Inter-Services Intelligence

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PakistanPakistan Inter-Services-Intelligence
- ISI -
State level Federation
Consist since 1948
Headquarters Islamabad
Authority management Asim Munir
Employee approx. 10,000 (estimated)

Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI has been an intelligence agency of the Pakistani armed forces since 1948 . It is considered to be one of the most powerful and best-equipped intelligence services in the Islamic world and a state within a state , some with its own foreign policy. The current director has been Lieutenant General Asim Munir since 2018 .

history

founding

Inter-Services Intelligence was created in 1948, shortly after Pakistan's independence, to support the young state's army with an efficient military intelligence service . The ISI was largely the creation of Major General R. Cawthome, an Australian- born officer in the British Army who was Deputy Chief of Staff of the new Pakistani Army at the time . Its first boss was Major General Syed Shahid Hamid , who initially only had a small office in Karachi . In the first years of its history, the ISI was designed exclusively as a military foreign intelligence service, whose mission was to collect and analyze civil and military information. Under the rule of Muhammad Ayub Khan , the mandate was increasingly extended to the surveillance of opposition activists in Pakistan itself and the protection of military rule. In its further development, the ISI increasingly gained the reputation of being a state within a state that was neither responsible to the army nor to the government, but riddled with corruption .

Conflict with the Soviet Union

In the 1980s, the ISI became a central part of efforts by the US , Pakistan and various Afghan guerrilla movements to drive the Soviet Army out of Afghanistan. Pakistan's efforts were led by Akhtar Abdur Rahman , who was Director General of the ISI under Head of State General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq . In addition to the transport of weapons to Afghanistan, the ISI's contribution consisted, among other things, of training around 83,000 mujahideen between 1983 and 1997 to fight in the neighboring country. The ISI continued these activities even after the withdrawal of the Red Army from Afghanistan.

Conflict with Afghanistan

The Afghan Secret Service (the National Security Directorate ) and the Afghan government have long accused the ISI of secretly supporting the insurgent Taliban. The Pakistani secret service is said to have been involved in the kidnapping of South Korean hostages and the Taliban attack on a military parade in Kabul. A low point between Afghanistan and Pakistan was reached when the ISI was blamed for a suicide attack outside the Indian embassy in Kabul in July and for an attempted assassination attempt on Hamid Karzai in April 2008. At the end of July 2008, the Afghan secret service announced that the ISI had smuggled 3,000 terrorists into Afghanistan in order to sabotage the road construction project of an Indian company. The Pakistani government has denied all allegations. In 2010 the London School of Economics published a study reporting massive aid to the Taliban with money, ammunition and equipment.

On May 5, 2011, following the killing of Osama bin Laden by DEVGRU ( Operation Neptune's Spear ), the Pakistani armed forces openly threatened to end cooperation with the United States if a similar action were to take place again. In the West, especially in the USA, the question had arisen how the ISI could escape the fact that bin Laden was living in a garrison town near the state capital, Islamabad .

According to US Chief of Staff Mike Mullen , the ISI supported fighters from the Haqqani network in the attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul in 2011 on the night of June 29, 2011, for a car bomb attack on September 11, 2011 in Kabul and the attack from a shell the NATO headquarters and the embassy of the United States in Kabul on September 13 and 14, 2011 in implementation and planning. US Senator Mark Kirk described the ISI as " the greatest threat to Afghanistan ". The Pakistani Ministry of Interior denied this.

organization

The headquarters of the ISI are in Islamabad . The leader has the title of Director General and must be a Lieutenant General in the Pakistani Army . Three Deputy Directors, reporting directly to the Director General, are each responsible for a branch of the ISI: the internal wing dealing with counter-espionage and domestic affairs, the external wing and the department for analysis and foreign affairs.

The ISI's personnel are mainly recruited from paramilitary and special forces of the Pakistani army. The number of employees is not published, but experts estimate it to be around 10,000 officers and other relatives.

Relationship to German agencies

The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) cooperates with the Pakistani secret service ISI. The strategic goal is to get information from Islamist terrorist cells.

Nevertheless, the ISI also spied on German agencies. In 2011, information leaked to the ISI through a security breach in the German Police Project Team (GPPT). The GPPT has been training Afghan police officers since 2002 . The ISI had read official telephone calls, such as reports to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, military orders and communication via two liaison offices with the staffs of the US troops and NATO.

The Guardian wrote in 2011 that the BND had advised the CIA that Osama bin Laden was living in Pakistan with the knowledge of the ISI.

In 2018, former BND boss Gerhard Schindler admitted that the ISI also supported terrorist attacks against the West, but that there was "no alternative" to cooperation. Up to this point in time, 380 Pakistani command officers had been trained in Germany by the Bundeswehr .

literature

  • Muhammad Ayub: An Army, Its Role and Rule (A History of the Pakistan Army from Independence to Kargil from 1947-1999). ISBN 0-8059-9594-3 .
  • Abid Ullah Jan: From BCCI to ISI: The Saga of Entrapment Continues . ISBN 0-9733687-6-4 .
  • Mohammad Yousaf (ISI Brigadier ): Afghanistan the Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower. ISBN 0-85052-860-7 .
  • Steve Coll: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 . ISBN 1-59420-007-6 .
  • Brassey's International Intelligence Yearbook . ISBN 1-57488-550-2 .
  • Jerrold E Schneider, PR Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, Stephen Phillip Cohen: Perception, Politics and Security in South Asia: The Compound Crisis in 1990 . ISBN 0-415-30797-X .
  • George Crile: Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History . ISBN 0-8021-4124-2 .
  • Jonathan Bloch: Global Intelligence: The World's Secret Services Today . ISBN 1-84277-113-2 .
  • James Bamford: A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies . ISBN 0-385-50672-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b ISI secret service cooperates with al-Qaeda. (Spiegel Online) Spiegel, accessed March 27, 2009 .
  2. ↑ Südwest Presse : Commentary on Pakistan , August 18, 2008
  3. ↑ Obituary: Maj-Gen Syed Shahid Hamid. Ahmed Rashid. In: The Independent. March 15, 1993. Retrieved March 12, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Stern : Allegations Against Pakistan's Secret Service , August 5, 2007
  5. ↑ Berner Zeitung : Indian embassy targeted by terrorists
  6. ↑ the daily newspaper : Neighbors are annoyed with Islamabad , August 4, 2008
  7. ↑ International Herald Tribune : Afghan spy agency says Pakistan prepares anti-India attacks , July 28, 2008
  8. ↑ The secret helpers of the Taliban. A British study accuses the Pakistani military intelligence service ISI of having very close links with the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistanis are even said to be involved in the leadership of the Taliban. June 13, 2010, accessed August 19, 2019 .
  9. ↑ RP of May 6, 2011: Pakistan threatens USA with rupture after Bin Laden's death
  10. ↑ Help for attack in Kabul? In: ORF . September 23, 2011, accessed September 23, 2011 .
  11. ^ Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI]. Federation of American Scientists, archived from the original January 11, 2006 ; accessed on August 19, 2019 .
  12. ↑ WORLD: Afghanistan: Pakistan's secret service intercepts German police officers . In: THE WORLD . October 30, 2011 ( online [accessed November 21, 2018]).
  13. ↑ Alia Waheed: Revealed: the British Pakistani brigadier at the center of new Bin Laden death conspiracy . May 19, 2015, ISSN  0307-1235 ( online [accessed November 21, 2018]).
  14. ↑ tagesschau.de: How the BND works with the godfather of terror. Retrieved November 21, 2018 .