WASHINGTON: The CIA has funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars to the ISI since 9/11 but believes that it has got its money’s worth from the Pakistani spy agency, the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday.

The support for the ISI has been the subject of a long-running debate within the US government that has usually led to the conclusion that ‘there is no other game in town’ when it comes to information on militants who operate in the country’s tribal belt where almost every terrorist plot in this decade was hatched, the Times says.

A former senior CIA official is quoted as saying, ‘They gave us 600 to 700 people captured or dead...Getting these guys off the street was a good thing.’

Another former national security official said that, despite the suspicions about where the ISI’s loyalties lie, ‘you’ve got no smoking gun from command and control that links them to the activities of the insurgents’.

US officials also told the newspaper that the CIA had routinely brought ISI operatives to a secret training facility in North Carolina, even as US intelligence analysts try to assess whether segments of the ISI have worked against US interests.

Explaining this, a US intelligence official told the Times that Pakistan had made ‘decisive contributions to counter-terrorism’.

‘They have people dying almost every day,’ the official said. ‘Sure, their interests don’t always match up with ours. But things would be one hell of a lot worse if the government there was hostile to us.’

The CIA depends on Pakistan’s cooperation to carry out missile strikes by Predator drones that have killed dozens of suspected extremists in Pakistani border areas.

Another former CIA official told the Times that he believed there really are two ISIs. ‘On the counter-terrorism side, those guys were in lock-step with us. And then there was the ‘long-beard’ side. Those are the ones who created the Taliban and are supporting groups like Haqqani.’

A one-time aide to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described to the newspaper a pointed exchange in which Pakistan’s army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani said his spies were no safer than CIA agents when trying to infiltrate notoriously hostile Pashtun tribes.

‘Madame Secretary, they call us all white men,’ Gen Kayani said, according to the former aide.

The newspaper notes that CIA payments to the ISI can be traced to the 1980s, when the Pakistani agency managed the flow of money and weapons to the Afghan Mujahideen. That support slowed during the 1990s, after the Soviets were expelled from Afghanistan, but increased after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.