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By Luke Ryland (about the author) Page 5 of 5 page(s)
Horton: I'm sorry - let's get back to this whole Nuclear Black Market thing. Tell me about this Tinner case - I guess, for the audience, give the background, German guys, arrested in Switzerland, computers destroyed, worked for the CIA, something like that. What is this story, what does it mean?
Lauria: We have not done a story on the Tinners yet. I just briefly mentioned them I think in the Griffin story. The Tinners met AQ Khan, I believe, when he was working in Europe in the 70s when he started to steal the designs there, so they've been very close associates with AQ Khan, and as AQ Khan was thrown into house arrest a couple of years ago, and he's recently started to speak out again, and what he's saying again is what Sibel has been saying in a way - which is that he got all this help from European companies, and from the US, and that they all knew what he was doing. So the Tinners were, after AQ Khan was put under house arrest, they started to prosecute people who were related to his procurement network going back to Griffin in Britain, and the Tinners in Switzerland, and this was suddenly shut down, and the US prosecutor had the files destroyed at the behest of the US. I interviewed David Albright about this some months ago - and I'm trying to remember, and he believed that China was the source of AQ Khan, not the US at the time, but that the Tinners were helping with parts and this was shut down, they just destroyed the evidence. We don't know why, it's obvious why - it's obvious why, I think, to us, because the Tinners were involved with the CIA, according to the Albright, and others - and exactly why, how that happened - in other words, were they being used as double agents? Were they being used to help facilitate this? This is not clear to me. I can't give an answer to that, not having investigated the Tinners case or written anything about that, but I'm just telling you what I've read. But they did work for the CIA, according to David Albright, he told me that. He is an expert on nuclear weapons.
Horton: And it should be noted here that the AQ Khan network, for all their nuclear proliferation, the terrible results that we know of, as far as I can tell, is that the North Koreans got some equipment that they never used, the Libyans got some equipment they never used, the Iranians got some equipment that they are using to enrich uranium to a measly 3.6% in the presence of IAEA inspectors, so for all the crisis, we don't have any rogue state making nuclear weapons because of this, other than Pakistan. Right?
Lauria: That's true. Well, the North Koreans did explode a device, didn't they, a couple of years ago?
Horton: Oh yeah, but that was made out of plutonium harvested from their Soviet era reactors. There's never been any evidence that they enriched uranium at all. They just bought the equipment.
Lauria: Well, I'll tell you about enrichment - Khan and his network enriched monetarily! That's a big part of this, you know, the business side of it. That reminds me, one of the theories is that they were actually selling phony parts to these countries.
...SNIP...
Horton: Well, let's hope that you can keep being a careerist journalist by writing good stories and proving that you actually are doing what it really takes, and not just cozying up there with your hairdo like the rest of these goofballs.
Lauria: I'm trying, and it's tough, I tell you, in terms of making a living trying to do it, but I appreciate what you said.
Horton: And I appreciate your effort. Everybody, that's Joe Lauria from the Sunday Times, formerly from the Boston Globe, Bloomberg News. You can find him at the Huffington Post. he is the co-author of Senator Mike Gravel's new book, A Political Odyssey: The Rise of American Militarism and One Man's Fight to Stop It, and I urge you to check out the series co-written with Chris Gourlay and Jonathan Calvert at the London Times, that's "For sale: West's deadly nuclear secrets," "FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft," "Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe" and "Inquiry into Nuclear Mr. Fix-it? dropped." Thank you very much for your time today, Joe.
http://lukery.blogspot.com/
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