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FLASH 22 (2/19/02): Pearl Murder Link to 9/11 Ignored (updated 3/16/02)
On Friday, February 22, the Wall Street Journal finally alluded tactfully to the reason, previously suppressed in this country, why Daniel Pearl's confessed kidnapper, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, had made big news in Indian newspapers last October.
The Journal wrote only that "Sheikh was suspected of wiring $100,000 to Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta." While interesting in itself, this statement was a highly bowdlerized distillation of the story that made headlines last October 9 in Times of India:
"NEW DELHI: While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that former ISI director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday, the truth is more shocking.
"Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday, that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre. The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen Mahmud.
"Senior government sources have confirmed that India contributed significantly to establishing the link between the money transfer and the role played by the dismissed ISI chief. While they did not provide details, they said that Indian inputs, including Sheikh's mobile phone number, helped the FBI in tracing and establishing the link.
"A direct link between the ISI and the WTC attack could have enormous repercussions. The US cannot but suspect whether or not there were other senior Pakistani Army commanders who were in the know of things. Evidence of a larger conspiracy could shake US confidence in Pakistan's ability to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition.
"Indian officials say they are vitally interested in the unravelling of the case since it could link the ISI directly to the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Kathmandu-Delhi flight to Kandahar last December. Ahmad Umar Sayeed Sheikh is a British national and a London School of Economics graduate who was arrested by the police in Delhi following a bungled 1994 kidnapping of four westerners, including an American citizen."
Why have US newspapers suppressed such a startling allegation, even now when Sheikh is back in the news? The most obvious explanation would be that India and Pakistan for some years have traded sinister allegations about each other's intelligence services, so that their charges have little credibility (cf. Peter Bergen Holy War, Inc., 212).
But in this case there are corroborating sources for the movement of $100,000 to Atta, notably in a PBS documentary of 1/17/02. Sheikh, according to the New York Times (3/15/02), "is a leader of Jaish-e-Mohammad," or Army of Muhammad, a militant Islamic group that General Musharraf banned last December, as part of his crackdown on extremist groups. The New York Times (3/19/02) has added that there are "reports that he [Sheikh] has links to Pakistan's main intelligence agency [i.e. the ISI]."
We now know from the New York Times (3/15/02) that Sheikh "was secretly indicted by a grand jury in Washington last November for his role in the 1994 kidnapping" -- this was, coincidentally or not, one month after the Times of India story. And the State Department has reported that "Usama Bin Ladin is suspected of giving funding to the JEM [Jaish-e-Mohammed]," the group of which Sheikh is a leader.
This deepens the mystery of silence considerably. Last fall the Bush Administration was under considerable pressure to produce evidence that bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks. But if State suspected bin Laden gave money to the JEM, and the Wall Street Journal suspected JEM leader Sheikh "of wiring $100,000 to Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta," why has no American newspaper put the two claims together?
A likely explanation is that the US wishes to protect Musharraf and those elements of the ISI loyal to him, knowing that Musharraf faces Islamist enemies inside as well as outside his government.
In 1999 Musharraf seized power with ISI and Islamist support. But he has veered since the US ultimatum of last September towards an anti-Islamist, anti-al-Qaeda posture. In addition to removing the head of ISI, he has outlawed the JEM and other extremist groups. (According to Paknews.com (3/10/02), he also arrested JEM supporters in a January roundup of extremists.) In the words of the New York Times, (3/19/02) Musharraf "went after extremist groups at home, which existed and flourished because of support from elements within the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus."
Asia Times (1/18/02) reported that in an important speech of January 12, 2002, Musharraf made clear his intention to challenge the influence of the madrassas and Islamists, and "transform Pakistan into a modern secular and prosperous state." But it is unlikely that all of the pro-bin Laden elements in ISI have been ousted. As a reviewer, Marin Strmecki, noted in the January issue of Commentary, "Over the past decade, it was the ISI that forged the link between bin Laden and the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, and it also played a central role in developing the al Qaeda infrastructure in Afghanistan and integrating its fighting forces with the Taliban military. The agency's involvement raises profound questions about our alliance with Pakistan in the war against terrorism, particularly as long as the Pakistani intelligence service remains unpurged of its pro-Taliban, pro-al Qaeda elements."
The ISI links to Jaish-i-Muhammad and to Sheikh himself were made more explicit by the New York Times on March 13, 2002: "During his years of international crime and terrorism, Mr. Sheikh was a member of a militant Islamic group, Army of Muhammad, that until recently had the support of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Mr Sheikh could presumably shed more light on the agency's involvement with militant groups. ....Five years [after his arrest in 1994 in India], still in jail awaiting trial, he was released, in exchange for the release of passengers aboard an Indian airlines jet that had been hijacked from Katmandu, a hijacking in which Pakistani intelligence officials had a hand, American officials have said."
On March 22, 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote even more bluntly: "Pakistan's infamous security agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, is still believed to maintain ties to the Taliban despite a decree by Musharraf to sever them. The fiercely independent spy agency was instrumental in the deposed Afghan regime's rise to power, and remains influenced by fundamentalist sentiments and beliefs."
Alfred McCoy wrote a decade ago that in the 1980s "The CIA's relationship with ISI was a complex give-and-take that makes simple cariatures inappropriate -- that ISI was the agency's errand runner on the Afghan border or, conversely, that ISI manipulated the CIA into writing a blank check for [Pakistan]'s own Afghan policies" (Politics of Heroin, 449).
All through the Soviet Afghan invasion of the 1980s, Casey of the CIA, Prince Turki of Saudi intellience, and the ISI worked together to create a Foreign Legion of so-called "Arab Afghans" (who in fact were never Afghans and not always Arabs) in Afghanistan. Bin Laden came to Afghanistan to represent Prince Turki in this endeavor. The foreigners were supported by the Services Center (Makhtab al-Khidmat) of the Jordanian Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, in the offices of the World Muslim League and Muslim Brotherhood in Peshawar (Rashid, Taliban, 131).
As the war ground down, "The friendships and associations made in The Office of Services gave birth to the clandestine al-Qa'ida" (Gerecht, Atlantic Monthly, July 2001). After the murder of Azzam in 1989, bin Laden ran the organization as al-Qaeda. At this time the Arab-Afghans became increasingly distant from all Afghan mujahedeen leaders except Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the latter a Wahhabist emissary who had long lived in Saudi Arabia (Rashid, Taliban, 85, 132).
The training camps at Khost and elsewhere in Afghanistan now prepared Afghan Arabs for service in other areas, notably Kashmir. In 1993 Omar Sheikh joined the lead Kashmir group, the Harkat ul-Mujahedeen, which sent him for training to their camp in Afghanistan. (According to the National Post of Canada, 2/7/02, this was an al-Qaida camp.) It was on the behalf of Harkat that he kidnapped four Britons in India in 1994, hoping to secure the release of Harkat leader Maulana Masood Azhar (NYT, 2/25/02).
Under Casey the CIA had used Islamists like the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman to help recruit Islamic zealots for the Legion, even in the United States (Cooley, 41). As late as 1989 Azzam and bin Laden received a consignment of US sniper rifles. But about this time the first Bush Administration became increasingly concerned about ISI activities, both in developing a Pakistani nuclear weapons program, and also in sponsoring cross-border attacks into Indian Kashmir. (This has been offered as a reason why in May 1989 ISI Chief Hamid Gul was fired, to appease US displeasure at his Islamist policies.)
Nevertheless ISI continued to maintain its close connections with elements and activities now opposed by the US: with Hekmatyar, with the Harkat ul-Mujahedeen and their terrorist offshoot the Harkat-ul-Ansar, and with the narcotics traffic which now increasingly helped pay for both. Bin Laden was associated with Hekmatyar until his departure for Saudi Arabia in 1990; and on his return in May 1996 he resumed these ISI connections.
Bin Laden returned via Pakistan in a large jet plane, which according to the French was a Pakistan military C130 (Labeviere, 115). Interestingly, according to Paknews (2/11/02), one of the two former ISI officials detained in 2002 in connection with the Pearl kidnapping was Khalid Khawaja, a former Pakistani Air force officer inducted into ISI, who "at one time he used to fly Osama's personal plane."
Bin Laden returned to Nangarhar province near the Khyber Pass, a principal drug-growing area. Although in May 1996 this area was not yet under Taliban control, it is alleged that bin Laden used his wealth from drug and other sources to help the Taliban buy their way into Kabul that September.
The politics of this situation were now very complex. The US was concerned about bin Laden, and had just successfully pressured Sudan to force him to leave that country. On the other hand, the US still looked favorably upon the Taliban as a force that might possibly restore unity and peace to a war-ravaged Afghanistan. As I wrote some months ago on this website the US oil company Unocal was particularly anxious to see a unified Afghanistan, so that it could complete its projected gas pipeline from Turkmenistan.
More to come.
Good find, keep up the good work.