AP sources: Pakistanis tip off militants again (AP)

By KIMBERLY DOZIER, AP Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier, Ap Intelligence Writer – Sun Jun 19, 12:44 pm ET

WASHINGTON – In another blow to Washington's relationship with Pakistan, U.S. officials say Pakistan failed another test to prove it could be trusted to go after American enemies on its soil by intentionally or inadvertently tipping off militants at two more bomb-building factories in its tribal areas, giving the suspected terrorists time to flee.

The two sites' locations in the tribal areas had been shared with the Pakistani government this past week, the officials said Saturday. The Americans monitored the area with satellite and unmanned drones to see what would happen.

In each case, within a day or so after sharing the information, they watched the militants depart, taking any weapons or bomb-making materials with them, just as militants had done the first two times. Only then, did they watch the Pakistani military visit each site, when the terror suspects and their wares were long gone, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

The Americans suspect that either lower-level Pakistani officials are directly tipping the militants off to the imminent raids, or the tips are coming through the local tribal elders that Pakistan insists on informing of the raids. U.S. officials have pushed for Pakistan to keep the location of such targets secret prior to the operations, but the Pakistanis say their troops cannot enter the lawless regions without giving the locals notice.

The latest incidents bring to a total of four bomb-making sites that the U.S. has shared with Pakistan only to have the terrorist suspects flee before the Pakistani military arrive. Both sides are attempting to mend relations and rebuild trust after the U.S. raid on May 2 that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, a Pakistani army town only 35 miles from the capital Islamabad.

The Pakistanis believe the Americans violated their sovereignty by keeping them in the dark about the raid. American officials believe bin Laden's location proves that some elements of the Pakistani army or Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, helped hide the al-Qaida mastermind.

"They are playing this very dangerous game ... by having elements of the ISI sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qaida," said House Intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., speaking on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Rogers said Pakistan's failure to apprehend the militants running the bomb-making factories "sends the wrong message" at a time Congress is considering reducing some $1.5 billion in annual aid to Pakistan in retaliation after the recent series of such disagreements.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., agreed with the notion of benchmarks. "After all, the United States is investing billions and billions of dollars in Pakistan," McCain said on "This Week" on ABC. "Taxpayers have a right to have a return on that."

In response, Pakistan army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas neither confirmed nor denied the new report that militants were tipped off, but he criticized U.S. officials for making such allegations anonymously.

"Why are these faceless U.S. officials speaking through the media?" Abbas said. "Why don't they come out in the open so that we can respond to them with clarity?"

Abbas said that these "so-called officials" should remember that roadside bombs manufactured by the militants have killed and wounded many Pakistani soldiers.

"Does it make sense to allow this `killer machine' to continue targeting our troops who are deployed all over the place?" he said.

Last week, Pakistan's army disputed earlier reports that its security forces had tipped off insurgents at bomb-making, calling the assertions of collusion with militants "totally false and malicious."

Pakistani army officials claimed Friday they had successfully raided two more sites, after finding nothing at the first two, but a Pakistani official reached Friday offered no details of what they found.

The official admitted that in each raid, however, the Pakistani security services notified the local elders who hold sway in the tribal regions. Speaking anonymously to discuss intelligence matters, the official said they would investigate U.S. charges that the militants had been tipped off.

Two U.S. officials said they were asking the Pakistanis to withhold such sensitive information from the elders, and even their lower ranks, to carry out their raids in secret, to prove they could be trusted to go after U.S. enemies.

At least two of the sites were run by the Haqqani network, which is part of the Taliban, closely allied with al-Qaida, and blamed for some of the deadliest attacks against U.S. troops and civilians in neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistan has long resisted attacking the Haqqani network, saying the group has never attacked the state of Pakistan.

The intelligence sharing was intended as a precursor to building a new joint intelligence team of CIA officers together with Pakistani intelligence agents. But U.S. officials say Pakistan has failed to quickly approve the visas needed, despite agreeing to form the team in May.

U.S. officials have also accused Pakistan of holding up to five Pakistani nationals accused of helping the CIA spy on the Abbottabad compound in advance of the bin Laden raid.

Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, confirmed Sunday that Pakistan had rounded up more than 30 people as part of the investigation. He said they were being questioned for information, not punished, but did not say what would happen to them if charged and found guilty of spying.

Speaking on ABC, Haqqani said if any among them were informants who worked for the CIA, "we will deal with them as we would deal with an offending intelligence service and we will resolve this to the satisfaction of our friends, as well as to our own laws."

The Pakistani government, according to the official reached earlier, views any citizen who worked with the U.S. to spy on the compound as having betrayed his or her country by failing to tip off the government that someone the Americans wanted was hiding there. The government's position, the official said, is that such a tip could have saved the Pakistani government the embarrassment of being surprised by the bin Laden raid.

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Associated Press writer Sebastian Abbot in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report.

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AP sources: US-Pakistan form an anti-terror squad (AP)

By KIMBERLY DOZIER, AP Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier, Ap Intelligence Writer – Thu Jun 2, 7:23 am ET

WASHINGTON – Bruised from their latest diplomatic clash, the U.S. and Pakistan are trying to bandage their relationship by forging a new joint intelligence team to go after top terrorism suspects, officials say.

The move comes after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton presented the Pakistanis with the U.S. list of most-wanted terrorism targets, U.S. and Pakistani officials said Wednesday. The list includes some groups the Pakistanis have been reluctant to attack, U.S. officials said.

It's one of a host of confidence-building measures meant to restore trust blown on both sides after U.S. forces tracked down and killed al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden during a secret raid in Pakistan last month.

But it also amounts to a new test of loyalty for both sides. The Pakistanis say the U.S. has failed to share its best intelligence, instead running numerous unilateral spying operations on its soil.

U.S. officials say they need to see the Pakistanis target militants they've long sheltered, including the Haqqani network, which operates with impunity in the Pakistani tribal areas while attacking U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

All those interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

The U.S. and Pakistan have engaged in a diplomatic stare-down since the May 2 raid, with the Pakistanis outraged over the unilateral action as an affront to its sovereignty and the Americans angry to find that bin Laden had been hiding for more than five years in a military town just 35 miles from the capital, Islamabad.

The U.S. deliberately hid the operation from Pakistan, recipient of billions in counterterrorism aid, for fear that the operation would leak to militants.

A series of high-level U.S. visits has aimed to take the edge off. Marc Grossman, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell met with intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha last month. Last week, the secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, held a day of intensive meetings with top Pakistani military and civilian officials.

After that outreach, Pakistan allowed the CIA to re-examine the bin Laden compound last Friday. Pakistan also returned the tail section of a U.S. stealth Black Hawk helicopter that broke off when the SEALs blew up the aircraft to destroy its secret noise- and radar-deadening technology.

The CIA has also shared some information gleaned from the raid, and Pakistan has reciprocated, U.S. and Pakistani officials said Wednesday.

The investigative team will be made up mainly of intelligence officers from both nations, according to two U.S. officials and one Pakistani official. It would draw in part on any intelligence emerging from the CIA's analysis of computer and written files gathered by the Navy SEALs who raided bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, as well as Pakistani intelligence gleaned from interrogations of those who frequented or lived near the bin Laden compound, the officials said.

The formation of the team marks a return to the counterterrorism cooperation that has led to major takedowns of al-Qaida militants, like the joint arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003.

The joint intelligence team will go after five top targets, including al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri, a possible bin Laden successor, and al-Qaida operations chief Atiya Abdel Rahman, as well as Taliban leader like Mullah Omar, all of whom U.S. intelligence officials believe are hiding in Pakistan, one U.S. official said.

Another target is Siraj Haqqani, leader of the Haqqani tribe in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas. Allied with the Taliban and al-Qaida, the Haqqanis are behind some of the deadliest attacks against U.S. troops and Afghan civilians in Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence officials say their top commanders live openly in the Pakistani city of Miram Shah, close to a Pakistani army outpost.

Pakistani officials say the U.S. has never provided them accurate intelligence as to the Haqqani leadership's location. Pakistani officials also argue that as the Haqqani network has been careful never to attack the Pakistani government, there is no reason to attack them.

One official said a final target on this preliminary list is Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, leader of a group called Harakat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, which the State Department blames for several attacks in India and Pakistan, including a 2006 suicide bombing against the U.S. consulate in Karachi that killed four people.

A second U.S. official confirmed that the Pakistanis and Americans have agreed to go after a handful of militants as a confidence-building measure, but the official would not confirm the specific names on the list.

Pakistani officials say those five have always been top targets, but they also did not confirm that the new agreement specifically names them as joint targets.

Intelligence-sharing operations between the U.S. and Pakistan were already strained before the bin Laden raid, particularly by the arrest and detention in January of CIA security contractor Raymond Davis in the shooting deaths of two Pakistani men. Davis said the two were trying to rob him.

Davis was eventually released in March after the dead men's relatives agreed to accept blood money under Islamic tradition, an agreement Pakistani intelligence officials say they brokered.

But only a day after his release, a covert CIA drone strike killed at least two dozen people in the Pakistani tribal areas — people the CIA said were militants and the Pakistanis said were civilians.

Both sides disputed media reports that Pakistan had completely shut down joint intelligence centers it operates with the Americans following the bin Laden raid.

Two of the five "intelligence fusion centers" where the U.S. shares satellite, drone and other intelligence with the Pakistanis were mothballed last fall, long before either the Davis or bin Laden controversies, the Pakistani official and another U.S. official say. It was part of the fallout of the public embarrassment of the WikiLeaks cables disclosures, which revealed a closer U.S.-Pakistani military relationship than publicly acknowledged by Pakistan.

Two other fusion centers, plus smaller cooperative intelligence-sharing facilities, remain operational, both sides say, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

The high-value target team is expected to use any intelligence found at the bin Laden compound in the hunt, although a month after the raid analysts have found nothing "actionable," a term describing intelligence that leads to a strike or operation against a new al-Qaida target, two U.S. officials say. The CIA-led teams have gotten through more than 60 percent of the computer files and written material taken from the compound so far.

They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the ongoing review of the now-classified bin Laden files.

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