Sunday, February 06, 2005
CIA frustrated by lack of access to Qadeer
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: A congressional hearing was told by a former head of the CIA that Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan “may yet be responsible for millions and millions of deaths because of what he did”.
James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, was testifying this week before the House Select Intelligence Committee. Asked by Rep John Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, if it was damaging to the US that it was not “engaging” with Dr Khan, who may have “distributed nuclear materials or information around the world,” the former CIA chief replied, “I would have far preferred to have seen AQ Khan and - some more disclosures about the network and AQ Khan dealt with very severely. This man may yet be responsible for millions and millions of deaths because of what he did. But politics is - international politics is a matter in which one has to make compromises. And President Musharraf found it, I’m sure, necessary to deal with the matter the way he did in order to maintain his own position in Pakistan and in order to take other steps that are in Pakistan’s and our mutual interest. I share the frustration very much, but ...”
The congressman asked if there were “many other AQ Khans are there out there,” and was told by Woolsey, “Well, the world has to hope there aren’t any, but I’m afraid there may be at least one or two derivative AQ Khans, people who get access in Libya, perhaps, or in Iran, to some of this technology of capable gas centrifuges, for example, and then find a way that they can further sell it. Khan himself probably got this in Europe - in the Netherlands, I believe. So what you’re really worried about, even if there’s no other country that’s doing what Pakistan was doing back years ago, is that there are individuals in, you know, Iran or Korea, other places, that are figuring out even as we speak ways to sell models of this kind of gas centrifuge.”
Others who testified before the Committee were: Richard Perle, American Enterprises Institute, Gregory Treverton, Rand Corporation, Michael Swetnam, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and Kurt Campbell, former deputy assistant secretary of defence policy.
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