40 CIA ‘informants’ taken into custody

The Pakistan Army denied on Wednesday a report published in The New York Times claiming that a major was among the five Pakistani informants arrested for assisting the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ahead of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but an Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) source told Pakistan Today that around 40 suspects had been rounded up on charges of spying for the CIA.
“Those who have been arrested also included some people who were picked up from a house close to Osama’s compound and it is believed the house was used by CIA operatives to keep an eye on the al Qaeda chief’s residence,” the official said. “I can’t give you the exact number but you can say around 40 people have been arrested,” he said, adding that among them were those who would frequent the residence of the al Qaeda chief.
He said a milkman who supplied milk to the residents of bin Laden’s compound was also arrested. “However, let me tell you clearly that those who have been detained do not include any army officers,” the official said. The New York Times had reported on Wednesday that the ISI has arrested an army major – said to have copied the licence plates of cars that drove up to bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad – along with four other informants, but the military denied that any army officer had been detained over what it called the ‘Abbottabad incident’. “The story is false and totally baseless,” the ISPR said in a statement.
Another security official, who asked not be named, said some of those arrested were those who had pointed out bin Laden’s compound to the US special forces’ helicopters. He said the CIA’s own operatives had also been asked to leave the country, adding that around a dozen agents of the US spy agency had left Pakistan in the last month alone. The fate of the arrested CIA informants was unclear, the Times reported, citing American officials.
When asked whether those arrested were CIA informants as mentioned in the Times report, a senior Pakistani security official said: “Investigations are under way and after completion of investigation one can say which category they belonged to.” US officials had told the newspaper that CIA Director Leon Panetta raised the fate of the CIA informants during talks with the Pakistani military and intelligence officers in Pakistan last week.
Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US Hussain 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 told the newspaper that ISI spies had resisted performing surveillance operations for the CIA, refused to grant visas to US intelligence officers and threatened to place more restrictions on US drone flights.
The Times also 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.The Obama administration acknowledged that US relations with Islamabad were “complicated”, but said ties remained strong after the CIA informants’ arrests, AFP reported.
“The cooperation that we do get is vital and essential to our war against terrorists and terrorism,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
“Our relationship with Pakistan is extremely important. It is also complicated.” State Department Spokesman Marc Toner would not comment on reports of the informants’ arrest. “We have a strong relationship with our Pakistani counterparts, we work through issues when they arise,” Toner said. He said that since the raid there had been “an intensity of engagement that illustrates our commitment to working through these issues”.
“We’ve been upfront about challenges in the relationship but we’ve been also consistent in saying Pakistan and US need each other,” he said. “We need to work through these challenges because it’s in both of our long term and short term interest to do so,” he added.