Jones and Panetta Gave Pakistani Leaders Details on Shahzad's Relationship with Pakistani Taliban, Pressed for Crackdown in Waziristan

During a two-day visit to Pakistan, White House National Security Adviser James Jones and CIA Director Leon Panetta gave senior Pakistani officials a "thorough debriefing" on what the U.S. government has learned about what is now believed to be a highly significant connection between the Pakistani Taliban movement, known as the TTP, and Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American now under arrest for attempting to attack New York's Times Square, according to two Obama administration officials who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information. Although the fact that the Pakistanis were briefed on the Shahzad case was publicly acknowledged by both nations and reported by the Associated Press, the details of what was discussed have not been previously reported.

When Jones and Panetta arrived in Pakistan, it appeared that their Pakistani interlocutors, who included President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani and Army Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, were confused about the extent of the TTP connection to the failed attack, according to one of the Obama administration officials. At least part of the root of their confusion, the official said, may have been contradictory statements made by American officials in the wake of the attack. For example, Gen. David Petraeus, the senior military commander for U.S. forces operating in the region, at one point described Shahzad as a likely "lone wolf" who launched the attack on his own.

Based largely on the information Shahzad has shared with U.S. investigators during more than two weeks of interviews since his arrest on May 3, Jones and Panetta took some pains to describe in detail to the Pakistani leaders what the U.S. now believes about the TTP's extensive connections to Shahzad and the militant movement's involvement in his Times Square attack, according to the two U.S. officials. Within hours of the failed bombing a newly created Taliban channel on YouTube had posted a message from the TTP claiming responsibility for an unspecified attack in the U.S. While this claim was initially dismissed by many U.S. experts as empty propaganda, after Shahzad was arrested trying to leave the U.S. and began to cooperate almost immediately, U.S. authorities quickly came to believe that the TTP connection is real.

In addition to exchanging information with Pakistani officials about the Times Square attack and Shahzad—more than one of whose Pakistani acquaintances is now understood to be in Pakistani custody and under questioning—the U.S. officials pressed Pakistan to continue and extend its efforts to crack down on the TTP and other militant groups, particularly in tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border. U.S. officials said there has been a pause in a large-scale military crackdown that Pakistan launched against Islamic militants in the South Waziristan area, and that they told the Pakistanis that Washington would like to see this campaign continued and extended beyond its initial borders, perhaps to the North Waziristan region, where according to some reports, Shahzad received training in bombmaking from TTP operatives.

Meanwhile, in a  partly censored letter made public on Thursday afternoon by the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, federal prosecutors officially confirmed that since his arrest, Shahzad is being questioned by the feds on "a number of sensitive national security and law-enforcement matters for the purpose of preventing potential and future attacks, identifying associates of the defendant and possible facilitators of the attempted attack, as well as gathering other actionable intelligence." The letter also added, cryptically, "hundreds of agents in different cities working around the clock since the defendant's arrest" were "vigorously and expeditiously pursuing leads relating to this and other information" provided by Shahzad, but did not elaborate on what any of this information might be.

The point of the letter appears to be a desire by the feds to maintain "uninterrupted access" to Shahzad, though the mechanisms and details by which the government wants to do this appear to have been censored from the letter.