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Edited on Tue Aug-26-08 10:44 AM by leveymg
Let's go back to the beginning of the Islamic atomic bomb. That starts with Israel developing its first deliverable nuke just before the 1968 Six-Day War. That started with a preemptive strike that all but destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian airforces on the ground.
Move forward to the next motivating incident, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which was started by the Arabs, which very nearly resulted in the use of those weapons against Egyptian and Syrian armour that was close to breaking through Israeli lines in the Sinai and Golan Heights. Israel essentially blackmailed a reluctant Nixon Administration into delivering TOW missiles from Europe and replacements for the IAF that had suffered heavy initial losses. The Israelis ended up humiliating the Arab world for the fourth time since 1948.
While they lost the war, however, the Arabs came out of the 1973-74 war with something much more valuable - the Saudis took the opportunity of American political paralysis attendant to Vietnam and Watergate to nationalize Aramco, and became fabulously rich. Rich enough to buy anything, including American politicians and officials.
Looking at the example of Israel, which had carried out a high-level influence and espionage operation to gain American nuclear technologies, the Saudis used their wealth and connections to Texas oil circles to catch up with the Israelis. During his brief tenure at CIA, in 1976 Director George H.W. Bush entered into a deal with the newly appointed head of Saudi external intelligence (GID), Prince Turki al-Faisal and his boss, Prince Kamal Adham, codenamed the Safari Club (1). (See, Trento, 102) (I surmise it gained that name from a meeting -- perhaps during Bush's March foreign trip (Bush, "All The Best", 249) -- at a luxury resort in Kenya owned by Adnam Khashoggi, the Saudi Royal family's most visible deal-maker.)
The cornerstone of the Safari Club agreement was that the Saudis would fund the global covert operations forbidden the CIA by the Democratic Congress and the next Administration. In exchange, the CIA looked the other way as the Saudis and their partners, which included Egypt, Jordan and elements of French intelligence, carried out independent covert activities around the world. Among these, was the fulfillment of Pakistan's dream of an "Islamic bomb" that dated from the 1960s, and began pursuing in earnest when India successfully tested its own device in 1974.
For several years, the CIA and Dutch intelligence had been watching a young Pakistani scientist named Abdul Quadir Khan who worked at URENCO, a Dutch nuclear processing company. When the Dutch wanted to arrest Khan, the CIA interceded, allowing him to return to Pakistan, bringing with him plans and samples of uranium enrichment centrifuges. After he fled, a Dutch court indicted Khan, and obtained an Interpol warrant for his arrest. That outstanding warrant remained in place for seven years until Khan's conviction in absentia was overturned on appeal, while Khan traveled to dozens of countries gathering and dispersing nuclear technology. Khan was never detained, and by the early 1980s, Pakistan is believed to have already compiled the materials and components for its first atomic bomb, constructed with a growing stock of highly-enriched uranium, produced by Khan's Urenco-based centrifuges.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Khan began exporting nuclear technologies and components to Iraq, Iran, Libya and lastly North Korea bought some in the late 1990s - none of these countries received sufficient numbers of workable machines to achieve industrial scale production of HEU needed to contruct a bomb. The P-1 centrifuge was particularly inefficient and prone to breakdown, requiring specialized parts that had to be imported. All the while that Khan was trading in these machines, the CIA was monitoring the slow progress of his clients.
Meanwhile, back in Pakistan, a parallel nuclear program was underway. That program relied on plutonium produced by heavy water reactor originally purchased from France in 1972, but that program was put on hold when in 1977, under pressure from the Carter Administration, France cancelled a contract to supply a plutonium processing plant. As a result, Pakistan initially pursued the uranium enrichment path, but later built a second large heavy water nuclear reactor and processing plants that produced enough plutonium to build lighter, more sophisticated nuclear bombs. These facilities not under IAEA inspection were constructed with assistance from China to produce more compact plutonium bomb designs that can be delivered by Chinese-designed ballistic missiles that Pakistan started receiving from China in 1990, followed by a variant of the North Korean No-dong missile in an arms swap arranged by AQ Khan.
Another Safari Club project was the development of a Saudi-financed and directed paramilitary capability, again funded by Riyadh through its Sunni proxies in the Rawalapindi military Establishment. That project preceded the December 1979 Russian invasion of Afganistan. After Reagan-Bush took power in 1981, the US took an increasing role in funding, equipping and organizing the Islamicist militias with modern weapons and training in "urban warfare" tactics. That international program, which included recruitment, training and financing operations inside the U.S., was codenamed, "Operation Cyclone", the result of which was that some of the program participants ended up as key figures in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, blowing up two US Embassies in East Africa in 1998, and carried out the 9/11 attacks.
In 1993, the incoming Clinton Administration put the brakes on US participation in the Safari Club. It closed down Operation Cyclone, tried to pressure Pakistan to halt it bomb project, and blocked deliveries of nuclear-capable F-16s sold by the Bush Administration. This was a period of great tension with the Pakistani military and ISI intelligence service, which in 1997 overthrew Banazir Bhutto, a Shi'a of mixed Indian and Persian family. Shortly after the coup, Pakistan detonated several nuclear weapons, following a string of Indian tests. Meanwhile, the ISI-sponsored Taliban, Sunni "scholars", entered Afghanistan from Pakistan in 1994, and captured Kabul in September 1996. Osama bin Laden followed on their heals from Sudan, which had come under U.S. pressure to arrest or expel him. After he arrived in Afghanistan, bin Laden approached Khan with a bid for nuclear weapons. In 1998, CIA Direct Tenet "went to war" with bin Laden.
Despite these tensions with Pakistan, Khan's association with al-Qaeda, the global proliferation of technologies and equipment he sold, AQ Khan was never harrassed in his extensive foreign travels by U.S. or western intelligence services, and was allowed a quiet, comfortable retirement in his walled compound near the headquarters of the Pakistani military after the Bush-Cheney Administration "outed" him in preparation for the invasion of Iraq, an AQ Khan customer. When, on June 1, 2001, Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage told Rupert Murdoch's Times that the US was aware that a "senior Pakistani official" was trading arms with North Korea, he signalled all of AQ Khan's customers and suppliers worldwide that the jig was up, allowing many to bury their tracks.
Khan was released from house arrest last year, on the day that President Bush commuted the sentence handed to Scooter Libby, who had been convicted of charges stemming from the outing of a CIA officer. Valerie Plame had managed a program within the CIA Counter-Proliferation Division that had monitored Khan's operation.
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