A veteran US diplomat, punished apparently for her affection for Pakistan, has said that an FBI investigation against her was flawed from the beginning.
In November 2014, the FBI raided Raphel’s home and reportedly confiscated some documents she brought home from the office. Reports in the US media claimed that the FBI had also intercepted a conversation she allegedly had with a Pakistani official, indicating that she was sharing secrets with the official.
The investigation quickly began to fall apart and was downgraded from espionage to less serious charges of keeping classified information at home.
In an interview published the other day, Ambassador Raphel recalled how agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation raided her Washington residence on Oct 21, 2014, launching an investigation that did an irreparable damage to her career before it fell apart.
“The FBI’s investigation of me was flawed from the beginning because they had a fundamental misunderstanding of what diplomats do,” Raphel told senior Washington Post journalist David Ignatius. “I was never told what triggered the investigation, but I am convinced it was a misreading of raw intelligence by persons who simply did not understand the context.”
Read more: Case against Pakistan-friendly US diplomat Robin Raphel closed with no charges
Raphel, a former assistant secretary of state for South Asia, has had a long association with Pakistan. She retired from the State Department in 2005 after 30 years of service but returned in 2009 as a senior adviser on Pakistan under then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Until Nov 2, 2014, she served as coordinator for non-military assistance to Pakistan.
In 2011 and 2012, military and intelligence channels with Pakistan were closed and Raphel was tasked with working on “the other channels that kept the relationship on life support and helped nurture it back”.
Raphel recalled how she frantically telephoned her office at the State Department to ask what was happening when the FBI agents arrived at her residence. But her colleagues had been instructed not to speak to her.
The government’s case collapsed in March, when the Justice Department informed Ambassador Raphel’s attorneys that it wouldn’t prosecute her, for either espionage or improper retention of the documents.
Three of Raphel’s supervisors at Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan office recalled that Raphel became special adviser in 2011 after leaving a post in Islamabad overseeing US assistance there. At that time, the relationship between Washington and Islamabad was “poisonous, with deep distrust” among intelligence and military officials.
They said that Raphel’s assignment was to “augment existing channels” at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington and that’s why she stayed engaged with Pakistani friends and contacts.
How does she know about her investigation, and after a year Hillary knows nothing?
They raided her home! They never raided Hillary's home. Weeks or months before they actually received Server. Gave Hillary a lot of time to use her wipimg cloth!
Comments are closed.