The (also known as '''Inter-Services Intelligence''' or '''ISI''') is the premier Intelligence Agency of Pakistan . The ISI provided most of the operational and organizational leadership during the U.S. -funded insurgency in Afghanistan against the USSR . Perhaps the most spectacular success of the ISI came in Afghanistan, where it engineered a takeover of the country by the hardline Islamic Taliban regime. Before that, it funneled US aid selectively to hardline Islamic mujahideen groups, most notably that of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar .
ISI is responsible for gathering and the cataloging of foreign and domestic intelligence and the smooth coordination of intelligence between the three main military branches. Obtaining intelligence can come either from surveillence, interception, monitoring of communication and conducting offensive, intelligence gathering and espionage missions during times of war. Apart from gathering information, the ISI is also responsible for training spies, security of the Pakistan nuclear program and the security of top Pakistan army generals.
After the partition of British India, two new Intelligence agencies were created called the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Military Intelligence (MI). However due to the weak performance of the Military Intelligence (MI) and in particular the sharing of intelligence between the Army, Navy and Air Force during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, a decision was taken in 1948 to create a new intelligence service which would effectively conduct Intelligence sharing between the three main branches of the Military of Pakistan, it was called the Inter-Services Intelligence or known as the ISI.
ISI was created by Major General R. Cawthome who was in 1948 the Deputy Chief of Staff in the Pakistan Army and the ISI was manned by officers from the Army, Navy and Air Force. It was initially tasked with collecting external intelligence
Their performance of the Military Intelligence (MI) during the Indo-Pakistani War Of 1947 was below expectation and a decision was taken in 1948 to create the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) which would be manned by officers from the three main Military services (Army, Navy and Air Force) to specialize in the collection, analysis and assessment of external intelligence either military or non-military.
The ISI was founded in 1948 to serve as the Intelligence Bureau for Pakistan. A British army officer, Major General R. Cawthome, then Deputy Chief of Staff in the Pakistan Army, created it and initially the ISI had no role in the collection of internal intelligence but with the exception of the North-West Frontier Province and Azad Kashmir . This changed however when in the late 1950s when Ayub Khan became the President of Pakistan and he suspected the loyalty of the East-Pakistan based officers in the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau or the Internal Bureau (IB) branch in Dacca , the capital of the then East Pakistan. He entrusted the ISI with the responsibility for the collection of internal political intelligence in East Pakistan. Later on during the Baloch nationalist revolt in Balochistan in the mid 1970s , the ISI was tasked with performing a similar intelligence gathering operation. During Zia's reign, the ISI was expanded by making it responsible for the collection of intelligence about the Sindh based Communist party and monitoring the Shia organization after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as well as monitoring various Politial parties such as the Pakistan People's Party (PPP).
During the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s saw the enhancement of the covert action capabilities of the ISI by the CIA . A number of officers from the ISI's Covert Action Division received training in the US and many covert action experts of the CIA were attached to the ISI to guide it in its operations against the Soviet troops by using the Afghan Mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan and Arab volunteers.
Even before India's Pokhran I nuclear test of 1974 , the ISI had set up a division for the clandestine procurement of military nuclear technology from abroad and, subsequently, for the clandestine purchase and shipment of missiles and missile technology from China and North Korea. This division budget was successfully concealed allocations in Pakistan's State budget and was instrumental in helping Pakistan achieve a military nuclear and delivery capability.
In 1988 , Pakistani President Zia Ul-Haq initiated Operation Tupac which was designation of a three part action plan for the liberation of Kashmir, initiated after the failure of Operation Gibraltar . The name of the operation came from Tupac Amru , the 18th century prince who led the war of liberation in Uruguay against the Spanish rule.
By May 1996 , at least six major militant organizations, and several smaller ones, operated in Kashmir. Their forces are variously estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000 armed men and were mostly of Indian-Kashmiri origin. They were roughly divided between those who support independence and those who support accession to Pakistan.
Aside from Kashmir, the ISI expanded its operations in India in the late 1990s and operated training camps near the border of Bangladesh where it trains members of various separatist groups from the northeastern Indian states. While the ISI has never confirmed these developments, it is generally believed that they have a hand in these activities.
It was alleged that the ISI has become a state within a state and answerable neither to the leadership of the army, nor to the President or the Prime Minister. Recently, Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf , has attempted to rein in the ISI and new reforms have been made such as disbanding the Kashmir and Afghanistan units due to the recent peace process between India and Pakistan and US lead war in Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Some officials have been forced to retire and others have been transferred back to the military. Intelligence experts have estimated that these moves would slash the size of the ISI by close to 40%.
Thus, the ISI, which was originally started as essentially an agency for the collection of external intelligence, has developed into an agency adept in covert actions, spy and espionage.
ISI's headquarters are located in Islamabad and currently the head of the ISI is called the Director General who has to be a serving Lieutenant General in the Pakistan Army. Under the Director General, three Deputy Director Generals report directly to him and are in charge in three separate fields of the ISI which are Political, External and General.
The general staff of the ISI mainly come from police, Paramilitary Forces and some specialized units from the Pakistan Army such as the SSG commandos. The total work force of the ISI has never been made public but experts estimate the size to be around 25,000.
ISI is divided into several departments who are each tasked with various duties with the over all aim to safe guard Pakistan's interests.
- In the 1950s , the ISI's Covert Action Division was used in assisting the insurgents in India's North-East and its role was expanded in the late 1960s to assist the Sikh Home Rule Movement of London-based Charan Singh Panchi , which was subsequently transformed into the Khalistan Movement, headed by Jagjit Singh Chauhan in which many other members of the Sikh diaspora in Europe, USA and Canada joined and then demanded the separate country of Khalistan . CIA and ISI worked in tandem during the Nixon Administration in assisting the Khalistan movement in Punjab.
- ISI decided to spy on the residence of Colonel Hussain Imam Mabruk who was a Military Attaché to the Embassy of Libya in Islamabad as he had made some inflammatory statements towards the military regime of Zia-ul-Haq. The spying paid off as he was seen talking with two Pakistani gentlemen who entered and left the compound suspiciously. The ISI monitored the two men and were later identified as Pakistani exiles that hated the current military regime and were Bhutto loyalists. They had received terrorist training in Libya and were ready to embark on a terrorist campaign in Pakistan to force the Army to step down from power. All members of the conspiracy were apprehended before any damage could be done.
- ISI foiled an attempt by the French Ambassador to Pakistan, Le Gourrierce and his First Secretary, Jean Forlot who were on an surveillance mission to Kahuta nuclear complex on June 26, 1979. Both were intercepted and their cameras and other sensitive equipment were confiscated. Intercepted documents later on showed that the two were recruited by the CIA.
- After the failure of Operation Eagle Claw , the U.S. media outlets such as News Week and Time Magazine reported that CIA agents stationed in Tehran had obtained information in regards to the location of the hostages, in-house information from a Pakistani cook who used to work for the U.S. Embassy. ISI successfully gathered evidence, and intercepted communication documents and showed it to the Iranian Chief of J-2 which cleared the cook. The Iranian chief of intelligence said, “We know, the Big Satan is a big liar.”
- ISI successfully intercepted two American private weapons dealers during the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980’s. One American (his name has not been de-classified) who lived in the F7/4 sector of Islamabad was bugged and trailed and was found to be in contact with various tribal groups supplying them with weapons. Another was Eugene Clegg, a teacher in the American International School who also indulged in weapons trade. Both were put out of business.
- A routine background checks on various staff members working for the Indian embassy raised suspicions on an Indian woman who worked as a school teacher in an Indian School in Islamabad. Her enthusiastic and too friendly attitude gave her up. She was in reality was an agent working for RAW . ISI monitored her movements to a hotel in Islamabad where she rendezvoused with a local Pakistani man who worked as an engineer for Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. ISI then confronted her and were then able to turn her into a Double Agent spying on the Indian Embassy in Islamabad.
- Ilam Din also knows as Ilmo was a infamous Indian spy working from Pakistan. He had eluded being captured many times but on March 23 at 3 A.M., Ilmo and two other Indian spies were apprehended by Pakistani Rangers as they were illegally crossing into Pakistan from India. Their mission was to spy and report back on the new military equipment that Pakistan will be showing in their annual March 23rd Pakistan day parade. Ilmo after being thoroughly interrogated was then forced by the ISI to send false information to his RAW handlers in India. This process continued and many more Indian spies in Pakistan were flushed out such as Roop Lal.
- ISI made aware to the world of the alleged naval base facilities granted by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to the USSR in Vizag and the Andaman & Nicobar Island and the alleged attachment of KGB advisers to the then Lieutenant General Sunderji who was the commander of Operation Bluestar in the Golden Temple in Amritsar in June 1984 .
- ISI, CIA and Mossad carried out a covert transfer of Soviet made PLO and Lebanese weapons captured by the Israelis during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and their subsequent transfer to Pakistan and then into Afghanistan . All knowledge of this weapon transfer was kept secret and was only made public recently.
- ISI played a central role in the U.S.-backed guerrilla war to oust the Soviet Army from Afghanistan in the 1980s. That Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed effort flooded Pakistan with weapons and with Afghan, Pakistani and Arab "mujahideen", who were motivated to fight as a united force protecting fellow Muslims in Soviet occupied Afghanistan. The CIA relied on the ISI to train fighters, distribute arms, and channel money. The ISI trained about 83,000 Afghan mujahideen between 1983 and 1997 , and dispatched them to Afghanistan.
- CIA through the ISI promoted the smuggling of heroin into Afghanistan in order to make the Soviet troops into heroin addicts and thus greatly reducing their fighting potential.
- Major General Sultan Habib who was an operative of the ISI's Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous department successfully procured nuclear material while being posted as the Defense Attaché in the Pakistani Embassy in Moscow from 1991 to 1993 and concurrently obtaining other materials from Central Asian Republics, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia . After Moscow, Major General Habib then coordinated shipping of missiles from North Korea and the training of Pakistani experts in the missile production. These two acts greatly enhanced Pakistan's Nuclear weapons program and their missile delivery systems.
- Perhaps the most spectacular success of the ISI came in Afghanistan, where it engineered a takeover of the country by the hard-line Islamic Taliban regime after the Soviets withdrew in the late in 1980s.
- Altaf Hussain , the leader of the MQM political party which represented the Mohajir (Immigrants from India during the partition of 1947) population in Karachi started a terror campaign by bombing, random murders and political assassinations to force the Pakistani government into creating an independent country for the Pakistan's Mohajir population. Hussein who had the backing of India and was living in exile in London, England and out of the reach of the Pakistani Justice but nevertheless, the ISI systematically dismantled his terror campaign and MQM has renounced its militant ways.
- The 1965 War in Kashmir provoked a major crisis in intelligence. When the war started, there was a complete collapse of the operations of all the intelligence agencies, which had been largely devoted to domestic investigative work such as tapping telephone conversations and chasing political suspects. The ISI, after the commencement of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, was apparently unable to locate an Indian armored division due to its preoccupation with political affairs. Ayub Khan set up a committee headed by General Yahya Khan to examine the working of the agencies.
- ISI became even more deeply involved in domestic politics under General Yahya Khan, notably in East Pakistan, where operations were mounted to ensure that no political party should get an overall majority in the general election and attempts were made to infiltrate the inner circles of the Awami League. The operation was a complete disaster as it lead to the 1971 Pakistan Civil War which saw East Pakistan become an independent nation of Bangladesh.
- ISI failed to perform a proper background check on the British Company which supplied the Pakistan Army with its Mountain climbing gear. When Pakistan attempted to secure the top of the Siachen Glacier in 1984, it placed a large order for Mountain climbing gear with that company but that company also supplied the Indian Army with its gear. Indians were easily alerted to the large Pakistani purchase and deduced that this large purchase could be used to equip troops to capture the Siachen Glacier. India then mounted an operation and secured the top of the glacier before Pakistan.
- ISI failed to calculate the International reaction to the Kargil operation in summer of 1999 . Subsequent heavy pressure by foreign countries such as USA forced the Pakistani backed forces to withdraw from Kargil.
- ISI's Internal Political Division has been accused of assassinating Shah Nawaz Bhutto, one of the two brothers of Benazir Bhutto , through poisoning in the French Riviera in the middle of 1985 in an attempt to intimidate her into not returning to Pakistan for directing the movement against Zia's Military government.
- India accuses ISI and along with Dawood Ibrahim's D-Company for masterminding the 1993 Mumbai bombings.
- Major General Abu Bakr Osman Mitha .
- Major General M Akbar Khan.
- Lieutenant General Ghulam Jilani. 1974 - 1980
- General Akhtar Abdur Rahman . 1980 - 1987
- Lieutenant General Hameed Gul. 1987 - 1989
- Lieutenant General Shamsur Rehman Kallue. 1989 - 1990
- Lieutenant General Asad Durrani. 1990 - 1991
- Lieutenant General Javed Nasir. 1991 - 1993
- Lieutenant General Javed Ashraf Qazi. 1993 - 1994
- Lieutenant General Khwaja Ziauddin Butt. 1998 - 1999
- Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmad. 1999 - October 2001
- Lieutenant General Ehsan ul Haq. October 2001 - October 2004
- ISBN 0850528607 - By ISI brigadier Mohammad Yousaf; Afghanistan the Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower.
- ISBN 1594200076 - By Steve Coll; Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.
- ISBN 1574885502 - Brassey's International Intelligence Yearbook.
- ISBN 041530797X - By Jerrold E Schneider, P R Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, Stephen Phillip Cohen; Perception, Politics and Security in South Asia: The Compound Crisis in 1990
- ISBN 0802141242 - By George Crile; Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History
- ISBN 1842771132 - By Jonathan Bloch; Global Intelligence : The World's Secret Services Today
- ISBN 0385506724 - By James Bamford; A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
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