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Musharraf Named in Nuclear Probe
Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has told investigators that he helped North Korea design and equip facilities for making weapons-grade uranium with the knowledge of senior military commanders, including Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, according to a friend of Khan’s and a senior Pakistani investigator. Khan also has told investigators that Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the Pakistani army chief of staff from 1988 to 1991, was aware of assistance Khan was providing to Iran’s nuclear program and that two other army chiefs, in addition to Musharraf, knew and approved of his efforts on behalf of North Korea, the same individuals said Monday.

Khan’s assertions of high-level army involvement came in the course of a two-month probe into allegations that he and other Pakistani nuclear scientists made millions of dollars from the sale of equipment and expertise to Iran, Libya and North Korea. They contradict repeated contentions by Musharraf and other senior officials that Khan and at least one other scientist, Mohammed Farooq, acted out of greed and in violation of long-standing government policy that bars the export of nuclear weapons technology to any foreign country. In conversations with investigators, Khan urged them to question the former army commanders and Musharraf, asserting that "no debriefing is complete unless you bring every one of them here and debrief us together," according to the friend, who has met with the accused scientist twice during the past two months. On the basis of Khan’s claims, Beg and another former army chief of staff, Gen. Jehangir Karamat, who occupied the post from 1996 to 1998, have been questioned by investigators in recent days, but both have denied any knowledge of the transactions, according to a senior Pakistani military officer. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s chief military spokesman, declined to comment on the specifics of the allegations but asserted that "General Pervez Musharraf neither authorized such transfers nor was involved in any way with such deeds, even before he was president."

Khan told two generals who jointly questioned him last month that three army chiefs of staff, including Musharraf, had known of his dealings with North Korea, according to the friend of the scientist. U.S. officials have long suspected that Pakistan supplied uranium enrichment technology to North Korea in exchange for help with its ballistic missile program, and that Khan acted as the principal agent of the arrangement. A retired Pakistani army corps commander said Monday that the barter arrangement dates to December 1994, when then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto traveled to North Korea at the request of Gen. Abdul Waheed, the army chief of staff at the time. A few months later, Khan led a delegation of scientists and military officers to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, according to the retired general and a senior active duty officer. Musharraf was serving at the time as Waheed’s director general for military operations. In January 1996, Waheed was replaced as chief of staff by Karamat, who secretly visited North Korea in December 1997. Four months after the trip, in April 1998, Karamat presided over the successful test-firing of a medium-range missile the Pakistanis called a Ghauri. According to U.S. intelligence officials and a former Pakistani nuclear scientist, the Ghauri was simply a renamed North Korean-supplied Nodong missile. Pakistani officials maintain publicly that the Ghauri missile is indigenous to Pakistan.
... despite the fact that it smells like rotted cabbage.
The senior investigator said Khan claimed that Karamat was privy to the details of the barter arrangement through which Pakistan received the missile, and that Khan had insisted that Karamat’s role also be examined. Khan also has asserted that Musharraf had to have been aware of the agreement with North Korea because Musharraf took over responsibility for the Ghauri missile program when he became army chief of staff in October 1998. According to Kidwai’s account to journalists, senior military commanders did not get wind of Khan’s nuclear dealings with North Korea until 2000, when the ISI conducted a raid on an aircraft that the laboratory had chartered for a planned flight to North Korea. Although a search of the aircraft turned up no evidence, authorities were sufficiently concerned that they warned Khan against pursuing any clandestine trade with North Korea, Kidwai told the journalists.
Posted by: Paul Moloney 2004-02-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=25526