From The Times Online is an article entitled For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets, January 6, 2008, which I reproduce in its entirety, with commentary and links.
A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.
Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency's Washington field office.
She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.
Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.
The passage speaks of "a network of moles".
People are recruited for the positions they are in.
For example, foreign service and military officers could be recruited based on the jobs they do, perhaps overseas in an embassy or on a military base. Alternately, political appointees may be recruited -- ambassadors or officials in the State or Defense Departments.
Once recruited, they help recruit others -- this is addressed farther down in the article.
Also, when a position deemed important to the cartel (my word in this post for the network of bad guys) comes available, the cartel pulls strings to steer the job in the direction of one of its people who is already on the take.
As such, strategic bases are covered, and when an opening comes up, key players are moved to that position.
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.
The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.
However, Edmonds said: "He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives."
This is called treason. Edmonds has on previous occasions pointed out that these traitors have to earn now, on the government payroll, the rewards they will get later from their foreign puppet-masters.
When Edmonds herself was the target of a recruitment attempt, her position as a translator was deemed strategic. She was told that all she needed to do was tell certain people where she worked, and she would be accepted as a member of their organization. That done, she would be set for life.
It is implicitly understood that she would have to do as her colleague Melek Can Dickerson, who attempted to recruit her, was doing: take the tapes and papers the FBI had and mark them as uninteresting and impertinent, thus covering for the activities of the American Turkish Council, and other organizations, which were conducting the espionage and which were the objects of the surveillance.
She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.
"If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials," she said.
It's not just information that the FBI has, much of which is classified. There are vast quantities of publicly-available information that, if sifted through, correlated, and studied, would serve to get some good, solid indictments against a wide range of VIPs.
As such, Sibel Edmonds is only one lead, and as a lead, she takes us into the land of the TiNRATs, only she takes us in as a guide, and can get us inside a good distance.
But, anyone who wishes to, can explore the Shadow Realm; one has to brave the TiNRATs, and perhaps be willing to face them without a guide.
Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.
The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain's Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.
This is exactly what happened in the Sibel Edmonds case: it was shut down to preserve diplomatic and business relations. The tool was something called State Secrets Privilege.
But, Edmonds has not been the only target of this tool. The Bush Administration has used it quite extensively.
Obviously, they are covering up something big -- something beyond what the Clinton Administration used to cover up just by obstructing justice.
Edmonds, a fluent speaker of Turkish and Farsi, was recruited by the FBI in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Her previous claims about incompetence inside the FBI have been well documented in America.
Incompetence? But of course, that is what they would plead.
But are they really incompetent?
The world-renowned Federal Bureau of Investigation, that famous federal agency that "always gets its man"... incompetent?
Or, riddled with traitors -- agents of foreign powers who occupy key positions?
She has given evidence to closed sessions of Congress and the 9/11 commission, but many of the key points of her testimony have remained secret. She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities' failure to act.
The 9/11 Commission buried much more than the skeletons in the closet that Sibel Edmonds wanted to expose.
This is much bigger than just Sibel Edmonds.
In fact, it is too big to hide.
One of Edmonds's main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.
A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.
At a time when FBI agents in the field were frantically working on leads associated with 9/11, and urgently needed translations of wiretaps and documents, Edmonds had been told to work slowly, and allow the backlog to increase. This would give the FBI more leverage for budget battles, to hire more people, it was explained.
But, of course, the real crimes -- bribery, treason, accessory to mass murder, accessory to terrorist acts, accessory to espionage -- were hidden behind this cover story of bureaucratic empire-building. An official might go to prison if the real crimes were exposed; indeed, the public would be demanding executions, far more vehemently than in Timothy McVeigh's case. But, who would go to prison for bureaucratic empire-building? So, the cover story is all-important as a line of defense -- just in case someone gets past the TiNRATs that are guarding the periphery of the Shadow Realm.
"What I found was damning," she said. "While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on."
The Turks and Israelis had planted "moles" in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. "The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States," she said.
The A. Q. Khan network comes to mind here -- see my posts under the label The Islamic Bomb.
But, beyond that, notice something of which I have been aware, but have not extensively addressed in my blog: the role of the Israelis.
Certain elements in Israel are in very tight with Turkey, and, in principle, there is nothing wrong with that. It is refreshing to see a Muslim country have friendly relations with Israel.
Isn't it?
But, just as there are criminals and traitors in the United States who do not have the best interests of America at heart... and just as there are criminals and traitors in Turkey who do not have the best interests of Turkey at heart....
Might there be such people in Israeli circles? People who would sell Israel out, providing nuclear weapons to those who announce a desire to use them to obliterate Israel?
They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.
It is important, reading this, to recall that Able Danger, while reviewing unclassified, open-source information about Al Qaeda, identified the name of a prominent figure at Stanford University in connection with proliferation to China. That person left Stanford in late 2000 to become the National Security Advisor for the Bush-43 Administration, and is now the Secretary of State. (See Information Dominance, Part 4.)
If the Secretary of State has been involved in proliferation to China all these years, and if all these years the Bush Administration has been gagging Sibel Edmonds, then the dirt goes straight to the top of the Bush Administration.
The 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, are in this up to their eyeballs; they are in bed with those who pass nuclear secrets to rogue nations, against which they then wish to make war over those nuclear programs; they are in bed with terrorists and narcotraffickers and arms-smugglers.
Bush is best friends with the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the nation from which most of the 9/11 hijackers came but the nation which has not yet been held accountable. Bush has extensive business ties with the Bin Laden family, of whom Osama is supposedly the "black sheep". Bush has extensive ties with Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, the Libel Terrorist, who seeks to sue into silence those who expose the funding of terrorism, thereby imposing upon us a legal sharia and forcing us to submit to the will of the mujahideen (see sidebar widget about Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld).
In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.
The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.
Edmonds said: "I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more."
One official who received a great deal of cash is supposed to be none other than Dennis Hastert. Do you know that name?
The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.
Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.
Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.
Has this ever been investigated?
Mostly everyone familiar with how things work agrees that the events of 9/11 could not be orchestrated without the support of the intelligence services of a nation-state.
And, the ISI is reputedly a world-class organization.
The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.
Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan's nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.
Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. "We were aware of contact between A Q Khan’s people and Al-Qaeda," a former CIA officer said last week. "There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end."
I pointed out the A. Q. Khan - Al Qaeda connection at the beginning of The Islamic Bomb, Part 3.
It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan.
And that is why the Bush Administration never insisted that Khan be made available to international investigators: he knows where the trail leads. In one direction, it leads to his Axis of Evil, Tehran and Pyongyang; and it leads back to Condoleezza Rice and others in Washington, and ultimately to himself and his VP, in the other direction. See The Islamic Bomb, Part 1.
Continued in Part 2.
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