For the last several years, my colleague Dave Armstrong and I have been immersed in unraveling the bi-partisan disaster that resulted in the unstable nation of Pakistan obtaining and then proliferating nuclear weapons.
We tell the story in America and The Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise. The book is out from Steerforth Press this week and I urge you to read it. Income from the book goes back into the National Security News Service and will allow us to continue the work we have been doing here since 1989. Organizations that once funded such work with great relish have become far fewer in recent years. As a result, we need your help to continue the work we do. I suspect one reason we are getting less money is that this is a story without a happy ending. Telling the truth in the United States is complex these days. For example, 60 Minutes did our story on the “no-fly” list last year. This year, instead of doing a story we offered them on the Pakistani proliferation network’s operations in Dubai they did a disgraceful puff piece on the Emirate and its Emir.
Though I have reason not to be objective, I think America and The Islamic Bomb is the best of several current books on the subject largely because we had the good sense not to rely on the participants in the proliferation scheme as key sources. Apparently reviewers agree with our assessment.
In the book we tell the story of a real life hero. Atif Amin, a British Customs agent, is a man of real accomplishment – he is of Pakistani descent and a devout Muslim. When health problems short-circuited his plan to fly helicopters for the Her Majesty’s Navy, he became a non-proliferation agent for the Royal Customs service. In 2000, his investigation into Pakistan’s proliferation network took him to Dubai where he discovered that even nuclear weapons components were part of free trade. Unlike his counterparts in the CIA, MI6, MI5 and the other Western intelligence services Amin did his job. But before he could finish, he was pulled out of Dubai by his superiors. His efforts to pull the lid off the Khan network were stymied and the proliferation continued for another three years. Had Amin been allowed to complete his work, Khan nuclear smuggling operation could have been exposed years earlier, before much of the damage was done.
Of course, the handful of books on the Pakistani bomb program, no matter how good, will not provide the history the public absorbs. Rather, public perception will be shaped by a glitzy new Hollywood production called Charlie Wilson’s War, starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. The media will give this fictionalized version of our government’s support for Pakistan and the Muslim Afghan rebels—the precursors to al Qaeda and the Taliban—a lot more coverage then our book will get. After all, Tom Hanks is cast as the outrageous Texas Congressman, Charlie Wilson, who supposedly wanted to bring freedom to Afghanistan. The film, with a script by Aaron Sorkin, portrays our support for the Islamic holy warriors in Afghanistan—through the good offices of Pakistan—as a strictly noble cause. Hanks loves pushing the American story into mythological proportions. But usually, in films such Apollo 13, he gets it more or less right. But in this film, he and Sorkin get it as wrong as they could get it, if the version of the script I saw is what ends up on the screen.
Hanks portrays a man who, in real life, facilitated the Saudis plan for Pakistan and Afghanistan. To gain Pakistan’s assistance in a proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the United States, with the full approval of Jimmy Carter and the encouragement of his ambitious National Security Adviser, elected to turn a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear program, setting the stage for much of the difficulty we face today. That is another of the grim stories we tell in our book.
This real story is not one that lends itself easily to Hollywood. On the other hand, the story we tell about a brave British Customs investigator attempting to expose the Pakistani nuclear proliferation network years before anyone else is a story Hollywood should tell. It also has another great advantage over the Charlie Wilson movie – it happens to be true.
One final note, the title of our new book has made some of our funders nervous and uncomfortable. Just to clarify, the phrase “Islamic Bomb” is not one we invented. The concept is one the Pakistanis themselves touted in seeking to raise funds for development of the weapon in the early years and the term appears in the title of A.Q. Khan’s semi-official biography. The niceties of political correctness cannot be allowed to obscure the truth when discussing weapons of mass destruction.
