00:00I'm going to ask you to wear some speculation hat over here, please. It's a very fundamental
00:05question. Now, why would the United States be okay with Pakistan getting the Islamic bomb,
00:11but not an Iran getting an Islamic bomb, and specifically when A.Q. Khan has publicly said
00:16that he wanted to give this to Iran in the first place? Okay, I'm speculating here. I've got my
00:22speculation hat on, but you may recall that Pakistan was at least assisting us in Afghanistan
00:28at the time, and so I think there was at least some turning a blind eye to Pakistan's acquisition
00:37of its own nuclear capability, and we thought that was a price we had to pay, I guess. I think it was
00:43probably a stupid move, but the United States has had a number of stupid moves, and maybe that was
00:54one of them, so, you know. I'm going to build on that a little bit. I'm going to build on that.
00:59Well, I mean, you know, things like overthrowing Mossadegh in 53, that worked for about 20 years,
01:08and then, boy, boomeranged on us. The attempt at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 in Cuba, you know, I seldom
01:18have we ever supported an indigenous movement that turned out well for the people or for the United
01:23States. It's one of those things, you know, you may get some short-term gratification from it, but
01:31if people want to overthrow their government, they need to do it themselves. We can't really,
01:35we shouldn't really be in there. More than that, this is the love story of successive
01:40White Houses with Pakistani military dictators, which, listen, we share a border with them, so it
01:46really baffles us. And this is where, just coming back to my point, post 9-11, there was a real
01:52fear, and there's been reporting in the New York Times as well, that these nuclear weapons that
01:57Pakistan possessed could fall into the hands of terrorists that were, it seemed as if they were
02:02overrunning the country, because Parvez Musharraf was running the show at the time. He was deeply unpopular
02:09at the time, and the Americans essentially were propping him up. So did, when you, I know that
02:16this was towards the end, I guess, of your career, but did you ever pick up the sense that, you know,
02:21the Americans had a contingency plan in case those nuclear weapons fell in the wrong hands?
02:26I'm pretty convinced they did. One of my best friends, Rolf Mouat-Larsen, was head of the CIA's
02:33Counter Terrorist Center's Weapons of Mass Destruction Department, and he, Director George
02:41Tenet, CIA Director George Tenet knew that Rolf and I were close friends, best friends, and so he said,
02:47I want to make sure that you both are, have complete transparency into each other's operations to make
02:54sure that Dr. Khan or other folks in Pakistan are not supplying these to Osama bin Laden.
03:02And so we did that, and we found no evidence that that was going on, but we were, we were concerned
03:08about it, sure. I mean, that was the nightmare scenario. What if Al-Qaeda or some Al-Qaeda supporters
03:15gets a nuclear weapon? You know, but it turned out, now, Khan may have done some extremely stupid
03:21or irrational things, but that wasn't one of them.
03:31And so, we're going out here, how would we jadi out?
03:44So that we arrived at the later, KKRI, that multiple scenes around the street?
03:49We are in one mirror, now, well, and we have the intention to do it.
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