ISI, Pakistan’s top military spy agency, has arrested five Pakistani informants who assisted the CIA ahead of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The arrests of the men, including a Pakistani Army major said to have copied the license plate of cars that drove up to bin Laden’s compound deep in Pakistan, comes amid strained ties between Washington and Islamabad in the wake of the US Navy SEALs raid last month.
A Pakistani security official told AFP in Islamabad that Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had no immediate comment on the report.
Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta raised the fate of the CIA informants during talks with Pakistani military and intelligence officers in Pakistan last week, US officials told the Times.
At a closed briefing last week, CIA Deputy Director rated Pakistan’s counterterrorism cooperation with the United States as three out of 10, officials told the newspaper.
The tension between the two countries comes as US President Barack Obama seeks to bring an end to the war in Pakistan’s neighbor Afghanistan.
But US and Pakistani officials have also sought to play down any unease between them.
Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani told the Times that the CIA and the ISI “are working out mutually agreeable terms for their cooperation in fighting the menace of terrorism. It is not appropriate for us to get into the details at this stage.”
US officials also told the newspaper that in recent months ISI spies have resisted performing surveillance operations for the CIA, refused to grant visas to allow US intelligence officers to operate in Pakistan, as well as threatening to place more restrictions on US drone flights.
A Pentagon program to train Pakistani paramilitary troops to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions bordering Afghanistan has also ended and US military advisers have left the country.
And the Times said the CIA was preparing to relocate some of its drones from Pakistan to a base in Afghanistan in order to survey the mountainous tribal areas along the border.
