Failure of Basic Fact-Checking:
I quote The Enemy:
"Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken;funding began with $20–30 million per year in 1980 and rose to $630 million per year in 1987.
Funding continued after 1989 as the Mujahideen battled the forces of Mohammad Najibullah's PDPA during the Civil war in Afghanistan (1989–1992).
The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups that were favored by neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Marxist-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan regime since before the Soviet intervention. "
"Raphel held a variety of positions throughout his career until his death in 1988. He was mainly a politician and diplomat for the US Government.
In 1979, Raphel was a key member of the State Department's Special Operations Group set up to free the American hostages seized by Iranian militants at the United States Embassy in Teheran."
So, this man is a Democrat.
It goes on:
"Raphel was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and succeeded Dean Roesch Hinton as US Ambassador to Pakistan in January 1987."
The Assassination of President General Zia ul Haq and US Ambassador Arnold Lewis Raphael from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
The United States and Pakistan's Quest for the Bomb
Newly Declassified Documents Disclose Carter Administration's Unsuccessful Efforts to Roll Back Islamabad's Secret Nuclear Program
Nationalistic Pakistani Officials Insisted That Their Country had an "Unfettered Right to do what It Wishes"
Washington, D.C., December 21, 2010 - The Wikileaks database of purloined State Department cable traffic includes revelations, published in the Washington Post and the New York Times about tensions in U.S.-Pakistan relations on key nuclear issues, including the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the disposition of a stockpile of weapons-grade highly-enriched uranium. (Note 1) These frictions are not surprising because the Pakistani nuclear weapons program has been a source of anxiety for U.S. policymakers, since the late 1970s, when they discovered that Pakistani metallurgist A.Q. Khan had stolen blueprints for a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facility. U.S. officials were alarmed that a nuclear Pakistan would bring greater instability to South Asia; years later, the rise of the Pakistani Taliban produced concerns about the nuclear stockpile's vulnerability to terrorists. Since 2002-2004 the discovery that the A.Q. Khan's nuclear supply network had spread nuclear weapons technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea, and elsewhere raised apprehensions even more. (Note 2) Last week, before the Wikileaks revelations, the recently disclosed North Korean gas centrifuge uranium enrichment plant raised questions about the proliferation of sensitive nuclear technology by the Khan network. (Note 3)
Recently declassified U.S. government documents from the Jimmy Carter administration published today by the National Security Archive shed light on the critical period when Washington discovered that Pakistan, a Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty [NPT] hold-out, had acquired key elements of a nuclear weapons capability. Once in power, the Carter administration tried to do what its predecessor, the Ford administration, had done: discourage the Pakistani nuclear program, but the CIA and the State Department discovered belatedly in 1978 that Islamabad was moving quickly to build a gas centrifuge plant, thanks to "dual use" technology acquired by Khan and his network. The documents further disclose the U.S. government's complex but unsuccessful efforts to convince Pakistan to turn off the gas centrifuge project. Besides exerting direct pressure first on President Zulkifar Ali Bhutto and then on military dictator General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Washington lobbied key allies and China to induce them to pressurize Islamabad, but also to cooperate by halting the sale of sensitive technology to Pakistan.
Declassified government documents show that the Carter administration recognized that export controls by industrial countries could not sufficiently disrupt Pakistan's secret purchases of uranium enrichment technology, so it tried combinations of diplomatic pressure and blandishments to dissuade the Pakistanis and to induce them to reach an understanding with India. Washington's efforts met with strong resistance from top Pakistani officials; seeing a nuclear capability as a matter of national survival, they argued that Pakistan had an "unfettered right" to develop nuclear technology. The Indians were also not interested in a deal. Senior US officials recognized that the prospects of stopping the Indian or the Pakistani nuclear programs were "poor"; within months arms controller were "scratching their heads" over how to tackle the problem.
Among the disclosures in the documents:
▪ U.S. requests during mid-1978 by U.S. diplomats for assurances that Pakistan would not use reprocessing technology to produce plutonium led foreign minister Agha Shahi's to insist that was a "demand that no country would accept" and that Pakistan "has the unfettered right to do what it wishes."
▪ By November 1978, U.S. government officials, aware that Pakistan was purchasing technology for a gas centrifuge enrichment facility, were developing proposals aimed at "inhibiting Pakistan" from making progress toward developing a nuclear capability.
▪ By January 1979, U.S. intelligence estimated that Pakistan was reaching the point where it "may soon acquire all the essential components" for a gas centrifuge plant.
▪ Also in January 1979, U.S. intelligence estimated that Pakistani would have a "single device" (plutonium) by 1982 and test a weapon using highly-enriched uranium [HEU] by 1983, although 1984 was "more likely".
▪ On 3 March 1979, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher spoke in "tough terms" with General Zia and Foreign Minister Shahi; the latter claimed that the U.S. was making an "ultimatum."
▪ On 23 March 1979, senior level State Department officials suggested to Secretary of State Vance possible measures to help make the "best combination" of carrots and sticks to constrain the Pakistani nuclear program; nevertheless, "prospects [were] poor" for realizing that goal.
▪ The decision in April 1979 to cut off aid to Pakistan because of its uranium enrichment program worried State Department officials, who believed that a nuclear Pakistan would be a "new and dangerous element of instability," but they wanted to maintain good relations with that country, a "moderate state" in an unstable region.
▪ During the spring of 1979, when Washington made unsuccessful attempts to frame a regional solution involving "mutual restraint" by India and Pakistan of their nuclear activities, Indian prime minister Morarji Desai declared that "if he discovered that Pakistan was ready to test a bomb or if it exploded one, he would act at [once] 'to smash it.'"
▪ In July 19799, CIA analysts speculated that the Pakistani nuclear program might receive funding from Islamic countries, including Libya, and that Pakistani might engage in nuclear cooperation, even share nuclear technology, with Saudi Arabia, Libya or Iraq.
▪ By September 1979 officials at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency said that "most of us are scratching our heads" about what to do about the Pakistani nuclear program.
▪ In November 1979, ambassador Gerard C. Smith reported that when meeting with senior British, French, Dutch, and West German officials to encourage them to take tougher positions on the Pakistani nuclear program, he found "little enthusiasm … to emulate our position."
▪ In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when improving relations with Pakistan became a top priority for Washington, according to CIA analysts, Pakistani officials believed that Washington was "reconciled to a Pakistani nuclear weapons capability."
Like the Israeli bomb, the Pakistan case illustrates how difficult it is to prevent a determined country, especially an ally, from acquiring and using nuclear weapons technology. It also illustrates the complexity and difficulty of nuclear proliferation diplomacy: other political and strategic priorities can and do trump nonproliferation objectives. The documents also shed light on a familiar problem: a US-Pakistan relationship that has been rife with suspicions and tensions, largely because of Washington's uneasy balancing act between India and Pakistan, two countries with strong mutual antagonisms, a problem that was aggravated during the Cold War by concerns about Soviet influence in the region. (Note 4)
The Pakistani nuclear issue was on Jimmy Carter's agenda when he became president in early 1977 because he brought a significant commitment to reducing nuclear armaments and to checking nuclear proliferation. His initial, though unrealized goal, of deep cuts of strategic nuclear forces, and his support for the comprehensive test ban treaty were of a piece with his support for the long-term abolition of nuclear weapons, suggesting that his concerns about proliferation were not the usual double standard of "what's good for us is bad for you." Carter made the danger of nuclear proliferation one of his campaign themes and during his presidency government agencies and Congress tightened up controls over nuclear exports; this led to the 1978 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, whose unilateral features were controversial with some allies, especially Japan and West Germany. The administration also engaged in a protracted, but generally successful, attempt to curb the Taiwanese nuclear weapons programs, although the effort to tackle South Africa's met with less short-term success. Another tough challenge was a West German contract to sell uranium enrichment and reprocessing plants to Brazil, although technical problems would ultimately undercut the agreement. (Note 5)
Pakistan's successful drive for a nuclear arsenal was perhaps the most significant frustration for the Carter administration's nonproliferation policy. Five years before Carter's inauguration, following Pakistan's defeat in the 1971 war with India, President Bhutto made a secret decision to seek nuclear weapons which he followed up in 1973 with negotiations to buy a nuclear reprocessing facility (used for producing plutonium) from a French firm. (Note 6) Apparently U.S. intelligence did not seriously examine the prospects for a Pakistani bomb until after India's May 1974 "peaceful nuclear explosion." In the following months, the authors of Special National Intelligence Estimate [SNIE] NIE 4-1-74, "Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons," expected Pakistan to "press ahead" with a nuclear weapons program, which they projected as "far inferior to its prime rival, India, in terms of nuclear technology." (Note 7) In August 1974, US intelligence estimated that Pakistan would not have nuclear weapons before 1980 and only as long as "extensive foreign assistance" was available. Over a year later, however, a new prediction emerged: that Pakistan could produce a plutonium–fueled weapon as early as 1978, as long as it had access to a reprocessing plant.
By 1978 Pakistan did not have a reprocessing plant or the bomb. Nevertheless, that same year a pattern of suspicious purchases detected by British customs officials led to the discovery that Pakistan was secretly acquiring technology to produce highly-enriched uranium as an alternative path to building the bomb. The "extensive foreign assistance" postulated by the SNIE turned out to be the theft of plans for a gas centrifuge enrichment technology from the Uranium Enrichment Corporation [URENCO] in the Netherlands. The perpetrator was metallurgist Abdul Q. Khan who founded a worldwide network to acquire sensitive technology for his country's nuclear project and later for providing nuclear technology to Pakistan's friends and customers. (Note 8)
Recent studies of the U.S.–Pakistan nuclear relationship see moments during the mid-to-late 1970s when it may have been possible to bring the Pakistani program to a halt by preventing Khan from acquiring sensitive technology. The Dutch may have had the best chance in 1975 when they suspected that Khan was a spy; whether the U.S. and British governments had similar opportunities to nip the Pakistani nuclear effort in the bud remains a matter of debate. (Note 9) For example, when British officials learned that Khan and his associates were trying to purchase high frequency electrical inverters needed to run centrifuges, they acted too late to stop the Pakistani from acquiring this technology, which they soon learned how to copy and manufacture. So far declassified documents do not shed light on when the British told the U.S. government about this development and how Washington initially reacted to it, or what else U.S. intelligence may have been learning from other sources. In any event, some of the documents in this collection suggest that the U.S. intelligence establishment may have had a mindset that prevented it from acquiring, or looking for, timely intelligence about the Pakistani secret enrichment program.
A significant problem was U.S. intelligence's assumption during 1974-1978 that Pakistan would take the plutonium route for producing the bomb. SNIE 4-1-74, "Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons," (published by the National Security Archive in January 2008) and two documents in this collection, a "Memorandum to Holders" of SNIE 4-1-74 and a 1978 CIA report, shed some light on the former assumption. Both documents give virtually exclusive emphasis to the plutonium route for acquiring the fissile material required for building the bomb. Thus, intelligence analysts assumed that countries like Pakistan would try to try to acquire reprocessing technology so that they could chemically extract plutonium from the spent fuel rods taken from nuclear power reactors. This was a reasonable premise because plutonium has played a central role in modern nuclear arsenals. Nevertheless, during the early 1960s, U.S. intelligence had assumed that China would first build and test a plutonium weapon, but as it turned out, Beijing found it more expedient to produce highly-enriched uranium for the nuclear device which it tested in October 1964. This surprised Washington, but if the intelligence community conducted any postmortems, they did not yield long-lasting lessons. (Note 10)
That Pakistan could try to acquire and develop advanced gas centrifuge enrichment technology was not an element in intelligence analysis. While the authors of SNIE 4-1-74 recognized the possibility that interested nations could secretly undertake a gas centrifuge enrichment program for producing highly-enriched uranium, they posited that it was "highly unlikely" that it could be undertaken "without our getting some indications of it." The possibility that "indications" might come too late was not discussed, but the tight secrecy controls over the gas centrifuge technique may have created a certain confidence that it would not leak out. Thus, the "Memorandum to Holders" did not include any discussion of what it would require for a country to build a gas centrifuge plant by purchasing "dual use" or "gray area" technology; no doubt its authors assumed that poor countries such as Pakistan were unlikely to pull off such a stunt. Indeed, according to some accounts, U.S. intelligence analysts dismissed Pakistan's competence to take the enrichment route. (Note 11) Whether such thinking may have made U.S. intelligence somewhat less watchful when Khan and his associates were creating their network will require more information than is presently available.
So far no U.S. government reports on the actual discovery of the enrichment program and the Khan network have emerged, although a few declassified CIA items in this collection include estimates how far Pakistan could go with the stolen technology. Most of the documents published today reflect the thinking of State Department officials— ambassadors and assistant secretaries--who worried about the Pakistani bomb, but were less than wholehearted supporters of a rigorous nuclear nonproliferation agenda because it might interfere with securing Pakistan's cooperation on regional issues. This collection does not tap the resources of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, but several documents at the National Security Council-level provide insight into high-level policy debates and strategy discussions. A few items provide some insight into President Carter's thinking because they include his observations in handwritten marginalia (see documents 2 and 36). No documents from the files of the former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency are yet available, although a few forceful memoranda by special ambassador on nonproliferation Gerard C. Smith may have dovetailed with ACDA views.
Notes
1. Karen DeYoung and Greg Miller, "WikiLeaks cables show U.S. focus on Pakistan's military, nuclear material," The Washington Post, 1 December 2010, and Jane Perlez et al., "Nuclear Fuel Memos Expose Wary Dance With Pakistan," The New York Times, 30 November 2010. For earlier coverage of the HEU stockpile issue, see Bryan Bender, "Pakistan, US Talks on Nuclear Security," Boston Globe, 5 May 2009. See also, Jeffrey Lewis, "Pakistan HEU Repatriation," www.armscontrolwonk.com, 2 December 2010.
2. For the Khan network and Libya, see David Albright, Libya: A Major Sale at Last, Institute for Science and International Security.
3. Joshua Pollock, "North Korea's Mixed Messages," www.armscontrolwonk.com 22 November 2010.
4. For background, see Robert J. McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
5. J. Samuel Walker, "Nuclear Power and Nonproliferation: The Controversy Over Nuclear Exports, 1974-1980," Diplomatic History 25 (Spring 2001): 235-249; William Glenn Gray, "Commercial Liberties and Nuclear Anxieties: The German-American Feud over Brazil, 1975-1977," SHAFR Conference Paper (provided by courtesy of the author); William Burr, ed., "U.S Opposed Taiwanese Bomb During the 1970s," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 221.
6. For background, see Jeffrey Richelson, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 326-332.
7. For background on India-Pakistan rivalry, see Joyce Battle, ed., "India and Pakistan -- On the Nuclear Threshold," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 6.
8. Besides Richelson, Spying on the Bomb, 329-332, see the following major studies of the Khan network and the Pakistani nuclear project, David Albright, Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America's Enemies (New York: Free Press, 2010); David Armstrong and Joseph Trento, America and the Islamic Bomb (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2007), Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, The Nuclear Jihadist (New York: Twelve, 2007), and Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walker and Company, 2007).
9. See books by Albright, Armstrong and Trento, Frantz and Collins, and Levy and Scott-Clark cited above, and a review of them (except Albright) by Mark Hibbs, "Pakistan's Bomb: Mission Unstoppable," Nonproliferation Review 15 (July 2008), 382-391.
10. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb, 161-162 and 168-169.
11. Albright, Peddling Peril, 41, and Frantz and Collins, The Nuclear Jihadist, 89-90.
12. For Kissinger's offer, see memorandum from the David Elliott and Robert Oakley of the National Security Council Staff to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Scowcroft), Washington, 12 July 1976, and memorandum of conversation, Washington, 17 December 1976, 3:20-4 p.m.
, both published in U.S. State Department, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E–8, Documents on South Asia, 1973–1976.
13. Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 408.
14. Ibid., 236.
15. See Albright, Peddling Peril, 46-50, and R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick, "A Nuclear Power's Act of Proliferation," The Washington Post, 13 November 2009.
16. For oral histories by Hummel covering his years in Pakistan, see the Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection at the Library of Congress Web site.
17. Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 235.
18. "U.S. To Renew Aid to Pakistan," The Washington Post, 25 August 1978.
19. See Albright, Peddling Peril, 41-42, for insights into these initial efforts.
20. Ibid, 34.
21. Armstrong and Trento, America and the Islamic Bomb, 78
22. Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 409, note 38.
23. By 1983, Pakistan had enough HEU to make a nuclear weapon and during the next two years "cold tested" a device to see whether its components would work. See Albright, Peddling Peril, 50.
24. Richelson, Spying, 340; Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 236.
25. Levy and Clark, Deception, 65.
26. Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 240.
27. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb, 341. For details on the Shahi-Vance-Smith talks, see Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 240-241.
28. Dennis Kux, Estranged Democracies: India and the United States, 1941-1991 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993), 358-362 and 37, and Walker, "Nuclear Power and Nonproliferation: The Controversy Over Nuclear Exports, 1974-1980," 245-246.
29. For details on the Shahi-Vance-Smith talks, see Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 240-241.
30. Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 238-245.
31. Ibid, 250; Leonard Spector, Nuclear Proliferation Today (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 85-86; Levy and Clark, Deception, 85.
32. See for example, Albright, Peddling Peril, 41-44.
Part of the interactive feature designed to support the special report "Unleashing the Nuclear Watchdog: Strengthening and Reform of the IAEA," this video features: Ashok Kapur, (Distinguished Professor Emeritus) University of Waterloo; and Matthew Bunn, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. http://interactive.cigionline.org/iaea/
Guess what?
This was PROMIS Software and the BCCI.
Our Own Private Bin Laden - The Brzynski Doctrine, Operation Cyclone and the BCCI from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
The Bank of Credit and Commerce International was the funding conduit and money laundering operation for (amongst other things) the Mujaheddin Support Effort, the CIA Jihadi training camps built in Afghanistan by the Saudi Binladen Group (some destroyed by the Missile strikes of 1998), all of Oliver North's Iran Contra doings in his "Off the Shelf Enterprise", General Noreiega, Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel, the October Surprise, PROMIS Software, the Mena Connection, the post-Soviet Mujahiden trraining effort, (GLADIO-B), the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing (2/26) and much more besides.
Most crucially, in concert with PROMIS Software, BCCI was the covert mechanism by which then-Vice President Bush and the Kissingerites such as Al Haig could covertly aid and supply the Islamic Republic of Pakistan under Zia al-Huq with technology, technical assistantce and materiel for the Pakistani nuclear weapons program behind the backs of the Reagan White House.
Featuring candid on-camera interviews with: Zbignew Brzynski, Admiral Stansfield Turner,Benazhir Bhutto, Milt Beardon and others.
Father of the Islamic Bomb
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