April 9, 2003	Wednesday	Safar 6, 1424

LONDONDERRY: The leaked top secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report titled “National Intelligence Estimate” which resulted in slapping of sanctions against Pakistan’s Kahuta Research Laboratories by the United States was put together from an 11-year-old Chicago University publication and bits and pieces collected from Indian think tanks.

The allegations repeated by CIA in its ‘latest’ reports are based on an article published in 1992 by the “The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.” The academic article in itself used references dating back to 1983, practically making the ‘latest’ CIA report more than 20 years old.

The article, which now forms a major part of the CIA report, was co-authored by David Albright, currently serving as president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington, D.C, and Mark Hibbs, who at the time of the publication of the article was European editor of Nuclear Fuel and Nucleonics Week in Bonn, Germany.

The ‘latest’ CIA intelligence information pertaining to Dr Qadeer Khan’s alleged communications in 1976 with Frits Veerman, a technician and photographer working with the Dutch Urenco project, form part of the article titled “Pakistan’s bomb: Out of the closet.” The same article mentions that Dr Khan had claimed the information he wanted from Mr Veerman about bottom bearings was not sensitive. An appeals court overturned Dr Khan’s 1983 conviction in absentia for trying to steal uranium enrichment secrets from the Netherlands in 1985, the article mentions.

Reportedly, the US government’s ‘classified’ intelligence dossier, which resulted in sanctions on Pakistan’s KRL, was submitted to President George Bush as “Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information” detailing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

The allegations in the ‘latest’ (2003) CIA report appear verbatim in the academic article (1992) which said: “Following the 1991 Gulf War, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that Urenco design information formed the backbone of Iraq’s clandestine centrifuge programme. German officials then speculated that the same unknown German sources who provided Pakistan with information on the G-1 and G-2 might have also passed the information to Baghdad.”

Interestingly enough, the allegations in the CIA report regarding North Korea and Pakistan have been skimmed off and passed as intelligence by CIA from the policy and research papers of Indian think tanks, particularly the South Asia Analysis Group. One of the officially proclaimed objectives of the Group is to advance strategic analysis and contribute to the expansion of knowledge of Indian and international security and promote public understanding.

Wording of the CIA report regarding the alleged WMDs proliferation connection between North Korea and Pakistan is the same as found in the research papers published by the South Asia Analysis Group.

The claims by the CIA in its reports that it had long known about the activities of Dr Qadeer and his relations to the countries of the ‘axis of evil’ are exact summaries of the South Asia Analysis Group’s “Pakistan as a proliferator state.”

According to media analysts at Ulster University, the CIA report, at one level, shows the effectiveness of the Indian information warfare strategy to sell the re-packaged work of its think tanks as ‘credible intelligence’ right to the top of the policy-making levels in the White House and the Pentagon.