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The man who knew too much
He was the CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, but Rich Barlow was
thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up. Now he's to
have his day in court. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report
Saturday October 13, 2007
The Guardian
Rich Barlow idles outside his silver trailer on a remote campsite in Montana
- itinerant and unemployed, with only his hunting dogs and a borrowed computer
for company. He dips into a pouch of American Spirit tobacco to roll another
cigarette. It is hard to imagine that he was once a covert operative at the
CIA, the recognised, much lauded expert in the trade in Weapons of Mass
Destruction (WMD).
He prepared briefs for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at the Pentagon, for the
upper echelons of the CIA and even for the Oval Office. But when he uncovered a
political scandal - a conspiracy to enable a rogue nation to get the nuclear
bomb - he found himself a marked man.
In the late 80s, in the course of tracking down smugglers of WMD components,
Barlow uncovered reams of material that related to Pakistan. It was known the
Islamic Republic had been covertly striving to acquire nuclear weapons since
India's explosion of a device in 1974 and the prospect terrified the west -
especially given the instability of a nation that had had three military
coups in less than 30 years . Straddling deep ethnic, religious and political
fault-lines, it was also a country regularly rocked by inter-communal violence.
"Pakistan was the kind of place where technology could slip out of control,"
Barlow says.
He soon discovered, however, that senior officials in government were taking
quite the opposite view: they were breaking US and international
non-proliferation protocols to shelter Pakistan's ambitions and even sell it
banned WMD technology. In the closing years of the cold war, Pakistan was
considered to have great strategic importance. It provided Washington with a
springboard into neighbouring Afghanistan - a route for passing US weapons and
cash to the mujahideen, who were battling to oust the Soviet army that had
invaded in 1979. Barlow says, "We had to buddy-up to regimes we didn't see
eye-to-eye with, but I could not believe we would actually give Pakistan the
bomb. How could any US administration set such short-term gains against
the long-term safety of the world?" Next he discovered that the Pentagon was
preparing to sell Pakistan jet fighters that could be used to drop a nuclear
bomb. Barlow was relentless in exposing what he saw as US
complicity, and in the end he was sacked and smeared as disloyal, mad, a drunk
and a philanderer. If he had been listened to, many believe Pakistan might
never have got its nuclear bomb; south Asia might not have been pitched into
three near-nuclear conflagrations; and the nuclear weapons programmes of Iran,
Libya and North Korea - which British and American intelligence now acknowledge
were all secretly enabled by Pakistan - would never have got off the ground.
"None of this need have happened," Robert Gallucci, special adviser on WMD to
both Clinton and George W Bush, told us. "The vanquishing of Barlow and the
erasing of his case kicked off a chain of events that led to all the
nuclear-tinged stand-offs we face today. Pakistan is the number one threat to
the world, and if it all goes off - a nuclear bomb in a US or European
city- I'm sure we will find ourselves looking in Pakistan's direction."
US aid to Pakistan tapered off when the Soviet Union
withdrew from Afghanistan. Dejected and impoverished, in 1987 Pakistan's
ruling military responded by selling its nuclear hardware and know-how for
cash, something that would have been obvious to all if the intelligence had
been properly analysed. "But the George HW Bush administration was not looking
at Pakistan," Barlow says. "It had new crises to deal with in the Persian Gulf
where Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait." As the first Gulf war came
to an end with no regime change in Iraq, a group of neoconservatives led by
Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Donald Rumsfeld were
already lobbying to finish what that campaign had started and dislodge Saddam.
Even as the CIA amassed evidence showing that Pakistan, a state that sponsored
Islamist terrorism and made its money by selling proscribed WMD technology, was
the number one threat, they earmarked Iraq as the chief target. When
these neocons came to power in 2001, under President
George W Bush, Pakistan was indemnified again, this time in return for signing
up to the "war on terror". Condoleezza Rice backed the line, as did Rumsfeld,
too. Pakistan, although suspected by all of them to be at the epicentre
of global instability, was hailed as a friend. All energies were devoted to
building up the case against Iraq. It is only now, amid the
recriminations about the war in Iraq and reassessments of where the real danger
lies, that Barlow - the despised bringer of bad news about Pakistan - is
finally to get a hearing. More than 20 years after this saga began, his case,
filed on Capitol Hill, is coming to court later this month. His lawyers are
seeking millions of dollars in compensation for Barlow as well as the
reinstatement of his $80,000 a year government pension. Evidence will highlight
what happened when ideologues took control of intelligence in three separate US
administrations - those of Reagan, and of the two Bushes -
and how a CIA analyst who would not give up his pursuit for the truth became a
fall guy. Born in Upper Manhattan, New York, the son of an army
surgeon, Barlow went to an Ivy League feeder school before attending Western
Washington University on America's northwest tip. Even then he was an idealist
and an internationalist, obsessively following world events. He majored in
political science, and his thesis was on counter-proliferation intelligence; he
was concerned that the burgeoning black markets in nuclear weapons technology
threatened peace in the west. "I got my material from newspapers and books," he
recalls. "I went to congressional hearings in Washington and discovered that
there was tonnes of intelligence about countries procuring nuclear materials."
After graduation in 1981, shortly after Reagan became president - avowedly
committed to the non proliferation of nuclear weapons - Barlow won an
internship at the State Department's Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency (ACDA), which had been established by John F Kennedy in the
60s. At first Barlow thought he was helping safeguard the world. "I
just loved it," he says. His focus from the start was Pakistan, at the time
suspected of clandestinely seeking nuclear weapons in a programme initiated by
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of Benazir. "Everywhere I looked I kept coming
up against intelligence about Pakistan's WMD programme," Barlow says. "I
thought I was telling them what they needed to hear, but the White House seemed
oblivious." Immersed in the minutiae of his investigations, he didn't
appreciate the bigger picture: that Pakistan had, within days of Reagan's
inauguration in 1981, gone from being an outcast nation that had outraged the
west by hanging Bhutto to a major US ally in the proxy war in Afghanistan.
Within months Barlow was out of a job. A small band of Republican hawks,
including Paul Wolfowitz, had convinced the president that
America needed a new strategy against potential nuclear threats, since
long-term policies such as détente and containment were not working. Reagan was
urged to remilitarise, launch his Star Wars programme and neutralise ACDA. When
the agency's staff was cut by one third, Barlow found himself out of Washington
and stacking shelves in a food store in Connecticut, where he married his
girlfriend, Cindy. He was not on hand in 1984 when intelligence reached the
ACDA and the CIA that Pakistan had joined the nuclear club (the declared
nuclear powers were Britain, France, the US, China and Russia) after China
detonated a device on Pakistan's behalf. Soon after, Barlow was
re-employed to work as an analyst, specialising in Pakistan, at the Office of
Scientific and Weapons Research (OSWR). The CIA was pursuing the Pakistan
programme vigorously even though Reagan was turning a blind eye - indeed,
Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, claimed in 1985: "We have full
faith in [Pakistan's] assurance that they will not make the bomb."
Back on a government salary, Barlow, aged 31, moved to Virginia with his wife
Cindy, also a CIA agent. From day one, he was given access to the most highly
classified material. He learned about the workings of the vast grey global
market in dual-use components - the tools and equipment that could be put
to use in a nuclear weapons programme but that could also be ascribed to other
domestic purposes, making the trade in them hard to spot or regulate. "There
was tonnes of it and most of it was ending up in Islamabad," he says. "Pakistan
had a vast network of procurers, operating all over the world." A secret
nuclear facility near Islamabad, known as the Khan Research Laboratories, was
being fitted out with components imported from Europe and America "under the
wire". But the CIA obtained photographs. Floor plans. Bomb designs.
Sensors picked up evidence of high levels of enriched
uranium in the air and in the dust clinging to the lorries plying the road to
the laboratories. Barlow was in his element. However, burrowing through
cables and files, he began to realise that the State Department had
intelligence it was not sharing - in particular the identities of key
Pakistani procurement agents, who were active in the US. Without this
information, the US Commerce Department (which approved export licences)
and US Customs (which enforced them) were hamstrung. Barlow came to
the conclusion that a small group of senior officials was physically aiding the
Pakistan programme. "They were issuing scores of approvals for the Pakistan
embassy in Washington to export hi-tech equipment that was critical for their
nuclear bomb programme and that the US Commerce Department had refused to
license," he says. Dismayed, he approached his boss at the CIA, Richard Kerr,
the deputy director for intelligence, who summoned senior State
Department officials to a meeting at CIA headquarters in Langley. Barlow
recalls: "Kerr tried to do it as nicely as he could. He said he understood the
State Department had to keep Pakistan on side - the State Department guaranteed
it would stop working against us." Then a Pakistani nuclear smuggler
walked into a trap sprung by the CIA - and the Reagan administration's
commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons was put to the test. US
foreign aid legislation stipulated that if Pakistan was shown to be procuring
weapons of mass destruction or was in possession of a nuclear bomb, all
assistance would be halted. This, in turn, would have threatened the US-funded
war in Afghanistan. So there were conflicting interests at work when Barlow got
a call from the Department of Energy. "I was told that a Pakistani businessman
had contacted Carpenter Steel, a company in Pennsylvania, asking to buy a
specific type of metal normally used only in constructing
centrifuges to enrich uranium. His name was Arshad Pervez and his handler,
Inam ul-Haq, a retired brigadier from the Pakistan army, had been known to us
for many years as a key Pakistan government operative." Barlow and US
customs set up a sting. "Pervez arrived to a do a deal at a hotel we had rigged
out and was arrested," Barlow says. "But ul-Haq, our main target, never
showed." Trawling through piles of cables, he found evidence that two
high-ranking US officials extremely close to the White House had tipped off
Islamabad about the CIA operation. Furious, Barlow called his superiors. "The
CIA went mad.
These were criminal offences," Barlow says. The State Department's lawyers
considered their position. They argued that an inquiry would necessitate the
spilling of state secrets. The investigation was abandoned just as Reagan made
his annual statement to Congress, testifying that "Pakistan does not possess a
nuclear explosive device."
More- http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0%2C%2C2188777%2C00.html
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