DG ISI got Arab consent to sack Z: blog

KARACHI: In another startling revelation in connection with Mansoor Ijaz's exchange of Blackberry messages, a blog on the Independent indicated that DG ISI Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha had sought and 'received permission from senior Arab leaders to sack Z' (President Zardari), Geo News reported.

Talking to Geo News program "Aaj Kamran Khan Kay Sath", Mansoor Ijaz said there was nothing new in the above information.

"This information has been on the record now for the better part of six weeks. There is nothing new in this information at all."

He said 'they' are now trying to 'spin' this information to make the ISI look like a culprit. "It is a spin job," he said.

Ijaz said he was approached by Husain Haqqani on the afternoon of May 9 and it was then that he (Ijaz) decided to do his own checking on whether or not what Haqqani was telling him was correct.

Mansoor Ijaz said his intelligence sources, doesn't matter where they were, told him that General Pasha had been traveling throughout the Arab world and other countries as well right after bin Laden raid.

"In many places he (DG ISI) in fact explained that there was a lot of stress in the system because people could not understand who the blame should be pinned on for the fact that bin Laden was on their soil," Mansoor Ijaz said quoting his sources.

He said 'stress' was the word that was being used to explain that there could really be the possibility of the coup that Hussain Haqqani had talked about.

Below are a few paras from the blog that appeared in The Independent on December 13, 2011:

About a quarter of the way down the purported BBM exchange between Ijaz and Husain Haqqani, the American businessman proffers an eyebrow-elevating tip. Some hours after the memo was delivered, Ijaz tells his alleged co-conspirator that he has learned of a clandestine effort to evict Asif Ali Zardari from Islamabad’s presidential palace.

“I was just informed by senior US intel,” Ijaz writes in a message on May 10, “that GD-SII Mr P asked for, and received permission, from senior Arab leaders a few days ago to sack Z. For what its worth.” It’s worth a great deal, if only because it carries the same weight as what else appears in the apparently incriminating exchange.

In his hasty typing, where he manages to turn “DG-ISI” into an anagram, Ijaz was saying that top American spooks have told him that Lieut. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha secured a green light from Gulf potentates to overthrow the government.

Intrigued, I asked Ijaz to furnish some context. When the memo was being crafted, he told me in a telephone interview some days ago, he wanted to independently verify whether the Zardari government was truly imperiled.

“One of the things I had done,” he explained over his London cell phone, “was to make sure that a senior person that I know in US intelligence would have had the opportunity to review what was about to sent over.”

This, he added, was why Leon Panetta came to know of the memo, hinting at a CIA link.

Ijaz said he felt the measure was necessary “to make sure that there was nothing we were doing that was against US interests.”

The well-placed source got back to him about a day later. “And the person told me,” Ijaz said, “that their information was that Pasha had traveled to a few of the Arab countries to talk about what would be necessary to do in the event they had to remove Zardari from power and so forth.”