Note (added 7/20): NYT and WaPo today refer to the group as the Kashmiri American Council, not Foundation.
Intuition and a glance at Wikipedia suggest that the Foreign Agents Registration Act is perhaps not one of the more consistently applied and enforced of U.S. laws. At any rate, quite hard on the heels of talks in Washington, which were said to have gone well, between the acting director of the CIA and the director-general of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency, comes news that the FBI has arrested the executive director of the Kashmiri American Foundation on charges of being an unregistered agent of the Pakistan government. Not to get too speculative (what is this, a blog?) but it looks like maybe the CIA and the FBI and the Justice Dept. aren't communicating as well as they might, in view of the timing. Pure speculation on my part. (Some may see this as retaliation for the Pakistanis having detained several people involved in the vaccination campaign in Abbottabad [see previous post on that] or for the earlier arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis. Who knows?)
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4 comments:
LFC
Reportedly the FBI arrested an agent of the East German STASI and charged him with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The case fell apart when it was discovered he had registered. It seems no ever checked the registrations.
Interesting.
I thought the act was designed to apply mainly to paid lobbyists for foreign govts, not spies. It's been on the books since '38, if I recall the Wikipedia entry correctly.
LFC
I think your right however in the cold war especlly it was used for expionage cases.
One needs to prove an unregistered employment or agency relationship exists. Revealing the substance of the information passed is not essential to proving or defending the charge so classified information does not have to be entered in open court.
I see. It's probably not the only law whose purpose was bent a bit during the Cold War.
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