How did a berserker like North Korea's Kim Jong Il get the bomb in the
first
place? Answer: He bought it from the Dr. Strangelove of Pakistan in
2001 -
while all our President's men ordered our intelligence agents to keep
their
eyes shut tight. by Greg Palast Wednesday,
May 27, 2009 (Orig pub in 2006)
On November 9, 2001, BBC Television Centre in London received a call
from a
phone booth just outside Washington. The call to our Newsnight team
was part
of a complex prearranged dance coordinated with the National Security
News
Service, a conduit for unhappy spooks at the CIA and FBI to unburden
themselves of disturbing information and documents. The top-level U.S.
intelligence agent on the line had much to be unhappy and disturbed
about: a
"back-off" directive.
This call to BBC came two months after the attack on the Pentagon and
World
Trade Towers. His fellow agents, he said, were now released to hunt
bad
guys. That was good news. The bad news was that, before September 11,
in
those weeks just after George W. Bush took office, CIA and Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) personnel were told to "back off" certain
targets
of investigations begun by Bill Clinton. He said there were particular
investigations that were effectively killed.
Which particular investigations? The agent was willing to risk his job
to
get this story out, but we had to press repeatedly for specifics on
the
directive to "back off." The order, he said reluctantly, spiked at
least one
fateful operation. As he talked, I wrote in my notebook, "Killed off
Conn.
Labs investigation." Connecticut Laboratories? I was clueless until
my
producer Meirion Jones, a weapons expert, gave me that "you idiot"
look and
said, "Khan Labs! Pakistan. The bomb." Dr. A. Q. Khan is known as the
"Father" of Pakistan's atomic bomb.
He's not, however, the ideal parent. To raise the cash for Pakistan's
program (and to pocket a tidy sum for himself), Khan sold off copies
of his
baby, his bomb, to Libya and North Korea-blueprints, material and all
the
fixings to blow this planet to Kingdom Come.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
>From another source inside the lab itself, we learned that Dr. Khan
was
persuading Pakistan to test his bomb-on India.
Why would Team Bush pull back our agents from nabbing North Korea's
bomb
connection? The answer in two words: Saudi Arabia.
The agent on the line said, "There were always constraints on investigating
the Saudis." Khan is Pakistani, not Saudi, but, nevertheless, the
investigation led back to Saudi Arabia. There was no way that the Dr.
Strangelove of Pakistan could have found the billions to cook up his
nukes
within the budget of his poor nation.
We eventually discovered that agents knew the Saudis, who had secretly
funded Saddam's nuclear weapons ambitions in the eighties, apparently
moved
their bomb-for-Islam money from Iraq to Dr. Khan's lab in Pakistan
after
Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.
But, said the insider, our agents had to let a hot trail grow cold because
he and others "were told to back off the Saudis." If you can't follow
the
money, you can't investigate. The weapons hunt was spiked.
BBC got the call about Dr. Khan's bomb in November 2001 and reported
it that
night on the tube and in the London Guardian. Over two years later,
on
February 11, 2004, President Bush, at an emergency press briefing,
expressed
his shock-shock!-at having learned that Dr. A. Q. Khan of Pakistan
was
running a flea market in fissionable material.
Our report on Dr. Khan's nuclear bazaar was confirmed in 2004, not by
U.S.
intelligence, but by one of Khan's customers, Muammar Gaddafi, the
mischievous tyrant of Libya. It was Gaddafi's last little bit of fun
with
Mr. Bush and Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair. The U.S. and Britain
had
agreed to end their trade embargo on Libya in return
for Gaddafi's shutting down his bomb program and, not incidentally,
Gaddafi's
giving an exclusive oil drilling agreement to British Petroleum.
So with Libya giving up Dr. Khan's bomb, it appeared we had a happy
ending
for the safety of the planet. Unfortunately, while our President was
holding
hands with Saudi King Abdullah at the Crawford Ranch and kissing Pakistan's
dictator Pervez Musharraf on both cheeks, Khan had given the secret
of the
bomb, hardware included, to
Kim of North Korea, a despot in a leisure suit a little less stable
than
Charles Manson.
The U.S. government missed discovering Dr. Khan's radioactive fire sale
because our agents were hard at work ignoring the Saudi money trail.
If the
agencies had not been told to "back off" the Saudis and Dr. Khan, would
the
U.S. have uncovered the nuclear shipments in time to stop them? We
can't
possibly know, but, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, it's amazing what you
don't
see when you're told not to look.
Now, in 2006, comes what the spook-world calls, "blow-back," the ugly
consequences of playing hide-and-don't-seek with the Saudis five years
ago.
Kim has finally decided to unwrap his gift from Pakistan - and our
President
is, once again, in that toxic mood we all know so well: both befuddled
and
belligerent.
Well, I suppose George can do what he usually does in a crisis: offer
Kim a
big fat tax cut.
GO TO ORIGINAL, URL BELOW, FOR AUDIO OF PALAST
AND AMY GOODMAN READING 'THE BACK-OFF'
DIRECTIVE FROM ARMED MADHOUSE
http://www.prisonplanet.com/how-george-bush-gave-krazy-kim-the-bomb.html
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