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November 19, 2007

Deception: British Reporter Adrian Levy on How the United States Secretly Helped Pakistan Build Its Nuclear Arsenal

Adrian Levy examines how five consecutive US administrations from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush have been complicit in building and protecting Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Levy’s is co-author of the new book: “Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons.”

In Pakistan, up to 100 people have been killed in clashes between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the country’s northwestern border region with Afghanistan. While Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf continued to defend his imposition of martial law as a necessary defense against Islamist militants from the same region, American military officials are reportedly considering a classified proposal to arm tribes from this area against Al Qaeda.

Analysts suggest that the US is concerned over the rising threat of instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan and worried about the safety and security of the country’s nuclear weapons. The New York Times revealed Sunday that the US has been using a $100 million dollar program to secretly help Pakistan guard its nuclear arsenal.

Adrian Levy is senior staff correspondent with the Guardian newspaper in the UK. He is the co-author of a new book on how Pakistan became a nuclear power. It’s called “Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons.” It discusses how five consecutive US administrations from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush have been complicit in building and protecting Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Adrian Levy joins me now from London. Welcome to Democracy Now!

Adrian Levy, co-author of “Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy.” He is also a senior staff correspondent for the Guardian.

AMY GOODMAN: In Pakistan, up to 100 people have been killed in clashes between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the country’s northwestern border region with Afghanistan. While Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf continues to defend his imposition of martial law as a necessary defense against Islamic militants from the same region, U.S. Military officials are reportedly considering a classified proposal to arm tribes from this area against Al Qaeda. Analysts suggest the U.S. is concerned over the rising threat of instability of nuclear armed Pakistan and worried about the safety and security of the country’s nuclear weapons. The New York times revealed Sunday the U.S. has been using $100 million program to secretly helped Pakistan guard its nuclear arsenal. Adrian Levy, a senior staff correspondent with the Guardian newspaper in Britain, is a co- author of a new book on how Pakistan became a nuclear power. It is called Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons. It discusses how five consecutive U.S. administrations from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush having to complicit in building and protecting Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Adrian Levy joins us now from London. Welcome to Democracy Now! Let’s talk about the latest New York Times revelation about the hundreds of millions of dollars that are going to the issue of nuclear weapons, they say protecting them.

ADRIAN LEVY: Well, I think this in itself is quite difficult to pinpoint in as much as the Pakistanis have insisted on keeping a great opaqueness over the nuclear program. And the access allowed is absolutely minimal, fearing that the access may at some time be turned around is targeting information either for the U.S. or the Israelis. And so I really do not hold too much—I really would not place too much on this information – you know, the great relation between the Pakistan military and the Pentagon, for example. I would suggest there’s much that’s being concealed.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Pakistan as a source of nuclear weapons, not only for Pakistan, but for well, what president Bush has called countries that are part of the access of evil. Give us a history of the nuclear weapons industry in Pakistan and how it relates to the rest of the world.

ADRIAN LEVY: I guess, the obvious starting point in essence is over the border with Pakistan’s long term nemesis, India and when India detonated a bomb in 1974–something it did in response to threats from China. Pakistan redoubled all of its efforts to obtain a nuclear weapons program. And a whole series of things came together. There were running a very dilapidated plutonium program, which is really going nowhere and tremendously costly and had been hampered by opposition from the United States, the UK and other powers. Come 1974, 1975, a man who would become identified as the father of the Pakistan bomb program, an entrepreneur, metallurgist and linguist, called A.Q. Khan, happened to be at the right place at the right time and was working as a technical translator in Holland, got a hold of some very simply in fact, through dire security, some critical blueprints on a revolutionary method of using uranium to arm a nuclear device. He took it back to Pakistan and Benathir Bhutto’s father Zulfiqah ali Bhutto puts them in place and thus begins the struggle to obtain nuclear weapons. Up until 1979, the whole of the world – the western world–was against Pakistan’s program and did everything it could to inderdict that program, fearing instability of Pakistan; fearing a nuclear arms race between Pakistan and India. In fact, at one point, the CIA and the Pentagon looked at sending over a team to destroy the program in a covert operation that was discussed in a meeting with General Brent Scowcroft. But, come 1979, things changed and really, this will completely alter the west’s attitude to the Pakistan program. In ’79, of course, the Soviets invade Afghanistan and prior to that, the U.S. ally, the Shah in Iran fleas enabling Khomenei, the Ayatollah, to come back and the CIA loses it’s listening stations, it loses a great ally; and suggestions are made to Carter for Brzyzenski, the National Security Adviser that America reconsider for the first time the gold standard of nonproliferation and shove it down the agenda in order to begin a new relationship with Pakistan that was struggling to obtain nuclear weapons. So the suggestion for Brzyzenski was the beginning of turning a blind eye, let’s say. But Carter runs out of steam. It will only be when Reagan comes in 1981 that effectively can lead to this policy being implemented. And then we will see ten years of what State Department people describe as U.S. permissiveness, but I think what the rest of us would describe as collaboration, covertly, between the Reagan administration and the Pakistan military, to cement security relationship, enabling their nuclear program and really—I suppose we can go back into some detail on this at a later point – but over that ten years, the whole program would be facilitated. They would cold test a bomb, which means computer simulate one in ’82. In ’83 they’d repeat that process. In 1984, the Chinese would take that bomb and hot test it, actually let it off in a [inaudible] test site. By 1987, that bomb, the Pakistani bomb, had been fixed under a U.S. supplied F-16 fighter jet and was ready to deploy. A jet sold on the precondition that it could never be used by Pakistan for the nuclear program. And one thing to remember here is that year in, year out, throughout that chronology that I’ve given you, President Reagan was telling the American people and Congress Pakistan has no bomb, Pakistan cannot deploy a bomb and is not seeking a bomb. And so, you know, the ground was created for the Pakistan weapons program. But it’s more overt than that even, there was actual direct U.S. covert aid to that program supplied to the Pentagon and the disruption of CIA operations to inderdict the weapons program by Reagan official appointees who were working with the Pakistanis, collaborating. The results in the 1990’s were that Pakistan did proliferate because the U.S. aid was cut off and the U.S. turned its back on Pakistan. And the Pakistanis milked their nuclear program for hard cash, selling to Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, the Axis of Evil powers. We also know there is intelligence to show that they began negotiations very much with Saudi Arabia, Syria, and of course there are tentative contacts with Al Qaeda elements as well.

AMY GOODMAN: When we come back from break, Adrian Levy, I want to talk with you about what happened in 2003 when all of the blame for the proliferation to countries like Libya and North Korea and Iran and others is laid at the feet of one man, A.Q. Khan. We are talking to Adrian Levy, he is co-author of a new book called Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons. We will be back with him in a moment. [music break]

AMY GOODMAN: We continue with Adrian Levy, the co-author of a brand new book called Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons Adrian Levy, talk about A.Q. Khan and how in 2003, the story unfolds.

ADRIAN LEVY: Well a remarkable thing has happened. Just to take you back a tiny bit before that actual date, of course, post-2001, it became blatantly obvious to everybody that there was only one military government repressing human-rights, connected tentatively to 9/11, state-sponsored terrorism with radical connections to Al Qaeda that was proliferating WMD and of course that was not Iraq, it was Pakistan. And the problem facing the Bush’s administration was their policy post 9/11 was very much to embrace Pakistan as an essential ally in the war on terror in order to allow the narrative over Iraq and the WMD in Iraq to rise. So 2003, as bits of news began to leak out, news that the U.S. has known about for years about Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation, a leak of information that happens really quite accidentally through a fairly unknown Iranian dissident group called the MEK, that holds a press conference in Washington, in which it reveals that the Iranians have been developing a nuclear program, uranium program, and one that is being largely constructed due to the largesse of the Pakistan military. Now Washington is forced to react to this. The Bush administration begins a series of fevered talks with Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan and a deal is constructed. The deal very much is to indemnify the Pakistan military, the No. 1 ally in the war on terror and instead of portraying these gross acts of nuclear proliferation – I mean the most serious acts of nuclear proliferation in any of our lifetimes—instead of portraying them as the foreign policy of the Pakistan military, to reconfigure it as the crime of one rogue scientist and a band of merry men who are working with him. This deal has a quid pro quo. A. Q. Khan will be sacrificed along with the scientists and in return, Pervez Musharraf will give to America intelligence on the procurements and proliferation at work; will end proliferation, one should add; will be honest and faithful security partner in the war on terror, passing back intelligence, helping with military operations in the border areas – Waziristan, South Waziristan, Northwest frontier province. Aiding the crackdown on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. These are the terms of the deal. So 2003 merges into 2004, and we have A.Q. Khan in January 2004, or February I think the 4th, appearing on live TV, Pakistan television–a great mea culpa, taking personal responsibility for these acts of proliferation and apologizing to his people, speaking in English. A speech very much aimed at the west and America. The next day, hes pardoned by Musharraf, the president, and the day after that, Bush speaking from the National Defense University in D.C., congratulates Musharraf on having effectively stamped out nuclear proliferation. An extraordinary series of events leading to a deal which essentially conceals the nature of Pakistan proliferation.

AMY GOODMAN: What evidence do you have that George w. Bush, that his administration, the Pakistani military concocted this cover-up?

ADRIAN LEVY: Well, we know first of all from 2001, from all the people who were helping to assemble the information, foreign governments and also within the CIA and the State Department. A massive dossier of evidence had been gathered, very precisely linking Pakistan and the military more broadly to these acts of proliferation. The CIA itself had infiltrated elements in the Khan network turning a European supplier. A Swiss man who had been reporting back information on the nature of these deals and how they were put together. And of course remember that by 2003, you may well remember that the Libyans had given up their WMD program with the son of Khaddafi coming to London and discussing some deal to save his father to prevent a srike against him, which is what they feared. The turning over of that program as well as information gained by the IAEA in Vienna on the Iranian program shows the way which those deals had been put together. Now we also got to talk to many of the European traders and the Pakistani scientists who had been involved in those deals. Even if you follow briefly the flow of money, it came from an official government bank accounts controlled effectively by the military. These were country to country deals. The transports used were military transports, Some of them were done actually on Pakistan International Airways, other done on military transporters and some were done on Shaneen Airways, which is a military owned transport company. The CIA itself had followed the movements of certain raw materials, for example, to North Korea. And in the following of those movements, the operations were vast and they often involved military logistics. But a final thing I think you should consider in the nature of Pakistan and the configuration of these deals, is that the Khan project, the nuclear labs outside Islamabad, in a place called Kahuta, were controlled by about 20 tiers of security. You have the labs itself, the scientists working in them, and surrounding that, you have so many different intelligence organizations, military intelligence, the inter-services intelligence, which is the most notorious and pervasive in Pakistan. Then you have lines of plain-clothes intelligence agencies from something called IB intelligence bureau, and then you have the military lines. Everything that moves in and out has to go through a process reporting back to the military. This is described to us by people that run the security at Kahuta for many years. So the idea that vast amounts of equipment, the know-how, the movements of key scientists could not be known in a country dominated and controlled by the Pakistan military is laughable.

AMY GOODMAN: Adrian Levy, what about the United States firing intelligence agents who were uncovering Washington’s complicity, purging government departments charged with tracking nuclear proliferation and tipping off the Pakistan government about probes into its illicit program?

ADRIAN LEVY: This is absolutely critical. I think that this thing that you picked up on resonates very much in methodology to what one in pre-Iraq and during Iraq. The politicization of intelligence the sidelining, monstering of intelligence officials who attempted to do their jobs. In the case of Pakistan, it was a fierce operation. One arm of government was contradicting what the other was doing. Publicly, the administrations were saying non-proliferation is a gold standard in government and privately, they were undermining us, collaborating. Elements of the CIA still believe that non-proliferation was the gold standard of government and within the bureau, looking at Pakistan, they still believed there agreement was to interdict the Pakistan nuclear program. We have the case of Richard Barlow, a young officer drafted in from the arms control and disarmament agency in the State Department. By the mid-1980s, he is working on the Pakistan desk within the CIA, becoming through many citations and awards and certificates. The pre-eminent researcher on WMD and Pakistan. And Barlow through his diligent research begins to uncover considerable evidence in the distribution cables, cables submitted by officials of the state department to their opposition to cohorts in Pakistan. He begins to undercover a level of complicity, something the state department would called “clientitis” but that the broader public would understand as collaboration, whereby the information appeared to be leaked on sensitive operations. He began to dig some more, and what he discovered was CIA operations to capture Pakistan military agents operating, buying, for the WMD program in America, those operations were being blown at the last minute to the Pakistan government. One operation in particular, involving U.S. Customs Service, was completely blown. He actually came up with the names of two presidential appointees in the state department, both at the Assistant Secretary of State level, who were passing information to the Pakistani government to compromise these operations. He reported this. He reported also the manipulation and the politicization of intelligence that betrayed Pakistan as much further back in the development of its program and his reward for this was to be cold-shouldered and very much to be forced out of the CIA.

AMY GOODMAN: Who were the top officials here reported on? Who did this? Who tipped Pakistan off?

ADRIAN LEVY: There’s only one name I can tell you officially, Bob Peck, who sadly, is no longer with us and was Assistant Secretary of State was one of the two. The second one I can tell you, is one of America’s leading – continues to be one of America’s leading diplomats. But for legal reasons, we are not allowed to name him. Although there is substantial evidence to point to him, but we’ve been asked by our legal team not to do that today. Now, I should just add one other thing before I move onto the second phase of the monstering of Barlow, the undermining of Barlow. I should say that there are other figures and characters who recur throughout this and the other one being General Inesoll, who became under Reagan the National Intelligence Officer for WMD. And Inesoll actually, in a closed session of Congress, was openly distorting and lying about information with Pakistan in order to support security relationship. And he would be supported by officials slightly below him within the state and political appointees and the CIA in a move that one long-term state officials described to me as making many of the people in the State Department deeply cynical about governments. But if we pick up with Barlow, when Barlow goes to the Pentagon to go to work for Dick Cheney, then Defense Secretary. He is tasked almost immediately with writing an intelligence estimate for Cheney to go to the president in 1988, 1989, looking at the state of play with Pakistan. In his report to go to Cheney, he tells Cheney what I have told you. The entire chronology of events vis a vis the rise of the Pakistan program and U.S. collaboration in it. He also makes a specific point that Pakistan is till procuring for the program and it has adapted its American supplied F-16 fighter jets as its platform to drop a nuclear bomb. Next thing you know, literally pretty much overnight, Barlow’s security clearances evaporate; a vicious whispering campaign begins in the Pentagon, accusing Barlow of being potentially a spy, adulterer, a drunkard, and his wife Cindy who is also in the CIA is very much set against him. This may sound remarkably like another case, the Plame-Wilson case. And it’s the same cast of characters essentially, on the periphery. With Barlow case it involves once again Louis Scooter Libby, Stephen Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eric Adelman, still in the Pentagon negotiating with Pakistan. All of these people revolving around the Barlow case, helping to spread the smear. And it really would take years until there is a triple inquiry by the Inspector-general for the CIA, for the State Department and for the Pentagon that rules pretty much unanimously that Barlow was monstrously smeared, and was never working against his country. And his lawyers discover his report to Cheney had been rewritten. Rewritten to say the exact opposite of what he had written: that Pakistan had no bomb, was not advancing its program, couldn’t use American F-16 jets to deploy its bomb. And the reason for that was that the Pentagon was considering a 1989, 1990 selling another several billions worth of F-16s to its client, Pakistan.

AMY GOODMAN: Adrian Levy, you have written about how President Bush and General Musharraf had been very close and I want to wrap up with your revelation about how Pakistan has been encouraging the resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda and continues the nuclear black market.

ADRIAN LEVY: Absolutely. I think there is a false configuration coming out of the Pentagon which is that if Musharraf falls, the Islamists will take over and have their fingers on a nuclear trigger. This is a false argument put out in order to continue the client status of the Pakistan military with the U.S. military. In fact, if you analyze Musharraf’s military record and look of his deeds rather than at the dogma, what you discover is the Pakistan military and Musharraf in particular, have been manipulating the Islamist faction. I mean the military as a whole had done that since 1988 when Benazir Bhutto first came to power, setting up an Islamist coalition to attack her viciously. They repeated the same in 1990 with the slush fund of $16 million. And Musharraf himself by 1995 reignited the Kashmir war by taking 10,000 Sunni extremists who then set fire to the divided state of Kashmir in order to make India bleed. That element of Islamists would join forces very much with Al Qaeda factions, with the Taliban by 2006, 2007. The national intelligence estimates for this and the published intelligence for this shows both in the UK And Europe that these factions – these Sunni militia gave new life blood to the Al Qaeda remnants and to the Taliban in the Waziristan area. The meddling would continue. There were 17 banned Sunni organizations which the U.S. State Department proscribed as did the Pakistan president. They were all resurging under new names post 2005. He said he would de-radicalize society, he would help control religious schools which tend to prey on the poor and impoverished in the tribal areas. You know, they increased to 13,000. I mean what we’ve seen is Musharraf and the military very much backing their own agenda. The agenda is to destabilize Afghanistan, to create a government there which is favorable to Islamabad. These are goals which are actually contrary to the goals – very largely contrary to the goals of the West. Yet, this is slowly moving car crash of the U.S. pumping billions of untraceable cash into the Pakistan military has continued since 2001 and we’re left with the position where Pakistan is to devoid of democracy, democracy is weakened and feeble, and we have just increased instability, quite honestly.

AMY GOODMAN: Adrian Levy, thank you for being with us. He is co-author of a new book. It’s called_ Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons_. He is a senior staff correspondent with the Guardian, joining us from the Reuters studio in London. Thank you so much.

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