Monday, October 29, 2007

The Nuclear Bombshell That Never Went Off


By Jeff Stein
Congressional Quarterly

Friday 19 October 2007

Say you're a member of Congress, and a Pentagon expert tells you that top officials are secretly letting Taiwan go nuclear, to contain China's emerging threat.

Do you: (1) start an investigation, with an eye toward hearings to grill officials on the facts, or (2) drop it and stand aside as officials run your whistleblower out of town?

In the real-life case of Pakistan and nuclear weapons, the answer from Congress has been (2). Twenty years ago, the House Foreign Affairs Committee learned that officials in the Reagan and Bush administrations were looking the other way while Pakistan acquired U.S. technology for its clandestine nuclear weapons program. Later, the United States allowed Pakistan to tweak its U.S.-supplied F-16s to carry nuclear bombs over India.

Why? Because Washington was dependent on Pakistan for arming and supplying the Islamic warriors battling the Soviet Red Army next door in Afghanistan.

Congress had passed legislation in 1985, aimed at Pakistan, that required the administration to cut off all military and economic aid to any country that was clandestinely pursuing nuclear weapons.

When the last beleaguered Soviet unit withdrew from Afghanistan on Feb. 15, 1989, CIA officials in Langley, Va., clinked champagne glasses. But the glasses were hardly dry when into the vacuum came the Taliban, followed by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Talk about unintended consequences.

But that wasn't all. Eventually it emerged that Pakistan's mad scientist, A.Q. Khan was running "a nuclear Wal-Mart," as Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, D-N.Y., put it at a hearing of a House International Relations subcommittee last May, "that sold nuclear equipment and related technologies to North Korea and Iran, two-thirds of the axis of evil, and also tried to sell it to the other third," Iraq. Khan also sold nuclear equipment to Libya and Syria.

Worse, perhaps, al Qaeda is actively seeking nuclear weapons, in the opinion of U.S. intelligence agencies and most private experts.

All this could have been avoided, says Richard M. Barlow, the former CIA and Defense Department expert whose warnings on the acquiescence of Reagan and Bush administration officials in Pakistan's nuclear program were quashed by the Pentagon and avoided by Congress.

For his candor, and despite the backing of some top intelligence officials, Barlow was stripped of his Top Secret/Codeword clearances and hounded out of the Pentagon.

Now he lives in a motor home, divorced, broke and unemployed. He spends half the year in a campground in Montana, the other half in California, living off the quickly diminishing proceeds of the sale of his house.

"I have serious financial problems," Barlow, now 52, told me by phone last week. "I basically live like a vagrant."

Forgotten Soldier

Barlow's story has been told before in magazine and newspaper articles that are mostly forgotten, even by some experts I talked to who only dimly remembered his name.

But if one definition of news is what we've forgotten, then two new books featuring Barlow to one degree or another could well astound the public all over again. Some members of Congress might even be moved to clear Barlow's name and hold officials accountable.

Luckily for them, Congress is hardly mentioned in "Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons," by British reporters Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clerk, and "America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise," by David Armstrong and Joe Trento.

One reason is that Congress has shown almost no interest in what Barlow has to say.

In 1987 then-Rep. Stephen Solarz, D-N.Y., chairman of the House International Relations Committee, "went wild," Barlow says, when he heard that officials were lying. But it never was explored in the open.

The closest Congress came to airing Barlow's charges came in the 2001 Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing of Paul D. Wolfowitz to be deputy secretary of Defense. According to Barlow, Wolfowitz knew what Pakistan was doing in the 1980s when he was undersecretary of State and later deputy secretary of Defense for policy in the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Barlow's name was never mentioned, but Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., briefly summarized what happened after Barlow told Congress the truth and asked Wolfowitz if whistleblowers should be retaliated against if they provided Congress classified information.

"My answer is, absolutely not," Wolfowitz said. He added that he was "aware of the issue" in the 1980s, and sought to distance himself from the decisions of Reagan and Bush administration officials not to tell Congress what was going on.

"I specifically sensed that people thought we could somehow construct a policy on a house of cards that Congress wouldn't know what the Pakistanis were doing. I've always thought policies based on withholding information from Congress are going fail in the long run, and in that case there was a clear legal obligation to keep the Congress informed," Wolfowitz told Levin in 2001.

Six and a half years later, the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade was trying to find out if the Khan network had been closed down or was simply under new management. Pakistan has prohibited U.S. intelligence from asking Khan or other officials if they made nuclear materials available to al Qaeda.

Barlow's name never came up.

And there are no firm plans to explore his allegations in the near future, said Brad Sherman, D-Calif., who chairs the subcommittee.

"The committee does not have plans to hold any hearings on this topic before the end of the year," Sherman said through a spokesman. "We most recently discussed the issue of Pakistan and nuclear weapons in July. We are carefully following the issue, gathering information and if new information warrants we will hold a hearing."

Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher, D-Calif., whom an aide described as "the foremost expert on nonproliferation" in Congress, did not respond to a request or comment over three days last week.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

A few senators, in particular, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, where Barlow used to live, have spent years trying to get the erstwhile nuclear smuggling expert some compensation for his pain and sorrow. Bingaman offered an amendment to the fiscal 2008 Defense spending bill that would consider compensation for wrongful termination.

According to multiple sources, Republicans close to the Pentagon have blocked it.

"There have been holds on it since day one," sighed Beth Pellet Levine, a spokeswoman for Iowa Republican Charles E. Grassley, a supporter of the provision. "Day one" was a decade ago.

Barlow's supporters in the Senate thought they could help him by referring his case to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which would sort out the merits of Barlow's quest for compensation.

It backfired.

CIA and Pentagon officials threw a cloak over the proceedings, declaring the supportive documents and depositions by top officials - including from CIA Deputy Director Richard Kerr and senior State Department arms negotiator Robert Galluci - "state secrets." The Reagan-appointed judge ruled not only that the government had the right to muzzle Barlow, but could withhold classified information from Congress.

Lou Fisher, the Congressional Research Service's senior specialist on the separation of powers, called the court's decision "repugnant."

"It is my personal judgment that the manner in which the Court of Federal Claims handled the case failed to do what the Senate asked: to get the facts," Fisher wrote in a private letter to Jennifer Hemingway, who in 2005 was looking into the Barlow matter for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. "The executive branch, by asserting the state secrets privilege, essentially told the court that it was not entitled to know the facts, and the court, in accepting that position, essentially told the Senate - and Congress - that it was not entitled to know the facts."

"To me that is deeply repugnant," Fisher continued. "In part, the Barlow case represents a matter of simple justice and fairness to an individual who dedicated his life to public service. More broadly, it ties directly to the institutional integrity of Congress and its right to be informed. Denied essential facts, it cannot perform its constitutional duties."

Today the committee has no interest in Barlow's case, because it "generally does not take up individual whistleblower cases in which the relevant agencies and subject matter fall under other committees' jurisdictions," says Leslie Phillips, the committee's communications director. "Instead the Committee focuses on enhancing protections for whistleblowers governmentwide."

A spokesman for John W. Warner, R-Va., who has dealt with the Barlow case for years as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not return a telephone call and e-mails asking for comment.

Steve Aftergood, editor of the authoritative Secrecy News, a publication of the Federation of American Scientists, said he's mystified why Congress hasn't done more.

"I don't know the answer," says Aftergood, "except that few whistleblowers find a sympathetic ear in Congress. And if they do, any such sympathy rarely translates into a meaningful remedy."

An embittered Barlow would agree.

"Congress has done me more harm than the office of the secretary of Defense," he said from his motor home, somewhere between Montana and California.

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