WASHINGTON, April 30: It was at a one-on-one meeting in New York that former CIA chief George Tenet convinced President Pervez Musharraf that Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan was heading an international ring of nuclear smugglers.

In his book ‘At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA’, Mr Tenet writes that he met Gen Musharraf in New York, where he was attending the UN General Assembly, on Sept 24, 2003.

“We met in his hotel suite. It was what we in the intelligence business called a ‘four yes’ meeting – just the two of us. No handlers, no note takers.”

“(Dr) A.Q. Khan, I said, is betraying your country. He has stolen some of your nation’s most sensitive secrets and sold them to the highest bidders.”

“(Dr) Khan has stolen your nuclear weapons secrets. We know this, because, we stole them from him.”

Mr Tenet then pulled out of his briefcase some blueprints and diagrams of nuclear designs stolen from the Pakistan government.

“I had been briefed well enough by my team that I could point out markings on the drawings that would prove that these designs were supposed to be in a vault in Islamabad not a hotel room in New York.”

Mr Tenet pulled out a blueprint of a Pakistan P-1 centrifuge design and said: “He sold this to Iran.” Then he produced design for the next-generation P-2 centrifuge. “He has sold this to several countries.” Without pause, he laid before President Musharraf another document. “These are the drawings of a uranium processing plant that he sold to Libya.”

Mr Tenet noted that although later Gen Musharraf described it as one of the most embarrassing moments of his presidency, he betrayed no emotion.

“I always found him to be a cool customer, someone who seems to be taking in every word you are saying.”

The CIA chief told Gen Musharraf: “Mr President, if a country like Libya or Iran or, God forbid, an organisation like Al Qaeda, gets a working nuclear device and the world learns that it came from your country, I am afraid the consequences would be devastating.”

Mr Tenet then suggested a few steps the US and Pakistan could take jointly to find out the full extent of Dr Khan’s ‘corruption’ and to put and end it once and for all.

“President (Gen) Musharraf asked a few questions and then simply said: ‘Thank you, George, I will take care of this’.”