Videos Capture US Nuclear Physicist Offering 'Venezuelan Spy' Nuke Info
Source: ABC News
Videos Capture US Nuclear Physicist Offering 'Venezuelan Spy' Nuke Info
Jan 28, 2015, 3:01 PM ET
By BRIAN ROSS, LEE FERRAN and MUSTAFA HAMEED
New hidden camera videos made public today by the government show a former American nuclear physicist covertly meeting with a man who he believed to be a Venezuelan intelligence officer in order to sell his expertise, as well as classified information, to the South American nation.
In one from 2008, nuclear physicist Pedro Mascheroni, former scientist in the X-Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1980s, tells the other man, who is really an undercover FBI agent, that Venezuela could test a nuclear bomb in the Pacific to put the U.S. on notice.
“Everybody sees it. You don’t kill anybody. Now you tell the United States, ‘Not only do we have this, but we have [these] other designs… You have to come up and say to the other nations, 'We are going to be, we’re going to have an umbrella for everybody. If any nation outside Latin America attacks any nation inside Latin America, we are going to retaliate with a nuclear bomb,'" he says,
Mascheroni is a naturalized American citizen from Argentina.
Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/US/videos-capture-us-nuclear-physicist-offering-venezuelan-spy/story?id=28553152
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Ex-Los Alamos Scientist Gets 5 Years in Venezuelan Nuclear Bomb Plot
By M. Alex Johnson
A former theoretical physicist at the classified Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday for scheming to sell plans to build nuclear bombs to the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
His wife, who also worked at Los Alamos, was sentenced to a year and a day.
Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni, 80, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Argentina, was arrested and indicted in 2010 after a two-year federal sting in which he promised an undercover agent posing as a Venezuelan intelligence official that he could help Venezuela build 40 nuclear missiles in 20 years by 2030, according to details of a plea agreement in the U.S. District Court in Albuquerque. He pleaded guilty in 2013.
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And he specifically advised the agent how Venezuela could knock out the Northeastern U.S. power grid by detonating a bomb over New York City, according to court documents, which said he wanted $793,000 and Venezuelan citizenship in exchange.
"
W)e blow this on top of New York," Mascheroni is recorded as having told the undercover agent. "Nobody dies from this explosion, but we've destroyed the electric power in New York with an EMP pulse — electromagnetic pulse. That is ... full deterrence."
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