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Report: CIA Operative Thought He Was Poisoned By Pakistan’s ISI After Bin Laden Raid

Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden / Wikimedia Commons
May 5, 2016

The CIA chief in Pakistan who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 left the country with an ailment and suspicions that he had been poisoned by the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

The Washington Post reported:

The CIA station chief was so violently ill that he was often doubled over in pain, current and former U.S. officials said. Trips out of the country for treatment proved futile. And the cause of his ailment was so mysterious, the officials said, that both he and the agency began to suspect that he had been poisoned. Mark Kelton retired from the CIA and his health has recovered after he had abdominal surgery. But agency officials continue to think that it is plausible--if not provable--that Kelton’s sudden illness was somehow orchestrated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, known as the ISI.

Reports at the time of the CIA chief’s exit, which occurred just months after bin Laden’s death, attributed it to illness and also indicated that he left amid tense relations with the ISI. The CIA chief did not accept requests from the Post for an interview but said briefly over the phone that the cause of his ailment "was never clarified." He said he was not the first individual to suspect being poisoned.

There does not exist concrete evidence that the CIA station chief was poisoned, officials told the Post, though they explained that the ISI was especially hostile toward the operative. He spent only seven months at the post in Pakistan before leaving abruptly.

The CIA, which did not comment for the Post report, never formally investigated the suspicions. A spokesman for the Pakistan Embassy called the charges "fictional, not worthy of comment."

Bin Laden was killed in a U.S. special forces raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, five years ago.

Published under: Osama bin Laden