The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  After Gerald Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Cheney had returned to his native Wyoming, where he was elected to Congress two years later. In the House, Cheney established himself as a reliable conservative, voting against the establishment of Martin Luther King Day, the U.S. Department of Education, and Head Start, the program to provide early education to poor children. In December 1988, House Republicans elected Cheney as minority whip, the number two leadership spot, though he didn’t stay long. After the newly elected president, George H. W. Bush, tapped Texas senator John Tower for defense secretary, the nomination was rejected by the Senate because of reports of Tower’s improper behavior with women and inappropriate ties to defense contractors; Bush turned to Cheney as his second choice. Cheney had been on the job for only a few weeks when the question arose over whether to sell the F-16s to Pakistan.

  Barlow’s report on Pakistan was to be part of an internal discussion with the White House. Having watched previous efforts to cover up Pakistan’s nuclear progress, Barlow worried that this was going to be business as usual. “We knew the F-16s they already had were perfectly capable nuclear-delivery systems,” Barlow said. “There were a few minor modifications necessary. It was not even a hypothetical. We knew they not only planned to do it but had taken the steps.”

  After reading the most recent intelligence reports, Barlow’s views remained unchanged about what the Pakistanis were doing and about the role that the F-16s played in their nuclear strategy. The top-secret assessment he prepared for Cheney was an unvarnished account of the status of Pakistan’s nuclear program and activities, of Bhutto’s lack of influence over the nuclear program, and of Pakistan’s intentions to use the F-16s purchased in previous years from the United States to deliver nuclear weapons, which were nearing completion. The assessment concluded that the proposed new sale violated congressional restrictions. Barlow knew he was staking out an unpopular and potentially dangerous position, so he asked the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency, to prepare a separate assessment. The DIA reached the same conclusion, saying that Pakistan was preparing to use its F-16s as a nuclear delivery platform. The concerns did not stop at the Pentagon. Evaluations by nuclear-weapons experts from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California also concluded that F-16s could carry a nuclear payload with relatively minor modifications well within the capabilities of Pakistani technicians. Even analysts at the CIA had reached the same conclusion.

  Barlow’s analysis, which covered the findings of all the other intelligence agencies, threatened to derail the sale of the aircraft, but first the report had to survive the vetting system within the Pentagon. The first step in that process was for Barlow to submit his conclusions to officials at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

  The report was sent first to Michael MacMurray, the desk officer responsible for military sales to Pakistan. A few days later, MacMurray summoned Barlow to his office and said that he objected to the findings. MacMurray said that he was alarmed because Barlow had used such unequivocal language in describing the sale as impossible because it would violate the Pressler and Solarz amendments. Barlow responded that he considered the intelligence behind his conclusion to be rock solid and he refused to change it. MacMurray pressed the issue, and eventually Barlow agreed to soften the passage slightly, altering the section saying that the sale was “impossible” to “extremely difficult or impossible.”

  Even the new version could derail the deal, so someone within the Pentagon hierarchy secretly altered Barlow’s conclusions so radically that the version sent to the defense secretary supported the sale. Since the intelligence did not support selling the aircraft to Pakistan, the intelligence was changed; Cheney argued in favor of the transaction later that month at the White House.

  WHEN BHUTTO arrived in Washington in June, Pakistan’s nuclear program was high on the agenda. The last Soviet troops had left Afghanistan in February, and the new administration had already hinted that President Bush might refuse to certify that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear weapon. As Reagan’s vice president for eight years and director of the CIA in the mid-1970s, Bush knew at least the broad outline of Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions. As president, his daily intelligence briefings included regular updates on the topic. “The president of the United States knew more about Pakistan’s nuclear program than the prime minister of Pakistan,” said a senior official at CIA headquarters. “He probably had more accurate information available to him because our scientists were doing better analysis. All of our information was processed by all the smartest people who knew more about how bombs are made than anyone else in the world.” Secretary of State James Baker had sent word to Bhutto before her departure that he felt the United States could no longer ignore the evidence of Pakistan’s nuclear efforts.

  Pakistan had never needed American aid more—its economy was in a shambles, with more than three million Afghan refugees who feared returning home because of civil conflict consuming scarce resources and sparking local resentment. Bhutto put on a charm offensive, telling a joint session of Congress that her election was a signal that democracy had arrived in Pakistan and that nuclear weapons were not part of its future. “I can declare that we do not possess, nor do we intend to make, a nuclear device,” she said, winning extended applause from both sides of the political aisle.

  The declaration was wishful thinking, at best. Bhutto might have been in the dark about the details of her country’s nuclear ambitions, but she knew the military intended to develop a nuclear device. Any doubts she may have harbored were removed the next day when she visited CIA headquarters to meet with the director, William Webster. In the conference room adjacent to Webster’s office, aides rolled out the model of the Pakistani bomb presented years earlier to the country’s foreign minister. Webster explained that American intelligence not only knew the dimensions of the nuclear device being built but had the technology and resources to monitor the enrichment level produced by Pakistan’s centrifuges. Bhutto was in a state of mild shock, but she composed herself enough to pledge to Webster that she would keep the enrichment level below the weapons level and promised that Pakistan would not transfer nuclear technology to any other country.

  After leaving Langley, Bhutto confided to Mark Siegel, a former Carter administration official who was Pakistan’s lobbyist in Washington at the time, that the briefing was more thorough than any information she had been provided by Pakistani authorities, leaving her more concerned than ever about what the military was doing behind her back.

  In a private meeting at the White House the following day, Bush told Bhutto that her agreement to keep Pakistan from enriching uranium to weapons-grade level was enough to allow him to certify once again that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear weapon, which meant financial assistance would continue. Behind the scenes, however, many in the American government believed that Bhutto’s assurances were empty and that Pakistan had done everything but turn the final screw. Bush’s decision reflected the concern among American policymakers that a cutoff in aid would doom Bhutto’s government and set back the course of democracy in Pakistan. The CIA believed the military would prohibit Bhutto from delivering on any pledge to restrict the nuclear program, regardless of her personal commitment. Bhutto herself later maintained that her opposition to going nuclear was one of the reasons she was later ousted from office.

  In addition to continuing assistance, Bush provided Bhutto with additional political cover with the Pakistani military by authorizing the sale of more F-16 fighter jets. (Pakistan already had forty American-made F-16s.) The generals had urged Bhutto to secure them, and it was one of her top priorities during the visit to Washington. The $1.4 billion sale would be subject to congressional approval, however, and even before Bhutto left town opposition surfaced among congressmen who feared the sale would fuel the arms race between Pakistan and India.

  Bush’s agreement to sell Pakistan the F-16s failed to improve Bhutto’s standing with the military. He
r promises to Congress not to build the bomb had dominated the headlines in the Pakistani press, reinforcing fears that she was willing to sacrifice the country’s nuclear program for closer ties with Washington. “Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability simply cannot be safe under the leadership of a westernized woman,” said Maulana Sami ul-Haq, the head of one of the leading Islamic parties aligned with the ISI. “She cares more for American approval than for ensuring the Umma’s first nuclear bomb,” referring to the worldwide Muslim community.

  BEFORE giving its approval to sell the additional F-16s to Pakistan, Congress wanted further assurance that Pakistan was not pursuing a nuclear weapon and that the planes could not be modified to carry nuclear payloads. The Democrats controlled Congress, and many of them suspected that the Reagan administration had distorted intelligence about Pakistan’s nuclear quest to keep aid flowing throughout the 1980s. By July, a resolution was introduced to block the deal. In response, the administration adopted a unified position that the transaction should be approved and that Pakistan had not violated American law. Lest anyone stray from the reservation, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz sent word throughout the Pentagon bureaucracy that he personally expected full backing for the F-16 sale.

  On August 2, the House Foreign Affairs Committee heard testimony from administration officials. The principal witnesses were Arthur Hughes, who had recently become the deputy assistant secretary of defense, with responsibility for Pakistan and India, and Teresita Schaffer, deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia. Both testified that the sale would strengthen U.S.-Pakistan relations and reinforce the Pakistani military’s confidence in Bhutto’s civilian government. Bolstering Pakistan’s conventional forces with the F-16s, they said, would reduce the likelihood that Pakistan would feel compelled to cross the nuclear-weapons threshold.

  When Democrat Dante Fascell asked whether the United States could rely on Bhutto’s word that the country would not develop nuclear weapons, Schaffer replied, “We obviously place great value on the fact that Benazir Bhutto told the Congress and the world that Pakistan does not have, nor intends to produce, a nuclear weapon.”

  Even if Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons, Hughes assured Congress, the F-16s could not be modified to carry nuclear weapons. “In order to deliver a nuclear device with any reasonable degree of accuracy and safety, it first would be necessary to replace the entire wiring package in the aircraft,” he said. “In addition to building a weapons carriage mount, one would also have to redo the fire control computer, the stores management system, and mission computer software to allow the weapon to be dropped accurately and to redistribute weight and balance after release. We believe this capability far exceeds the state of the art in Pakistan and could only be accomplished with a major release of data and industrial equipment from the U.S.”

  Steve Solarz, the New York Democrat, was still highly skeptical of administration pronouncements about Pakistan and pressed Hughes on that point. “Now, in your testimony, Mr. Hughes, I gather you’ve said that the F-16s which we have already sold them are not nuclear capable?”

  “That’s right, sir,” replied Hughes.

  Barlow was livid when he learned a few hours later about Hughes’s sworn testimony, alerting his bosses at the Pentagon to what he regarded as its misleading nature. Barlow did not blame Hughes, who was new in the job and had relied on prepared testimony, but he maintained that the underlying material had been altered to an extent that misled Congress. Pentagon officials were alarmed—not by Barlow’s accusation that Congress had been misinformed but that he might be on the verge of blowing the whistle.

  Gerald Brubaker, the senior assistant for nonproliferation policy at the Pentagon, summoned Barlow to his office. Barlow had been promoted six weeks earlier. Suddenly, he was told he was being fired. Brubaker refused to disclose the reasons, saying only that they were classified. Barlow felt trapped in a Kafka novel. When he protested, demanding to know who was behind the move, Brubaker first refused to say. Then he told Barlow that his dismissal was approved at high levels of the Pentagon—Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley, the assistant secretary in charge of nuclear weapons and arms control. Barlow was stunned, and he was to get another blow two days later. As he packed up his desk, he was informed that his security clearances were canceled. He still did not know anything about the allegations against him, and removing his clearances meant he might never penetrate the secret world in which his fate had been decided.

  Barlow’s sin was that he refused to go along with what he viewed as the manipulation of intelligence. He had written an accurate assessment of American intelligence concerning Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, and he had refused to back down when the Pentagon altered the findings. The Pentagon bosses who had cooked the intelligence to support the administration’s policy then decided they had to get rid of him. In fact, they decided to destroy him.

  In attempting to justify the dismissal, Brubaker started a campaign to discredit Barlow. He told the Defense Intelligence Agency and Cheney’s office that Barlow had intended to go to Congress to “give them the other side of the slant.” As part of the smear, Brubaker said his concerns about Barlow’s potential for harming the government were heightened when he learned that the intelligence analyst was under psychiatric care. Brubaker pressured security officers to dig into Barlow’s personal life, his finances, and his marriage.

  Even when the internal investigation was launched, Barlow was given no explanation for it. He was told only that it was based on a classified allegation by a senior-level Defense Department official, with the support of others who were concerned about Barlow’s ability to protect classified information. The logic was circular: Barlow was told that he was not entitled to know the names of his accusers or the details of the investigation because they were classified, and he no longer held a security clearance.

  Barlow was crushed and baffled, his faith in government shattered far beyond anything he had experienced at the CIA. He continued to beg associates at the Pentagon to describe the charges against him. He was convinced he had done nothing wrong. Without any solid understanding of why he had been fired, he feared the worst. Perhaps he had even been accused of being a Soviet spy. He also worried about the impact on his marriage, which had been in trouble since his downfall at the CIA. He and Cindy, who had also worked for the CIA, were undergoing marriage counseling at the time. Barlow later learned that it was the counseling sessions that led to a fabricated accusation that he was under psychiatric care.

  With the investigation hanging over his head, Barlow had little money and no prospects. Some Pentagon security officials, who were familiar with Barlow’s record and doubted the allegations against him, offered a solution: If he resigned from the department before his firing became official, they would give him a temporary job until the inquiry was completed and he was reinstated. He agreed reluctantly and soon found himself arranging lunches for Defense Department officials and locating public schools that would accept used computers.

  As the months wore on, Barlow grew desperate to clear his name. But he faced more false accusations, ranging from claims that he had not paid his taxes to allegations that he was an alcoholic suffering from mental illness. The pressure drove Cindy to leave him, and Barlow feared that the chance to recover his career was diminishing with each passing day. He decided to hire a lawyer to help him navigate his way back to the Pentagon. Paul Warnke, a prominent Washington lawyer and former Defense Department official, agreed to take the case on a pro-bono basis. After months of depositions and litigation, Barlow was cleared of any wrongdoing. The Defense Department’s own inquiry concluded that there was no information to support allegations that he had threatened to blow the whistle on misleading testimony or any of the other accusations. The suspension of his security clearance, the Pentagon found, was based on false charges, and his clearances were restored. But the man who spoke out about lies to Congress concerning Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal never got his
job back, despite appeals from senior Department of Defense security and personnel officials and prominent congressmen. He was damaged goods, someone whose determination that the record should reflect accurate intelligence assessments stained him. Although the allegations against him had been found to be false, they remained in his file and continued to haunt him.

  Barlow could not understand why simply telling the truth had destroyed his career. He took his case to friends in other parts of the government and to the offices of congressmen he hoped would be sympathetic enough to reach out to the Pentagon on his behalf. At one point, he made an appointment with Len Weiss, optimistic that Senator Glenn’s well-known concerns about Pakistani proliferation would translate into a helping hand. Weiss knew something of Barlow’s circumstances, and he was indeed sympathetic, seeing in his downfall a Washington parable.

  “You should understand that although there is a law to protect whistleblowers, they always find a way to get to you,” he told Barlow as they sat in Weiss’s Senate office. “The whistleblowers always suffer. We can do our best to see that they don’t get to you, but they will get to you. They always do.”

  Weiss promised that he would get in touch with the inspector general at the Pentagon and ask for a review of the case, but he did not hold out much hope. As Barlow left the office, Weiss thought of him as a patriotic but naïve person, someone who believed telling the truth would be enough to protect him. But Weiss had been in Washington too long to believe that. Barlow, he knew, would have been better off if he had leaked the real information about Pakistan’s procurement crimes to a friendly Senate staff member, who could have made sure that it got into the right hands without leaving Barlow’s fingerprints and jeopardizing his career. Barlow’s case was extreme, but it was not isolated, and Weiss regarded it as an indictment of the way the U.S. government—or perhaps any government—operates.