Two
months after Osama bin Laden was killed, the CIA’s top operative in Pakistan
was pulled out of the country in an abrupt move vaguely attributed to health
concerns and his strained relationship with Islamabad.
In
reality, the CIA station chief was so violently ill that he was often doubled
over in pain, current and former U.S. officials said. Trips out of the country
for treatment proved futile. And the cause of his ailment was so mysterious,
the officials said, that both he and the agency began to suspect that he had
been poisoned.
Mark
Kelton retired from the CIA, and his health has recovered after he had
abdominal surgery. But agency officials continue to think that it is plausible
— if not provable — that Kelton’s sudden illness was somehow orchestrated by
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, known as the ISI.
The
disclosure is a disturbing postscript to the sequence of events surrounding the
bin Laden operation five years ago and adds new intrigues to a counterterrorism
partnership that has often been consumed by conspiracy theories.
That
2011 time frame was marked by extraordinary turbulence in the United States’
relationship with Pakistan, a wary alliance that was close to collapse when
U.S. Navy SEALs descended on the al-Qaeda leader’s compound in Abbottabad.
Photos have been released of the
Tora Bora compound where the al-Qaeda leader lived until a Western bombing
campaign forced him to flee.
Even
if the poisoning suspicion is groundless, the idea that the CIA and its station
chief considered the ISI capable of such an act suggests that the breakdown in
trust was even worse than widely assumed.
Kelton,
59, declined multiple requests for an interview, but in a brief exchange by
phone he said that the cause of his illness “was never clarified,” and he added
that he was not the first to suspect that he had been poisoned. “The genesis
for the thoughts about that didn’t originate with me,” he said.
In
the conversation, Kelton declined to answer questions about his illness or his
tenure in Pakistan. “I’d rather let that whole sad episode lie,” he said. “I’m
very, very proud of the people I worked with who did amazing things for their
country at a very difficult time. When the true story is told, the country will
be very proud of them.”
U.S.
officials acknowledged that the CIA never saw proof that Kelton was poisoned or
confronted Pakistan with that charge. CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said that privacy
considerations “limit what we can say about any individual cases . . . but we
have uncovered no evidence that Pakistani authorities poisoned a U.S. official
serving in Pakistan.”
Even
so, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the ISI has been
linked to numerous plots against journalists, diplomats and other perceived
adversaries and that the spy agency’s animosity toward Kelton was intense.
Officials
said the ISI chief at the time, Ahmed Shuja Pasha, routinely refused to speak
with Kelton or even utter his name, referring to the dour CIA station chief as
“the cadaver.”
Tensions from the start
Although
Kelton’s tenure lasted only seven months, it was in many ways a parade of
humiliation for his hosts. Within days of Kelton’s arrival, one of his
subordinates, CIA contractor Raymond
Davis, was involved in a Jason Bourne-style shootout in Lahore.
Kelton signed off on dozens of drone strikes that infuriated the Pakistanis. He
also presided over the final preparations for the assault in Abbottabad that
killed bin Laden and, to many, exposed Pakistan’s security agencies as
incompetent.
The
CIA asked that Kelton not be identified by his full name. But since retiring,
Kelton has posted his name and portions of his CIA resume on publicly
accessible Websites. He has not disclosed his assignment in Pakistan, but other
key figures associated with the bin Laden operation have come forward over the
past five years or have been publicly identified.
Pakistan
dismissed the allegations against the ISI.
“Obviously
the story is fictional, not worthy of comment,” said Pakistan Embassy spokesman
Nadeem Hotiana. “We reject the insinuations implied in the allegations.”
U.S.
officials emphasized that the relationship with Pakistan had been deteriorating
for years before Kelton arrived in Islamabad.
By
2009, officials said, U.S. intelligence agencies had evidence that the ISI was
complicit in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, suspected the ISI of staging
raids to disguise the deaths of militants killed in custody and were convinced
that the ISI routinely tipped off its proxies when they were about to be struck
by CIA drones.
The
strain intensified in 2010 when the CIA sharply escalated the pace of its drone
campaign and Pasha was named in a Mumbai-attack-related lawsuit in the United
States. In apparent retaliation, a suit filed in Pakistan by alleged victims of
a drone strike revealed the name of the CIA’s then-station chief, Jonathan
Bank.
Concerned
for Bank’s safety, the CIA employed a modest ruse to get him out of the
country, former officials said. As then-CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell
finished a series of scheduled meetings in Islamabad, Bank escorted his boss to
a waiting agency plane. Then, without any notice to Pakistani authorities and
in violation of protocol, Bank stayed aboard as the flight crew closed the
door.
The
next station chief would face a doubly daunting assignment — managing the toxic
relationship with the ISI while secretly pursuing the most promising lead in
more than a decade on bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Kelton,
known as having an acerbic personality, was not an obvious candidate for the
role. He had little experience with counterterrorism operations and had spent
much of his career in traditional Cold War outposts, including Moscow, where
the CIA remained locked in a decades-long duel with the KGB and its successor
organization.
But
given the increasingly tense atmosphere in Islamabad, then-CIA Director Leon
Panetta and others concluded that years of engaging in adversarial espionage
could be an asset. “They thought his Moscow experience was a very good
credential,” said a former senior CIA official who, like others, spoke on the
condition of anonymity to discuss agency operations and personnel.
Former
U.S. officials who worked alongside Kelton said he began preaching “Moscow
Rules” upon arrival, meaning that the ISI should be treated as a determined foe
rather than a problematic partner. The inevitable clash came sooner than either
side expected.
Less
than 48 hours after Kelton’s arrival in Islamabad, Davis, the CIA contractor,
was arrested after opening fire on two armed Pakistani men accused of trying to
rob him. In Davis’s car, authorities found a conspicuous collection of spy
gear, reportedly including a disguise kit, an infrared flashlight and a camera.
Some
in the U.S. Embassy argued that lying about Davis would only insult the
Pakistanis, who might be persuaded to release him if the agency acknowledged
the blunder. But Kelton and his superiors at headquarters were adamantly
opposed.
“Don’t
tell them anything,” Kelton told then-U.S. Ambassador Cameron Munter, according
to former officials familiar with the exchange. The stonewalling continued for
weeks — with President Obama demanding the release of “our diplomat” — until
Munter secured permission to deal with Pasha directly and admit Davis’s ties to
the CIA.
Davis
was released March 16 after a secret court proceeding in which the families of
those killed were paid $2.4 million. The CIA’s drones, which had gone
dormant during much of Davis’s captivity, roared back to life the next day,
carrying out a strike that killed at least 40 people at a tribal council
meeting in Datta Khel.
Pasha
was livid, sending word to Munter that the strike amounted to a “kick in the
teeth” after the Davis deal was arranged. Pasha’s relationship with Kelton
never recovered, and the two rarely spoke in the ensuing months.
In
a recent interview, Munter described 2011 as “by far my most difficult year in
the Foreign Service.” Attempts to reach Pasha through the Pakistan Embassy in
the United States were unsuccessful.
Bin Laden raid
On
the first night in May, as midnight approached in Pakistan, Kelton, Munter and
a senior U.S. military official gathered in a secure CIA room in the embassy to
watch transmissions from a stealth drone circling over Abbottabad as the bin
Laden raid began.
The
trio had made secret preparations for possible Pakistani reprisals, officials
said, drafting evacuation plans that called for employees at scattered U.S.
diplomatic sites to flee across the border into India or be scooped up by the
USS Carl Vinson from the Karachi shore. Those at the embassy would have to
hunker down.
At
first, Pakistan seemed paralyzed by the raid. But amid mounting public anger
and recriminations from abroad — Panetta accused Islamabad of being inept or
complicit in hiding bin Laden — senior Pakistani officials began to lash out.
A
week after bin Laden’s death, a story in the Pakistani press said that Pasha
had summoned the CIA station chief to a meeting and railed at him for keeping
the bin Laden operation a secret. The story contained a garbled version of
Kelton’s name, identifying him as “Mark Carlton.”
After
the Bank episode, it was the second time in six months that the CIA’s top
operative in Pakistan had been outed, a major breach of the unwritten rules of
espionage. But this time the agency left Kelton in place even as emerging
details about the raid — including the existence of a CIA safe house in Abbottabad
and the agency’s use of a Pakistani doctor to try to get DNA
samples from residents of bin Laden’s house — compounded Pakistan’s resentment.
Amid
the fallout, Kelton began to experience stomach pain. At first he assumed he
had come down with the sort of digestive ailment that afflicts many Westerners
in Pakistan, former U.S. officials said. But as the symptoms worsened, he began
to miss days of work and left the country several times for treatment.
By
July, Kelton was in what one official described as a “severe medical crisis.”
Less than seven months after arriving for a tour that was supposed to last at
least two years, Kelton told headquarters that he could no longer function in
the job.
Some
of Kelton’s colleagues, including several who were based in Pakistan, remain
skeptical that the ISI would risk Pakistan’s multibillion-dollar dependency on
the United States by poisoning a high-ranking U.S. official. Instead, skeptics
believe that Kelton’s Moscow mind-set saw conspiracy in a condition more likely
caused by bad food or the pressure of the job.
“Stress
does funny things to the body,” said one former senior agency official who
added that “there is zero evidence” Kelton was poisoned.
The
agency never mounted a full investigation to determine whether Kelton was
poisoned, officials said, but took his suspicion seriously enough to search its
intelligence files for any indication that Kelton had been targeted.
Back
in the United States, Kelton took months to recover and ended up having
abdominal surgery. Kelton acknowledged that he had the procedure but declined
to discuss its nature. After recovering, he was named deputy director for
counterintelligence, a job that put him in charge of protecting the agency from
foreign spy services.
Since
retiring last year, Kelton has written articles for a national-security-related
website called the Cipher Brief,
including a piece about the Kremlin’s alleged role in the 2006 assassination of
a former Russian intelligence operative who was poisoned in London with a
lethal dose of radioactive polonium.
In
the article, which argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin was complicit
in the attack, Kelton quotes a line from a 1939 espionage novel: “The important
thing to know about an assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid
for the bullet.”
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