Former US National Security Adviser James Jones has said that he was the intermediary who delivered to former military chief Admiral Mike Mullen a secret memorandum that Mansoor Ijaz purportedly drafted on behalf of the Pakistan government, a foreign newspaper reported on Monday.
Jones confirmed to the media that he received the memo from the Pakistani-American businessman and delivered it to Mullen in May. Ijaz has claimed that he drafted the memo on the instructions of Ambassador Husain Haqqani, a charge denied by the envoy.
However, Jones said he was neither a serving US government official or associated with Obama administration in any way when he delivered the memo to Mullen. “I was not in government when I forwarded the message to Admiral Mullen on May 10,” Jones, who was the adviser of President Barack Obama from January 2009 to October 2010, said in an email sent to some journalists.
Jones said he had confirmed his role as the intermediary to The Financial Times four days ago. Haqqani has been at the centre of what the media is referring to as the “Memogate” controversy since Ijaz claimed last month that the memo delivered to Mullen had sought US assistance to prevent a possible military takeover in the wake of the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden on May 2.
Haqqani, a close aide of Zardari, has served as a vital link between the Pakistan government and the US administration and played a key role in resolving several recent crises in bilateral relations, including the stand-off over CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who was arrested after he shot and killed two men in Lahore earlier this year.
