Media concealed agent’s CIA capacity at US request

Raymond Davis

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Several American news outlets withheld information about the CIA capacity of a US citizen who was arrested in Pakistan last month after killing two men. Raymond Allen Davis (note: this may not be his real name), who holds a United States diplomatic passport, was detained in Lahore on January 25, after using an unregistered Glock semi-automatic pistol to shoot dead two men, who he says tried to assault him. There has been intense speculation about Davis’ professional capacity, with many observers suspecting he works in intelligence. His CIA role was confirmed earlier this week by British newspaper The Guardian, which cited officials in Pakistan and the US in revealing that Davis, 36, is “beyond a shadow of a doubt” an employee of the CIA. Shortly after that revelation, three US-based news outlets, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Associated Press, confirmed Davis’ CIA credentials, saying that they had been aware of them for weeks. The Times and the Post both suggested that they decided to consciously suppress Davis’ CIA role after the Obama administration told them that not doing so would endanger the CIA operative’s life. The Associated Press said it knew about Davis’s CIA capacity almost “immediately after the shootings”, and that it planned to reveal it when “he was out of harm’s way”. But all three outlets said that the US government dropped its request for secrecy immediately after The Guardian went ahead with its story. Speaking to Yahoo News, the British newspaper’s deputy editor, Ian Katz, said that the US government made to The Guardian “similar representations […] to those received by US media”, but that the paper refused to comply, arguing that Davis’s captors were already aware of his CIA capacity. Meanwhile, anonymous intelligence sources have voiced concern about Davis’ fate and some are even urging the White House to bribe the Pakistani government to release him, or even organize a raid to rescue him. Watch this space for updates.