http://tribune.com.pk/story/99782/nuclear-proliferation-no-aq-khan-network-only-western-suppliers/
Nuclear proliferation: No AQ Khan
network, only western suppliers
By Shahidur Rehman
Published: January 6, 2011
AQ Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear
programme. PHOTO: FILE
ISLAMABAD: There was no AQ Khan
nuclear proliferation network; there were only Western suppliers of
nuclear wares. This is borne out by the report submitted recently
by a Swiss Magistrate into the affairs of three members of Tinner
family.
The report has spelt out that there was
as such no AQ Khan network but several members of the so-called
network (actually suppliers) were collaborating with CIA and MI6.
The report submitted by a Swiss
Magistrate into the affairs of three members of Tinner family last
month has spelt out in words what previous accounts of Dr. A.Q. Khan
saga had stated between the lines i.e. -several members of the
so-called network were collaborating with CIA and MI6.
It has been established beyond doubt
that three Tinners,- father Frederick Tinner and his two sons Marco
and Urs Tinners were working for CIA at least since 2000 till Dr.
Khan’s fall from high pedestal on February 4, 2004 on charges of
proliferation to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Magistrate Andreas
Muller has recommended that charges be brought
against three Tinners for violation of Swiss laws and obstructing
justice.
“They massively interfered in the
wheels of justice,” the judge said.
"The Americans also used their influence to persuade the Swiss to abandon plans to prosecute six CIA agents for espionage."
"The
conversation was conducted in the polite language of international
diplomacy, but the meaning was clear: if the Swiss didn't dispose of
the cases against the Tinners and the CIA, the United States would
portray them as a hindrance to worldwide counterproliferation efforts
and roll out the years of warnings that went unheeded by Swiss
officials," the book said.
"It's easy to say you are acting in the nation's best interests when nobody can check," Senator Marty said.
Albright said: "It was a huge mistake by the CIA and senior members of the Bush administration to interfere in the Swiss justice system like that, and try to use their co-operation with the Tinners as a get out of jail free card."
"This is a very good result," Albright continued. "The Swiss justice system needed to do something to set a good precedent for the future. After 20 years of crime, you can't just buddy up with a foreign intelligence service and get off."
Muller had investigated proliferation
activities of Tinners for four years and the reports that a huge
drove of documents and electronic files including allegedly “a
highly sophisticated Pakistani bomb design” were destroyed by the
Swiss authorities on pressure
from CIA.
Tinners played a central role in
Pakistan’s nuclear program since its inception in the 1970’s till
the disgraceful fall of Dr. Khan in February 2004.
In February 2008 when Swiss President
had acknowledged that document and files relating to Tinners have
been destroyed by Swiss authorities, Pakistan Foreign Ministry
spokesman had regretted that while the design is being stated of
Pakistani origin, Pakistan government was never taken into
confidence.
Dr. Khan had told Kyodo
News Agency that the destruction of the documents have wiped out some
proof that would have proved that he was innocent of the
wrongdoing heaped on his doorstep.
The observations by the Swiss
judge about CIA’s complicity in the whole affair has
partially vindicated the stance taken by Pakistan government and Dr.
Khan.
The whole story of how CIA carried out
several sting operations to bring down Dr. Khan and who played a role
in it would be brought out once Tinners go on trial.
More facts about Tinners and CIA have
been promised by David Albright of Washington-based ISIS who
has promised to shortly release a preliminary assessment of CIA
Recruitment of the Tinners.
The recruitment of Tinners by CIA to
spy on Dr. Khan is not surprising because without his double deals,
Frederick Tinner would not have managed to proliferate for at nearly
three decades.
Frederick Tinner was manager of Cora
Engineering company in the picturesque Chur Valley in Switzerland
from whom Khan had brought a key component for enrichment plant at
Kahuta in 1976 and almost all the books about Pakistan’s
nuclear program written in the 1980’s and 1990’s have talked
about Dr. Khan visit to Cora Engineering in 1976, in graphic
details.
According to “Islamic Bomb”
published in 1982, Dr. Khan had ordered “ a major component,-a
gasification and solidification unit to feed uranium hexafluoride gas
into the centrifuges, and then to transform it back into a solid at
the end of the centrifuge process,” from Cora Engineering in 1976.
In 2004 when Dr. Khan saga broke out,
Frederick Tinner was operating a workshop and a company in Dubai and
his son Urs Tinner was manager of the factory in Malaysia which was
manufacturing the components for Centrifuge meant for the Libyan
program.
The factory in Malaysia was owned by a
Sri Lankan national B.S.A. Tahir who has been dubbed as Dr. Khan’s
deputy and Chief Financial Officer of the so-called Khan network.
“Dr. Khan used to call him son and
Tahir called him pa. He was the son that Khan never had,” Gordon
Correra has said in his book “shopping for Bombs.” For once Dr.
Khan has concurred with Correra.
The components of centrifuge that were
seized on a ship BBC-China on October 4, 2003 was the turning point
in Dr. Khan Saga. The components were sent by Urs Tinner in four
consignments to Dubai from where they were to be dispatched to Libya.
After sending the last consignment to
Dubai, Urs Tinner removed the information about himself and drawings
of the component from computer and disappeared. He was finally
arrested in Switzerland with two other Tinners, who were released in
2008 under US pressure.
According to NYT report dated
April 25, 2008 CIA paid up to $ 10 million to Tinners, “some of it
delivered in a suitcase stuffed with cash.”
But Tinners were not the only three
members of the so-called network working for CIA and MI6.
In 2004 when CIA and MI6 agents had
visited Malaysia they could not conveniently find Urs Tinner and only
interviewed Tahir.
According to Tahir, his company had
manufactured the components on order from a Dubai-based company owned
by a British national Peter Griffin,- dubbed
conveniently as another member of the so-called network.
Dr. Khan have accused Peter
Griffin to be working for MI6.
After Dr. Khan’s proliferation
activities came to light, Peter Griffin was widely reported as a
member of the alleged network.
Peter Griffin sued Guardian
newspaper and BBC for reporting that he had signed the contract for
supply of centrifuges. He claimed that he had supplied
machines that ended up in Libya to B.S.A. Tahir and that Tahir used
his company’s name by counterfeiting the stationary of his company
to fabricate the sub-contract deal.
He ended up in getting sizeable amounts
from both the media organizations(?).
What is surprising is the fact that Dr.
Khan’s acquaintance with Peter Griffin also go back to his 1976
shopping trip to Europe. Peter Griffin is mentioned by name,
by the Islamic Bomb. (published in 1982).
Another member of the so-called network
whose name has been mentioned only in passing was Chacha (Uncle)
Mohammad Farooq, paternal uncle of B.S.A. Tahir,- Chief Financial
Officer of the network and Khan’s deputy.
Farooq is known to have en-cashed
$ 3 million check paid by the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran to the
network in 1987 but surprisingly no effort has been made by the
western authors of Dr. Khan saga and host of inquiry commissions to
locate him.
The latest report by David Albright
about Libya has only mentioned erroneously that he is living in
Singapore.
“The Ba…d died of cancer that he
deserved,” according to Dr. Khan.
Farooq split with his nephew in
mid-1990’s and the two were engaged in a legal row ending in a
settlement paying him a hefty amount. Chacha Farooq is known to have
blackmailed Tahir in 2003 on the ground that a CIA team was in
Srilanka to demand his extradition.
“Chacha Farooq was a CIA agent,” a
2-star general told me during a rare interview granted for my book.
Dr. Khan concurred.
The general said that after Dr. Khan
Saga, Pakistani intelligence agencies tried to locate Chacha Farooq
but it appeared that he had disappeared in thin air.
There are reasons to believe that
Pakistani investigators mistook Engineer Mohammad Farooq as Chacha
Farooq who had contacted the Iranians in 1980’s.
Foreign office spokesman Masood Khan
had told a briefing on December 2003 that Iran and IAEA had provided
details of two Pakistani scientists who received money for supplying
used centrifuge.
Let us assume that the first
beneficiary was Dr. Khan but who was the second Pakistani scientists
receiving money from Iran? The books about Dr. Khan Saga have
reported Chahca Farooq to be major beneficiary of the money received
from Iran.
None of the dozen books and accounts of
Dr. Khan saga has found any deposits in any Pakistani scientist
account. The names given to Pakistan was that of Mohammad
Farooq, uncle of B.S.A. Tahir.
The over –zealot Pakistani investigators assumed it to be engineer
Mohammad Farooq, director Foreign Procurement, KRL.
Engineer Mohammad Farooq is the only
member of KRL who is still under virtual house arrest in Rawalpindi
suburb of Satellite Town.
A book by David Armstrong about Dr.
Khan Saga. America and the Islamic Bomb have highlighted that CIA
could have wounded up Khan network in 2000 when a British custom
agent had tracked possible proliferation exports to Tahir in
Dubai.
However, MI6 station chief in
Dubai forced the British Custom agent back to London.
******
'' Khan, a metallurgist, worked for several European governments,
including the Netherlands, in the late 1970s, Frantz says. While in
the Netherlands, Khan stole plans needed to develop the fuel for
nuclear weapons.
The
Dutch government didn't want to draw attention to its lapses in
nuclear security and debated whether to arrest Khan. The Dutch
security service, which believed Khan was a threat, appealed to the
CIA to weigh in on whether the Dutch government should make the
arrest.
"Instead,
the CIA told the Dutch, 'Let him go; we'll watch him,' " says
Frantz. "This was in 1975. In the subsequent years and decades,
Khan became clearly the most dangerous proliferator in history. ''
(Fallout) ******
The million dollar question is not why
the so-called network was not closed down in 2000 but how its members
managed to stay in proliferation business for nearly three decades?
All the key members of the network,
Gothard Lerch, Hans Mabus, Hank Slebos besides Frederick Tinner and
Peter Griffin go back to Dr. Khan’s 1976 shopping trip to Europe or
his stay in Holland, Belgium and Germany.
Chacha Farooq was also inducted into
the business in 1977 when Bukhari (full name not available) father of
B.S.a. Tahir was encouraged by Dr. Khan to set up a company to supply
wares to Pakistani nuclear program.
The role played by CIA n bringing about
Dr. Khan’s fall has been touched upon by several other books and
commissions.
On February 5, 2004, a day after Dr.
Khan’s disgraceful fall, CIA chief George Tenet
concluded his speech at the George Town University with “one final
story” about Dr. Khan. He had said:” Last year (2003) in my
annual world-wide threat testimony before Congress in an open
session, I talked about the emerging threat from private
proliferators specially, nuclear brokers I was cryptic about this in
public, but I can tell you now that I was talking about A.Q.
Khan His network was shaving years off the nuclear weapons
development timelines of several states including Libya.
Now as you know from news coming out
from Pakistan, Khan and his network has been dealt a crushing blow,
with several of his senior aids in custody….. what did intelligence
have to do with this?
First we discovered the extent of
Khan’s network. We tagged the proliferators. We detected the
network stretching from Pakistan to Europe to the Middle East to
Asia, offering its wares to countries like North Korea and Iran.
We were inside his residence, inside
his facilities, inside his rooms. We were everywhere these people
were.”
George Tenet has said in
his Memoirs that on his second last day in office as CIA Chief, he
walked down to a room in the CIA building at Langley to pin a medal
on the man who had brought down Dr. Khan. Tenet has not given the
name of the officer but most probably, it was Rolf
Mowit Larson, director Operation CIA.
******
'' A CIA spokesman, George Little, refused to discuss the Tinner
case. The agency has said in the past that "the disruption of
the A.Q. Khan network was a genuine intelligence success, one in
which the CIA played a key role."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2169816/posts
'' ******
Mowit is a Jew and in Hebrew his name
means Death. Probably, he was the second person who had
accompanied CIA Chief George Tenet to his meetings with Musharraf on
December 1, 2002 in Islamabad and on September 2003, in New York.
As a result of the December 1
meeting, Musarraf detained two Pakistani nuclear scientists Bashir
uddin Mehmood and Abdul Majid who were interrogated by CIA and
American nuclear scientists while the second meeting triggered the
investigation against Dr. Khan that finally led to his downfall.
Both Tenet and Ron Suskind have given
graphic details of the two meetings of the CIA chief with Musharraf.
However, a paragraph in Suskind’s book about the meeting speaks
loudly of the stuff our leaders are made of.
“Everyone rose. Tenet left a packet
with a list of demands” Suskind has reported in “THE ONE PERCENT
DOCRINE.”
What was in the packet? I will like to
ask of former President Musharraf. I hope it was not a packet
containing one hundred dollars note that Tenet has said he left
behind in several brief cases that he gave to people who had provided
tips in the war on terror.
After Musharraf resigned as President,
I had the opportunity to met him at Army House. My meeting with him
turned sour when I asked him why he had to meet CIA Chief and agents
without any aide. He flatly refused that he met CIA chief or CIA
agents alone.
“What about December 1, 2002 meeting
at the Presidency at which George Tenet asked for arrest of Bashir
uddin Mehmood and another Pakistani nuclear scientist?” I asked.
“Who was Bashir uddin Mehmood,”
Musharraf asked quizzically.
That was the end of my interview with
him. My requests seeking another interview from him in London or
Duabi has evoked no response.
While the details of CIA operations to
bring down Dr. Khan have remained secret and bulk of its details
would remain so, the best compliments to CIA and its agents in
bringing down Dr. Khan could be discerned from a paragraph in the
report of “The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of
United States regarding the WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction).
The Commission was set up by Bush Administration after 9/11 and
presented its report in 2005.
The Commission hailed CIA
operations against Dr. Khan as third biggest CIA success since the
Second World War.
It observed that “Human intelligence
serves policy-makers by providing a unique window into our target’s
most guarded intentions, plans and programs.
During the Cold War, intelligence from
GRU Colnol Oleg Penkovosky proved critical to our management and
eventual restoration of the Cuban Missile crisis.
Later, Polish Colnol Ruszard Kukilinsky
provided us with highly secret war plans of the Soviet Union.
The recent penetration of Dr.A.Q.
Khan’s nuclear proliferation network is another example of an
impressive human intelligence achievement. …. The intelligence
community learnd through what former DCI George Tenet correctly
described as “Operation Daring” that the Khan network was the
source of Libya’s procurement of a nuclear weapon design. Further
information about the details of these efforts is classified and
cannot be discussed in classified setting.”
According to another CIA agent
Valerie Palme, who shared room with the group against
Terrorist WMD, CIA had launched “ an innovative operation
code-named “Operation Daring” against CIA. Palme had given some
context to the innovative CIA program by reproducing some extracts
from George Tenet and outlining CIA counter terrorism center
activities.
The names of foreign agents of CIA and
MI6 spying on Pakistan’s nuclear program are cropping up in western
media.
However, there have been stories of
influential people in Pakistani nuclear establishment working for the
western intelligence agencies. Dr. Khan and his associates have named
people but obviously what they say is tainted with bias.
The million dollar question is if the
Pakistani nuclear establishment could be ever purged of these people?
Dr. Khan had fallen from his pedestal
on February 4, 2004 and new facts have emerged about his alleged
proliferation activities. Surprisingly, several lies in the meantime
have been exposed.
“There was no proliferation
network. The term was given currency by western intelligence and
western media and our media also jumped on the western media
bandwagon,” Tasneem Aslam,
former spokesman of Foreign Office who handled media query in the
wake of Dr. Khan Saga told me in her farewell meeting.
******
Khan confessed
in 2004 to running a network selling nuclear equipment and know how,
after one of his shipments was intercepted on the way to Libya. Khan
and his associates are also believed to have supplied Iran and North
Korea with uranium centrifuges, as well as the blueprint for a
nuclear warhead which the Tehran government said it received
unsolicited from the network.
It was said that Dr. Khan proliferated
for money. However, almost all the accounts of Dr. Khan Saga have
found that Dr. Khan did not attend any of the meeting with Iranian
Atomic Energy officials in 1987 and 1994 which led to the supply of
discarded Pakistani centrifuges to Iran.
“If I proliferated for money than
why Musharraf sent General Kidwai and his wife to my house with money
to overcome financial problems and fixed my pension,” Dr. Khan had
been telling his critics.
During Khan Saga, at least 27 members
of KRL were debriefed. Those who were taken into custody were asked
to write down the names of all their relatives. The bank accounts of
all these relatives were investigated.
A 2-star general who investigated Dr.
Khans alleged proliferation activities told me that the biggest
account discovered was one million dollars I held by his daughter
Dina Khan in a bank in Dubai.
The general said that Dina Khan had
explained that the money was her share from the inheritance that her
grandmother had left for her in her inheritance. Dr.Khan’s
mother-in-law had died in Islamabad and rests in a graveyard in
Islamabad.
Dina also disclosed to author in a
meeting in Dubai that some of the amount came from the sale of her
apartment in London.
“Dr Khan was brought down as a result
of a sting operation, one big sting operation having several smaller
sting operations within,” a former aide of Dr. Khan believed. He
pointed out that it has been established beyond doubt by people like
Samual Hersh and Ron Suskind that BBC-China was a sting operation by
several western intelligence agencies.
There was no network. There were only
western suppliers. At some point and time, they also started
supplying the same ware that they were supplying to Pakistan to Iran
and Libya, Dr. Khan has maintained.
However, he has conceded that he was
aware that the western suppliers were fueling the Iranian and Libyan
nuclear programs.
“When people who make bombs meet,
they talk about bombs,” he said and added “ What was I expected
to do. Ring the American Embassy ask for CIA mission chief and
say”Hey, this is Dr. Khan. I want to tell you about some companies
selling nuclear wares to Iran and Libya.”
Dr. Khan opined that the design that
the design of P-1 centrifuge and the so-called Pakistani device that
he is alleged to have delivered to Iran and Libya could have been
collected by CIA-MI6 from western suppliers and their agents and
portrayed as result of his proliferation activities.
As for example, in his confession to
Pakistan government, Dr. Khan had named Benazir Bhutto’s military
advisor General Imtiaz and her dentist Dr. Niazi to have asked him to
provide the centrifuges to Iran. His words were not believed but
David Albright has conceded in his latest article about Libya that
the role of Dr. Niazi in the initial shipments resulting from 1987
meeting cannot be ruled out.
*Shahidur Rehman has authored a
book about Pakistan’s nuclear program “Long Road to Chaghai’ in
1999 and another book “Horrible examples,- Z.A. Bhutto. A.Q. Khan
and Iranian Nuclear program” is being published.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire