A deceptive book on ‘nuclear weapons conspiracy’

Deception—Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark is a deceptive book. The sheer volume (586 pages) impresses you as you hold it. The authors have added profuse notes running into about 85 pages and there are four pages of bibliography and nearly 40 index pages. And the list of sources is more than impressive. The authors thank Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, Shahbaz Sharif, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Farhatullah Baber, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Samina Ahmed, Humayun Gohar, Brigadier Mohammad Yousuf, Hamid Gul, Mirza Aslam Beg, Asad Durani, General Arif, Farooq Leghari, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, VA Jaffery, Iqbal Akhund and the late Agha Shahi who they say were extremely generous with their time and memories. I am not listing the names of the US, Indian and British sources mentioned because many don’t mean much to Pakistani readers and some of them would not know more than what the above mentioned people know about Pakistan’s nuclear programme. The authors omitted naming a number of their sources because as the two said “(they) asked not to be named fearing repercussions, especially in Pakistan where speaking out nowadays gets people ostracised and even killed.” All this certainly adds an imposing aura to the book. But very quickly you find there is nothing much in the book you do not know already.

The husband and wife team of authors was there at Akber’s in Soho, where the book was launched on Wednesday for the benefit of a small group of local journalists and writers. Introductions over, I could exchange only a few pleasantries with the author couple because it was too noisy in the small pub for any intelligent exchange. Even then I found out quickly that Adrian is no friend of Musharraf. In fact he told me that not only he has been banned from entering Pakistan, but a dozen of his contacts and fixers had been picked up by the government agents and roughed up well and proper.

The name of the book I thought suggested it to be an investigative exercise tracing A.Q. Khan’s so-called clandestine nuclear proliferation network, how it was unearthed, who did what and naming and shaming of others involved in this game, besides Dr Khan. According to the claim of authors themselves, “Deception was pieced together with the help of a trove of official documents—restricted government memorandums, embassy cables, company telexes and classified reports, written by ambassadors, cabinet members, policy makers and civil servants—many of them released under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) thanks to the endeavours of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, Washington. Others were obtained from contacts in India, Pakistan, London, the US, Israel and elsewhere.”

But long before you put down the book you get the feeling that the nuclear case has been used as an excuse to do a comprehensive but petty hatchet job on Pakistan. The graphic language used to re-tell stories told a hundred times if not more, makes the book read more like a horror tale but too transparent to horrify perhaps even the most gullible reader. It is more of an accusatory book desperately trying to pass off as a factual story. The authors have used a number of published facts and juxtapositioned them in such a way as to allow a large room for innuendoes to slip in creating the impression of being the real truth.

My interest in the book had been whetted by a recent statement of Benazir Bhutto that if she came to power again, she would not deny the IAEA access to Dr. AQ Khan who is in house arrest in Pakistan since he confessed to having single-handedly sold nuclear material and equipment in the international market. On the face of it she seems to have committed political blasphemy. More so because these are election times.

To digress a little, Ms Bhutto has this uncanny habit of taking the most controversial positions at the most ‘importune’ moments like general elections. I remember her giving a controversial interview to Radio Tehran on Kashmir soon after she was sworn in as prime minister for the second time but before the bye-elections. Nawaz used the story to criticise the PPP chairperson in his by-election speeches and regained all the seats but polled less votes than what he had in these very constituencies in the general elections. Similarly during the first Iraq war when the then COAS General Aslam Beg had manoeuvred to bring the nation out on the streets in support of Saddam Hussain, Benazir Bhutto, duirng who was doing her first stint as the leader of the opposition, was giving TV interviews in the US criticising Saddam. This had brought her party members in Pakistan under a lot of pressure but in the end it was only my friend Javed Jabbar who felt obliged to leave the party. I could go on and on about how Benazir has perfected this art of speaking ‘wrong’ things at the ‘right’ time or ‘right’ things at the ‘wrong’ time, without losing a grain of her support in the masses.

But let us now go back to the book. One paragraph in the first chapter (Introduction: The Core) of the book tells it all: In reality, Khan’s confession was a ruse. It takes more than one person to make a mess of this proportion. Khan was the fall guy and his performance papered over the true nature of what many now believe was the nuclear crime of all our lifetimes and undoubtedly the source of our future wars. The nuclear bazaar Khan claimed to have orchestrated certainly existed, but where the public and private stories diverged was that the covert trade in doomsday technology was not the work of one man, but the foreign policy of a nation, plotted and supervised by Pakistan’s ruling military clique, supposedly a key ally in America’s war on terror. The true scandal was how the trade and the Pakistan military’s role in it had been discovered by high-ranking US and European officials many years before, but rather than interdict it they had worked hard to cover it up.