Author: Matt Kelley
Publication: The Associated Press
Date: February 27, 2004
Although the Bush administration
reacted with surprise to Pakistan's nuclear assistance to Iran, the Islamabad
government warned the United States that such technology transfers might
occur as long as 14 years ago, two former Pentagon officials say.
The threat was conveyed in January
1990 from Pakistan's top general to the administration of President Bush's
father, but the information doesn't appear to have made its way to the
Clinton administration when it took office three years later, according
to interviews by The Associated Press.
In recent weeks, evidence has emerged
that Pakistani nuclear aid to Iran began in the mid-1980s but accelerated
after 1990 and included transfer of some of Pakistan's most advanced nuclear
technology.
The former Pentagon officials' accounts
suggest the United States may have missed an early opportunity to thwart
some of those transfers.
"We knew they were up to no good,"
said Henry Sokolski, the Pentagon's top arms control official in 1990.
Henry S. Rowen, at the time an assistant
defense secretary, said Pakistani Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg issued the warning
in a face-to-face meeting in Pakistan.
"Beg said something like, 'If we
don't get adequate support from the U.S., then we may be forced to share
nuclear technology with Iran,'" said Rowen, now a professor at Stanford
University.
Beg, who was then Pakistan's army
chief of staff, has acknowledged Iran approached him seeking nuclear assistance
that year and publicly advocated military cooperation between Pakistan
and Iran to counter U.S. power in the region. Beg said he never authorized
nuclear transfers to Iran or made threats to the United States.
"I have said many times it's all
pure lies," Beg said in a telephone interview. "Am I a fool, to tell the
U.S. what to do or what not to do?"
A key scientist in Pakistan's nuclear
weapons program admitted this month he supplied nuclear weapons technology
to Iran as well as North Korea and Libya. The scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan,
said Pakistan's leadership was unaware and uninvolved. President Pervez
Musharraf pardoned Khan the day after his public confession.
President Bush has said the United
States became aware of Khan's network only in the past few years through
daring work by U.S. and British intelligence agents.
"A.Q. Khan is known throughout the
world as the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program," Bush said Feb.
11. "What was not publicly known, until recently, is that he also led an
extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology."
But Sokolski and Rowen said former
President Bush's administration did little to follow up on Beg's warning.
"In hindsight, maybe before or after that they did make some transfers,"
Rowen said.
Ashton Carter, an assistant defense
secretary from 1993 to 1996, said he doesn't remember even being told about
the problem when he joined the Pentagon.
Rowen said he told Beg that Pakistan
would be "in deep trouble" if it gave nuclear weapons to Iran. Rowen said
he was surprised by the threat because at the time Americans thought Pakistan's
secular government dominated by Sunni Muslims wouldn't aid Iran's Shiite
Muslim theocracy.
"There was no particular reason
to think it was a bluff, but on the other hand, we didn't know," Rowen
said.
Declassified documents and former
officials say U.S. officials knew since at least 1983 about Pakistan's
extensive underground supply network for its nuclear weapons program, which
first tested nuclear explosives in 1998. Former officials say Washington
had other murky clues about Pakistani help to Iran and strong suspicions
of the North Korea link by the late 1990s.
Most of the middlemen for Khan's
network in the 1990s were either investigated or convicted in Europe for
supplying Pakistan's nuclear program in the 1980s.
Pakistan never cracked down on its
scientists when former President Clinton and other U.S. officials shared
their suspicions with Pakistani leaders, former U.S. officials say.
"The response was, 'Yes, we'll examine
your concerns, but we don't believe they are well founded,'" said Robert
Einhorn, who was the head arms control official in the State Department
from 1999 to 2001.
While Islamabad and Washington squabbled
about the evidence, the Khan network provided sophisticated technology
to Libya, North Korea and Iran, three countries the United States considered
among the most dangerous.
A decade earlier, the Reagan administration
had looked the other way on Pakistan's nuclear program, said Stephen P.
Cohen, a State Department expert on the region from 1985 to 1987. Back
then, Washington used Pakistan as a conduit for sending weapons and money
to guerillas fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
"They were covering up our involvement
in Afghanistan, pretending we played no role in Afghanistan, so they expected
us to cover up their role in procuring a weapons system they saw as vital
to their survival," said Cohen, now with the Brookings Institution think
tank.
American officials scolded Pakistan
repeatedly for buying nuclear technology from sources in Europe, Asia and
the United States, Cohen said. But often those warnings were with "a wink
and a nod" that Washington would tolerate those activities, he said.
A declassified State Department
memo from 1983 says Pakistan clearly had a nuclear weapons program that
that relied on stolen European technology and "energetic procurement activities
in various countries."
Cohen said the United States suspected
Pakistan was helping Iran in the late 1980s, in part because Pakistan had
cooperated with Iran on nuclear matters before Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution.
The evidence, however, was murky, Cohen said.
