Media Reports On Prithvi Motivated

Senior US officials believe the continuing leak in the American media about Indias alleged missile deployment was a sinister move by the intelligence community to further their own agendas on the subcontinent.

There are so many agendas floating around in the intelligence community, a senior official explained, and noted that all this stuff that they were able to detect and track the movement of the Prithvis to near the Pakistani border could be to promote any one of these agendas.

It could even be to make sure that at a time when US Congress is thinking twice about allocating millions of dollars to intelligence activity...these efforts are to show that they are still on top of things going on in South Asia, Afghanistan and other places, the official said on condition of anonymity.

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said the US did not dispute Prime Minister I K Gujrals assertions that ballistic missiles had not been deployed along the Pakistani border.