ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An official of the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s top spy organization, angrily denied on Saturday that it was responsible for revealing the name of the Central Intelligence Agency’s top clandestine officer in Pakistan. “We absolutely deny this accusation, which is totally unsubstantiated and based on nothing but conjecture,” a senior ISI official said in a background briefing at the headquarters of the spy organization in Islamabad.
The top C.I.A. officer in Pakistan was removed yesterday after American officials said the C.I.A. station chief had received a number of death threats since being publicly identified in a legal complaint sent to the Pakistani police this week by the family of victims of earlier drone campaigns.
“This organization has immense tolerance. We have cooperated to the hilt despite constant allegations leveled against us. But this story is the biggest bomb shell,”the official said referring to the article published in The New York Times yesterday.
Claiming that the allegation had greater implications, the official said that the article seemed “intended to create rifts between the ISI and C.I.A.”
Some American officials had said that they strongly suspected that operatives of Pakistan’s powerful spy service had a hand in revealing the C.I.A. officer’s identity, possibly in retaliation for a civil lawsuit filed in Brooklyn last month implicating the ISI chief in the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008. The American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, did not immediately provide details to support their suspicions.
The ISI officials, in turn, pointedly denied these accusations.
The briefing by two senior officials included a litany of complaints as the officials accused western news organization, and specifically the New York Times, of continuously publishing news reports that “cast aspersions on the credibility of the spy organization.”
Both officials claimed in the briefing that ISI had an excellent working relationship with their counterparts in the C.I.A. “We regularly deal with the C.I.A. and it has never communicated to us that they have doubts on our sincerity and credibility,” said one official. “Such accusations and insinuations only appear in media.”
In the briefing, the officials suggested that the conduct of C.I.A.’s top officer might itself have been responsible for blowing the agent’s cover. “Americans have a vast access in Pakistan. They openly interact with civil society members, attend dinners and meetings,” one official said.
