So we knew the Pakistani’s were selling Nuclear Secrets Before 9/11? Before we invaded Iraq?
On March 27, 2001, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf threw a banquet for Abdul Qadeer Khan.
A German-trained metallurgist, Khan had led Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program from its infancy. Musharraf’s celebration marked Khan’s unexpected retirement.
By then, Musharraf had good reason to know Khan was leading a secret life. The U.S. government, very carefully, had told him so.
A combined British-American intelligence inquiry into Khan, among the most closely held secrets of the Bush administration’s first year, was progressively surpassing its worst fears. What London and Washington had struck upon — beginning in Clinton’s final year — was a danger not seen before: a global private marketplace in the makings of a nuclear bomb.
By the time Bush arrived in office, according to a recent British government report, the CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service knew that “Khan was at the center of an international proliferation network” supplying uranium equipment “to at least one customer in the Middle East, thought to be Libya.” Khan not only dealt in designs but also had begun mass production of components.
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