The CIA persuaded Switzerland to destroy millions of pages of evidence showing how a Pakistani scientist helped Iran, Libya and North Korea acquire sensitive nuclear technology, according to a new book. "Fallout" by Americans Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz tells the story of the illicit nuclear procurement network created by Abdul Qadeer Khan.
In 2004, Khan admitted to selling Iran, North Korea and Libya uranium enrichment technology that can be used to produce fuel for civilian reactors or atomic weapons. Khan's movements have been curtailed since his public confession. Analysts and UN officials have said that Khan's illicit network, which specialised in helping countries skirt international sanctions, created the greatest nuclear proliferation crisis of the atomic age.
"Fallout" is the second book on the Khan network by Frantz and Collins, a husband-and-wife team of investigative journalists. They say the United States pressured the Swiss government to destroy evidence that could have helped UN investigators determine the full extent of Khan's black marketeering and say they did it to cover up CIA mistakes that had enabled Khan's network to flourish.
The CIA, the authors say, tracked Khan's activities for years thanks to a Swiss family, the Tinners, involved in the supply of nuclear technology which was a key element in Khan's network. Members of the family were recruited by the CIA. Through the Tinners, the CIA successfully infiltrated the Khan network, but Washington failed to act quickly enough to stop it spreading "the world's most dangerous technology to the world's most dangerous regimes," Frantz told Reuters. The CIA tried to sabotage Iran's nuclear program while monitoring Khan, but it appears the Iranians discovered the problems with equipment that had been tampered with and repaired it, the authors write.
"STUPIDITY" A Swiss investigator who worked on the Khan case was quoted by the authors as saying that Washington had wanted the evidence collected in raids on the Tinners' home and offices, including computer files, hard drives, disks and documents, to be destroyed in order to "hide their own stupidity."
"They are responsible for the spread of this dangerous technology," the investigator said. "You cannot stop it now. The Tinners were free. They were computer freaks, living in different countries, and duplicating all those files." Among the files confiscated from the Tinners, Collins and Frantz say, were elements of a Chinese design for a nuclear weapon that had been scanned and could therefore have been copied and disseminated around the world. Investigators from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also identified possible elements of designs for two other more sophisticated Pakistani nuclear weapons among the materials they were allowed to see.