Jonathan Schwarz:
Fixing the intelligence, circa 1989
There are other episodes almost no one knows about, though. One is the
effort by Cheney and others in the eighties to cover up Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, as well as the way we and the Saudis were helping. (They couldn’t let the truth get out because Pakistan was helping us with our proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which of course turned out to be a giant success in its own right.) In order to do this, they had to crush a government nuclear analyst named Richard Barlow who was loudly warning about what Pakistan was up to.
Today the Guardian is running an excellent story about Barlow—what they did to him, what’s happened to him since, and the chance he may receive a small measure of justice. It provides a real glimpse into how the US government truly works, which is why it appears in a foreign publication. I encourage you to read it all.
http://thismodernworld.com/4021The man who knew too much He was the CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, but Rich Barlow was thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up. Now he's to have his day in court. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report
Saturday October 13, 2007
The Guardian
Rich Barlow idles outside his silver trailer on a remote campsite in Montana - itinerant and unemployed, with only his hunting dogs and a borrowed computer for company. He dips into a pouch of American Spirit tobacco to roll another cigarette. It is hard to imagine that he was once a covert operative at the CIA, the recognised, much lauded expert in the trade in Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
He prepared briefs for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at the Pentagon, for the upper echelons of the CIA and even for the Oval Office. But
when he uncovered a political scandal - a conspiracy to enable a rogue nation to get the nuclear bomb - he found himself a marked man.....................
He soon discovered, however, that
senior officials in government were taking quite the opposite view: they were breaking US and international non-proliferation protocols to shelter Pakistan's ambitions and even sell it banned WMD technology. In the closing years of the cold war, Pakistan was considered to have great strategic importance. It provided Washington with a springboard into neighbouring Afghanistan - a route for passing US weapons and cash to the mujahideen, who were battling to oust the Soviet army that had invaded in 1979. Barlow says,
"We had to buddy-up to regimes we didn't see eye-to-eye with, but I could not believe we would actually give Pakistan the bomb........................
It is only now, amid the recriminations about the war in Iraq and reassessments of where the real danger lies, that Barlow - the despised bringer of bad news about Pakistan - is finally to get a hearing. More than 20 years after this saga began,
his case, filed on Capitol Hill, is coming to court later this month. His lawyers are seeking millions of dollars in compensation for Barlow as well as the reinstatement of his $80,000 a year government pension.
Evidence will highlight what happened when ideologues took control of intelligence in three separate US administrations - those of Reagan, and of the two Bushes - and how a CIA analyst who would not give up his pursuit for the truth became a fall guy.amazing read:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,2188777,00.html