The Hindu : We broke his network: CIA chief

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 06, 2004

International

International

We broke his network: CIA chief

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, FEB. 5. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), George Tenet, has said that his outfit had delivered a crushing blow to the network run by the father of Pakistan's nuclear programme, A.Q. Khan, which had resulted in the arrest of senior scientists and the Malaysian authorities shutting down one of the network's largest plants.

"His network [the one run by Mr. Khan] is now answering to the world for years of nuclear profiteering," Mr. Tenet told an audience at the Georgetown University today.

The CIA chief, under fire from various sources for the intelligence on Iraq, referred to his testimony to Congress last year when he talked about the emerging threat from private proliferators, especially nuclear brokers.

"I was cryptic about this in public but I can tell you now that I was talking about A.Q. Khan. His network was shaving years off the nuclear weapons development timelines of several states, including Libya."

"What did intelligence have to do with this? First we discovered the extent of Khan's hidden network. We tagged the proliferators. We detected the network, stretching across four continents, offering its wares to countries such as North Korea and Iran. Working with our British colleagues, we pieced together the picture of the network revealing its subsidiaries, its scientists, its front companies, its agents, its finances and manufacturing plants on three continents. Our spies penetrated the network through a series of daring operations over several years," he said.

"Through this unrelenting effort we confirmed that the network was delivering such things as illicit uranium enrichment centrifuges. ... We stopped deliveries of prohibited material."

Mr. Tenet's focus was not on Pakistan. He presented a vigorous defence of the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, arguing, among other things, that American intelligence experts had never claimed that Iraq was an imminent threat.

The analysts "painted an objective assessment for our policy makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programmes that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests. No one told us what to say or how to say it."

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