Book accuses US, Swiss of nuclear cover-up

UNITED NATIONS, (Reuters) – The CIA persuaded  Switzerland to destroy millions of pages of evidence showing  how a Pakistani scientist helped Iran, Libya and North Korea  acquire sensitive nuclear technology, according to a new book.

“Fallout” by Americans Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz  tells the story of the illicit nuclear procurement network  created by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist who is widely  considered the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.

In 2004, Khan admitted to selling Iran, North Korea and  Libya uranium enrichment technology that can be used to produce  fuel for civilian reactors or atomic weapons. Khan’s movements  have been curtailed since his public confession.

Analysts and U.N. officials have said that Khan’s illicit  network, which specialized in helping countries skirt  international sanctions, created the greatest nuclear  proliferation crisis of the atomic age.
“Fallout” is the second book on the Khan network by Frantz  and Collins, a husband-and-wife team of investigative  journalists.

They say the United States pressured the Swiss government  to destroy evidence that could have helped U.N. investigators  determine the full extent of Khan’s black marketeering and say  they did it to cover up CIA mistakes that had enabled Khan’s  network to flourish.
The CIA, the authors say, tracked Khan’s activities for  years thanks to a Swiss family, the Tinners, involved in the  supply of nuclear technology which was a key element in Khan’s  network. Members of the family were recruited by the CIA.

Through the Tinners, the CIA successfully infiltrated the  Khan network, but Washington failed to act quickly enough to  stop it spreading “the world’s most dangerous technology to the  world’s most dangerous regimes,” Frantz told Reuters.

The CIA tried to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program while  monitoring Khan, but it appears the Iranians discovered the  problems with equipment that had been tampered with and  repaired it, the authors write.

A Swiss investigator who worked on the Khan case was quoted  by the authors as saying that Washington had wanted the  evidence collected in raids on the Tinners’ home and offices,  including computer files, hard drives, disks and documents, to  be destroyed in order to “hide their own stupidity.”