In a cover-up only Richard Nixon could dream up, Pakistan is protecting a lot of friends. Among them is a CIA that has been aware of Pakistan’s nuclear program and its proliferation since the 1970s. In fact, the CIA Director who knows most about all this is none other than George H. W. Bush.
It was Bush’s close relationship with the late Saudi intelligence chief Kamal Adham and the CIA’s use of an outlaw Pakistani bank for intelligence operations that caused Bush, the CIA, and later the White House to look the other way as Saudi Arabia funded A.Q. Khan efforts to build the first Islamic bomb. The CIA helped cover up the most dangerous arms proliferation in history. The irony here is that the father of a president pledged against the “Axis of Evil” was the handmaiden to the Islamic nuclear bomb.
So let’s get down to the truth: There is no private black market network being run by A.Q. Khan. What existed was a pan-Islamic effort to trade nuclear technology with North Korea in exchange for missile technology. National Security News Service sources say this exchange was approved on national leadership levels in both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Because many Islamic states were convinced Israel had helped India’s nuclear program, Muslim leaders argued through the Saudis that this imbalance needed to be addressed. While officially protesting the Pakistani bomb program, the United States kept quiet because it was funding covert anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan through the same bank the Saudis were using to support the Pakistani nuclear program.
What the first Bush administration missed (or ignored) was that the Saudi financing of Pakistan’s program was really the financing of a pan-Islamic program. By sharing technology with countries like Iran, Libya and Malaysia, the Saudis were sending a message to the Islamic world that they were true Muslims. A.Q. Khan is a patriot of Pakistan — by taking the fall, the pan-Islamic bomb scheme simply melts into a seemingly-discredited anti-Islamic conspiracy theory. Almost. A lone government agency has been raising hell about Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s nuclear activities for years. The Defense Intelligence Agency has warned of Khan’s network for a very long time.
Of particular concern to investigators are similarities between Pakistani and U.S. weapons designs. How did U.S. weapons plans make their way to Pakistan and A.Q. Khan? The answer to that question might be found in the Army Computer Laboratory in Maryland. It seems a regular exchange of information between China and the computer lab took place during the 1980s and early 1990s. An FBI probe into what went on at Aberdeen prompted the retirement of some top lab officials. The details of the probe were never made available to the public.
In a world so porous that even U.S. security can be breached, how contained is the pan-Islamic nuclear technology? Our heroes at DIA called Pakistan a “friendenemy.” “Sometimes they are our friends and sometimes they are the enemy,” a high-level DIA official told National Security News Service. While the Bush administration was telling us how hard they were working on the war on terror, officials with the DIA were convinced that nuclear technology was transferred to Pakistan’s intelligence agency, or ISA. ISA has close ties to al-Qaeda. The nightmare scenario we all face now is whether A.Q. Khan turned over enough details to give al-Qaeda the bomb?
As the investigation into Khan proceeds, we’re learning that many of the companies he did business with are government controlled. The idea that Khan was a lone ranger peddling nuclear materials gives cover to the CIA and U.S. policy makers who looked the other way. But if, as DIA believed, there was a massive and secret pan-Islamic bomb project right under the nose of the U.S. intelligence community and Khan was the front man, then we have a very big problem with our intelligence apparatus.
While the Bush administration relied on garbage intelligence for Iraq, its intelligence looked away when the biggest nuclear conspiracy in history took place. Maybe it’s time to face up to the fact that ground zero for the axis of evil is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The least we can do is add them to our list of “friendenemies.”
