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Burleigh, said to be fluent in Hindi, Bengali, Nepali and Sinhalese, was Ambassador to Sri Lanka in the mid 1990s and US Deputy Permanent Representative at the United Nations from 1997-1999. With US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke likely to return to India and the region early next month, sources said Burleigh could be here soon.
Panetta, meanwhile, is expected to stay in the neighbourhood for at least a week. With the US intelligence community identifying the region from the Middle-East till Pakistan as the “arc of instability”, sources said, issues concerning terror and the situation in Pakistan would be discussed. The CIA is also paying keen attention to the economic crisis and has started providing a weekly economic intelligence brief to US President Barack Obama.
An outsider to CIA, Panetta’s appointment drew concerns from some quarters although he was former US President Bill Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff besides having been a Congressman earlier. During his visit, he’s expected to meet NSA M K Narayanan, RAW Chief K C Verma and also Director Intelligence Bureau Rajiv Mathur.
The CIA Director’s visit comes within weeks of his meeting Pak Army Chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani and ISI head Lt Gen Shuja Pasha in the US during their recent visit. The rise of the Pakistan Taliban, the Lahore attack and the BDR rebellion in Bangladesh are likely to figure prominently in the talks. Panetta is also likely to touch upon the impact of the economic crisis on international security and share the US assessment with India ahead of the G20 Summit in London where Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to have his first bilateral meeting with Obama.
It was the CIA that had first passed on the intelligence alert of a possible attack on Mumbai hotels in September in which terrorists were likely to use the sea route. It was later confirmed by Ajmal Amir Kasab to interrogators that the attack was supposed to be in September but was called off at the last moment. After the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, the CIA was among the first foreign agencies to pick up intercepts of congratulatory messages between Pakistan Army outposts and Afghan operatives. This was shared with India and helped in mounting the diplomatic offensive on Pakistan.
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As Sri Lankan government ministers were engaged in a propaganda campaign against the figures referred by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mr. Weerawansa, an extreme Sinhala nationalist leader aligned with the Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, had issued a public threat against the UN office in Colombo hinting that the office would be attacked. He had said "people" would be compelled to surround the UN office in large numbers if it persisted with the move, which he described as a UN-led conspiracy to prosecute Sri Lanka over alleged war crimes.-Courtesy Press at United Nations