Despite its startling announcement a week ago, the Bush administration had detailed knowledge for more than a year about North Korea's program to covertly make uranium fuel for an atom bomb, the Mercury News has learned.
North Korea's admission that the country's secretive, authoritarian government was pursuing a new route to nuclear weapons sparked international alarm last week. But interviews with experts and former Clinton administration officials, and a review of little-noticed statements by Bush officials, raise questions about why the administration waited so long to deal with this threat, now the subject of intense diplomatic efforts.
In addition, the administration had strong evidence, dating back to the Clinton presidency, that North Korea got help from Pakistan's top nuclear weapons scientist.
The Pakistanis appear to have given nuclear technology to North Korea in exchange for long-range ballistic missiles that could reach deep into the territory of its traditional foe, India. Bush administration officials pointed a finger at this in early June 2001, at a time when they were courting India. But since Sept. 11, when Pakistan became a key ally in the war on terrorism, they turned mum on the Pakistan connection.
It is not clear who authorized the deal, but the existence of the Pakistan-North Korea tie was already known more than two years ago, during the Clinton administration. ``Our concerns were addressed to the Pakistanis at the highest levels,'' in connection with President Clinton's trip to Islamabad in 2000, said a senior Clinton official who was involved. ``Our concern was about whether the Pakistani government was sufficiently in control of its nuclear labs and certain nuclear scientists.''
The concerns centered on ``people who were employed by the nuclear agency and have retired,'' Armitage told the Financial Times of London. He spoke two months after the sudden retirement of Khan, who had been the well-known face of Pakistani nuclear weapons for decades.
``It is suspected that he did something on his own with North Korea as a quid pro quo for missile technology,'' said Rifaat Hussain, a prominent Pakistani political scientist who has written extensively on the country's nuclear program and is now a visiting scholar at Stanford University.
The Khan Research Laboratory has both a missile-development center and an industrial-sized gas-centrifuge plant for enriching uranium for Pakistan's nuclear weapons. ``If there was a transfer, Khan's organization at the lab would probably be the contact,'' said Gaurav Kampani, an expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. ``But he could not have done it without the sanction of the military,'' which tightly controls the nuclear weapons program.
U.S. intelligence officials subsequently told the New York Times that Pakistan was a major supplier of the uranium-enrichment equipment, part of a barter deal to obtain North Korean ballistic missiles.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN last Sunday that there was evidence of North Korea's pursuit of this program going back to at least 1999 but that they decided to confront the North Koreans based on evidence confirmed only this past summer. She referred to a ``shadowy proliferation network'' that supplied the technology but did not name any specific countries.
The Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence caught North Korea trying to import large quantities of high-strength aluminum that could be used to construct centrifuges. There was also evidence of significant new construction, the Post reported.
Khan, the man believed to have supplied the North Koreans, is a metallurgist who worked at a Urenco uranium enrichment facility in the Netherlands until 1975, when he left with stolen blueprints for centrifuges and a list of Urenco's key technology suppliers. The Khan Research Laboratory in Kahuta was founded the next year. Khan's high-profile life and nuclear bravado made him a household name in Pakistan. He is seen as instrumental in Pakistan's development of a uranium bomb and its first test in 1998.
The rivalry between the two Pakistani weapons labs became more intense after the 1998 nuclear test, with scientists squabbling over credit for the success, some of them angry at Khan's grandstanding.
In the 1990s, both labs competed to design a ballistic missile to counter India, with KRL championing a liquid-fuel missile while the PAEC pursued a solid-fuel model. Pakistan's Ghauri missile, designed by Khan's lab, is based on the North Korean Nodong missile.
``We saw all that activity,'' Bermudez said. ``We didn't know exactly what the North Koreans were getting in return, but we didn't think it was money, because Pakistan was in such a bad way.'' Help with the North Korean nuclear program was considered a possibility, he said.
Rumors of a North Korean centrifuge program, perhaps hidden underground, had circulated for some time. It was curious that the North Korean bomb program had pursued only plutonium, while most other nuclear states followed a dual-track effort of producing both plutonium and uranium, Bermudez said.
What specific help Pakistan may have given North Korea is unknown. It could be equipment, materials, blueprints, expertise or a shopping list of where crucial items might be purchased, said Kampani, the expert at the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
``If it was a bargain, it fits together so perfectly,'' he said.
By Dan Stober and Daniel Sneider; Mercury News
