Some Pakistani Journalists Moonlight For Government

By: Allan Wolper It is 7 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 1, in the London Sunday Telegraph newsroom, and Christina Lamb, one of Britain's most celebrated foreign correspondents, is hatching a scheme to outsmart the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents who threw her out of their country.

"I want to cover the fighting in southern Afghanistan," Lamb explains by telephone. "The fastest way is through Pakistan, but the Pakistani embassy said I'd be arrested if I flew back there."

Lamb left London the next day, her route a secret.

But the full story of why she and Justin Sutcliffe, a Sunday Telegraph photographer, were dragged out of their hotel rooms in Quetta, Pakistan, at 2 a.m. on Nov. 9 by seven ISI officers and sent back to Britain needs to be told to American readers.

Four mainline English-language newspapers in Pakistan -- Dawn, the Frontier Post, and The News International, all in Karachi, as well as The Nation in Islamabad -- published stories about Lamb's forced departure that read as if they were dictated by the intelligence agents who arrested her.

What did Lamb do?

She reported that officials in the ISI -- the Pakistan version of the CIA -- were smuggling weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan. What did the ISI agents say she did? They claimed Lamb and Sutcliffe bought airline tickets as "O.B. Laden" in a plot to prove he was hiding out in Pakistan.

Lamb said the travel agent refused to book their tickets in their own names. So they told him to identify them as "O.B. Laden." He did -- and then called the intelligence cops down on them.

The fearless American media have hardly been leading the charge to support their British press ally -- worried perhaps that their correspondents might be shipped out. That fear was given legs when The Nation disclosed the local spy network had intensified scrutiny of journalists. The government had ... tightened the surveillance of foreign journalists after Ms. Lamb's episode to malign Pakistan through fake travel documents in the name of Osama bin Laden," The Nation said.

Not that correspondents are ever out of sight or out of mind. "The phones are all tapped at the hotels," Lamb said. "An extremely high British official said one of the prime e-mail services is owned by the Army. All the hotel drivers report back to the ISI intelligence agents, and the places you go to are the places that the government wants you to go to."

And it's not very safe for sources. "People who came to my hotel said intelligence agents asked them why they spoke to me and what we talked about," Lamb recalled. "You feel you compromise people by seeing them."

Now Lamb wants some Pakistani news outlets to pay for maligning her. So last week the Sunday Telegraph's lawyers filed libel suits in Britain against Dawn, the Frontier Post, The News International, The Nation, and News Network International, the Pakistani wire service. Lamb's paper is demanding that they retract their stories on her arrest and apologize.

"Not one Pakistani reporter called me to get my side," Lamb said. "I wasn't exactly hiding. I was staying in the main hotel. I am pretty well-known in this country."

Ah, that old Brit understatement.

Lamb, 35, who is married to free-lance journalist Paulo D'Anunciacao and has a 2-year-old son, has covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for almost 15 years. Her dispatches have won her governmental enmity, and her 1992 book, "Waiting for Allah: Pakistan's Struggle for Democracy," is not a favorite of Islamabad officials.

The only ones upset by Lamb's deportation, aside from her newspaper, are the U.K. Foreign Office, the British press corps, and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which exposes press-freedom abuses. "What the Pakistani government did was outrageous," said Kavita Menon, head of CPJ's Asian program.

And Lamb learned why. "I asked an editor in Pakistan who is a good friend of mine why the papers printed all those lies about me and he said, 'You know how it works -- the intelligence people plant things and then we have to publish them. And I said, 'Why do you have to?' And he said, 'Otherwise, we will be shut down.'"

It is an open secret that many journalists in Pakistan hold down side jobs with the government, including the ISI. "Nobody, unless they are incredibly connected, would be a journalist in Pakistan because you wouldn't be able to look after your family," Lamb said. "Some journalists are particularly known to be linked to the ISI."

Masood Haider, an American correspondent for Dawn, confirmed that. "My newspaper is scrupulous," said Haider. "But Ms. Lamb's right. Some newspaper journalists are known to be in the pay of the intelligence agency. It is the normal scheme of things in Pakistan. Reporters are paid very poorly. Some of them don't get paid at all."

Pakistani newspapers: Not good places to get any truth-telling done.