The task of this piece on the front page of today’s Washington Post is to establish the believe that Iran has a nuclear weapon design.
An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by a former top U.N. arms inspector that suggests the plans could have been shared secretly with any number of countries or rogue groups.
The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states.
The Swiss ‘businessmen’, Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, are alleged to have sold several nuke related stuff to Lybia and other countries.
There is more to the Tinner story, but for now let me concentrate on the date. The WaPo says the laptop has been discovered in 2006. But Tinner was under CIA control at least since the 2003 bust of nuclear related stuff on board of the ‘BBC China’.
The German magazine Der Spiegel had a big story about this in March 2006:
Two circumstances could prove to be Lerch’s undoing: first, the fact that the German ship "BBC China" was intercepted in October 2003 carrying a cargo of containers filled with nuclear technology headed for Libya and, second, that the incident prompted a panicked Gadhafi to disclose the names of all those who had supplied the Libyans with material and expertise for their nuclear program.
…
The authorities caught up with Gotthard Lerch, who Tahir calls his "main contractor," in Switzerland. They also arrested members of the Tinner family — Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Urs and Marco — all on the suspicion of having built parts for Gadhafi’s nuclear weapons program in return for 15 to 20 million Swiss francs.
Tinner was flipped by the CIA at least since the ‘BBC China’ event but likely even earlier. Another man taking part in the alleged smuggling was also turned by the CIA or has worked for the CIA all along.
Indeed it somehow seems like everybody involved in the issue was somehow related to the CIA.
The usual story is that the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Kahn was the one who ran a smuggling network. That may not be true at all. Khan denies having been involved in such. A new book asserts that it was then Prime Minister of Pakistan Bhutto who personally gave Pakistani nuclear secrets to North Korea in exchange for North Korean No Dong missiles for the Pakistani army.
A Dutch court somehow ‘lost’ legal files about the Khan case and the CIA likely had a hand in this too. The CIA also successfully pressed (link in German) the Swiss government to destroy information it had about the Tinner case. Tinner will thereby never be convicted.
Now please explain to me how people arrested in 2003 and flipped by the CIA at least since then managed to keep nuclear plans on a laptop that were somehow found only in 2006?
This whole story stinks from A to Z and no one should assume that anything put out about the issue by David Albright and WaPo is somewhat the truth. The whole ‘Khan network’ stuff, including some of the reports about it, are part of an intelligence operation.
Indeed as Der Spiegel wrote:
It is becoming increasingly clear that the CIA and Britain’s MI6 infiltrated the Khan network and that they probably even recruited some of the main suspects. How else, for example, could one explain the fact that vacuum pumps manufactured by Germany’s Pfeiffer Vacuum, ended up in both Libya and Iran? The company, after all, never sent any vacuum pumps to Libya or Iran — but did send some to the US nuclear weapons research facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Also why would Khan peddle German vacuum pumps to other countries when his peronal company’s main export product were vacuum pumps made in Pakistan?
By now I come to believe that the ‘Khan network’, if it ever existed as such at all, was throroughly penetrated as early as 1990. Iran may or may not have the design for a warhead. But if such design plans came through the ‘Khan network’, i.e. Tenner and others, they are likely to have U.S. fingerprints all over them.