Author: Ben Fenton
Publication: The Telegraph, UK
Date: October 29, 2001
URL: http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/10/29/war129.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/10/29/ixhome.html
An elite American military unit
is preparing for possible incursion into Pakistan in order to steal its
nuclear weapons arsenal, it is reported today.
The special forces unit is training
with Israel's most trusted anti-terrorist unit, and would be called into
action in the event that Gen Pervaiz Musharraf lost power in Pakistan,
the New Yorker magazine said.
The CIA believes that Pakistani
army officers sympathetic to the Taliban could pose a threat to Gen Musharraf,
and that some of the country's estimated 24 nuclear warheads could be stolen
by renegades within Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI.
Seymour Hersch, a journalist whose
reporting on the post-September 11 crisis has been broadly accurate so
far, said that members of Israel's Unit 262, or Sayeret Matkal, came to
America soon after the attacks and have been training with Pentagon special
forces.
Mr Hersch quoted a "senior military
officer" as confirming that intense planning was going on for the "exfiltration"
- theft - of warheads. But there are doubts about whether the CIA - or
any other intelligence agency - knows the exact location of Pakistan's
warheads, which were first tested, to the surprise of American intelligence
agencies, in 1998.
The fear that Gen Musharraf could
lose control of the country and some or all of the warheads is based on
the close links between the ISI and the Taliban. Last week, the Pakistani
president dismissed such concerns.
"We have an excellent command-and-control
system which we have evolved, and there is no question of their falling
into the hands of any fundamentalists," Gen Musharraf said. Pakistan is
thought to have a number of intermediate-range missiles to carry its warheads
as well as using F-16 fighter-bombers.
There are a number of possible targets
for the use of these weapons by renegades sympathetic to the Islamic extremists
in Afghanistan. These include India, itself a nuclear power, or the four
American aircraft carriers and British vessels currently cruising off Pakistan's
coastline as bases for air and commando attacks on the Taliban and al-Qa'eda.
