Former Lieutenant-General Faiz Hameed, also a former Director-General Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, is in military custody since August 8. The details have already been reported about the court of inquiry (CoI), why it was constituted, the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s order in the Top City case and Hameed’s alleged role in it. I will eschew them.
Additionally, the CoI has also established that Hameed has committed multiple violations of the Pakistan Army Act after his retirement. The note is silent on what those instances of violation might be or how the CoI has established that Hameed committed those violations. This part, as speculation goes, is about the political nature of the proceedings against him since corruption per se has never earlier netted a three-star officer in an FGCM.
Predictably, the commentary has mostly focused on the dramatic first in Hameed’s case — the first DGI to have been arrested and will be put through the FGCM wringer. Also, a DGI who both as DG-Counterintelligence when he was a major-general and later as head of ISI garnered much controversy, especially for his role in political manipulation.
What’s worth debating, though, is not Hameed and his role. It’s the role of the ISI, ironically established by army’s own CoI in Hameed’s case. Consider.
In a petition before the SC in November 2023, Moeez Khan, a real estate developer and reportedly himself a controversial figure, prayed that on May 12, 2017, Pakistan Rangers and officials of the ISI raided the office of Top City, a housing scheme, and the petitioner’s residence in connection with a purported terrorism case.
The raiding party took away valuables, including gold and diamond jewellery and money. Interestingly, while the reason for the raid was a terrorism charge, after Khan’s arrest, Hameed’s brother Sardar Najaf, a petty employee of the Revenue Service, mediated and tried to resolve the issue. This point should be noted since it clearly indicates that the terrorism charge was bogus.
As per the petition, there’s further proof of this because after Khan was acquitted, Hameed contacted Khan through the latter’s cousin — a brigadier in the army — to arrange a meeting. The petitioner claimed that during the meeting, Hameed told the petitioner that he (Hameed) would return some of the items taken away during the raid except for 400 tola gold and cash. The petition also named two retired brigadiers Naeem Fakhar and Ghaffar of the ISI who allegedly forced the petitioner to pay Rs 40 million in cash and sponsor a private network for a few months.
While all of this needs to be proved, the army’s own CoI, as per the ISPR note, makes clear that there’s enough evidence against Hameed and possibly his other accomplices for the army to consider initiating FGCM proceedings against him.
Illegal covert activities and rogue behaviour are not peculiar to the ISI. All intelligence agencies are prone to them, which is why an oversight mechanism is so important to keep them in check.
Which brings us back to the issue of the purported terrorism charge, its veracity (or lack thereof) and how it was used by the country’s most powerful covert organisation to harass a private citizen. Khan might not be the most upright citizen, as I have noted above, and was accused earlier by a Pakistani-British woman of defrauding her, but that is irrelevant to the central point in this argument.
The central point is a basic question: do we have a covert organisation that can and does use the legal ecosystem established for counterterrorism to act for the private benefit of its officials? The answer, ironically, has been provided to us by the army’s own CoI. Yes, it can and does.
Nor can it be argued that this is a one-off or that Hameed and a few others were exceptions, that the ISI (as also other security services) is a beacon of liberal democracy. ISI’s reach and the exercise by its officials of that reach is possibly the biggest open secret in this country. Some cases get reported; most are lost to public scrutiny forever.
The significance of the Hameed saga is therefore not about an individual, even though the individual was a general officer. It’s about the organisation and how it conducts itself. In this case, if the details are correct, the organisation acted like mafia thugs and extortionists. As for political machinations, again an open secret, the late Asghar Khan case is probably the best known example of how the ISI operates in murky political waters. That case and its details are a matter of public record.
Illegal covert activities and rogue behaviour are not peculiar to the ISI. All intelligence agencies are prone to them, which is why an oversight mechanism is so important to keep them in check. Here’s a tale.
In January 1975, the United States Senate set up a Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The Church Committee, as it came to be called, because it was led by Senator Frank Church, was to investigate abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigations and Inland Revenue Service.
The committee’s investigations unearthed Operation Mk-Ultra (CIA), which involved drugging and torture of US citizens as part of human experimentation on mind control; COINTELPRO (FBI), a series of covert and illegal projects aimed at surveilling and infiltrating American political and civil-rights organisations; Family Jewels, a CIA programme involving covertly assassinating foreign leaders; Operation Mockingbird, a systematic propaganda campaign with domestic and foreign journalists operating as CIA assets and dozens of US news organisations providing cover for CIA activity. It also unearthed Project SHAMROCK, a sister project of MINARET, in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA, while officially confirming the existence of the signals intelligence agency to the public for the first time.
The committee presented its final report in 1976. The shocking revelations led to the establishment of the permanent US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In a 1977 interagency memorandum, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: Public trust and confidence in the Intelligence Community have been seriously undermined by disclosures of activities in the past that were illegal, injudicious or otherwise improper by today’s standards.
There’s been much debate within the US about secrecy and effectiveness. Intelligence agencies are required to gather and collate information and then analyse that information, turning it into actionable, credible intelligence. Information gathering can have many tools, from technical means to human intelligence, from covert operations to open-source intelligence.
The army has taken a good decision to try Hameed. But he is not the only one to use the powers bestowed in his office illegally and he won’t be the last. Even as I pen these lines, laws are either being twisted, arbitrarily applied or used illegally in exercise of the powers vested in its functionaries by the state. Unchecked power inevitably leads to hubris, excesses and violence.
This creates a dilemma: how to ensure that a particular intelligence agency does not cross the line that must separate covert operations from rogue ones and yet remain effective? As a Swiss handbook puts it:
Where intelligence agencies serve the public interest within a framework of respect for rule of law and human rights, they perform functions essential to peace and democracy, such as providing information that may help resolve or prevent an escalation in conflict, identifying potential threats to the public and the nation before they become violent, and providing strategic assessments that support the best possible decisions about national security policy.
In other cases, especially in authoritarian systems, intelligence agencies act as secret police, disappearing and killing citizens and dissenters, torturing them at black sites, spreading disinformation and acting in support of ruling cliques or parochial organisational and political interests. None of this should surprise us because it hits too close to home.
The army has taken a good decision to try Hameed. But he is not the only one to use the powers bestowed in his office illegally and he won’t be the last. Even as I pen these lines, laws are either being twisted, arbitrarily applied or used illegally in exercise of the powers vested in its functionaries by the state. Unchecked power inevitably leads to hubris, excesses and violence.
In his fable, War and his Bride, Aesop tells us how the gods chose their mates. The god of war, Polemos couldn’t find a partner until only Hybris, the goddess of reckless pride, was left. As it happened, Polemos fell madly in love with Hybris and would go wherever she went. The moral: once Hybris, from where we get hubris, comes among a people, Polemos – war and violence - is never far behind.
The moral of our story is that if justice specifically targets Hameed then Hameed was the specific target. If it goes beyond him to reform how the organisation he once headed works then we are looking at a significant and welcome development.