In an analysis of Pakistan’s ‘Memogate,’ Mansoor Ijaz, a key player in the controversy, offers his interpretation of the actions of Islamabad’s erstwhile ambassador in Washington—actions that led to an uproar in Pakistan and the envoy’s ouster.

“This FT op-ed of yours is a disaster,” read a BlackBerry message to me on the night of Oct. 10. The sender, Husain Haqqani, was still Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington at the time. Earlier in the evening, the Financial Times had posted my column—“Time to Take On Pakistan’s Jihadist Spies”—on its website, unleashing a political firestorm in Pakistan over my disclosure of a memorandum Haqqani had asked me to help him prepare and deliver to Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the memorandum, Haqqani asked the admiral for help in calming Pakistan’s restive Army chief as fears of an alleged coup whipped through Islamabad in the tense days that followed Osama bin Laden’s death in a Pakistani garrison town. In return, he offered the United States nothing short of a wholesale paradigm shift in Pakistani governance that would transfer essential powers from the Army to civilian leaders, giving Pakistan the veneer of civilian legitimacy that has eluded it since partition from India.

I have a history of involvement in back-channel diplomacy, particularly between the governments of Pakistan and India on the subject of Kashmir and nuclear proliferation, but it is still important to ask why, in this instance, Haqqani chose to come to me. Perhaps because he had tried other interlocutors to deliver the same message and had been refused. Perhaps because the basis of his request—an alleged coup plot—was only a concocted threat and he needed someone who couldn’t verify the postulation in the short time frame required by the ambassador for action. What I am certain of is that Haqqani believed I was the most plausibly deniable back channel he could use. He knew I was disliked by many in Islamabad’s power circles for my strong anti-establishment views. Haqqani also knew I had the connections to get the message quickly and quietly to Mullen. He knew I maintained friendships with former CIA director James Woolsey, former U.S. national-security adviser Gen. James L. Jones, Reagan “Star Wars” commander Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, and others.

Before I had a chance to read and reply to his BlackBerry message, the ambassador called—“Is there anyone else in Isloo [slang for Islamabad] you know who is a ‘senior Pakistani diplomat’?” he asked hurriedly. This was the phrase I’d used in the op-ed to describe the author of the memo to Mullen. Not wanting to be “outed” as the memo’s author, Haqqani insisted that without another name—any name—that might put Pakistan’s press hounds on another diplomat’s scent, all trails emanating from the memorandum would soon lead back to him—or, worse, to his boss, President Asif Ali Zardari.

The cover-up had begun.

Haqqani would orchestrate denials by Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry and President’s House in the days after the FT column was published. When those didn’t douse the flames, he had the gall to warn me that he was about to orchestrate a U.S. denial as well—“Are you sure your side won’t deny?” he wrote by BlackBerry to me at 10:38 p.m. on Nov. 1, a week before Admiral Mullen’s unwitting spokesman issued a confused denial that was later retracted. At 10:39, he all but confirmed his complicity when he wrote, “Is it not the nature of a private mission that officials deny it?”

In Islamabad, he was telling Zardari that he had it all under control and that the memo flap would disappear in a few days once all the denials were in place. If the acceptance of multiple petitions by the Supreme Court of Pakistan on Dec. 1 is any indication of the seriousness with which Pakistan’s entire governmental infrastructure takes this issue, the memorandum is not going away anytime soon. Certainly not until the full truth comes out.

A few days before the Mullen denial was posted on Foreign Policy’s blog, The Cable, Haqqani changed his BlackBerry handset for the third time since May. Maybe he hoped that changing PINs would erase his damning conversations from my handset. Unfortunately for him, they remain preserved—now in a bank vault—in exactly their original form on my original device as he and I exchanged them. The constant changing of handsets raised the disturbing specter that Haqqani had persuaded his friends in the U.S. intelligence community to assist him in “scrubbing” his BlackBerry records because my disclosures were not just about to lose him his job, but could potentially uncover sensitive matters of U.S. national interest as well. After all, I was not the only entry on Haqqani’s BlackBerry contact list. Other BlackBerry chats could prove highly embarrassing or prove complicity and culpability if they were made public by Supreme Court action in Pakistan.