US face saving:
The Central Intelligence Agency's top clandestine officer in Islamabad was pulled from the country on Thursday amid an escalating war of recriminations between American andPakistani spies, with some American officials convinced that the officer's cover was deliberately blown by Pakistan's military intelligence agency.
The CIA officer hastily left Pakistan on the same day that an Obama administration review of theAfghanistan war concluded that the war could not be won without greater cooperation from Islamabad in rooting out militants in Pakistan's western mountains.
The outing of the CIA station chief is tied to the spy agency's campaign of drone strikes, which are very unpopular in Pakistan, although the government has given its tacit approval for them.
American officials said that the CIA station chief had received a number of death threats after he was named publicly in a legal complaint sent to Pakistani police this week by the family of victims of an earlier drone strike.
The officials said there is strong suspicion that operatives of Pakistan's powerful spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, had a hand in revealing the CIA officer's identity — possibly in retaliation for a civil lawsuit filed in Brooklyn last month implicating the ISI chief in theMumbai terror attacks of November 2008.
The intensifying mistrust between the CIA and ISI, two uneasy but co-dependent allies, could hardly come at a worse time. The Obama administration relies on Pakistan's support for the armed drone program, which this year has launched a record number of strikes in North Waziristan against terror suspects.
The relationship between the spy services has often frayed in recent years. American officials believe that ISI officers helped plan the deadly July 2008 bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, as well as provided support to Lashkar-e-Taiba militants who carried out the Mumbai attacks later that year.
The legal complaint in Pakistan that named the CIA station chief, who was working undercover and whose name is classified, was filed on Monday over an attack late last year that killed at least four Pakistanis. The complaint sought police help in keeping the station chief in the country until a lawsuit could be filed.
The agent's name had already been revealed in a news conference last month by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer who filed the complaint this week, and the name had been reported in local media.
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