Nuclear expert purportedly offered to help Iraq's weapons progr

UNITED NATIONS -- A middleman claiming to represent the father of Pakistan's nuclear program offered Iraq help in building an atomic bomb on the eve of the Gulf War, according to U.N. documents, diplomats and former weapons inspectors.

While there was no indication Pakistan's government was involved in the offer, former inspectors who spoke on condition of anonymity said Pakistani officials were uncooperative when the U.N. nuclear agency tried in the mid-1990s to investigate whether the scientist was really behind the proposal.

The alleged offer to Iraq, made by an unidentified agent purportedly speaking on behalf of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, was shown to The Associated Press. The revelation follows news reports this fall that Pakistan had assisted North Korea's nuclear program and comes at a time when U.N. inspectors are poring over Iraq's latest arms declaration, looking for both clues to its weapons programs and any possible omissions in its report.

Pakistan denies any link to Pyongyang or Baghdad and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca last week said President Pervez Musharraf has given his assurance that nothing is being given to North Korea.

Khan is in Pakistan and now serves as a special adviser to Musharraf. Calls for comment from Khan in Islamabad went unanswered Saturday.

Pakistan is one of three Asian nations known to have nuclear arms, along with China and India. Pakistan, now a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism is poised to join the Security Council in January.

"This is a blatant lie," said Mansoor Suhail, spokesman for the Pakistani mission to the United Nations.

In a statement issued later, Suhail's office said: "Many of the actual truths may never come out," because Iraq's recent nuclear arms declaration to the United Nations has been circulated only to the Security Council's five permanent members: the United States, Russia, France, China and Britain.

U.N. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Iraq didn't accept the offer and didn't mention it in its latest arms declaration. It also is not mentioned in a previous declaration which Iraq made in 1996 and which was recently seen by AP.

U.N. inspectors discovered the offer in 1995 amid more than 1 million Iraqi intelligence documents they found at an Iraqi storage facility.

Among the documents was a letter, dated Oct. 6, 1990 -- two months after Iraq had invaded Kuwait -- in which Iraq's secret service wrote to Iraq's nuclear weapons department:

"We've enclosed for you the following proposal from Pakistani scientist, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, regarding the possibility of helping Iraq establish a project to enrich uranium and manufacture nuclear weapons."

According to the letter, the Iraqis were told by a middleman that Khan was "prepared to give us project designs for nuclear bombs." The middleman would "ensure any requirements of materials from Western European companies, via a company he owns in Dubai," in the United Arab Emirates, it added.

According to the letter, the motive was profit for the Pakistani nuclear scientist and the middleman. Such sales and help would have violated U.N. sanctions, imposed after the Iraqi invasion, and international nuclear controls.

The U.N. atomic agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says it has never identified the middleman because Iraq would not provide more details on the offer.

The IAEA tried to track down Khan and interview him after they discovered the letter. But former inspectors on the team, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Pakistan repeatedly frustrated those attempts.

Instead, Pakistan said it had investigated on its own and determined that the letter was a fraud by an individual with no connection to the government.

In a report to the Security Council on Feb. 9, 1999, the IAEA reported Iraq had received an offer "to provide, for financial reward, assistance and information on nuclear weapons design, weapons-usable nuclear material production and the procurement of critical components and materials."

The IAEA report went on to say that "after initial protracted reluctance to recall the offer, an Iraqi counterpart provided some additional details" on the middleman. "This additional information was, however, not sufficient for the IAEA to be able to identify and locate the foreign national alleged to have made the offer."

The IAEA didn't reveal to the Security Council at the time that the offer was made in Khan's name and didn't include the letter about the offer that the U.N. inspectors had found.

Khan was employed, until 1975, at URENCO -- a European consortium that worked on uranium enrichment in the Netherlands.

Iraq said in its nuclear declaration that German experts had sold it several centrifuge drawings stolen from URENCO.

Khan later worked for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and in 1976 was given control of the uranium enrichment project, reporting directly to the prime minister's office.

Under Khan's supervision, Pakistani scientists completed the necessary enrichment work that ultimately led to the successful detonation of Pakistan's first nuclear device in May 1998.

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EDITORS: Associated Press Writer Kathy Gannon contributed to this report from Islamabad, Pakistan.