*** The Spooks of Pakistan

Maxwell Carter

Toward the end of “The Spy” (1821), James Fenimore Cooper’s novel of the Revolutionary War, George Washington bids the book’s triple-agent hero, Harvey Birch, an unusual farewell: “‘Remember,’ said [Washington], with strong emotion, ‘that in me you will always have a secret friend; but openly I cannot know you.’” Nearly two centuries later, the tensions in intelligence work between patriotic glory and determined obscurity remain. Despite its outsize role in Pakistani politics—ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan, nurturing the “Islamic bomb” and harboring Osama bin Laden—the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence has mostly evaded the limelight. In “Faith, Unity, Discipline,” Hein Kiessling explores its shadowy history.

The ISI was established in 1948, the year after Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, which authorized the CIA to coordinate, evaluate and disseminate American intelligence. The nascent Pakistani government created the ISI within months of partition, partly to address the mistakes of the First Kashmir War with India, and partly, Mr. Kiessling suggests, to tend the dying embers of the “Great Game,” the contest between Great Britain and Russia for primacy in Central and South Asia. Maj. Gen. Walter Joseph Cawthorne, an Australian holdover from the Raj, drew up its organizational structure. The original mandate of the ISI, which was initially comprised of Muslims formerly in the Indian Intelligence Bureau, was restricted to reconnaissance in India and Kashmir.

A domestic remit wasn’t long in coming. General Ayub Khan’s military coup in 1958 expanded the ISI’s responsibilities to monitoring and suppressing internal dissent. Even so, Ayub favored its peer organizations, the Intelligence Bureau and Military Intelligence, referring to the ISI witheringly in his diary: “ISI were nearly asleep … we are babes in intelligence.” The ISI’s blunders under Ayub included misjudging support for his opponent in the 1965 election; failing to uncover various anti-Ayub conspiracies; and, above all, its Bay of Pigs-style “fiasco,” Operation Gibraltar.

In 1965, the ISI plotted to send “groups of armed men, disguised as freedom fighters, to infiltrate Kashmir and carry out a campaign of sabotage in the territories under Indian occupation.” Gibraltar (along with its second phase, code-named Grand Slam) was calamitous, exposing Pakistan’s logistical and military shortcomings. The 17-day conflict brought “only significant losses and no territorial gains,” writes Mr. Kiessling.

The ISI survived the resulting military inquiry and redoubled its internal efforts for General Yahya Khan, who deposed Ayub in 1969, and his successor, Z.A. Bhutto, who assumed the presidency in December 1971. Both would live to regret the ISI’s domestic intriguing. Once again, in 1970, its election predictions proved inaccurate: The Awami League’s near-sweep in East Pakistan (contemporary Bangladesh) led to civil war and Yahya’s early retirement. The ISI would subsequently be linked by the Pakistani press to Bhutto’s overthrow and, later, to his infamous hanging in 1979 at the behest of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Islamist general who ruled from 1977-1988.

The ISI’s greatest undertaking took shape under Zia. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 brought the CIA and ISI into strategic alignment. Over the next decade, the CIA provided arms and funds, while the ISI recruited, coached and handled mujahedeen insurgents. The Soviets were expelled in 1989, but creeping distrust and Zia’s mysterious plane crash in 1988 marred the outcome. By then, the CIA had become disaffected by ISI corruption, and Pakistan’s civilian leadership post-Zia—namely the freshly elected prime minister, Z.A. Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir—was out of the loop.

This brings the book to what for most readers will be the more familiar part of the tale: the collapse of the Soviet Union and America’s evolving regional priorities. These shifts forced painful changes on the ISI, which retained ties with the Afghan holy warriors who had turned their CIA weapons and ISI training on America and the West. After 9/11, the U.S. expected Pakistan to disown its former proxies. Unsurprisingly, not all were disavowed, most conspicuously Osama bin Laden. How could bin Laden’s “secret” compound in Abbottabad (the site of an ISI station) have gone undetected? Was the ISI deceitful or incompetent? The author concludes the first, dismissing the idea that bin Laden was untraceable as “pure myth.” Based on Mr. Kiessling’s 13-year stint in Pakistan, if even the humblest shepherd “chanced upon foreigners … the news would find its way up to the village elders from there to [an ISI] agent.”

Notable episodes from the ISI’s past have been covered recently elsewhere. Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower” (2006) charted the “road” to 9/11, paved by the CIA and the ISI; Zahid Hussain’s “Frontline Pakistan” (2006) considered the ISI’s fraught position in the war on terror; Shuja Nawaz’s “Crossed Swords” (2008) illumined Pakistan’s military, the ISI’s senior partner; and Gary Bass’s “The Blood Telegram” (2013) examined the genocide in East Pakistan following the 1970 election crisis. In each, however, the ISI is seen out of focus or relegated to the sidelines. Mr. Kiessling, whose style, befitting his subject, is lean and restrained, fills this void nicely.

Mr. Kiessling draws his title from the father of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, whose celebrated exhortation today serves as Pakistan’s national motto. How might Jinnah judge the ISI’s legacy? In the winter of 1947, an eager group of soldiers vowed to follow Jinnah “through sunshine and fire.” There was no sunshine yet, he cautioned. There remains disappointingly little now. Darkness may be the ISI’s means; sunshine, as with Pakistan’s army, should be its end.

Mr. Carter is an M.A. candidate in South Asian studies at Columbia and senior specialist in Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s.