‘US controlled Pak’s nuclear arsenal, didn’t eliminate AQ Khan due to Saudi pressure’: Former CIA agent

Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer John Kiriakou has revealed in an interview that the United States provided millions of dollars to Pakistan in the regime of former President Pervez Musharraf to “buy” the latter’s “cooperation”. He also claimed that Musharraf handed over control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal to the US. “When I was stationed in Pakistan in 2002, I was told unofficially that the Pentagon controlled the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, that Musharraf had turned control over to the United States because he was afraid of exactly what you just described (nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands),” Kiriakou told news agency ANI.

He added that Musharraf allowed the US to operate freely. “Our relations with the Pakistani government were very, very good. And look, let’s be honest here. The United States loves working with dictators. Because then you don’t have to worry about public opinion and you don’t have to worry about the media anymore. And so we essentially just purchased Musharraf,” said Kiriakou, who worked with the CIA for 15 years as an analyst and later as part of its counterterrorism operations.

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“We gave millions and millions and millions of dollars in aid, whether it was military aid or economic development aid. And we would meet with Musharraf regularly, several times a week. And essentially he would let us do whatever we wanted to do. Yes. But Musharraf also had his own people that he needed to deal with,” he said.

Musharraf had to keep the military happy, and they didn’t care about Al Qaeda, the former CIA officer added.

So in order to keep the military happy and keep some of the extremists happy, he had to allow them to continue committing terror against India while pretending to cooperate with the Americans on counterterrorism, Kiriakou said.

‘US did'nt eliminate AQ Khan due to Saudi pressure’

Kiriakou also revealed that the US decided not to eliminate the infamous nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the architect of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, after “direct intervention” by the Saudi government.

“A colleague of mine was dealing with A Q Khan,” Kiriakou said. “If we had taken the Israeli approach, we would have just killed him. He was easy enough to find. We knew where he lived. We knew how he spent his day. But he also had the support of the Saudi government. And the Saudis came to us and said, ‘Please leave him alone. Please. We like AQ Khan. We’re working with AQ Khan. We’re close to the Pakistanis. ..They named Faisalabad after King Faisal. Just leave him alone.”

Kiriakou said succumbing to Saudi pressure was a major US policy failure, and a “mistake” by Washington. “This was a mistake that the US government made, not confronting A Q Khan head-on,” he said.

Khan was born in Bhopal in 1936, but moved to Pakistan with his family in 1952 after Partition, and died in Islamabad in 2021 at the age of 85.

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He was regarded as one of the world’s most infamous nuclear smugglers, having supplied technology to countries like North Korea, Iran, and Libya.

‘US expected India to strike after 2002, 2008 terror attacks’

Kiriakou further said the US had expected India to retaliate after the 2001 Parliament attack and 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, but it did not. “At the CIA we called the Indian policy strategic patience. The Indian government would have been perfectly within its rights to respond by striking Pakistan and they didn’t. We expected the Indians to, to strike back and they didn’t,” he said.