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NEW YORK: Mansoor Ijaz, the main character in the memo case, is reported to have told his US go-between Gen Jim Jones in a private email that there were three people who “prepared” the now-infamous document, not just former Pakistani ambassador Husain Haqqani, according to a report published in Foreign Policy magazine on Friday.
The report contradicts his previous assertion that Haqqani alone authored the memo.
“I personally know two of the three men,” Ijaz wrote to Gen Jones, referring to the three men who allegedly prepared the document. “I believe they are men of honour and integrity, although they have been away from the games played in Islamabad for some time.”
In an October 10 Financial Times article where Ijaz revealed the existence of the memo, he wrote that the scheme was devised by “a senior Pakistani diplomat”, who he later alleged was Haqqani.
Ijaz didn’t mention the existence of the other two officials in the article.
In an interview on Thursday with The Cable, Ijaz confirmed the authenticity of the email he sent to Gen Jones but said its contents did not contradict his various other statements. He said the email was meant as a general overview but didn’t reflect the details of the involvement of the other two men, whom he identified as Jehangir Karamat, who served as chief of army staff and US ambassador under former military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf, and Mahmud Ali Durrani, a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.
“There was only one author of the memo and that was Haqqani, but the way Haqqani presented it to me was that there was a team of people back in Pakistan involved and the two names he gave me were Karamat and Durrani,” Ijaz told The Cable.
He said his current understanding was that Karamat and Durrani were involved in some unclear way in the scheme to overhaul Pakistan’s military and intelligence leadership but were not involved in the actual drafting or delivery of the memo.
“My impression at the time I wrote the email to Jones was that they had been probably a part of the thinking process about the ideas in the memorandum. They were probably involved at least in thinking through how you execute these things,” Ijaz told The Cable.
“They certainly did not have anything to do with the actual drafting of the memorandum or the delivery of the message. Then again, maybe they did, I don’t know. Who the hell knows? What I put down in the email was what Haqqani told me.”
In his written statement to the Supreme Court, Ijaz claims that Karamat and Durrani were names given to him by Haqqani “as people that would be involved in forming the new national security team”, but he did not identify them as being involved in the preparation of the document.
“(Haqqani) said there was a like-minded group of people in Islamabad that would be brought on board by ‘the boss’ — a reference I understood to mean President Asif Ali Zardari — as the new national security team once tensions had dissipated.
“He mentioned two names I recognised (Jehangir Karamat and Mahmud Durrani) but added that they would be approached once this was all over — a point I took to mean they were unaware of this operation in advance,” Ijaz wrote in his statement.
