The prospect of nuclear weapons getting into the hands of jihadists or terrorists did not happen overnight. Counterterrorism officials all over the world worry about the possibility of nuclear armed extremists because of shortsighted American and other nuclear-armed countries’ policies, and some Pakistani scientists, military officers, and politicians’ greed and fanaticism. The Carter and Reagan administrations decided not only to allow Pakistan to build a nuclear weapon, but they also allowed them to procure key parts for it in the United States. What came next should have surprised no one.
Dr. AQ Khan Photo from the U.S. State Dept.
In 1987, just as Iran-US relations were reaching their nadir – the year before the Iran Air shoot down and the Pan Am 103 tragedy – the head of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon program, A.Q. Khan, announced to the world that Pakistan had the capability to build nuclear bombs. The missiles and rockets to launch these weapons would come in a series of technology exchanges with North Korea. Pakistan had pursued its nuclear bomb building capabilities with abandon in the 1980s while it had the chance – while the Reagan administration was supplying it with weapons and money to support the Afghan mujahedin fighting the Soviet Union.
As Washington looked the other way, and even provided cover, Islamabad spent tens of millions of dollars purchasing equipment from the United States, Europe and Asia with which it created its nuclear weapon. From that point forward, every confrontation with India had the potential to go nuclear. Pakistan was not about to give up its bomb and would, in fact, expand its arsenal even though it was losing its political protection and financial support as the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988 and 1989.
The bomb that Pakistan had developed with America’s acquiescence would not be used simply to stave off an attack by India. The bomb technology would be sold and traded as a commodity. The network that had become so adept at procuring equipment for Pakistan’s bomb program would now, for a price, provide other countries everything they needed to build their own nuclear weapons. A.Q. Khan himself had declared that Pakistan’s nuclear bomb shop was open for business. But Khan’s giant ego did not take into account that the jihadi-dominated Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Service), could make certain that its allies in Al Qaeda would get access to Khan’s supermarket.
Compounding the problems created by this international bazaar for nuclear weapons technology is the fact that the CIA, MI5 (British domestic intelligence), other foreign intelligence agencies as well as her Majesty’s Royal Customs Service all had sources inside the A.Q. Khan network yet declined to shut down the nuclear supermarket. In order to protect its intelligence sources in Khan’s ring and ISI, the West decided the risk of proliferation was worth taking. The result: old Russian bomb designs ended up in Iran’s hands via China, North Korea and Pakistan.
Just days after Khan’s interview claiming to have a bomb appeared in print in March 1987, Senator John H. Glenn, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated, “Pakistani nuclear weapons production will, sooner or later, whether by design or by espionage, result in the wider transfer of nuclear weapons technology to countries in the Middle East.” Although Glenn could not have known it, that process had already begun.
Pakistan’s entry into the retail nuclear bomb business began with a pair of meetings in 1987. The first is believed to have taken place early in the year in Switzerland at the Zurich-Kloten International Airport. There, a member of A.Q. Khan’s network reportedly presented a top official of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization with what amounted to an order form for a nuclear weapons starter kit. The one-page, handwritten document listed everything necessary to attain a full-fledged uranium enrichment capability. Among the items on the list were dismantled centrifuges and components; auxiliary equipment, such as vacuum pumps and electrical drives; and drawings, plans, and specifications for a complete centrifuge plant complete with a workshop for manufacturing additional parts. The list also included equipment for casting enriched uranium into the hemispherical forms used as the cores of atomic bombs as well as technical reports on the process — normally, one of the most difficult to master and closely guarded secrets of the bomb-making arts. Yet Khan’s network was offering all of this to Iran in a straight cash deal. Prices ranged from millions of dollars for individual items to hundreds of millions for the complete package.
The offer came against a backdrop of increased nuclear cooperation between Iran and Pakistan. Iran’s nuclear ambitions stretched back to the mid-1970s. As money poured into the country following the 1973 oil crisis, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi not only doled out large sums to Pakistan’s Ali Bhutto, who was then raising funds for his Islamic bomb, but also announced plans to launch his own large-scale nuclear power program.
Work soon began on four French- and German-designed reactors with four more on the drawing board. By the late 1970s, US intelligence had determined that in addition to this ostensibly peaceful program, the shah had also established a secret nuclear weapons development effort. But in 1979, the shah’s nuclear ambitions fell victim to the Islamic revolution that drove the monarch himself from power. Many top scientists fled the country, and the nuclear effort languished. But in the mid-1980s, with the country bogged down in a long, bloody war with Iraq, Iran’s clerical leaders took a renewed interest in developing a nuclear option. In 1985, they revived a scaled-back version of the shah’s nuclear power program.
That same year, Iran also launched a secret uranium enrichment effort. Procurement agents quickly obtained critical equipment from a West German firm, and Iranian scientists and engineers began the daunting task of mastering the highly complex technology. They would soon get significant help from outside.
In February 1986, Tehran entered into an agreement with Islamabad to send Iranian engineers to Pakistan for training in nuclear energy. That same month, A.Q. Khan traveled to Iran and paid a secret visit to the nuclear reactor facility in Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf coast. The plant had been heavily damaged in repeated bombings by Saddam Hussein’s air force in the course of the ongoing Iran–Iraq War. In January 1987, shortly before making his public declaration of Pakistan’s nuclear status, Khan returned to Iran, this time, reportedly, to prepare a study for the Tehran regime on the feasibility of using the Bushehr reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. According to an account by conservative journalist Kenneth Timmerman, Khan met with senior Iranian officials at an intelligence ministry guesthouse south of Tehran and, in a revival of his performance for Ali Bhutto more than ten years earlier, made the case for the superiority of enriched uranium as a path to the bomb. It was at about this time that a member of Khan’s supply network extended the offer to provide enrichment technology, plans, and bomb-making equipment to Iran.
The man who reportedly received the hand-printed order form in 1987 was Dr. Masud Naraghi, a US-trained laser and plasma physicist who was a senior project manager in the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). Naraghi, who now lives in the United States, says that it was Khan’s European suppliers who “initiated” the sales. He insists he found out only later that the European “salesmen” were hawking Pakistani technology.
A CBS interview with DC Bureau Editor-in-Chief Joseph Trento and Co-Author of the book America and the Islamic Bomb David Armstrong.
Whatever the exact genesis of the offer, Iran followed through. But rather than ordering a full-blown, off-the-shelf uranium enrichment capability, the Iranians, by their own account, selected a more modest entry-level kit. This included parts from one or two disassembled first-generation Pakistani centrifuges along with technical specifications, designs, and instructions for the manufacture and assembly of additional machines. Iranian officials have since said that they planned to follow Pakistan’s model and develop an indigenous enrichment capability. As former UN weapons inspector David Albright has noted, acquiring the plans and components would be “tremendously helpful” to the Iranians, allowing them to skip many of the difficult early research steps.
Once the Iranians had placed their order with Khan’s network, they received a summons to travel to Dubai later in 1987 to consummate the deal. The freewheeling Persian Gulf port city had long served as a transshipment point for much of the equipment Pakistan acquired for its own nuclear weapons program. Now it would increasingly become a hub for Khan’s nuclear export business. It was in a dusty Dubai office that the first known transfer took place. Khan himself did not participate in the session. Instead his friend, a Dubai-based businessman named Sinawappu Seeni Mohamed Farook, represented the Pakistani side of the transaction. Farook, who was born in British India and lived in Sri Lanka before moving to Dubai, had a business that reportedly supplied goods to Khan’s operation. He would play a key role in the expansion of Khan’s network. Also at the meeting was Farook’s twenty-eight-year- old nephew, Bukhary Sayed Abu Tahir. Although Tahir, a Sri Lankan national, played only a minor role in the meeting with the Iranians, he would eventually supplant his uncle to become the central figure in Khan’s nuclear smuggling enterprise.
The Iranian side of the bargain was represented by a three-man delegation that included Masud Naraghi. Naraghi says that his role was primarily that of a technical expert, designated to ensure that the goods received from the Pakistanis checked out. UN investigators believe that some of the Iranians at the meeting posed as employees of a front company to disguise their connections to Tehran’s defense ministry. Also at the meeting were three of Khan’s European suppliers. One, a German named Heinz Mebus, was an old college friend of Khan’s from Berlin and had been one of the earliest suppliers to Pakistan’s enrichment program. At least one of the other suppliers at the meeting is believed to have been a German.
The Iranians reportedly paid several million dollars for the items they had ordered. Years later, after the deal was exposed, Iran told UN investigators that the Pakistanis had thrown in the equipment for casting uranium into bomb cores at no extra cost, presumably as an incentive to encourage future purchases. The Iranians would buy more from Khan’s network, but they would also shop elsewhere. Using the plans and specifications they had purchased from Khan and his cohorts as a kind of nuclear shopping list, Iran went bargain hunting, buying much of the equipment and technology they needed at lower prices from competitors in Europe, China, and Russia. Iran quickly developed an extensive procurement network that would eventually rival and possibly exceed Pakistan’s.
But for all the purchases, Iran’s centrifuge program made little progress initially. Scientists at the AEOI encountered serious technical difficulties and the enrichment effort foundered. Within several years, Iran would return to the Khan network for additional help and equipment. When it did, B.S.A. Tahir would play a lead role in the deal.
Read Unclassified documents detailing Pakistan's drive towards a nuclear weapon.
At around the time of the Dubai deal, the heads of the Iranian and Pakistani atomic energy agencies entered into a secret nuclear cooperation agreement. Under the pact, Iranian engineers traveled to Pakistan to receive advanced training in nuclear technology. These officially sanctioned but clandestine contacts may have helped obscure Khan’s activities. Pakistani officials would later say that Khan’s sales of nuclear plans and equipment to Iran began under the cooperation agreement to share ostensibly peaceful nuclear technology. According to US intelligence sources, the CIA had picked up on the increased nuclear collaboration between the two countries but did not immediately detect the component and technical data transfers. Late the following year, US and allied intelligence services determined that Pakistan was helping Iran build a secret uranium enrichment plant outside of Tehran. It was the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that first picked up message traffic among Pakistani military officers indicating Khan and his associates were engaged in a deal with Iran. According to a high-level DIA source, that evidence was turned over to the CIA, which launched a wider eavesdropping operation, tasking the National Security Agency (NSA) with targeting the top level of the Pakistani government, including intelligence and military officials. But for all the intelligence collected, Washington was unwilling to impose sanctions on its Cold War partner for its dangerous behavior.
Throughout 1987 and 1988, Pakistan’s nuclear activity sped up dramatically as Islamabad scrambled to push its bomb program as far forward as possible before the clock struck midnight on its relationship with the United States. A part of that process, Islamabad’s nuclear procurement efforts in the United States and Europe also picked up markedly, according to intelligence sources. Increasingly though, those purchases would now feed into A.Q. Khan’s lucrative new enrichment technology export business. All those involved in the Dubai deal had done very nicely for themselves. Now they would begin to formalize and expand the operation.
Then on August 17, 1988, Pakistani President Mohammed Zia Ul-haq traveled to a military base near Bahawalpur, an hour’s flight from Islamabad, to observe a target practice demonstration by a single American-made M-1 Abrams tank. At the time, Pakistan’s military was considering making a major investment in the highly touted tank to help bolster its defenses in the wake of the latest war scare with India. The demonstration turned out to be a flop, with the M-1 missing its target on each of ten attempts. At the conclusion of the embarrassing presentation, Zia was shuttled back to his waiting aircraft for the return flight to Islamabad. At the last minute, he invited US Ambassador Arnold Raphel to join him on the official presidential plane. Raphel, who had flown to Bahawalpur separately, accepted. Standing on the tarmac waving as the door to Pak One closed was Lt. Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the army vice chief of staff. Beg was the only general in Pakistan’s chain of command who was not on the plane with Zia that day. He would fly back to Islamabad on a smaller aircraft, right behind Zia’s.
Zia’s American-built Hercules C-130b transport plane took off on schedule at 3:56 p.m. But just minutes into the flight, air traffic controllers at Bahawalpur lost contact with the craft. Witnesses later said they saw the plane lurching up and down in the sky like an airborne roller coaster before it barreled into the earth. All thirty-two people on board were killed. In addition to Zia and Raphel, the dead included US Brig. Gen. Herbert Wasson, the head of the American military aid mission to Pakistan, and Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rehman, the chairman of Pakistan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the second most powerful man in the country, after Zia. As head of the ISI for ten years, Rehman had been the main architect of the anti- Soviet campaign in Afghanistan.
President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and Chief of Army Staff Gen. Aslam Beg.
Zia’s death, along with the deaths of most of Pakistan’s military leadership, left an enormous power void. After eleven years of Zia’s rigid rule, there was suddenly an entirely new political order in Islamabad. In accordance with Pakistan’s constitution, the head of the Senate, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, became the country’s acting president. The seventy-three-year old Ishaq Khan was a longtime advocate of Pakistan’s nuclear program and a major supporter of A.Q. Khan’s enrichment empire at Kahuta. Zia’s successor as army chief of staff, a position he still held at the time of his death, was Gen. Aslam Beg. Beg, who had been one of a group of officers trained in guerrilla warfare tactics by the CIA during the 1950s in preparation for a possible Soviet invasion of Pakistan, was one of the principal tacticians behind the Afghan jihad. A committed Islamist with a deeply anti-Western worldview, Beg was also a fierce proponent of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program.
Having come to power amid the trauma of Zia’s death, Beg and Ishaq Khan chose to allow previously scheduled elections set for November 1988 to proceed. The contest pitted a wealthy businessman, Nawaz Sharif, who had the backing of Pakistan’s military establishment, against the Western-educated Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar ali Bhutto, the father of the Islamic bomb and the man Zia had overthrown and hanged. Bhutto eked out a narrow victory in the election, and after considerable prodding by the United States, the military agreed to let her take office. As usual, though, there were conditions. Bhutto was not to interfere in military matters or issues related to the bomb. And while she would nominally serve as Pakistan’s first democratically elected prime minister since her father, Beg and Ishaq Khan would maintain tight control over the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
The CIA was convinced that Pakistan’s military and nuclear establishments kept Bhutto in the dark about the full extent of the country’s nuclear capabilities and the activities of Khan and his associates. Bhutto stated that as prime minister she was repeatedly approached by Pakistani military officials and scientists seeking permission to export nuclear technology. The former prime minister acknowledged before her assassination that her efforts to “control the direction of nuclear policy” were “much resisted.” She also noted that she was barred from Khan’s labs and had little influence over the Kahuta operation, which was protected by the military. After her assassination in 2007, a journalist who knew her well wrote that on a state visit to North Korea in 1993, Bhutto smuggled in critical data on uranium enrichment – a key to making a nuclear weapon – to help facilitate a missile deal with Pyongyang.
Benazir Bhutto during a state visit to the US
U.S. Dept. of Defense
At the top of the military heap in Pakistan was General Beg, a man with a grand vision for the bomb. Beg’s Islamist views extended to sharing Pakistan’s nuclear expertise with Iran. As army chief, Beg openly proposed selling or trading nuclear technology to Tehran. A.Q. Khan has reportedly claimed that Beg was aware of the transfers of centrifuge technology to Iran. In 1989, Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani reportedly told Bhutto that a group of Pakistani generals led by Beg had offered to provide Iran with nuclear weapons technology. Bhutto is said to have told both Rafsanjani and Beg that she objected to the scheme. But that was apparently not enough to curb Beg’s enthusiasm. Following the 1991 Gulf War, Beg reportedly proposed that in order to avoid suffering the same fate as Iraq, Pakistan should sell nuclear technology to Iran as part of a “grand alliance” against the United States. Beg denies making such a proposal. Yet that same year, Beg told US Ambassador Robert Oakley, who had replaced Raphel, that he had reached an agreement with the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to exchange Pakistan’s bomb-making know-how for Iranian oil and conventional weapons. When the United States protested, the Pakistanis pledged to halt the deal. But that did not put an end to Pakistan’s export of nuclear technology.
Next: Part XI:Atoms for Ayatollahs
The Pakistan nuclear weapons bazaar stays open for Iran.
Six months after the US Navy shot down Iran Air Flight 655, Iran’s leaders enjoyed their revenge.
Four days before Christmas 1988, a Pan Am plane took off from Frankfurt, Germany, connected in London, and began its journey from Heathrow to New York as Pan Am 103. Undetected by Pan Am or airport personnel, a pound and half of explosives was hidden in a Toshiba radio, packed in a Samsonite bag stowed in the forward cargo hold. At 7:03 pm, thirty-eight minutes into the flight to New York, as Pan Am 103 was flying at thirty-one thousand feet over the picturesque town of Lockerbie, Scotland, the bomb detonated. On the ground, residents heard a rumbling noise that seemed to get louder and louder. The blast blew a huge hole in the fuselage, and debris struck the tail assembly. A few seconds later the 747 suffered structural failure. The two-story forward fuselage and flight deck separated from the main cabin. On the ground, residents saw flaming sections of aircraft raining down. They watched in the darkness as the plane, on an uncontrolled descent, disintegrated.
Wreckage of Pan Am 103
Wreckage crashed into Rosebank Terrace and Sherwood Crescent near Lockerbie. At nearby Dumfries and Galloway, a fire began to spread. All 259 people who had been on board were dead, and by sunrise 11 local residents had been killed in the fire.
Christmas week had been turned into hell. Among the dead were CIA and military covert officers, college students, and citizens trying to get home for the holidays. The emotions of the season and the multinational character of the disaster created an outcry in Europe and the United States.
The once venerable Pan Am, already in financial trouble, would be sent into a death spiral as failures in its security and baggage-screening process emerged. The feckless Federal Aviation Administration, long under the thumb of a Congress dominated by airline lobbyists, promised reform. Much as his son would do after 9/11, President George H. W. Bush stubbornly refused to form a presidential panel to examine the security breakdown. Only after seven months of organizing by the families of the victims, and with heavy media and political pressure, did the new Bush administration relent and appoint a seven-member commission to look into the bombing.
The reason the Bush administration was reluctant to allow Pan Am 103 to be fully investigated is that the government did not want to provide secret intelligence records that would have revealed U.S. complicity with Iran since 1980. An investigation might expose the secret, strange, and often incomprehensible behavior between the United States and Iran that would embarrass the administration as well as expose secret US intelligence relationships. The Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie was but one manifestation of these covert operations.
CIA director William Casey’s efforts to reach out to Iran began when he was campaign director for the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign. For six years Casey and his colleagues hid these relationships by using Israel as an intermediary with the Iranians. At the same time, Vice President George H. W. Bush headed the effort to support Iran’s sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein, in the bloody Iran–Iraq War. These were secret operations. During this entire time frame, the Reagan/Bush White House and the intelligence agencies made Libya the focus of public attention for almost all terrorist acts committed in the 1980s, much like the last Bush administration made Saddam Hussein the villain in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003.
A BBC report the morning after the disaster
To avoid criticism that the United States was doing business with terrorists should the secret negotiations with Iran be exposed, the CIA participated in a bizarre campaign to divert blame for terrorist acts from Iran and Iran’s surrogate, Hezbollah, to Libya. If there was a comprehensive investigation into the Pan Am 103 tragedy, everything might be exposed — even the fact that the CIA had recruited a family of Beirut criminals to pretend to be a Libyan terrorist cell operating in Europe.
The major behind-the-scenes player in all this activity was the former number two man in covert operations at the CIA, Theodore G. Shackley. Before he was forced out of the CIA during the Carter administration, Shackley had planted the CIA’s top business asset, Edwin Wilson, in Libya to spy on the regime and had used him to great effect. In the early Reagan years, Shackley’s meetings with the Iranians began the process that became known as Iran-Contra. But the White House and CIA’s secret dealings in the Middle East were bound to fail. The CIA’s main conduit to Iran had close ties to Hezbollah, and he cooperated with this terrorist group in Lebanon, often with deadly results for Americans.
A recent BBC report on the Libyan Lockerbie bomber
At the same time, the Reagan-Bush administration knew how to manipulate events because the FBI had recruited a key Libyan source. A top Libyan official shared information with the United States. The FBI successfully recruited the chief of the Libyan United Nations delegation, Dr. Ali A. Treiki, a Bedouin who missed the Sahara Desert so much that in 1983 he hired an Italian designer to re-create his homeland on the top floor of Libya House, a twenty-four-story building at 309 East 48th Street in New York. He used a huge aqua-and-peach tent to entertain.
Casey operated so informally that he used agents who had been discarded by the CIA years before. George Whitman, a man with a huge ego as well as CIA, Mossad, and publishing connections, was responsible for recruiting Treiki and convincing him to supply information to US intelligence and arrange access to Libya’s encrypted message traffic. Helping William Casey with the Treki operation was William Zylka, who had been a business asset of the CIA for years. The CIA had dropped Whitman in the 1960s after it learned that he had been recruited by Israeli intelligence. After a stint at AIG, the insurance giant, and with one foot in the New York literary world, Whitman was picked up by Casey in the early 1980s to conduct “back-pocket operations.” After Zylka was used to win Treki’s confidence, Whitman ran a darker side of the operation.
Whitman needed the New York FBI’s cooperation because it was responsible for all surveillance of United Nations missions. “Whitman,” according to an FBI official who worked with him, “looks like out of Central Casting.” Whitman made the FBI approach by volunteering to speak about intelligence at the FBI’s training center at Quantico and later convinced the FBI to finance and let him work the Treiki recruitment. Using information from another Casey business operative, Whitman became Treiki’s case officer.
Whitman and the FBI uncovered Treiki’s relationship with a blond prostitute, whom he used to meet at the Palace Hotel in New York. It turned out that her pimp had a history of filming his heroin-addicted call girl’s clients and blackmailing them. When the FBI interceded on Treiki’s behalf, he agreed to remain in place and not defect to the United States.
At the same time in the mid-1980s the FBI and the National Security Agency got routine access to the code room at Libya House and replaced circuit boards in secret communications computers. This allowed the United States to monitor everything sent back and forth to Tripoli.
When Libya agreed to cooperate and coordinate with Iran on terrorist operations, that put Libyan President Muammar Qadhafi right where Iran needed him for the revenge attack against the United States for the Iran 665 shoot-down.
For the victims and their families in Iran, Scotland, and the United States, the whole truth would be secondary to protecting state secrets — even if it was those very secrets that had caused their family members’ deaths.
When the Pan Am 103 commissioners finally brought in their report, in 1990, they were adamant in concluding that the bombing could have been prevented and that there “are gaping holes throughout the system.” They charged that the FAA had failed to keep pace with changing times. “At a time when bombings already had become the preferred method for terrorists, the security program was still aimed largely at preventing hijackings. There were shortcomings in virtually all areas . . .” The 182-page commission report called for a complete remodeling of US airline security. That did not happen.
To this day, the United States has not released files on secret military, DEA and other intelligence operations smuggling drugs and other contraband from the Middle East, through Europe and into the United States. Time magazine reported in 1992 that a team of agents operating in Lebanon to help secure release of American hostages were on board Pan Am 103 returning to the United States. Time wrote:
Almost immediately after the Pan Am bombing, which killed the 259 people aboard the plane and 11 more on the ground, the prime suspect was Ahmed Jibril, the roly-poly boss of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (P.F.L.P.-G.C.). Two months earlier, West German police had arrested 16 members of his terrorist organization. Seized during the raids was a plastic bomb concealed in a Toshiba cassette player, similar to the one that blew up Flight 103. There was other evidence pointing to Jibril. His patron was Syria. His banker for the attack on the Pan Am plane appeared to be Iran. U.S. intelligence agents even traced a wire transfer of several million dollars to a bank account in Vienna belonging to the P.F.L.P.-G.C. Iran's motive seemed obvious enough. The previous July, the U.S.S. Vincennes had mistakenly shot down an Iranian Airbus over the Persian Gulf, killing all 298 aboard.
President Bush's remarks triggered an outcry from the victims' families, who claimed that pointing the finger at Libya was a political ploy.
Photo: The Whitehouse
Suddenly, last November, the U.S. Justice Department blamed the bombing on two Libyans, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah. The scenario prompted President Bush to remark, "The Syrians took a bum rap on this." It also triggered an outcry from the victims' families, who claimed that pointing the finger at Libya was a political ploy designed to reward Syria for siding with the U.S. in the gulf war and to help win the release of the hostages. Even Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's investigation of the bombing, told the New York Times it was "outrageous" to pin the whole thing on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
US intelligence fed the media stories like GOLDENROD and imprisoned airline hijacker Fawaz Younis to protect more important and profitable sources and operations. By 2002, during the George W. Bush administration, Libya agreed in principle to pay compensation to relatives of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing. A minister in Colonel Gaddafi’s government – African affairs minister Ali al-Treiki – told the pan-Arab Al Hayat newspaper in New York that “as a matter of principle” Libya accepted the idea of compensating victims’ families because it was a demand of the UN Security Council.
Libya said it admitted responsibility for Pan Am 103 and agreed to compensate American victims to get sanctions lifted. By 2004 the United States normalized relations with Libya after it renounced its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. On August 20, 2009, Scottish authorities released on humanitarian grounds Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The BBC reported that oil companies’ interests in Libya played a role in the deliberations.
Iran’s leadership was so distrustful of the US alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia that a decision was taken to spend its oil money on advanced weapons systems that could inflict real damage on the United States should the Americans decide to attack Iran.
Even though Iran was an embargoed state and was technically not able to buy weapons, the Iranian leadership had managed to buy hundreds of millions of dollars in spare parts for the Shah’s old weapons systems from Israel during the 1980s and the eight-year-long war with Iraq. Many of these weapons came through a notorious Syrian arms dealer. Through him, Iran made a connection to China and contracted with them to build a new series of sophisticated anti-ship cruise missiles that the Chinese assured Iran could present a real threat against the US Navy in the Gulf. Because it would be several years before the missiles were ready, as an interim solution, the Iranians bought from North Korea truck-launched Silkworm missiles to protect the entrance to the Persian Gulf at the Straits of Hormuz. The Iranians also cut a series of deals with North Korea and US ally Pakistan to purchase multi-stage rockets with the hope of improving their SCUD missile capabilities.
American intelligence understood Iran was expanding its military. Dr. A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, took money from Saudi Arabia and skimmed money from the covert US program to arm the mujahedin in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet Union that was being run by Pakistan’s intelligence service and poured it all into his crash program to build the first “Islamic nuclear bomb.” Khan’s efforts were fully known to the Pakistani government. Both the Carter and Reagan administrations had ignored the issue of nuclear proliferation by Pakistan in exchange for cooperation in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Because US intelligence officials were told not to monitor these activities, Iran was permitted to pursue its own nuclear weapons program. US officers who tried to officially put an end to Pakistan’s activities were punished at the highest levels of our government.
By the time President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council team was in place it was fully aware of Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation activities. Both the CIA and MI6, British intelligence, claimed that it had penetrated and was carefully monitoring what had become a worldwide proliferation network. Yet both intelligence services refused to stop it.
Three machine gunners stand guard at an entry control point in Sarajevo during Operation Joint Endeavor.
Photo by Staff Sergeant Andy Dunaway
By the mid-1990s, Iran, like the United States, was focused on Bosnia where Muslim minorities were under full assault in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Lebanese and other Middle Eastern terrorists were now moving to Central Europe to wage jihad. Technically, the U.S. and Iran were on the same side, trying to protect Muslims in the conflict, but to Iran or its surrogate, Hezbollah, it was a distinction without a difference.
In Bosnia, Issa Abdullah, the American who travels freely in and out of the country even though he has been sighted at various terrorist attacks, was lying in wait to organize an even bigger blow against the United States.
In Iran, the mullahs were positioning the country to take back control of the Persian Gulf, share weapons with its allies, and develop their own Shi’a nuclear capabilities.
NEXT: Part X – Iran goes on a weapons buying binge and gets some covert help from two key American allies.
