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Retired Lieutenant General Hamid Gul is a walking anomaly — a former Pakistani spymaster who loves publicity.

A hawk-like man with dark piercing eyes, he is self-confident to the point of condescending arrogance. Well-educated and outspoken, he thrives on Pakistan’s infatuation with grand conspiracy theories. And, if the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war logs are to be believed, he is also behind a secret network helping the Taliban and al-Qaeda strike at U.S. forces.

An architect of Afghanistan’s jihad against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, he used financial and logistical support from the CIA and Saudi Arabia to mould the mujahedeen into a victorious fighting force.

Now, he is fiercely anti-American, publicly defends al-Qaeda and the Taliban and condemns Washington for waging war on all Muslims.

In his final years in the army, Gen. Gul decorated his desk with a chunk of the Berlin Wall that was presented to him by West Germany’s intelligence agency the BND. It had a small plaque that read, “With deepest respects to General Hamid Gul, who helped deliver the first blow — 1989.”

Nowadays, the 74-year-old former tank commander is regarded by many as one of the world’s most dangerous men.

U.S. military documents released this week by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks portray Gen. Gul as head of a secret Pakistani intelligence network that arms, supports and directs the Taliban while helping co-ordinate insurgent attacks on U.S. and foreign troops in Afghanistan.

One document, dated mid-December 2006, says Gen. Gul met with “senior members of the Taliban leadership in Nowshara, Pakistan,” and announced he had dispatched three insurgents with improvised explosive devices to Kabul to carry out attacks during the Muslim celebration of Eid.

“Gul instructed two of the individuals to plant IEDs along the roads frequently utilized by Government of Afghanistan and ISAF vehicles,” the report says. “The third individual is to carry out a suicide attack utilizing a suicide vest” against Afghan government and NATO targets.

“Make the snow warm in Kabul,” Gen. Gul told the bombers, the report says. “Set Kabul aflame.”

Another report, dated Jan. 5, 2009, says Gen. Gul attended a meeting of insurgents in South Waziristan that was held to plot revenge attacks for the death of a Taliban commander killed in a U.S. drone attack.

“Three unidentified older Arab males, who were considered important” also attended. They were probably top al-Qaeda leaders, since they had “approximately 20 Arab bodyguards.”

There has been speculation for years that Gen. Gul was working tirelessly in retirement to maintain his intelligence contacts with insurgent networks in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

In the past, India claimed it was Gen. Gul who unleashed the forces of Islamic fundamentalism to wage a proxy terrorist war in Indian-occupied Kashmir in the 1990s.

India also claims Gen. Gul was behind the 2008 Mumbai hotel massacre by the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba and say he played a major role in the 2008 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul.

After the Kabul embassy bombing the United States tried to have Gen. Gul listed by the United Nations as a supporter of Islamic terrorism.

A year before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, then U.S. counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke claimed a “former head of Pakistan’s ISI,” widely believed to be Gen. Gul, had given the Taliban advance warning in 1998 of U.S. attempts to assassinate Osama bin Laden with a barrage of missile strikes, after bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa.

The Pakistani spymaster was rumoured to have warned bin Laden his satellite phone was being used to track him.

Gen. Gul retired from the army in 1991, after being denied a chance to become the head of the armed forces and forced to step down as the country’s spy chief by then-prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Ever since, he has been actively involved with radical Islamist groups and served as a “strategic advisor” to a six-party coalition of religious extremists that now serves as Pakistan’s main opposition.

He regularly appears as a pundit on television talk shows and is frequently consulted as a supporter of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

In recent years, Gen. Gul has claimed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, were “inside jobs” carried out by Israel’s Mossad and elements of the CIA.

He has also fingered the U.S. for carrying out Ms. Bhutto’s assassination in 2007.

Always impeccably dressed, Gen. Gul frequently entertains foreign reporters at his home, in a gated compound for retired officers near army headquarters in Rawalpindi. This week, after the WikiLeaks accusations were made public, he took delight in dismissing the claims as “fiction and nothing else.”

“If this is the condition of U.S. intelligence, then I am afraid it is no wonder they are losing in Afghanistan,” he said.

“I am their favourite whipping boy and it is not the first time that such allegations are made against me. It is almost two decades since I retired from the ISI, but they keep accusing me of everything.”

National Post

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