Jailing of Drug Informer Sours U.S. Pakistan Ties
Islamabad Military Said to Retaliate for a Sting

By Tim Golden
New York Times Service

In much of the drugproducing world, where frail governments struggle with
rampant corruption and enterprising organized crime, American
drugenforcement agents depend heavily on men like Ayyaz Baluch.

Mr. Baluch, a 43yearold Pakistani, was a fixture in the small headquarters
that the United States Drug Enforcement Administration runs out of the U.S.
Embassy in Islarnabad. Working as a fulltime investigator and interpreter,
he was never paid more than $10,000 a year. Yet he earned a reputation as a
resourceful, unfailingly loyal agent, one whose knowledge and guile were
vital in the rugged southwestern corner of Pakistan that is home to some of
the region's biggest heroin traffickers.

In February, Mr. Baluch's American bosses turned to him to make a quick
undercover paymerit in what they considered a modest but potentially useful
operation. And with his help, two Pakistani Air Force pilots were arrested
for smuggling, $160,000 worth of heroin was seized, and a warning appeared
to have been sent to corrupt. officers in Pakistan's powerful armed forces.

Then the Pakistani military delivered a warning of its own.

Within days of the sting operation, Mr. Baluch, whose work was well known to
the Pakistani authorities, was taken from his home by agents of the
country's militaryrun intelligence force. According to confidential
diplomatic cablegrams, he was held incommunicado, injected with drugs and
tortured with electric shocks by interrogators who demanded that he confess
knowledge of a plot by the U.S. ambassador to destabilize Pakistan.

Last month Mr. Baluch was sentenced by a military court to 10 years' hard
labor for illegally inducing a military officer to commit a crime.

With Madeleine Albright's arrival in Islamabad late Monday for the first
visit by an American secretary of state in almost a decade, the case of Mr.
Baluch has become the source of new recriminations in the difficult
relationship between the two countries. American officials say it has
seriously damaged cooperative efforts to fight drug trafficking and raised
doubts about the authority of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over the military.

"This was direct retaliation for their embarrassment at the revelanon of
corruption by a senior Pakistani officer," a Clinton administration official
said. "There are questions here about human rights; there are questions
about corruption, and there are questions about whether the government is
doing anything to fight drug trafficking."

A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, Mohammad Azam, denied
that Mr. Baluch had been mistreated or misjudged. TSe said his government
had shown its resolve by prosecuting one of the two air force officers
implicated in the case, and he insisted that it was the American
drugenforcement agency that had stepped out of line.

"Our government is not protecting any corrupt people," Mr. Azam said. "The
sting operation itself was criminal under Pakistani law "

U.S. of ficials said they had been pressing quietly for months for Mr.
Baluch's freedom, raising the matter with Mr. Sharif, with senior military
officers, and with the Pakistani foreign minister, Gohar Ayub Khan. On
almost every occasion, they added, they have been assured that the matter
would be resolved.

"Comnmitments have been made at every level that something would be done
about this," a senior official said. The anger of many American officials
has been tempered by concern among others that stronger pressure over the
case might worsen the antagonism of Pakistani nationalists. The fate of one
man, a few of these officials said, should not be allowed to jeopardize
efforts to contain Pakistan's nuclearweapons program or limit its support
for the fundamentalist Islamic government in neighboring Afghanishn.

But an official who once worked .closely with Mr. Baluch answered this
argument tersely: "The United States," he said, "owes this man a lot."

The Clinton administration has refused in each of the last three years to
certify Pakistan's cooperation in antidrug programs while waiving the
sanctions that are usually imposed after such a finding.

But American officials acknowledge now that they underestimated the
sensitivities of the Pakistani military when they recruited Mr. Baluch to
help them trap Qasim Bhatti, a young squadron leader in the country's
prestigious air force.

According to officials familiar with the case, Mr. Bhatti first came to the
Drug Enforcement Administration's attention in October 1996, after he flew a
Pakistan Air Force Boeing 707 to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to pick up
spare aircraft parts.

At a party of Pakistani emigres i n N ew York during his stay, Mr. Bhatti
met a Pakistani informant for the agency. The pilot confided that he had
brought a cache of heroin with him, and said he could bring more on his next
trip.

A couple of weeks later, Mr. Bhatti's cousin, Tahir Bhatti, sold a kilogram
of heroin to an undercover drugenforcement agent in Chicago, officials
said. Then, after Qasim Bhatti insisted that he would need some money up
front to secure his next load, drug agents sent Mr. Baluch to the Marriott
Hotel in Islamabad with $5,000.

American drug agents videotaped the meeting but said nothing to their
Pakistani counterparts. Ultimately, Qasim Bhatti was not allowed by his
superiors to return to the United States because he had been caught
shoplifting from a post exchange on the Dover base. But he sent another air
force pilot, Farooq Ahmed Khan, who was arrested atter he brought about 4
pounds (l.8 kilograms) of heroin to an undercover agent at a McDonald's near
Penn Station in Manhattan.

After American officials notified the Pakistan AntiNarcotics Force, Mr.
Bhatti was arrested outside Islamabad. Days later, Mr. Baluch was dragged
from his home by officers of the InterServices Intelligence Directorate.
American officials said they understood that Pakistan's military code made
it illegal to induce an of ficer to commit a crime. "We just have a problem
with how they have interpreted this," an official said, adding that Mr.
Bhatti "brought heroin into the United States before we ever even knew who
he was; that fact seems to have been lost."