Intel v. intel

After presiding over bin Laden raid, CIA chief in Pakistan came home suspecting he was poisoned by ISI

Two months after Osama bin Laden was killed, the CIA’s top operative in Pakistan was pulled out of the country in an abrupt move vaguely attributed to health concerns and his strained relationship with Islamabad.

In reality, the CIA station chief was so violently ill that he was often doubled over in pain, current and former U.S. officials said. Trips out of the country for treatment proved futile. And the cause of his ailment was so mysterious, the officials said, that both he and the agency began to suspect that he had been poisoned.

Mark Kelton retired from the CIA, and his health has recovered after he had abdominal surgery. But agency officials continue to think that it is plausible — if not provable — that Kelton’s sudden illness was somehow orchestrated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, known as the ISI.

The disclosure is a disturbing postscript to the sequence of events surrounding the bin Laden operation five years ago and adds new intrigue to a counterterrorism partnership that has often been consumed by conspiracy theories.

Intel v. intel

Did Pakistani Intelligence Back Terrorists Against the CIA in Afghanistan?

A new document, made public this week by the nongovernmental National Security Archive at George Washington University, makes the impactful claim that an “unidentified” Pakistani intelligence officer paid $200,000 to the Haqqani network to carry out a suicide attack on a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) base in eastern Afghanistan in 2009. The Haqqani network is a militant group active on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and is closely linked with the Taliban.

The attack occurred at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan’s Khost province on December 30, 2009, and was carried out by a Jordanian double agent loyal to militants affiliated with al-Qaeda, Humam Khalil al-Balawi. Seven people working with or for the CIA died, making the attack the second-deadliest ever incident in CIA history.

According to the still heavily redacted document, marked “secret,” a certain Afghan border commander of the Khost provincial force was promised $100,000 for his assistance in enabling a suicide mission by an “unnamed Jordanian national.”