Word: diplomat
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...swift--but not in the way the Egyptians expected. That night the Pakistani security forces never turned up. Instead a car with diplomatic plates roared up to the Peshawar house. As the Egyptians watched, a gang of Taliban spilled out, grabbed Khadr and then drove him over the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan, beyond the Egyptians' reach. The Pakistani spy agency, known as Inter-Services Intelligence, had betrayed the Egyptians. "The next day the ISI called up and said, 'So sorry, the man gave us the slip,'" a diplomat recalls...
...With hard-liners seizing on such testimony as reason to attack, it falls to Secretary of State Colin Powell - whom many Administration hawks blame for preventing a march on Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War - to play the lonely diplomat. While batting down rumors that he is fed up and quitting, Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, are close to getting a new set of Iraqi sanctions at the U.N. But other Administration principals fear that Saddam is working his own U.N. angle for the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, whose presence could make the U.S. look...
...that true. The ISI is now actively supporting the U.S. "We've joined out of conviction, not compulsion," says a government official. This change has been noted gratefully in Washington. "We're quite pleased with the cooperation we've got from them," says a U.S. official. A Western diplomat in Islamabad concurs, "There's grudging compliance. The ISI is saluting Musharraf and obeying him." This required a 180 turn for Pakistani spooks. Former friends such as the Taliban and homegrown jihad outfits became the new enemies. "Overnight, our strategic assets," as one top Islamabad official puts it, "had become liabilities...
...more could be done. The ISI wants to keep its militant "assets" should it decide to rev up its clandestine support for Kashmiri combatants, say Western diplomats. (For now, activity in guerrilla training camps inside Pakistan is suspended, militant sources say.) And some of these assets are downright dangerous. For example, the seven main suspects still at large in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in January all had indirect links with the spy agency through the Kashmiri conflict, according to Western diplomats. Now they are on the run, and as one investigator remarks acidly...
...Each country accuses the other of using diplomats as a cover for spying. So India and Pakistan both routinely tap each other's embassy telephones, tail diplomats around the cocktail circuit and sometimes have dispatched gigolos to seduce each other's wives for future blackmail. One barometer of the chill between India and Pakistan is the frequency with which they toss out each other's diplomats. The temperature is decidedly frosty: last week, Indian police allegedly slapped around and expelled a Pakistani diplomat for spying, and the Pakistanis responded in kind. In South Asia, the "foreign hand" is always restless...