CIA: Pakistan spy agency worth the money

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 15 (UPI) -- U.S. money given to Pakistan's spy agency is well-spent despite misgivings about the agency, intelligence sources say.

Despite longstanding concerns that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency plays both sides of the street when it comes to Taliban militants, it has delivered handsomely on CIA bounties paid to it for dead or captured terrorists in the country, unnamed U.S. officials told Sunday's Los Angeles Times.

"They gave us 600 to 700 people captured or dead," one former senior CIA official who worked with the Pakistanis told the newspaper. "Getting these guys off the street was a good thing, and it was a big savings to (U.S.) taxpayers."

Another U.S. intelligence official told the Times that Pakistan had made "decisive contributions to counter-terrorism.

"They have people dying almost every day," the official added. "Sure, their interests don't always match up with ours. But things would be one hell of a lot worse if the government there was hostile to us."

The newspaper said the CIA has long funneled covert cash to the ISI even though elements of the Pakistani agency are sympathetic to the Taliban, which it helped establish in the 1980s as a response to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.