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BEIRUT – Pakistan may have transferred nuclear weapons to the chief bankroller of its development program, Saudi Arabia, as far back as 2004, according to a then-U.S. government official who received the revelation in a Pakistani intelligence briefing at the time, says a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
Larry Werline, in a little-noticed report in Blackwater Tactical Weekly last June, said the transfer was revealed in a briefing that Pakistani Inter-Service Directorate, or ISI, officials gave him and other U.S. experts when relations between the United States and Pakistan were on a far better political and diplomatic footing.
Werline said that it was unusual that the intelligence service would oversee Pakistan’s nuclear program. Nonetheless, the high-ranking ISI briefers told of the increasing cooperation Pakistan was receiving at the time from China.
Chinese assistance included advanced production of lighter plutonium warheads for miniaturization to fit on Chinese missiles, based on technology, Werline said, that was stolen from U.S. and British work.
Essentially, the result of such work is weapons, with plutonium, that are lighter and have a higher explosive yield than weapons based on enriched uranium.
Sources have told WND/G2Bulletin that Saudi Arabia financed Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and that even now, given the increasing Islamist threat in Pakistan, Islamabad may have decided to store some of its nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia for safe keeping.
The ISI briefings took place in Pakistan in November 2004. The series of briefings over a three-day period were by ISI officials who at one time were senior Pakistani military officers.
Attending the briefings were scientists from the U.S. and Britain. One of the scientists, Werline said, was from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The briefings pointed out that ISI was in exclusive control of the country’s nuclear arsenal, and security forces were “recklessly moving nuclear warheads” around the country, Werline said.
Pakistan’s ISI is known for having created the Afghanistan Taliban and other Islamist militant jihadist groups, such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, or LeT, among others, to act as proxies for the Pakistani military to launch attacks against India, which is Pakistan’s arch-enemy even until this day.
The LeT was responsible for a series of attacks in Mumbai, India, on Nov. 28, 2008, that killed 164 people and wounded some 308.
The briefing also included details of a Pakistani nuclear scientist’s visit to Afghanistan to brief then-al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s when the Afghan government then was under the control of the Taliban.
The briefing to bin Laden “was orchestrated, planned and executed by Pakistan’s ISI,” Werline said.
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