Pakistan’s spy agency listed as terrorist organization

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Guantanamo Bay prison authorities named Pakistan’s main intelligence agency a terrorist organization along with Hamas and other international militant networks, according to leaked documents.

The 2007 documents from the prison were part of a batch of classified material released by the Wikileaks website and included in interrogation summaries from more than 700 detainees.

The revelations are likely to damage already rocky relations between the Inter-Services Intelligence agency and the CIA.

The publicity about the documents in Pakistan coincided with a visit here Monday by Gen. David Petraeus, top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

The ISI, which falls under the control of the country’s powerful military, declined to comment, but it has consistently denied any ongoing links with Islamist militants.

The ISI is included in a list of more than 60 international militant networks, as well as Iran’s intelligence services, that appear in guidelines for interrogators at Guantanamo. It says the groups are “terrorist” entities or associations and say detainees linked to them “may have provided support to al-Qaida and the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against U.S. and coalition forces.”

The CIA and the ISI have worked closely together since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to hunt down al-Qaida operatives sheltering in Pakistan. But U.S. officials have often voiced suspicions that elements of the ISI were either linked to or supporting militants even as the two countries publicly talked of their alliance in the campaign against extremism.

Those suspicions appear to be bolstered in part by documents about some individual detainees that were first reported by the Guardian newspaper of London.

For instance, the profile of Harun Shirzad al-Afghani says the U.S. believes the detainee attended an August 2006 meeting that included a variety of militants as well as representatives of Pakistan’s military and intelligence service. Those gathered decided to increase attacks in certain provinces of Afghanistan, the profile states, citing an unidentified letter.