Mossad's former chief Shabtai Shavit would have sent a team to assassinate Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan if his true intentions were interpreted correctly, according to an investigative report published by the Israeli daily Ha'aretz on Monday.
Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, 85, known as the father of Pakistan's Atomic Weapons Program, died on Sunday in Islamabad.
In an opinion piece, investigative journalist Yossi Melman wrote that AQ Khan got Pakistan the bomb, stole and sold atomic secrets, profited from a shady global-proliferation network, helped Iran go nuclear, aided Libya's Muammar Gaddafi's reactor ambitions - and still passed away from natural causes, and not at the hands of the Mossad, the Israeli spy agency.
In his piece titled "How Pakistan's AQ Khan, Father of the 'Muslim Bomb,' Escaped Mossad Assassination", Melman wrote that Mossad had noted Khan's extensive travels throughout the Middle East but could not correctly identify his efforts to set up a shady proliferation network (of nuclear arsenal).
"Israel's intelligence service, led at the time by Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit, took note of Khan's travels in the region. But, as Shavit told me a decade and a half ago, Mossad and Aman (Israel's Military Intelligence) did not understand what Khan was up to," Melman wrote.
"Khan, who has just died at the age of 85 from COVID-19, is considered a national hero in Pakistan, his homeland. There, and worldwide, he has been dubbed the 'Father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons', but he could equally be called as the Godfather of Iran's nuclear program", the writer said.
Iran bought from Khan the drawings and plans of Pakistan's centrifuges known as P1 and P2. Iranian scientists, led by Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was recently assassinated by a Mossad hit team, as per foreign media reports, built their own centrifuges, renaming them Ir-1 and Ir-2, he claimed.
After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, the Libyan leader feared that he was next. He negotiated with the CIA and the UK's equivalent MI6 and revealed to them, complete with full documentation, how Khan's network was building nuclear sites for him, some disguised as chicken farms, Melman said.
"Years after Khan fled the Netherlands in 1975, Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers revealed that the CIA knew already then about Khan and his involvement in plundering nuclear technology, but the US did very little to stop Pakistan getting nuclear weapons," Melman said.
Israel-India plan to attack Pakistan's nuclear facilitiesTellingly, after
successfully destroying Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, Israelis planned a
similar attack on Pakistan's nuclear facilities at Kahuta in collusion with
India in the 1980s. Using satellite pictures and intelligence information,
Israel reportedly built a full-scale mock-up of Kahuta facility in the Negev
Desert where pilots of F-16 and F-15 squadrons practiced mock attacks.
According to 'The Asian Age', journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine
Scott-Clark stated in their book 'Deception Pakistan, the US and the Global
Weapons Conspiracy', that Israeli Air Force was to launch an air attack on
Kahuta in mid-1980s from Jamnagar airfield in Gujarat (India). The book claims
that "in March 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi signed off (on) the
Israeli-led operation bringing India, Pakistan and Israel to within a hair's
breadth of a nuclear conflagration".
Another report claims that Israel also planned an air strike directly out
of Israel. After midway and midair refueling, Israeli warplanes planned to
shoot down a commercial airline's flight over Indian Ocean that flew into
Islamabad early morning, fly in a tight formation to appear as one large
aircraft on radar screens preventing detection, use the downed airliner's
call sign to enter Islamabad's air space, knock out Kahuta and fly out to
Jammu to refuel and exit.
According to reports in mid-1980s this mission was actually launched one
night. But the Israelis were in for a big surprise. They discovered that
Pakistan Air Force had already sounded an alert and had taken to the skies in
anticipation of this attack. The mission had to be hurriedly aborted.
Military Watch Magazine
Not surprisingly, the Military Watch Magazine wrote on September 12, 2018:
"While an attack on Pakistani facilities could have been contemplated by Tel Aviv or other state actors in the 1990s, it is today near impossible to take such military action. Pakistani ballistic missile capabilities have expanded considerably, with Islamabad acquiring the Rodong-1 from North Korea ballistic missile and fielding it as the Hatf-5/Ghauri-1 to deliver its nuclear payloads.
"Other platforms such as the solid-fuelled Shaheen 3 have also been tested. Pakistan's airspace meanwhile is more secure than ever before, and while the Air Force still lacks advanced air superiority fighters to match the F-15, it fields both heavily armed new indigenous fighters, the JF-17, as well as state of the art HQ-16 air defense systems."
