In his Asia Times article, Shahzad reported that the CIA had launched a series of covert operations in the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan after receiving "strong tip-offs that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been criss-crossing the area in the past few weeks for high-profile meetings." Bin Laden had been tracked to "Kunar and Nuristan for meetings with various militant commanders and al-Qaeda bigwigs."
US "decision-makers have put a lot of weight on the information on Bin Laden's movements as it has come from multiple intelligence agencies, in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia." Intelligence officials now believe they have "top-grade accounts as they come from the inner circles of militant camps."
Intelligence officials, Shahzad wrote, were "'stunned' by the visibility of Bin Laden's movements, and their frequency, in a matter of a few weeks in the outlawed terrain of Pakistan and Afghanistan."
He cited "leaks" from the "inner circle" of the militant group, Hizb-e-Islami Afghanistan (HIA), confirming that weeks earlier, bin Laden had met with the group's leader, "Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the legendary Afghan mujahid" in a militant camp in thick jungle on the fringes of Kunar and Bajaur provinces in Afghanistan."
During the Cold War, Hekmatyar's HIA received the largest share of military and economic assistance from Saudi Arabia, supervised by the CIA and delivered through the Pakistani ISI.
After the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan, HIA was among the many insurgent groups, including the Taliban, that targeted NATO troops and Afghan security forces. But in the years preceding the bin Laden raid, this changed as the US sought ways to end the insurgency and stabilise Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai regime. Saleem Shahzad noted that:
"Hekmatyar's representatives of the HIA have been in direct active negotiations with the Americans and have also brokered limited ceasefire agreements with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan."
Journalist Edward Girardet, in his book Killing the Cranes: A Reporter's Journey through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan (2011), reports that in 2009, he was told by former HIA supporters in Kunar, eastern Afghanistan, that "Hekmatyar was operating from the Pakistani frontier tribal agencies of Mohmand and Bajaur with the support of the ISI."
Thus, throughout this period, bin Laden's movements appear to have been heavily monitored by the ISI, which even knew precise details about bin Laden's discussions with Hekmatyar. Shahzad refers to "intelligence sources" that were "privy to the meeting in Bajaur," where the two terror chiefs discussed a future "grand strategy."
Corroboration for Shahzad's report of Osama bin Laden being on the move comes from an interview of a senior official of the Taliban faction, the Haqqani network, by BBC reporter, Syed Shoaib Hasan. The Haqqani network member told the BBC that "he met Bin Laden near the town of Chitral two months ago""--"that is, two months before the raid.
Shahzad's report flies in the face of claims that bin Laden could not be identified by CIA surveillance because he never left his compound, or that he was under perpetual house arrest at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It also corroborates the other reports showing that bin Laden had significant freedom of movement, albeit under the watchful eye of the ISI, and extensive patronage of ISI-sponsored groups, HIA and the Haqqani network.
But more strikingly, Shahzad's report shows that elements of Pakistani, Saudi, and Afghan intelligence agencies were all involved in monitoring bin Laden's movements, and were regularly sharing intelligence on bin Laden with the CIA. Clearly, though, this hitherto unacknowledged joint surveillance operation was highly compartmentalised, and known to only certain specialised units in these agencies.
Given that therefore both the Official History and Hersh's account omit this revelation, the question must be asked as to how long the US was in fact cooperating with Saudi and Pakistani intelligence to monitor bin Laden as he moved back and forth from his base in Abbottabad?
At the end of May 2011, nearly a month after the bin Laden raid, Shahzad was tortured and murdered.
A Human Rights Watch investigation concluded that Shahzad had been assassinated by the Pakistani ISI. Obama administration officials later revealed that classified intelligence proved the culpability of senior ISI officials in directing the operation.
The fact that the US government had such intelligence on the inner high-level workings of the ISI in itself demonstrates the extent of the US intelligence community's penetration of the Pakistani agency and its secrets.
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