New Bin Laden Documents released

[Channel72]

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/01/opinions/ ... index.html

In the last months of his life, an isolated Osama bin Laden was in a serious dispute with the two brothers who had been pretty much his only connection to the outside world for the previous eight years.

The brothers -- two longtime members of al Qaeda whose family hailed from northern Pakistan, not far from where bin Laden was hiding in the city of Abbottabad -- did everything for bin Laden.

Worried about the CIA hunting for him, bin Laden was confined to one building inside the large compound in Abbottabad, which the brothers had moved him to in 2005.

The two brothers shopped for produce from local markets for bin Laden as well as for the dozen members of his family who were living with him.
Crucially, it was one of the brothers who was the courier who delivered messages to and from al Qaeda's leader to senior members of al Qaeda living in other parts of Pakistan.

Bin Laden was completely reliant on the two brothers both to maintain any semblance of control over al Qaeda and its far-flung affiliates and also for the daily necessities of life.

But by January 2011, just four months before U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden, he and the two brothers were having a serious dispute.
According to letters released by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence that were recovered during the SEAL raid, by early 2011 the brothers were fed up with all the pressure that came from protecting and serving the world's most wanted man.

A fallen leader

Indeed, the documents portray bin Laden, a man who once had commanded training camps in Afghanistan that had churned out thousands of recruits and had also overseen the single most deadly assault on American civilians in the history of the United States, as entirely dependent on his two bodyguards, running out of money and paranoid that even his family members might have concealed tracking devices to home in on him.
Bin Laden confided to one of his wives that the brothers who protected him were "exhausted" by all the pressures on them and were planning to quit.
Things got so bad with his two protectors that on January 14, 2011, bin Laden took the unusual step of writing the brothers a formal letter, despite the fact that they lived only yards away from him on the Abbottabad compound.

In the letter bin Laden said the brothers had been so "irritated" in a recent meeting with him that he was resorting to writing them a letter to clarify matters. He asked the brothers to give him adequate time to find substitute protectors.

Bin Laden then wrote a letter to one of his confidantes asking if he knew of any Pakistanis who could be trusted with "complete confidence" who might replace the two brothers as his liaisons to the outside world.

Relations between bin Laden and the two brothers deteriorated to the point that they entered into a written agreement that they would separate sometime in 2011 or early 2012 and that bin Laden and his family would move away from the compound in Abbottabad.

Of course, that didn't happen and on the night of May 2, 2011, bin Laden and his two bodyguards were killed in the SEAL raid.

But the new documents underline the fact that if the CIA had learned of the compound in Abbottabad later than it did, or if President Obama had not ordered the SEAL raid when he did, it's quite possible that bin Laden could have left for another location and the trail that led the CIA to his Abbottabad compound might have gone cold.

In addition to the conflict that bin Laden was having with his two key protectors, the newly released documents underline some themes that had emerged in documents recovered from the SEAL raid that had been previously released by the U.S. intelligence community.

Al Qaeda was an organization that felt increasingly under pressure. Bin Laden fretted about the CIA drone program, which was picking off so many key members of al Qaeda in the Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan bordering Afghanistan. Bin Laden instructed his organization to "leave Waziristan."
Bin Laden was also keenly aware that as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approached he hadn't pulled off another attack in the States and he pushed al-Qaeda's affiliates to not get distracted by local issues, but to attack Americans and the United States. He advised the leader of al Qaeda in Yemen to recruit Yemenis with U.S. visas or American citizenship to carry out attacks in the States.

Al Qaeda leaders were worried about financing for the group, and despite the fact that bin Laden had drafted a will mentioning a supposed $29 million stashed in Sudan from his sojourn there in the mid-1990s, that money had long disappeared. Bin Laden was the scion of a wealthy Saudi family but there is no indication he had access to that fortune by the time of the raid that killed him.

Bin Laden also drafted a number of speeches he planned to videotape about the "Arab Spring" revolutions that began in early 2011 and were roiling the Arab world. He never delivered those speeches, but he clearly believed these revolutions to be momentous.

Despite the pressures he was under, while he was in hiding, bin Laden tried to maintain control of al Qaeda affiliates around the Muslim world. He conducted correspondence with the leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, a supporter in Saudi Arabia, a fellow militant in Egypt, members of al Qaeda in Iraq, the leadership of al Qaeda in North Africa, and with the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab.

Bin Laden also remained in touch with the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, as late as 2010, sending him a letter intended to be a pep talk about how NATO was tiring of the occupation of Afghanistan. It cited the scheduled pullout of Canadian troops and Obama's decision to eventually pull U.S. troops out as well. In a separate letter in September 2010, bin Laden graciously thanked Mullah Omar for a letter he had sent him.

Despite the well-publicized claims of American journalist Sy Hersh, who wrote a piece in the London Review of Books in May that bin Laden was being guarded by the Pakistani military and that he was simply handed over to the SEALS the night of May 2, 2011, there is no evidence for that in the documents released Tuesday, which run to thousands of pages.

In fact quite the reverse: The documents describe the Pakistani army as "infidels," as well as "the intense Pakistani pressure on us" and they include lengthy plans for attacks to be carried out on Pakistani military targets.

So, some of the key things that I took away from this is that:

(1) The Pakistani military really wasn't that complicit in hiding Bin Laden, despite what some conspiratorial journalists at the NY times might say.

(2) The drone program really was highly effective, to the extent that Bin Laden was forced to abandon all operations in Waziristan. I recall that everytime some Al Qaeda "second in command" got obliterated, everyone would roll their eyes because they knew it was only a matter of time before a new one appeared. But the reality is that constantly having your "second-in-command" killed takes a serious toll on any organization after a while. Imagine running a business where the Vice President or CFO keeps getting killed, and you need to keep hiring qualified people to replace said person. It's only a matter of time before that organization is going to become desperate and eventually collapse.

(3) In his final days, Bin Laden was pretty much a useless figurehead (but I guess we all knew that), who probably just stayed at home watching porn all day in his compound, pathetically scribbling down new plans for terrorist attacks that would never get executed. Undoubtedly if Bin Laden was alive today he would be reduced to even further irrelevance, because he likely would not have endorsed ISIS.

It's also sad to reflect how the US has come up with a technological solution to destroy terrorist networks, but ultimately the solution fails in the long-term because foreign policy blunders keep generating new sources of Jihadist activity, mostly based around power-vacuums in nations which fell victim to US policy-makers.

[Mr Bean]

I recall that everytime some Al Qaeda "second in command" got obliterated, everyone would roll their eyes because they knew it was only a matter of time before a new one appeared. But the reality is that constantly having your "second-in-command" killed takes a serious toll on any organization after a while. Imagine running a business where the Vice President or CFO keeps getting killed, and you need to keep hiring qualified people to replace said person. It's only a matter of time before that organization is going to become desperate and eventually collapse.

The reason why everyone rolled their eyes was the "second in commands" were never the second in command, that man was Ayman al-Zawahiri and the fact for every real operational man the drone program killed there was two janitors and one Al-Qaeda intern who were also called the second in command. I still to this day have no idea who the genius in the Pentagon who started calling everyone "Second in command" and to make it even worse Al-Shihri (Post Bin-Ladin the real second in command) was reported dead three times before we got it right. Ayman al-Zawahiri was the number 2 man from late 90s until Bin Ladin's death at which point Al-Shihri became the number 2.

People can argue about Bin Ladin only being the figure head and Ayman al-Zawahiri having always been the real number 1 but the point was officially he was the number 2 in Al-Q and we killed about fifteen people by my count which the Pentagon for again no reason philosophers have yet found labeled Al-Q's number 2. Who we were killing as you note Channel72 were senior people, important regional leaders but not... the number 2 man in Al-Q.

[Joun_Lord]

Sounds like Binny was in a real sorry state before he died. Afraid for his life (with good reason), paranoid, reduced from running a global terrorist organization to sending letters, having a whole army of followers to being reliant on two dudes (and the charity of the Pakistani government probably, even if the military wasn't helping him somebody in the government had to have been helping him I think), and fapping it to some porn like a pimply teen. I'd almost feel sorry for him if he wasn't Osama Bin Laden. He may have been a "sad harmless old man" but he was still a mass murdering piece of shit. I wish he had been captured to stand trial but it sounds like he didn't give the Seals much choice.

I have to wonder if Hitler, if he had managed to run to South America or whatever his escape plan had been, would have wound up in such a sad and sorry state if he had lived in hiding until like the 60s. Thankfully the world will never know.

[Simon_Jester]

Probably, if only because he'd have had to spend the rest of his life hiding from Mossad.

[Lord Revan]

Tbh had Hitler escaped Germany it's unlikely that he would have lived past the 1940s and definetly not into the 1960s as his health was wrecked by 1945 and it's unlikely enough could be done without revealing his location to reverse the effects of the sad excuse for medical treatment Hitler had before is actual death.

[Elheru Aran]

If he had done the sensible thing and left early on, say after D-Day, he probably would have managed well enough health-wise; from what I understand he only really began declining after that point with the increased stress. Good enough for us that he stuck in there, though.

[Simon_Jester]

Tbh had Hitler escaped Germany it's unlikely that he would have lived past the 1940s and definetly not into the 1960s as his health was wrecked by 1945 and it's unlikely enough could be done without revealing his location to reverse the effects of the sad excuse for medical treatment Hitler had before is actual death.

Probably yes, but it's still an interestingly similar counterfactual.

Besides, it's not like there weren't people predicting that bin Laden would die soon if forced into hiding due to ill health.

[Elheru Aran]

Tbh had Hitler escaped Germany it's unlikely that he would have lived past the 1940s and definetly not into the 1960s as his health was wrecked by 1945 and it's unlikely enough could be done without revealing his location to reverse the effects of the sad excuse for medical treatment Hitler had before is actual death.

Probably yes, but it's still an interestingly similar counterfactual.

Besides, it's not like there weren't people predicting that bin Laden would die soon if forced into hiding due to ill health.

Indeed. I recall speculation, here and elsewhere, that he had actually died from kidney failure or some such in Tora Bora or whatever. There were a number of people suspecting that the Bin Laden assassination was actually some sort of farfetched con-job, using a look-alike, because the actual Bin Laden had been caught and killed/died in prison or whatever... but then there are people who think the earth is flat.

[MKSheppard]

(1) The Pakistani military really wasn't that complicit in hiding Bin Laden, despite what some conspiratorial journalists at the NY times might say.

Like fucking hell they weren't. We should have levelled their nuclear weapons program for this. There is no way he survived living next to the functional Pakistani equivalent of West Point where who lives there is carefully scrutinized by the organs of the state; for what was it, seven years, without the ISI knowing.

[MKSheppard]

From the old thread five years ago LINK to thread

Shroom wrote:

Congratulations America, and congratulations to Barry Muslim Dude (BMD) and American Barry Man (BMD). After those anti-American unpatriotic traitors tried to distract America with their false-flag diversion operation that wasted eight years and countless freedom-loving American lives, FINALLY one of America's sons, born on her freedom-loving soil, has righted these wrongs and done the ultimate patriotic thing in the universe! Birth certificates, lambasting Donald Trump and making terrible jokes at his expense, and now killing Osama bin Laden? Today is a good day to be President. Those Hyper Patriotic Conservative Americans should dub him HEROBAMA instead of Zerobama. He did in four years what their beloved Decider couldn't do in eight. The graphs say it all.

Since the operation was weeks in planning, I bet Obama deliberately released his birth certificate so he could fuck with Trump and his opponents in the Correspondents Dinner and top it off with delivering OBL's head in a platter the day after, to culminate in a week of total awesome for him.

Which is really quite awesome. Imagine, what kind of bastard one would be if just the other night you were busy cracking jokes at the expense of your political rivals while knowing full well that the next day you're going to tell everyone that you just had one of the world's most feared terrorists shot and killed in his own home thirty kilometers away from another nation's capital?

Osama bin Laden had a pretty sad end. He killed so many people, did so much evil, but now he's dead. And what's his last act? Getting used in Obama's reelection campaign, shortly before getting chucked into the ocean.

No trials, no imprisonment, no defiance, nothing. And what did the man who order his death do in the night before? Make fun of Donald Trump and making Lion King jokes.

Obama's gonna come out looking like greased lightning, his opponents are going to look like assholes and idiots, and Osama looks like a corpse.

Man.

Shroom is fucking psychic.

But anyway.

This isn't him hiding out in the mountains, far beyond the reach of the Pakistani government's effective control. It was him hiding out in a fucking tourist trap town about 1-2 hours from the fucking Pakistani capital.

This is only about 1,370m from the Pakistani Military Academy, Kakul as the crow flies. If you're going by driving distance, it's about 2,140~m to get to PMA Kakul; or about 3 minutes of driving at 30 MPH (50 kph).

Dubai: The compound in Abbottabad where Osama Bin Laden was killed was once used as a safe house by Pakistan's premier intelligence agency ISI, Gulf News has learnt.

"This area had been used as ISI's safe house, but it was not under their use any more because they keep on changing their locations," a senior intelligence official confided to Gulf News. However, he did not reveal when and for how long it was used by the ISI operatives. Another official cautiously said "it may not be the same house but the same compound or area used by the ISI".

The official also confirmed that the house was rented out by Afghan nationals and is not owned by the government. The house is located just 800 metres away from the Pakistan Military Academy and some former senior military officials live nearby.

Abbottabad is a garrison town located just 50 kilometres north of Islamabad and it is a popular summer resort, originally built by the British during colonial rule. The city houses a number of upscale educational institutions and religious schools as well.

Secluded affluence

According to the briefing by senior US officials on the killing of Bin Laden, the area is relatively affluent, with lots of retired military staff.

American diplomats were told that one of the key reasons why they had failed to find bin Laden was that Pakistan’s security services tipped him off whenever US troops approached.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) also allegedly smuggled al-Qaeda terrorists through airport security to help them avoid capture and sent a unit into Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban.

The claims, made in leaked US government files obtained by Wikileaks, will add to questions over Pakistan’s capacity to fight al-Qaeda.

[MKSheppard]

The Pakistan Military Academy (also known as PMA or Kakul (Urdu: پاکستان فوجی درسگاہ; Pakestan Fewja Dersegah) is a four-year coeducational federal service military academy.[1] It is located at Kakul near Abbottabad in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The Pakistan Military Academy is similar in function to Sandhurst, Saint-Cyr, and West Point, and provides training to the officers of Pakistan Army. The academy has three training battalions and 12 companies. Another 2,000 guests each year, from over 34 countries, receive some training at PMA.

This would be like Israel finding Hitler living a few blocks down the road from West Point or Sandhurst.

Plus, Abbotabad was also the HQ/Garrison city for the Baluch Regiment of the Pakistani Army, and well within the ADIZ for Islamabad, making drone surveillance so risky we had to use the RQ-170 Stealth Drone to get video.

(OBL's Next door neighbor is a medical officer in the Pakistani Army Medical Corps!)

By Dean Nelson, Abbottabad 9:00PM BST 03 May 2011

Major Amir Aziz, a 45-year-old officer serving as a commander in the Army Medical Corps, lives barely 80 yards from the compound where the world's most wanted terrorist leader evaded an American-led manhunt for up to five years.

He was unavailable at his Doric columned high-security mansion on Tuesday in Thanda Choha or 'cool pond' village in Abbottabad yesterday. But an Urdu name plaque on the door confirmed the owner's title and villagers, including policemen, said Major Aziz was a serving soldier heading a non-combat unit.

The disclosure came amid growing suspicion that some sections of Pakistan's powerful security services may have helped him hide in the shadow of its Military Academy at Kakul, one of the country's highest security garrison towns.

General David Petraeus visited Abbottabad as recently as last November [2010], when bin Laden was reportedly already present – an event in itself that would have made a major security search inevitable. That is why so many are coming to believe the theory that Pakistan's army was complicit in hiding bin Laden...

A police officer familiar with Mr. bin Laden’s compound in the scenic town of Abbottabad said the location was used by Hizbul Mujahedeen, one of the biggest militant outfits in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Like other groups fighting Indian troops in the borderlands, HM’s radical membership has never been rounded up by Pakistani forces and some analysts say Islamabad covertly supports the group

Any link to HM would deepen Pakistan’s embarrassment over Mr. bin Laden’s death. Pakistan has denied any collusion with terrorists, saying that its leading intelligence service had been sharing information with U.S. counterparts since 2009 about the compound where Mr. bin Laden was found.

Still, in the wake of the raid, Islamabad scrambled to ensure that precise ownership of the compound would not become public knowledge.

“The place belonged to Hizbul Mujahedeen,” the police officer said. “But the authorities have asked us not to share any information about the exact ownership.”

Land-registry officials in Abbottabad, known in the local language as patwaris, were summoned to a meeting on Tuesday and urged to keep quiet.

“The patwaris are meeting right now,” a local official said. “They are being instructed not to say anything about the land-ownership issue.”

Essentially:

* Local Police chief says that the compound was owned by Hizbul Mujahideen, the largest terror group created by Pakistan active in Indian Kashmir

*Hizb's close ties to the ISI means that locals know not to ask too many questions about its areas

*Locals knowing that it's a jihadi compound also explains why no one asked questions about high walls and barbed wire fences

*Hizb owning the place also shows the cross connections between the "good" terrorists used by ISI and the "bad" terrorists they want to avoid.

-------------

I could go on and on and on (and I probably will), but it's important to note that all the information that we've forgotten about in the last five years points to the Pakistanis being dirty as hell.

[MKSheppard]

OBL was found hiding inside a safehouse about 800 metres from the grounds of the Pakistani Military Academy; and the safehouse was owned by Hizbul Mujahedeen.

If you've never heard of them, don't worry. Nobody really does, except for India.

Why?

Because the Hizbul Mujahedeen was created by the Pakistani ISI in 1989 to wage war on India inside Kashmir.

Mysteriously, census takers apparently avoided Osama bin Laden's compound. Painted on the entrance gate to most homes in the neighborhood – but not at Osama bin Laden's compound – was a note in Urdu saying that census enumerators had visited over the past two months. Houses that participate in the census have to give details about everyone who lives there.

[Simon_Jester]

It wouldn't exactly be hard for the official owner of the compound to fool the census by giving them a false name for bin Laden, since I doubt that Pakistani census-takers demand ID and expect to identify everyone personally. Even if they did, bribery is a likely explanation.

And in and of itself, the fact that his compound was close to the Pakistani capital doesn't prove much. A fugitive who doesn't leave his house could probably live in Washington, D.C. (or, say, Annapolis or Fredericksburg or Frederick, three cities that are a substantial distance from Washington but not more than an hour or so's driving away) without being spotted IF efforts to conceal him were organized, effective, and disciplined.

On the other hand, bin Laden's compound being owned by a terrorist movement created and (presumably) controlled by Pakistani intelligence is not something one can wave away. That is much more damning evidence.

[Zixinus]

Census takers could be bribed, couldn't they?

[Channel72]

Yeah, I mean - it's kind of funny that he was that close to a military academy, but that just reduces to some kind of "argument from incredulity", which doesn't prove much.

My guess is that some in the ISI knew he was there, but may not have assisted him too much and tried to keep it a secret more over the embarrassment of it all rather than a proactive coverup for reasons of loyalty. I mean these new documents clearly indicate a pretty antagonistic relationship between bin Laden and the Pakistani military/ISI if anything.

[Simon_Jester]

Census takers could be bribed, couldn't they?

Exactly my point.

[K. A. Pital]

Congratulations America, and congratulations to Barry Muslim Dude (BMD) and American Barry Man (BMD). After those anti-American unpatriotic traitors tried to distract America with their false-flag diversion operation that wasted eight years and countless freedom-loving American lives, FINALLY one of America's sons, born on her freedom-loving soil, has righted these wrongs and done the ultimate patriotic thing in the universe! Birth certificates, lambasting Donald Trump and making terrible jokes at his expense, and now killing Osama bin Laden? Today is a good day to be President. Those Hyper Patriotic Conservative Americans should dub him HEROBAMA instead of Zerobama. He did in four years what their beloved Decider couldn't do in eight. The graphs say it all.

Goodness my I forgot that Shroompatine had foreseen it... *runs away and is sorry for the one-liner, just too amazed*

[Simon_Jester]

Trump was actively trying to 'birther' Obama at the time, and was making public demands in the media for his birth certificate and falsely claiming that Obama was not a 'real' American citizen. He was doing this at just about the same time the bin Laden raid took place, to the point where someone on this site joked that Obama should simply show up at a press conference and say "I'm sorry, Donald, I would have brought my birth certificate to this conference, but I couldn't find it because I was too busy killing Osama bin Laden."

I'm not seeing Shroom's reference to Trump ever running for president, only that he mentioned the guy... which was perfectly reasonable at the time since he was actively shitting over the American media in a way largely unrelated to his later presidential run. At least, unrelated except insofar as "Trump is an egotistical blowhard and the news loves to spread his lies" was a common theme of both things.

[K. A. Pital]

I forgot that Trump was then a key birther figure, my bad.

[MKSheppard]

Hum dee DUM

Link

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.

That 2011 time frame was marked by extraordinary turbulence in the United States’ relationship with Pakistan, a wary alliance that was close to collapse when U.S. Navy SEALs descended on the al-Qaeda leader’s compound in Abbottabad.

Even if the poisoning suspicion is groundless, the idea that the CIA and its station chief considered the ISI capable of such an act suggests that the breakdown in trust was even worse than widely assumed.

[CIA tweets U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden — five years later]

Kelton, 59, declined multiple requests for an interview, but in a brief exchange by phone he said that the cause of his illness “was never clarified,” and he added that he was not the first to suspect that he had been poisoned. “The gen­esis for the thoughts about that didn’t originate with me,” he said.

In the conversation, Kelton declined to answer questions about his illness or his tenure in Pakistan. “I’d rather let that whole sad episode lie,” he said. “I’m very, very proud of the people I worked with who did amazing things for their country at a very difficult time. When the true story is told, the country will be very proud of them.”

U.S. officials acknowledged that the CIA never saw proof that Kelton was poisoned or confronted Pakistan with that charge. CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said that privacy considerations “limit what we can say about any individual cases . . . but we have uncovered no evidence that Pakistani authorities poisoned a U.S. official serving in Pakistan.”

Even so, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the ISI has been linked to numerous plots against journalists, diplomats and other perceived adversaries and that the spy agency’s animosity toward Kelton was intense.

Officials said the ISI chief at the time, Ahmed Shuja Pasha, routinely refused to speak with Kelton or even utter his name, referring to the dour CIA station chief as “the cadaver.”

In this Jan. 28, 2011, file photo, Pakistani security officials escort Raymond Allen Davis (center), a CIA contractor, to a local court in Lahore, Pakistan. (Hamza Ahmed/AP)
Tensions from the start
Although Kelton’s tenure lasted only seven months, it was in many ways a parade of humiliation for his hosts. Within days of Kelton’s arrival, one of his subordinates, CIA contractor Raymond Davis, was involved in a Jason Bourne-style shootout in Lahore. Kelton signed off on dozens of drone strikes that infuriated the Pakistanis. He also presided over the final preparations for the assault in Abbottabad that killed bin Laden and, to many, exposed Pakistan’s security agencies as incompetent.

The CIA asked that Kelton not be identified by his full name. But since retiring, Kelton has posted his name and portions of his CIA résumé on publicly accessible Websites. He has not disclosed his assignment in Pakistan, but other key figures associated with the bin Laden operation have come forward over the past five years or have been publicly identified.

Pakistan dismissed the allegations against the ISI.

“Obviously the story is fictional, not worthy of comment,” said Pakistan Embassy spokesman Nadeem Hotiana. “We reject the insinuations implied in the allegations.”

U.S. officials emphasized that the relationship with Pakistan had been deteriorating for years before Kelton arrived in Islamabad.

By 2009, officials said, U.S. intelligence agencies had evidence that the ISI was complicit in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, suspected the ISI of staging raids to disguise the deaths of militants killed in custody and were convinced that the ISI routinely tipped off its proxies when they were about to be struck by CIA drones.

The strain intensified in 2010 when the CIA sharply escalated the pace of its drone campaign and Pasha was named in a Mumbai-attack-related lawsuit in the United States. In apparent retaliation, a suit filed in Pakistan by alleged victims of a drone strike revealed the name of the CIA’s then-station chief, Jonathan Bank.

Concerned for Bank’s safety, the CIA employed a modest ruse to get him out of the country, former officials said. As then-CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell finished a series of scheduled meetings in Islamabad, Bank escorted his boss to a waiting agency plane. Then, without any notice to Pakistani authorities and in violation of protocol, Bank stayed aboard as the flight crew closed the door.

The next station chief would face a doubly daunting assignment — managing the toxic relationship with the ISI while secretly pursuing the most promising lead in more than a decade on bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Kelton, known as having an acerbic personality, was not an obvious candidate for the role. He had little experience with counterterrorism operations and had spent much of his career in traditional Cold War outposts, including Moscow, where the CIA remained locked in a decades-long duel with the KGB and its successor organization.

[How the CIA ran a ‘billion dollar spy’ in Moscow]

But given the increasingly tense atmosphere in Islamabad, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and others concluded that years of engaging in adversarial espionage could be an asset. “They thought his Moscow experience was a very good credential,” said a former senior CIA official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss agency operations and personnel.

Former U.S. officials who worked alongside Kelton said he began preaching “Moscow Rules” upon arrival, meaning that the ISI should be treated as a determined foe rather than a problematic partner. The inevitable clash came sooner than either side expected.

Less than 48 hours after Kelton’s arrival in Islamabad, Davis, the CIA contractor, was arrested after opening fire on two armed Pakistani men accused of trying to rob him. In Davis’s car, authorities found a conspicuous collection of spy gear, reportedly including a disguise kit, an infrared flashlight and a camera.

[CIA’s Global Response Staff emerges from the shadows]

Some in the U.S. Embassy argued that lying about Davis would only insult the Pakistanis, who might be persuaded to release him if the agency acknowledged the blunder. But Kelton and his superiors at headquarters were adamantly opposed.

“Don’t tell them anything,” Kelton told then-U.S. Ambassador Cameron Munter, according to former officials familiar with the exchange. The stonewalling continued for weeks — with President Obama demanding the release of “our diplomat” — until Munter secured permission to deal with Pasha directly and admit Davis’s ties to the CIA.

Davis was released March 16 after a secret court proceeding in which the families of those killed were paid $2.4 million. The CIA’s drones, which had gone dormant during much of Davis’s captivity, roared back to life the next day, carrying out a strike that killed at least 40 people at a tribal council meeting in Datta Khel.

Pasha was livid, sending word to Munter that the strike amounted to a “kick in the teeth” after the Davis deal was arranged. Pasha’s relationship with Kelton never recovered, and the two rarely spoke in the ensuing months.

In a recent interview, Munter described 2011 as “by far my most difficult year in the Foreign Service.” Attempts to reach Pasha through the Pakistan Embassy in the United States were unsuccessful.

Bin Laden raid
On the first night in May, as midnight approached in Pakistan, Kelton, Munter and a senior U.S. military official gathered in a secure CIA room in the embassy to watch transmissions from a stealth drone circling over Abbottabad as the bin Laden raid began.

The trio had made secret preparations for possible Pakistani reprisals, officials said, drafting evacuation plans that called for employees at scattered U.S. diplomatic sites to flee across the border into India or be scooped up by the USS Carl Vinson from the Karachi shore. Those at the embassy would have to hunker down.

At first, Pakistan seemed paralyzed by the raid. But amid mounting public anger and recriminations from abroad — Panetta accused Islamabad of being inept or complicit in hiding bin Laden — senior Pakistani officials began to lash out.

A week after bin Laden’s death, a story in the Pakistani press said that Pasha had summoned the CIA station chief to a meeting and railed at him for keeping the bin Laden operation a secret. The story contained a garbled version of Kelton’s name, identifying him as “Mark Carlton.”

After the Bank episode, it was the second time in six months that the CIA’s top operative in Pakistan had been outed, a major breach of the unwritten rules of espionage. But this time the agency left Kelton in place even as emerging details about the raid — including the existence of a CIA safe house in Abbottabad and the agency’s use of a Pakistani doctor to try to get DNA samples from residents of bin Laden’s house — compounded Pakistan’s resentment.

Amid the fallout, Kelton began to experience stomach pain. At first he assumed he had come down with the sort of digestive ailment that afflicts many Westerners in Pakistan, former U.S. officials said. But as the symptoms worsened, he began to miss days of work and left the country several times for treatment.

By July, Kelton was in what one official described as a “severe medical crisis.” Less than seven months after arriving for a tour that was supposed to last at least two years, Kelton told headquarters that he could no longer function in the job.

Some of Kelton’s colleagues, including several who were based in Pakistan, remain skeptical that the ISI would risk Pakistan’s multibillion-dollar dependency on the United States by poisoning a high-ranking U.S. official. Instead, skeptics believe that Kelton’s Moscow mind-set saw conspiracy in a condition more likely caused by bad food or the pressure of the job.

“Stress does funny things to the body,” said one former senior agency official who added that “there is zero evidence” Kelton was poisoned.

The agency never mounted a full investigation to determine whether Kelton was poisoned, officials said, but took his suspicion seriously enough to search its intelligence files for any indication that Kelton had been targeted.

Back in the United States, Kelton took months to recover and ended up having abdominal surgery. Kelton acknowledged that he had the procedure but declined to discuss its nature. After recovering, he was named deputy director for counterintelligence, a job that put him in charge of protecting the agency from foreign spy services.

Since retiring last year, Kelton has written articles for a national-security-related website called the Cipher Brief, including a piece about the Kremlin’s alleged role in the 2006 assassination of a former Russian intelligence operative who was poisoned in London with a lethal dose of radioactive polonium.

In the article, which argues that Russian President Vladi­mir Putin was complicit in the attack, Kelton quotes a line from a 1939 espionage novel: “The important thing to know about an assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.”

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

KEY TAKEAWAY:

By 2009, officials said, U.S. intelligence agencies had evidence that the ISI was complicit in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, suspected the ISI of staging raids to disguise the deaths of militants killed in custody and were convinced that the ISI routinely tipped off its proxies when they were about to be struck by CIA drones.

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The next station chief would face a doubly daunting assignment — managing the toxic relationship with the ISI while secretly pursuing the most promising lead in more than a decade on bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Kelton, known as having an acerbic personality, was not an obvious candidate for the role. He had little experience with counterterrorism operations and had spent much of his career in traditional Cold War outposts, including Moscow, where the CIA remained locked in a decades-long duel with the KGB and its successor organization.

But given the increasingly tense atmosphere in Islamabad, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and others concluded that years of engaging in adversarial espionage could be an asset. “They thought his Moscow experience was a very good credential,” said a former senior CIA official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss agency operations and personnel.

Former U.S. officials who worked alongside Kelton said he began preaching “Moscow Rules” upon arrival, meaning that the ISI should be treated as a determined foe rather than a problematic partner.