Pakistan Brokered the Ceasefire. That Makes Pakistani Intelligence a Principal Actor in What Comes Next.
The Iran-U.S. ceasefire was brokered by Pakistan. The talks in Islamabad — the highest-level U.S.-Iran discussions since the 1979 Revolution — ran 21 hours before JD Vance announced they had produced no agreement. Pakistan has since stood down the security apparatus it assembled for those talks, signaling that resumption is not imminent. But Pakistan’s role in the negotiation structure did not end when the talks stalled. As long as the mediation channel remains open, Pakistani intelligence — the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate — is positioned as a collection and communication node between two adversaries who have no direct channel of their own.
That position is enormously valuable and not purely a function of Pakistani goodwill. ISI has maintained working relationships with Iranian intelligence for decades, relationships that survived significant ideological friction and the sectarian tensions that characterize Pakistan-Iran relations at the political level. It also has relationships with U.S. intelligence services that, while tested by the Afghanistan period, remain operationally active. A state whose primary intelligence service has access to both sides of an ongoing conflict is a state with significant leverage over both sides — leverage that is independent of whatever Pakistan says publicly about its mediating role.
The intelligence dimension of Pakistan’s position is complicated by what the historical record shows about ISI and the Iranian nuclear program. Earlier reporting established that Iran received external assistance on nuclear and missile development from Pakistan and North Korea. The Pakistani origin of centrifuge designs in the Iranian program through the A.Q. Khan network is not disputed. That history makes Pakistan a uniquely informed party to any negotiation about the extent and remaining capacity of Iran’s nuclear program — and makes the question of what ISI knows and has shared with U.S. negotiators a significant variable in assessing what those negotiators think they know.
The cancellation of the U.S. negotiating team’s trip to Pakistan last week — Trump told Iranian officials to call Washington directly rather than going through the Pakistani channel — may reflect frustration with the mediation process, or it may reflect a U.S. assessment that continuing talks through ISI creates intelligence exposure that direct communication avoids. The distinction matters. If the U.S. pulled back from the Pakistani channel because negotiations are substantively stalled, it signals one kind of diplomatic impasse. If it pulled back because the channel itself was generating collection risks — Iranian knowledge of U.S. positions that arrived via ISI before Washington intended — it signals a different kind of problem: one where the intelligence environment around the negotiation is as contested as the negotiation itself.