ex-CIA Rocca back in Pakistan

posted by ewing2001 on Tuesday May 06, @09:56AM

Armitage, Rocca to meet President, PM on 8th

http://www.hipakistan.com

ISLAMABAD:

"...US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Christina Rocca will meet top Pakistani leaders in Islamabad on Thursday, US and Pakistani officials said.

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Mr Armitage and Ms Rocca are due to arrive in the Pakistani capital late on Wednesday for Thursday's talks, a US embassy spokesman said on Monday. "The main day of talks is Thursday," the spokesman said. They will meet President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali, an official said.

The duo will be capitalizing on the fresh momentum towards a thaw in Pakistan-India tensions which have kept the subcontinent on a knife-edge for 17 months..."

On Rocca:

http://www.saag.org/papers3/paper230.html
South Asia Analysis Group, Paper no. 230

20. 04. 2001

"...Mrs.Christina Rocca, who has been nominated by President Bush, subject to Senate confirmation, as the new US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia in place of Mr.Karl Inderfurth, is presently a foreign policy adviser for Senator Sam Brownback (Republican-Kansas).

Mrs.Rocca, a career officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) since 1982, resigned from the CIA in 1997 and started working with Mr.Brownback. Mr.Brownback had moved two amendments, adopted by the US Senate in 1999, vesting powers with the President to lift sanctions against India and Pakistan if he deemed it fit.

Mrs.Rocca, who belongs to Washington DC, lives in neighbouring Virginia along with her husband and two children. She is a graduate in history from London's Kings College.

It is believed that she was closely involved in the operations of the CIA against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s. She had twice visited India and Pakistan under her real name.

Mrs.Rocca belonged to the clandestine operations Directorate of the CIA, which sends officers abroad under different cover jobs. In the early 1990s, she monitored the implementation of a plan for the buy-back by the CIA from the Afghan Mujahideen groups and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan the unused Stinger missiles supplied by the CIA, free of cost during the 1980s, for use against the Soviet troops. The CIA apprehended that these missiles might get into the hands of Islamic terrorist groups and might pose a threat to the security of the US President and other foreign VIPs, including the Prime Minister of India.

Lt.Gen.Javed Nasir, the Director-General of the ISI during Mr.Nawaz Sharif's first tenure as the Prime Minister (1990-93), did not co-operate with the CIA in the implementation of this buy-back scheme. It was on the recommendation of Mrs. Rocca that Mr.Clinton placed Pakistan in the so-called watch list of suspected State-sponsors of international terrorism in January, 1993, and demanded that Mr. Nawaz Sharif should remove from the ISI Lt.Gen.Nasir and other senior officers identified by Mrs. Rocca as colluding with international Islamic terrorist groups. After Mr.Sharif succumbed to the pressure and removed them, Pakistan was removed from the list in July,1993.

Since leaving the CIA in 1997, she has hardly written or spoken on foreign policy issues and has confined her role to advising Mr.Brownback on South Asia and helping him in transacting the business of his Senate Sub-Committee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs.

She was a member of a bipartisan group of Washington academics and former government officials constituted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which, in a report on West Asia submitted on January 16,2001,advised the incoming Bush Administration to consider whether the Oslo process has run its course and might usefully now be replaced. It suggested that President Bush himself should "reserve his intensive involvement" in the Middle East peace process "for decisive moments," and reduce the role of the CIA in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship.

The report urged the administration to "recognize the sharp differences between" Iraq and Iran, both of which it saw as "major threats to U.S. interests" and to regional stability. It said that the U.S. should act to promote political change in both countries, but should realize that in Iran such change can come though peaceful political dynamics while in Iraq it "will almost surely come only through violence."

...The study was guided by a Steering Group, which included amongst others, Senator Brownback himself and she was included as a member of the group on his recommendation. Amongst other members of the group were Mr.James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA during President Clinton's first term, and former Congressman Stephen Solarz (ed: who was member of the Carlyle Group until January 2001), both reputed to be good friends of India and critics of the Clinton Administration's soft approach towards China's clandestine supply of nuclear and missile technologies to Pakistan.

...From the Indian perspective, amongst subjects of likely interest and concern to her would be Pakistan's role in Afghanistan, reports of Pakistan flouting the UN arms embargo against the Taliban, the contacts of rogue elements in Pakistan's nuclear and missile establishment such as Dr.Abdul Qadir Khan, the self-proclaimed father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, with the regimes in Iraq and North Korea etc.

...The "Dawn" of Karachi reported on her on March 26,2001, as follows:
* "She is generally regarded as a person of balanced and independent views, with good relations with both Pakistani and Indian lobbies - qualities that may also help to provide an indication as to the Bush administration's approach to South Asia.

The News International of Pakistan circulated the following report on Mrs.Rocca on March 27,2001:
* "As Legislative Assistant of Senator Brownback, Rocca is known to have helped him formulate a more active US policy towards South Asia. She also shares Senator Brownback's views on a tough US stance towards China.

* "Rocca is known to have varied interests in South Asia as well as the Middle East. She is an activist for the freedom of Tibet, which indicates her anti-China bias. Some Indian experts see that factor favouring New Delhi.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/GOD111A.html

"...To burnish their image in the United States, the Taliban even hired a PR representative in Washington, Laila Helms. The authors say that Helms was well-versed in the arcana of U.S. intelligence agencies because her uncle, Richard Helms, is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place in August, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, the analysts maintain. On that occasion, Christina Rocca, at the time head of Central Asian affairs for the State Department, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad. Brisard and Dasquie have long experience in intelligence analysis. Brisard was until the late 1990s director of economic analysis and strategy for Vivendi, a French company. He also worked for French intelligence, and wrote a report in 1997 on the now notorious al Qaeda network headed by bin Laden..."

How Richard Armitage (Deputy Secretary of State) and the US State Department ignored the Taliban Warning in June 2001

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/9/7/222140.shtml

Did the U.S. Ignore Warning of 9-11 Attack?

NewsMax.com Staff

Sunday, Sept. 8,2002

In July, 2001 a U.S. State Department official was told by an aide to a top Taliban government minister that Osama bin Laden was planning a huge attack on American soil and that the attack was imminent. The warning was never passed on to Washington, Britain’s Independent newspaper reports.

The heads-up alert was given by an aide to Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, then the Taliban Foreign Minister, to David Katz, U.S. consul general in Pakistan, but was never communicated to Washington.

Muttawakil, who is now in custody, was convinced that his government’s harboring of bin Laden and the other al-Qaeda members would lead to the destruction of his government in Afghanistan if the terrorist chieftain attacked the U.S. The Independent reports that he told his aide: "The guests are going to destroy the guesthouse."

Fearing massive U.S. retaliation in the event of an al-Qaeda attack Muttawakil told his aide to alert the U.S. and the U.N. about what was going to happen. Incredibly, the warning was disregarded because American officials were suffering from what they called "warning fatigue" from an overabundance of alerts that led the FBI and the CIA to fail to take seriously warnings that Islamic fundamentalist students had enrolled in flight schools across the U.S.

In an interview with Independent reporter Kate Clark in Kabul, the aide revealed how he alerted first the Americans and then the United Nations of the coming Sept. 11-type disaster.

He said his boss had been told that bin Laden was planning a "huge attack" on targets inside America, adding that the attacks were imminent and would be so deadly the United States would react with destructive rage aimed at the Taliban government.

Muttawakil learned of the planned attacks on America from the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yildash. The organization was one of the fundamentalist groups that had found refuge on Afghan soil, supplying fighters for the Taliban's war on the Northern Alliance and benefiting from good relations with al-Qaeda in its fight against the Uzbek government.

After that meeting with Yildash, the aide said his boss emerged looking shocked and troubled. Until then, the Foreign Minister, had no hints from his Taliban associates of what bin Laden was planning.

"At first Muttawakil wouldn't say why he was so upset," the aide told Clark. "Then it all came out. Yildash had revealed that Osama bin Laden was going to launch an attack on the United States. It would take place on American soil and it was imminent. Yildash said Osama hoped to kill thousands of Americans."

At his boss’s instructions the aide met with Katz at a safehouse in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar, in the third week of July 2001. The owner of the house confirmed to The Independent that the meeting had taken place.

The informant told Clark that another U.S. official was also present ­ and suggested that he might have been from the U.S. intelligence community. Katz, now stationed at the American embassy in Eritrea, refused to discuss the meeting. But other U.S. sources confirmed that the warning was not passed on.

A diplomatic source told Clark: "We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff. When people keep saying the sky's going to fall in and it doesn't, a kind of warning fatigue sets in. I actually thought it was all an attempt to rattle us in an attempt to please their funders in the Gulf, to try to get more donations for the cause."

The aide admitted that he did not tell the Americans that the warning came directly from the Taliban's foreign minister, an omission that may have caused the Americans to pay no attention to it.

"As I recall, I thought he was speaking from his own personal perspective," one source told Clark. "It was interesting that he was from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, but he gave no indication this was a message he was carrying."

Interviewed by The Independent in Kabul, the aide said: "I told Mr. Katz they should launch a new Desert Storm ­ like the campaign to drive Iraq out of Kuwait ­ but this time they should call it Mountain Storm and they should drive the foreigners out of Afghanistan. They also had to stop the Pakistanis supporting the Taliban."

Katz, he said, replied that neither action was possible. Nor did Mr. Katz pass the warning on to the State Department, according to senior U.S. diplomatic sources.

When he went back to Kabul, his boss sent him to see U.N. officials. He took the warning to the Kabul offices of UNSMA, the political wing of the U.N. where officials heard him out, but did not report the secret Taliban warning to U.N. headquarters.

A U.N. official familiar with the warnings said: "He appeared to be speaking in total desperation, asking for a Mountain Storm, he wanted a sort of deus ex machina to solve his country's problems. But before 9-11, there was just not much hope that Washington would become that engaged in Afghanistan."

Officials in the State Department and in U.N. headquarters in New York insist they knew nothing about a Taliban warning. They said they would look into the matter.

Actually the statement by the State Dep. was a lie. The U.S. State Department confirmed, that they issued an alert in June 2001, which was reported by AP:

"...A close aide to Osama bin Laden denied that followers of the suspected terrorist plan strikes against U.S. and Israeli interests in the coming weeks, the Taliban news agency said Monday.

Bin Laden deputy Abu Hafas told the Bakhtar news agency that no remarks on imminent attacks were made by bin Laden's aides and that no attacks were planned as a media report over the weekend stated...

...Two days earlier, the U.S. State Department issued an alert, saying that American citizens may be the target of a terrorist threat from extremist groups with links to bin Laden and his Al-Qaida organization. .."

Source:

http://www.afghan-info.com/News/June2001_News.htm

Furthermore, on September 7, 2001, the State Department issued a “worldwide caution” which said: “American citizens may be the target of a terrorist threat from extremist groups with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization.” http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/09/14/MN92245.DTL

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