG (General). The ISI is staffed mainly by personnel deputed from the police, Para-military forces and some specialized units of the Army. There are over 25,000 active men on its staff. This figure does not include informants and assets. It is organized into six to eight departments who are each tasked with various duties with the over all aim to safe guard Pakistan’s interests.

[[Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh]], suspected killer of [[Wall Street Journal]] reporter [[Daniel Pearl]], surrendered to a retired ISI officer under circumstances which remain unclear to date. In 1989 the [[Maktab al-Khadamat]] or services centre, the Peshawar based Saudi-ISI headquarter for cordinating the Afghan [[Jihad]], was supplanted by a more clandestine body, the military base or [[Al-Qaida]]. Many ISI officers played major roles in setting up, funding, and directing the [[Taliban]] regime in [[Afghanistan]] and it's intelligence bureau-Istihbarat with assistance of the American CIA covertly. Former ISI director-general Lt-Gen [[Mahmoud Ahmad]] sought retirement after being superseded on October 8, 2001- the day the US started bombing [[Afghanistan]]. It is believed that the he had developed disagreements with senior officers in the organisation regarding Pakistan's role in the American operation against the Taliban.

==Departments==

*'''Joint Intelligence X''': JIX serves as the secretariat which co-ordinates and provides administrative support to the other ISI wings and field organizations. It also prepares intelligence estimates and threat assessments.

ISI is alleged to have a political role and most notably that of a 'king maker' in Pakistani politics. It is thought to be very close to the intelligence agencies of America and most evidently from the first afghan war and the "War on Terrorism"

*'''Joint Intelligence Bureau''': JIB responsible for political intelligence, was the most powerful component of the organization during the late 1980s. The JIB consists of three subsections, with one subsection devoted to operations involving India, other operations involve, anti-terrorism and VIP security. This is the largest part of ISI.

== Former directors of the ISI ==

*'''Joint Counter Intelligence Bureau''': JCIB is responsible for field surveillance of Pakistani diplomats stationed abroad, if need be monitoring foreign diplomats, as well as for conducting intelligence operations in the Middle East, South Asia, China, Afghanistan and the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union.

*'''Joint Intelligence North''': JIN is responsible for Jammu and Kashmir operations, including monitoring Indian forces deployed within disputed Kashmir.

*'''Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous''': JIM offensive intelligence operations and war time espionage.

*'''Joint Signal Intelligence Bureau''': JSIB which includes Deputy Directors for Wireless, Monitoring and Photos, operates a chain of signals intelligence collection stations, and provide communication support to its operatives. It also collects Intelligence through monitoring of communications channels of neighboring countries. A sizeable number of the staff is from the Army Signal Corps. It is believed that it has its units in Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar.

*'''Joint Intelligence Technical''': JIT, not much is know about this section however it is believed that JIT include a separate explosives section and a chemical warfare section.

==History==

After the partition of British India, two new Intelligence agencies were created called the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Military Intelligence (MI). However their performance of the Military Intelligence (MI) during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 was below expectation and a decision was taken in 1948 to create the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) which would be manned by officers from the three main Military services (Army, Navy and Air Force) to specialize in the collection, analysis and assessment of external intelligence either military or non-military.

The ISI was founded in 1948 to serve as the Intelligence Bureau for Pakistan. A British army officer, Major General R Cawthome, then Deputy Chief of Staff in the Pakistan Army, created it. Initially the ISI had no role in the collection of internal intelligence but with the exception of the North-West Frontier Province and Azad Kashmir. This changed however when in the late 1950s when Ayub Khan became the President of Pakistan and he suspected the loyalty of the East-Pakistan based officers in the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau or the Internal Bureau (IB) branch in Dacca, the capital of the then East Pakistan. He entrusted the ISI with the responsibility for the collection of internal political intelligence in East Pakistan. Later on during the Baloch nationalist revolt in Balochistan in the mid 1970s, the ISI was tasked with performing a similar intelligence gathering operation. During Zia's reign, the ISI was expanded by making it responsible for the collection of intelligence about the Sindh based Communist party and monitoring the Shia organization after the Iranian revolution of 1979 as well as monitoring various Politial parties such as the Pakistan People's Party (PPP).

During the Soviet-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.

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 budget was successfully concealed allocations in Pakistan's State budget and was instrumental in helping Pakistan achieve a military nuclear and delivery capability.

In 1988, Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq initiated Operation Tupac which was designation of a three part action plan for the liberation of Kashmir, initiated after the failure of Operation Gibraltar. The name of the operation came from Tupac Amru, the 18th century prince who led the war of liberation in Uruguay against the Spanish rule.

By May 1996, at least six major militant organizations, and several smaller ones, operated in Kashmir. Their forces are variously estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000 armed men and were mostly of Indian-Kashmiri origin. They were roughly divided between those who support independence and those who support accession to Pakistan.

Aside from Kashmir, the ISI expanded its operations in India in the late 1990s and operated training camps near the border of Bangladesh where members of separatist groups of the northeastern states, known as the United Liberation Front of Seven Sisters (ULFOSS) are trained with military equipment and militant activities. These groups include the National Security Council of Nagaland (NSCN), People's Liberation Army (PLA), United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), and North East Students Organization (NESO) and in the southern Indian States. While the ISI has never confirmed these developments, it is generally believed that they have a hand in these activities.

It was alleged that the ISI has become a state within a state and answerable neither to the leadership of the army, nor to the President or the Prime Minister. Recently, Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, has attempted to rein in the ISI and new reforms have been made such as disbanding the Kashmir and Afghanistan units due to the recent peace process between India and Pakistan and US lead war in Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Some officials have been forced to retire and others have been transferred back to the military. Intelligence experts have estimated that these moves would slash the size of the ISI by close to 40%.

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, spy and espionage.

==Successes==

*In the 1950s, the ISI's Covert Action Division was used in 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 Khalistan Movement, headed by Jagjit Singh Chauhan in which many other members of the Sikh diaspora in Europe, USA and Canada joined and then demanded the seperate country of Khalistan. CIA and ISI worked in tandem during the Nixon Administration in assisting the Khalistan movement in Punjab.

*ISI made aware to the world of the alleged naval base facilities granted by Indian Prime Minister Indra Gandhi to the USSR in Vizag and the Andaman & Nicobar Island and the alleged attachment of KGB advisers to the then Lieutenant General Sunderji who was the commander of Operation Bluestar in the Golden Temple in Amritsar in June 1984.

*ISI, CIA and Mossad carried out a covert transfer of Soviet made PLO and Lebanese weapons captured by the Israelis during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and their subsequent transfer to Pakistan and then into Afghanistan. All knowledge of this weapon transfer was kept secret and was only made public recently.

*ISI played a central role in the U.S.-backed guerrilla war to oust the Soviet Army from Afghanistan in the 1980s. That Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed effort flooded Pakistan with weapons and with Afghan, Pakistani and Arab "mujahideen", who were motivated to fight as a united force protecting fellow Muslims in Soviet occupied Afghanistan. The CIA relied on the ISI to train fighters, distribute arms, and channel money. The ISI trained about 83,000 Afghan mujahideen between 1983 and 1997, and dispatched them to Afghanistan.

*CIA through the ISI promoted the smuggling of heroin into Afghanistan in order to make the Soviet troops into heroin addicts and thus greatly reducing their fighting potential.

*Major General Sultan Habib who was an operative of the ISI's Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous department successfully procured nuclear material while being posted as the Defense Attaché in the Pakistani Embassy in Moscow from 1991 to 1993 and concurrently obtaining other materials from Central Asian Republics, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia. After Moscow, Major General Habib then coordinated shipping of missiles from North Korea and the training of Pakistani experts in the missile production. These two acts greatly enhanced Pakistan's Nuclear weapons program and their missile delivery systems.

*Perhaps the most spectacular success of the ISI came in Afghanistan, where it engineered a takeover of the country by the hard-line Islamic Taliban regime after the Soviets withdrew in the late in 1980s.

*Altaf Hussein, the leader of the MQM political party which represented the Mohajir (Immigrants from India during the partition of 1947) population in Karachi started a terror campaign by bombing, random murders and political assassinations to force the Pakistani government into creating a independent country for the Pakistan's Mohajir population. Hussein who had the backing of India and was living in exile in London, England and out of the reach of the Pakistani Justice but nevertheless, the ISI systematically dismantled his terror campaign and MQM has renounced its militant ways.

==Failures==

*The 1965 war in Kashmir provoked a major crisis in intelligence. When the war started, there was a complete collapse of the operations of all the intelligence agencies, which had been largely devoted to domestic investigative work such as tapping telephone conversations and chasing political suspects. The ISI, after the commencement of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, was apparently unable to locate an Indian armored division due to its preoccupation with political affairs. Ayub Khan set up a committee headed by General Yahya Khan to examine the working of the agencies.

*ISI became even more deeply involved in domestic politics under General Yahya Khan, notably in East Pakistan, where operations were mounted to ensure that no political party should get an overall majority in the general election and attempts were made to infiltrate the inner circles of the Awami League. The operation was a complete disaster as it lead to the 1971 Pakistan civil war which saw East Pakistan become an independent nation of Bangladesh.

*ISI failed to calculate the International reaction to the Kargil operation in summer of 1999. Subsequent heavy pressure by foreign countries such as USA forced the Pakistani backed forces to withdraw from Kargil.

==Unproven acts blamed on the ISI==

*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's Military government.

*India accuses ISI and along with Dawood Ibrahim for masterminding the 1993 Mumbai bombings.

== Former directors of the ISI ==

*[[General]] [[Akhtar Abdur Rahman]]

*[[Major-General]] [[A.O. Mitha|Abu Bakr Osman Mitha]]