From 1985 to 1988, Richard Barlow worked inside the CIA, tracking Pakistan’s secret nuclear weapons program. He uncovered how the U.S. government not only knew about Pakistan’s bomb but chose to ignore it—until he exposed the truth. What happened next shocked the world. In this video, we dive into Barlow’s explosive revelations, the cover-up, and the consequences for whistleblowers in the intelligence world.
00:00And begin with your time when you started off in the CIA, which was 1985, if my research is correct.
00:07And you said that Pakistan weapons program was going on before you arrived at the CIA.
00:15And I mean, it's now known that A.Q. Khan had stolen designs from the Urenko plant in the 70s and had basically brought centrifuge designs to Pakistan and had kickstarted the nuclear program.
00:28So. Tell me what the nature of the intelligence was that you saw that led you to believe conclusively that they had achieved enrichment of uranium and had the bomb by the mid 80s.
00:43Well, I can't get into the details of the intelligence that we knew, but we had extensive intelligence on their enrichment activities.
00:54Lots. I mean, we knew exactly what they were doing, you know, and we also had a lot of intelligence on their nuclear weapons activities at that time, you know, in the early to mid 1980s.
01:10I don't think that they had the bomb before 86, 87, you know, they actually manufactured nuclear explosive device, technically speaking.
01:26Right. But that's what they were working on.
01:29And we had, you know, we had superb intelligence.
01:33I mean, we probably had better intelligence, at least in those days.
01:38OK. On Pakistan's nuclear weapons and enrichment activities than any other nuclear program in history.
01:46Right. And so zooming out, it was it American policy at the time of essentially a wink and a nod about Pakistan's nuclear program and the fact that battling the Soviets trumped any sort of nuclear proliferation that was going on by Pakistan?
02:12Well, I think that's a fairly accurate assessment.
02:17I mean, it all began under the Carter administration when I was at the arms control agency in 1981, 82.
02:26Initially, as I said, we knew all about Pakistan's enrichment activities, et cetera, back in the late 1970s, by 79 or 78.
02:37And President Carter put major sanctions on Pakistan initially.
02:43And then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and it's Zbigniew Brzezinski is the one who really started this mess.
02:54You know, in my opinion, he wrote a very famous memo back around 1980, 81, in which he said, I mean, you use the right term.
03:06And there was no lack of intelligence.
03:09This was not an intelligence failure.
03:12This was a policy issue here where the problems arose.
03:17A wink and a nod, as you said.
03:19And in his famous memo, he said, we cannot let our proliferation policy dictate our foreign policy.
03:26And I would say, you know, that that's what happened for the next 25, 30 years.
03:33Yes.
03:34So, yes.
03:35I mean, the the.
03:38The Cold Warriors were in charge.
03:42Fighting the Soviets was the number one overbearing issue.
03:47And, you know, I think back in those days, they were completely clueless as to the threat of Islamism, that a country like Pakistan obtaining nuclear weapons could pose a national security threat to the United States or our allies.
04:08They were, they didn't think it was a problem because they looked at everything through the Cold War Soviet lens.
04:22They thought they were good people, you know, and the Mujahideen.
04:26I mean, not just the Pakistanis, but, you know, people like Ghulhuddin Hamakjar and Haqqani, you know, I mean, go read Charlie Wilson's work.
04:35You can see how wonderful they thought these people were.
04:40And and these the Haqqani Network and Hekmatyar, they they reappeared with Bush Seconds War.
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