The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

The ISI also tailed its nominal allies. The CIA funded much of the ISI’s fancy counterterrorism wing, known as Directorate C, and the two agencies collaborated closely on the hunt for members of al Qaeda. But out in the field, a chasm of mistrust lay between the two agencies, and the gloves came off. A CIA officer who went by the name George, and who came to Quetta to cooperate on counterterrorism, was the subject of an intensive surveillance operation, Ashraf told me. The American’s phone was tapped, his car was tailed and his meetings were monitored at the ISI safe house where he was staying. (CIA officials in Pakistan, for their part, had begun to apply ‘Moscow Rules’, a highly defensive form of spycraft in a hostile country.) Of likely greatest interest to the Americans was Section 21. Also known as the Afghan cell, Section 21 was part of what American intelligence called Directorate S – the most sensitive, action-oriented branch of the ISI, roughly akin to the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division, which had been at the heart of the agency’s blackest operations for decades. Colonel Imam had been deputy chief of Section 21 for a period during the 1980s, directing guerilla strikes against the Red Army inside Afghanistan. A sister unit, known as the