Two months after Osama bin Laden raid in Abbottabad, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) top operative in Pakistan was pulled out of the country after he became violently ill leading him and the agency to suspect that he had been poisoned by the Inter-Services Intelligence, reported by foreign media.
According to current and former US officials, the CIA station chief Mark Kelton was suffering from a mysterious ailment which made him double over in pain.
Kelton, 59, has since recovered after he had abdominal surgery but agency officials still believe that it is plausible, even if it cannot be proven, that his sudden illness was somehow orchestrated by ISI.
Speaking about the incident, Kelton said the cause of his illness “was never clarified,” adding that he was not the first to suspect he had been poisoned. “The genesis for the thoughts about that didn’t originate with me,” he said.
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.”
Pakistan has since 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.”
US officials admitted they never had any prove of the accusation and they did not confront Pakistan over it. According to CIA spokesperson Dean Boyd, privacy considerations “limit what we can say about any individual cases but we have uncovered no evidence that Pakistani authorities poisoned a US official serving in Pakistan.”
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 Pak-US relations were even worse than initially thought.
Further, current and former US intelligence officials said 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 further revealed 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.”
During Kelton’s seven months in Pakistan, he signed off dozens of drone strikes and he also presided over the final preparations for the raid in Abbottabad that killed bin Laden. The shootout incident involving CIA contractor Raymond Davis in Lahore also occurred within days of Kelton’s arrival.
