Plame Watched A.Q. Khan

Ignoring the scintillating topic of Valerie Plame’s nails and much else in this interview, I have to scream now: Plame thinks A.Q. Khan was only worth ‘watching’.

I thought one of the most interesting personalities that came up in the documentary was A. Q. Khan. How was he left unchecked for so many years and left to do so much damage? Are we still seeing the fallout?

We are indeed still seeing his fallout. It was my group at the CIA, counter-proliferation division, that ultimately wrapped him up and shut down Libya’s program in December 2003. In intelligence work sometimes you let an operation continue to see where it will lead you, where do the threads go and pulling, pulling, pulling. We wrapped up A.Q. Khan as quickly as we thought was prudent, and that allowed us to peer into his network and to see what else was there. We thought it would be useless early on to just pull him out when so much was still out there that we didn’t know.

Useless?! To allow a ideologue to continue stealing Urenco technology, re-engineer it, and package it for sale to any state wanting its own nukes, to “see what else was there” is about the dumbest idea I’ve heard.

The rest is fairly lame, too. But, I would like to see this documentary, just not the part with Plame in it.


Filed under: Movies/Media, WMD Tagged: aq khan, cia, countdown to zero, libya, nuclear proliferation, valerie plame