Value Buy
Senior Associate
Joined: Dec 20, 2010 17:57:07 GMT -5
Posts: 18,680 
Today's Mood: Getting better by the day!
Location: In the middle of enjoying retirement!
Favorite Drink: Zombie Dust from Three Floyd's brewery
Mini-Profile Name Color: e61975
Mini-Profile Text Color: 196ce6
|
Post by Value Buy on Jun 23, 2011 22:15:32 GMT -5
By CARLOTTA GALL, PIR ZUBAIR SHAH and
ERIC SCHMITT
updated 2 hours 31 minutes ago
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan— The cellphone of
Osama bin Laden’s trusted courier, which was
recovered in the raid that killed both men in
Pakistan last month, contained contacts to a
militant group that is a longtime asset of
Pakistan’s intelligence agency, senior
American officials who have been briefed on
the findings say.
The discovery indicates that Bin Laden used
the group, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, as part of
his support network inside the country, the
officials and others said. But it also raised
tantalizing questions about whether the group
and others like it helped shelter and support
Bin Laden on behalf of Pakistan’s spy agency,
given that it had mentored Harakat and
allowed it to operate in Pakistan for at least 20
years, the officials and analysts said.
In tracing the calls on the cellphone, American
analysts have determined that Harakat
commanders had called Pakistani intelligence
officials, the senior American officials said.
One said they had met. The officials added that
the contacts were not necessarily about Bin
Laden and his protection and that there was
no “smoking gun” showing that Pakistan’s spy
agency had protected Bin Laden.
Story: Pakistan relies on militias, but
what side will they take?
But the cellphone numbers provide one of
the most intriguing leads yet in the hunt for
the answer to an urgent and vexing question
for Washington: How was it that Bin Laden was
able to live comfortably for years in
Abbottabad, a town dominated by the
Pakistani military and only a three-hour drive
from the Islamabad, the capital?
“It’s a serious lead,” said one American
official, who has been briefed in broad terms
on the cellphone analysis. “It’s an avenue we’
re investigating.”
The revelation also provides a potentially
critical piece of the puzzle about Bin Laden’s
secret odyssey after he slipped away from
American forces in the Tora Bora region of
Afghanistan nearly 10 years ago. It may help
answer how and why Bin Laden or his
protectors chose Abbottabad, where he was
killed in a raid by a Navy Seals team on May 2.
Harakat has especially deep roots in the area
around Abbottabad, and the network provided
by the group would have enhanced Bin Laden’
s ability to live and function in Pakistan,
analysts familiar with the group said. Its
advertisement Cellphone offers clues to bin Laden's Pakistan ties
The former Al Qaeda leader had contact with a militant group with links to ISI
leaders have strong ties with both Al Qaeda
and Pakistani intelligence, and they can roam
widely because they are Pakistanis, something
the foreigners who make up Al Qaeda’s ranks
cannot do.
Even today, the group’s leader, Maulana Fazlur
Rehman Khalil, long one of Bin Laden’s closest
Pakistani associates, lives unbothered by
Pakistani authorities on the outskirts of
Islamabad.
Story: Bin Laden's trusted confidante
identified
The senior American officials did not name
the commanders whose numbers were in the
courier’s cellphone but said that the militants
were in South Waziristan, where Al Qaeda and
other groups had been based for years.
Harakat’s network would have allowed Bin
Laden to pass on instructions to Qaeda
members there and in other parts of Pakistan’
s tribal areas, to deliver messages and money
or even to take care of personnel matters,
analysts and officials said.
Wielding a militant tool
Harakat is one of a host of militant groups set
up in the 1980s and early ’90s with the
approval and assistance of Pakistan’s premier
spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services
Intelligence, or ISI, to fight as proxies in
Afghanistan, initially against the Soviets, or
against India in the disputed territory of
Kashmir. Like many groups, it has splintered
and renamed itself over the years, and
because of their overlapping nature, other
groups could have been involved in
supporting Bin Laden, too, officials and
analysts said. But Harakat, they said, has been
a favored tool of the ISI.
Harakat “is one of the oldest and closest allies
of Al Qaeda, and they are very, very close to
the ISI,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former Central
Intelligence Agency officer and the author of
“Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the
Future of the Global Jihad.”
“The question of ISI and Pakistani Army
complicity in Bin Laden’s hide-out now hangs
like a dark cloud over the entire relationship”
between Pakistan and the United States, Mr.
Riedel added.
Indeed, suspicions abound that the ISI or
parts of it sought to hide Bin Laden, perhaps t
o keep him as an eventual bargaining chip, or
to ensure that billions of dollars in American
military aid would flow to Pakistan as long as
Bin Laden was alive.
Both the chairman of the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence,
Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of
Michigan, and the panel’s ranking Democrat,
Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of
Maryland, said this month that they believed
that some members of the ISI or the Pakistani
Army, either retired or on active duty, were
involved in harboring Bin Laden.
Bin Laden himself had a long history with the
ISI, dating to the mujahedeen insurgency that
the Americans and Pakistanis supported
against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the
1980s.
Two former militant commanders and one
senior fighter who have received support from
the ISI for years said they were convinced that
the ISI played a part in sheltering Bin Laden.
Because of their covert existence, they spoke
on the condition that their names not be used.
One of the commanders belonged to Harakat.
The other said he had fought as a guerrilla and
trained others for 15 years while on the
payroll of the Pakistani military, until he quit a
few years ago. He said that he had met Bin
Laden twice.
Meetings in tribal areas
In the spring of 2003, Bin Laden, accompanied
by a personal guard unit of Arab and Chechen
fighters, arrived unexpectedly at a gathering of
80 to 90 militants at a village in the Shawal
mountain range of North Waziristan, in
Pakistan’s tribal areas, the former commander
said. He met Bin Laden briefly inside a house;
he said he knew it was him because they had
met before, in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11,
2001, terrorist attacks.
The encounter in North Waziristan occurred
before the American campaign of drone
aircraft strikes, which began in 2004, made it
unsafe for militants to gather in the area in
large numbers. For about three years before
the American drone campaign, Bin Laden was
moving from place to place in Pakistan’s
mountainous tribal areas, the commander
said.
The United States had small Special Operations
units and C.I.A. operatives working with
Pakistani security forces to track Qaeda
members at that time. At some point Bin Laden
went deeper underground. That is when the
commander speculated that the Qaeda leader
was moved to a safe house in a city, though he
did not say he knew that Bin Laden had gone
to Abbottabad.
He and the other commander, who spent 10
years with Harakat, offered no proof of their
belief that Bin Laden was under Pakistani
military protection. But their views were
informed by their years of work with the ISI
and their knowledge of how the spy agency
routinely handled militant leaders it
considered assets — placing them under
protective custody in cities, often close to
military installations.
The treatment amounts to a kind of house
arrest, to ensure both the security of the asset
and his low profile to avoid embarrassment to
his protectors.
Art Keller, a former C.I.A. officer who worked
in Pakistan in 2006, said he had heard rumors
after he left Pakistan in 2007 that Harakat was
providing “background” assistance with
logistics in moving and maintaining the Qaeda
leader in Pakistan. That did not necessarily
mean that members of the group were aware
of the role they played or knew of Bin Laden’s
whereabouts, another American intelligence
official said, speaking on the condition of
anonymity because of the nature of his work.
It remains unclear how Bin Laden arrived in
Abbottabad, where American officials say he
and his family lived for five years, beginning in
2006. The city is home to one of the nation’s
top military academies, which sits less than a
mile from the compound where Bin Laden was
killed.
It is also a transit point for militants moving
between Kashmir and the tribal areas. The
region is the prime recruitment base of
Harakat, whose training camps and other
facilities still exist nearby in Mansehra.
Through the late 1990s, Harakat collaborated
closely with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, sharing
training camps and channeling foreign fighters
to Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.
The group’s leader, Mr. Khalil, was a co-signer
of Bin Laden’s 1998 edict ordering attacks
against America. The group even organized
press trips for journalists to see Bin Laden in
Afghanistan before 9/11 and was used to pass
messages to him, said Asad Munir, a retired
brigadier and former intelligence official.
Such were the links between the groups that
when the United States fired cruise missiles at
Bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan, after the
1998 American Embassy bombings in
Tanzania and Kenya, 11 Harakat fighters were
killed. Some of the group’s fighters were also
killed in the bombings of one of Bin Laden’s
bases in Afghanistan at the start of the
American invasion in October 2001.
Driven underground
Under strong American pressure, Harakat and
similar groups were officially banned and
driven underground by the government of
President Pervez Musharraf in 2002. Harakat
just renamed itself and continued to run
camps unencumbered by Pakistani authorities
and to train militants, some of whom have
been caught while fighting American and
NATO forces in Afghanistan, the commanders
said.
After 2007, many of its fighters left to join the
Taliban, but its leadership and network have
remained intact, if reduced, the commanders
said. Indeed, Bin Laden’s courier appears to
have used a camp in Mansehra that belonged
to a Harakat splinter group, Jaish-e-
Muhammad, as a transit stop, said an
American government official familiar with the
analysis of the Bin Laden material.
The Pakistani Army continued its links with
the Harakat leadership, in particular Mr. Khalil,
Pakistani officials and analysts said. In 2007,
Mr. Khalil was used by the Musharraf
government as a member of a group of clerics
who tried to negotiate an end to a siege by
militants at the Red Mosque in Islamabad.
“They can find him when they want him,” said
Muhammad Amir Rana, the director of the Pak
Institute of Peace Studies, who has written a
book on militant groups.
What role if any Mr. Khalil may have played in
helping Bin Laden in Abbottabad, or whether
he even knew he was living there, is still not
clear. It is also the case that hard-liners within
the ranks of his organization may had become
disillusioned with their ISI handlers over the
years, broke from them and operated more
independently.
Another Pakistani militant leader closely
connected to Bin Laden is Qari Saifullah
Akhtar, a commander in Harakat-ul-Jihad-al-
Islami. Mr. Akhtar stopped in South Waziristan
on the way to Afghanistan just months ago, a
militant interviewed by phone said.
The presence in Waziristan of Mr. Akhtar —
who is wanted in connection with the attack
that killed Benazir Bhutto, a former prime
minister, in 2007 — demonstrated that he
could still move freely without ISI interference.
A report by the Pakistani Interior Ministry said
that Mr. Akhtar had visited Bin Laden in
August 2009 near the border with Afghanistan
to discuss jihadist operations against
Pakistan, according to an account that was
published in the Pakistani newspaper The
Daily Times in 2010.
It is the only recorded episode showing that
Bin Laden’s presence inside Pakistan was
known to Pakistani intelligence, until the
American raid that killed him.
Carlotta Gall reported from Islamabad, and
Eric Schmitt from Washington. Jane Perlez and
Salman Masood contributed reporting from
Islamabad, and Mark Mazzetti from
Washington.
This story, "Cellphone offers clues of bin
Laden's Pakistan ties," originally appeared in
The New York Times.
Copyright © 2011 The New York Times
|
