US mandarins said the station chief, who cannot be named under American secrecy laws, left due to an illness, but officials from both sides dropped enough hints to suggest his exit was part of a broader ailment afflicting intelligence cooperation between the two sides, including a widening trust deficit.
The departing station chief served just over seven months in Islamabad in what appears to have been a turbulent period in the relationship starting with the Raymond Davis episode, in which a CIA contractor shot his way out of trouble by killing two Pakistanis.
The station chief, then new to his post, is said to have played a key role in pressuring Pakistan into releasing Davis, who returned to US in exchange for blood money to the relatives of the victims. From that time onward, ties between the chief spook and his US counterpart went downhill. The raid that killed Osama a few weeks later, in which the station chief also played an important role by developing local CIA assets, is said to have further enraged the Pakistanis.
The CIA operative also appears to have fallen victim to the turf war between the CIA and state department. US officials suggested to media outlets that the station chief did not develop good ties with his Pakistani counterparts, implicitly blaming him for the deteriorating relationship.
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