Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the global nuclear weapons conspiracy
Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark
London: Atlantic Books, 2007, £25, h/b
This is not an area I have any expertise in and I am hardly competent to review this. But I found this big (500 pages), massively-documented book an absolutely riveting read.
The authors’ account of how Pakistan acquired nuclear technology can be crudely reduced to two strands. In the first, all manner of Western European companies supplied nuclear-useful technology to the Pakistan team, lead by A. Q. Khan, trying to build a bomb in the arms race with India. In so doing they alerted a number of intelligence services who attempt to monitor such technology transfers. These services were ignored by their governments who didn’t think it mattered because they couldn’t believe that a ‘backward’ society like Pakistan would ever master the process (and they wanted the export sales).
In the second, the Americans turned a blind eye to the Pakistan programme, and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, (a) because Pakistan was helping the USA in its war with the Soviets in Afghanistan, and (b) US arms corporations were making money selling weapons systems and planes to the Pentagon which were being passed on to the Pakistan military as part of the price of co-operation in ‘the war on terror’. In short: Pakistan acquired the technology because of racism, American anti-communism and the politics of the pork barrel. (One of the major subthemes of this book is the sheer venality of some American politicians, willing to abandon any principle, fuck any ally, and ignore any treaty in pursuit of a buck. Turning a blind eye to the spread of nuclear weapons in the pursuit of private profit is hard to comprehend.)
After 9-11 the American complicity with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme became one of the dirty secrets which had to be kept out of the 9-11 inquiry. This material is one of the reasons that the testimony of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who listened to FBI wiretaps of the Khan network using Turkish intermediaries and American lobbyists and politicians in the network’s continuing pursuit of nuclear technology, has been suppressed in the United States.(7) It also explains the persecution of Atif Amin, a UK customs official who was investigating the Pakistani nuclear trade.(8)
This story is going to rumble on for years, an acute source of embarrassment to the US (and the UK) in their absurd attempts to fight the ‘war on terror’, and the cause of much harassment of individuals, such as Edmonds, Amin, and the CIA and Pentagon intelligence officer Richard Barlow, (9)who, by merely doing their assigned jobs, learned things which the American and British states wish they hadn’t and are going to pay the traditional price of people in that situation who decline to stay shtum.
Notes
- But not outside it. See the account of Edmonds’ allegations in ‘For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets’ in The Sunday Times of 6 January 2008.
- ‘Customs official in secrets inquiry over nuclear revelations’, The Guardian 19 December 2007. He is apparently suspected of passing information on this to David Armstrong and Joseph Trento, the authors of another book on this subject, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise. See also the 2005 account by David Rose – yes, that David Rose, ex SIS asset Rose – in Vanity Fair at <www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9774.htm> On Rose and SIS see ‘View from the Bridge’ in Lobster 54.
- <http://rawstory.com/news/2007/They_sold_out_world_for_F16_0426.html>