Read The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps Online
Authors: Mike Evans
The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (23 page)
What weapons are effective against an enemy such as this? Will those Muslims that do not share this Iranian president’s worldview be enticed to take up arms against him? Can we even convince them that they are in as much danger as any infidel on the globe? Or will we simply sit idly by and allow the madmen, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Iran who support him, to take the world by nuclear storm?
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OW
P
OSSIBLE
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S A
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ERRORIST
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UCLEAR
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TTACK?
In 1999, as I was reading the chapter on the opening of the scrolls in the Book of Revelation, I became inspired to write a novel,
The Jerusalem Scroll.
In chapter eight of the novel, I described a meeting in the Soviet Union between the Russian Mafia and an Islamic terrorist organization. The purpose of the meeting? The Islamic terrorist organization was negotiating the purchase of suitcase nuclear bombs:
“Both of us know the United States is the Great Satan,” Khaled continued. “Remove these obstructionists and we can eradicate the Zionists instantly. In one great sweep, our armies will dispatch these pests.” He gestured as if swinging a sword in the air. “Of course, your help is essential for our victory, my brother.”
“Yes. Yes.” Ivan’s smile never changed. He held a Cuban cigar between his thumb and index finder and kept popping it into the black forest above his fat lower lip. The former KGB agent chewed his cigar, but said nothing more.
“We would have no problem transporting the bomb south through
Afghanistan and then into Iran,” Khaled continued. “Our friend, Osama bin Laden, has already made his facilities in the Kandahar region available to us.” He crossed his arms over his chest confidently. “No problem anywhere along the way.” He laughed. “The CIA trained and armed his people to fight you in Afghanistan. Now we both win. It’s payback time.”
The bomb was to be purchased for twenty million dollars.
Avraham studied the man across from him. Tanned, graying, slightly over-weight, the prime minister had more determination and sheer guts than one might have thought. Avraham would have to reevaluate his opinion of the leader.
“The gravity of this policy ought to cause the Western nations to be a bit more temperate toward us and a great deal more supportive of our position.”
For a moment Avraham pondered his response. The right words were everything in a conversation of this magnitude. “What if, God forbid, one of those bombs went off in New York City or Los Angeles? I’d think there would be a radical change in perspective.” He shook his head.
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Unfortunately, just such a scenario seems all too easy for terrorists to instigate and all too easy for them to pull off.
In September 2003, Yossef Bodansky and I spoke at the World Conference on Terrorism in Jerusalem. As director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare in 1998, Bodansky stated:
The Afghans have sold seven to eight billion dollars of drugs in the West a year. Bin Laden oversees the export of drugs from Afghanistan. His people are involved in growing the crops, processing, and shipping. When Americans buy drugs, they fund the jihad.
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When Osama bin Laden left Sudan at the insistence of the United States in 1996, he arrived in Jalalabad on a Hercules C-130 cargo plane specifically outfitted for him. One hundred fifty Al Qaeda associates and his children and wives accompanied him.
Bin Laden was not the wealthy terrorist that most people had pictured him to be in 1996. The Saudi government revoked his citizenship and froze his assets in 1994. He was in desperate need of a new source of revenue. In 1997, the poppy harvest in Afghanistan had sold 3,276 tons of raw opium, and revenues began to pour into the coffers of Al Qaeda at a rate estimated to be between $5 and $16 billion per year.
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Bin Laden’s cut was somewhere between $500 million to $1 billion per year. His decision to secure suitcase nuclear bombs and nuclear technology from the Russian Mafia cost bin Laden $30 million in cash and two tons of refined heroin.
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As a matter of fact, the United States filed court papers in an extradition hearing in December 1998 charging a senior bin Laden deputy with attempting to purchase “enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.”
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Is it possible to launch a suitcase-sized nuclear device with a grenade or rocket launcher? Yes. These weapons of terrorism could also be triggered in shopping malls, theaters, or sports stadiums in metropolitan areas. The death tolls would be astronomical.
In 1998, more than seven hundred reports of nuclear material sales were received at the Russian Defense Ministry. These materials were reportedly being sold to various buyers within and outside the Russian borders.
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In that same year, Boris Yeltsin’s security secretary, Alexander Lebed, met behind closed doors with members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Lebed reported that as many as 40 nuclear-laden suitcase bombs were missing from the Russian arsenal. He surmised that they could be in the hands of Muslim radicals. Lebed could account for only 48 of the 132 suitcases that had been produced by the Russians and had no idea what had happened to the missing 84 nuclear devices.
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Reporter Steve Kroft interviewed Lebed for a segment of
60 Minutes
in 1997 and asked him how easy it would be to steal a suitcase bomb. Lebed’s response was frighteningly clear. According to Lebed, since each bomb is actually made in the form of a suitcase, it would be easy to walk down any street in Moscow, Washington, or New York City with one of these bombs and never raise an eyebrow.
Kroft went on to ask Lebed about detonation. Lebed’s response to this question was even more threatening than the first: no secret codes from the Kremlin are needed, and the detonation could be prepared in as little as twenty minutes. Only one person is required to trigger this nuclear weapon.
Admitting that the bombs could be in Georgia, the Ukraine, the Baltic countries, and beyond, Lebed went on to say: “More than 100 weapons out of the supposed number of 250 are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia. I don’t know their location. I don’t know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they’ve been sold or stolen. I don’t know.”
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In an appearance on
Meet the Press
in December 1991, Dick Cheney made this observation: “If the Soviets do an excellent job at retaining control over their stockpile of nuclear weapons—let’s assume they’ve got 25,000 to 30,000; that’s a ballpark figure—and they are 99 percent successful, that would mean you could still have as many as 250 that they were not able to control.”
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When asked about the propinquity of a nuclear threat, Yossef Bodansky said:
We don’t have any indication that they are going to use [the nuclear weapons] tomorrow or any other day. But they have the capability, they have the legitimate authorization, they have the logic [for using them]. One does not [make] the tremendous amount of expenditures, effort, investment in human beings, in human resources, to have something that will be just kept somewhere in storage.
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In November 2001, bin Laden granted an interview to Pakistani editor Hamid Mir. Mir pointedly asked if bin Laden had obtained nuclear devices. Bin Laden responded, “It is not difficult, not if you have contacts in Russia and with other militant groups. They are available for $10 to $20 million.” Al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s chief strategist, interposed, “If you go to BBC reports, you will find that thirty nuclear weapons are missing from Russia’s nuclear arsenal. We have links with Russia’s underworld channels.”
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There is absolutely no doubt that in 1993, bin Laden began his search for nuclear devices in an attempt to build a viable nuclear arsenal. His first attempted purchase was enriched uranium from South Africa.
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Bin Laden’s hunt for nuclear weapons concluded with purchases of forty-eight nuclear suitcases from the Russian Mafia. He added between twelve and fifteen kilos of uranium-235 from Ukrainian arms dealer Semion Mogilevich.
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What might bin Laden’s target be? Consider Times Square in New York. A ten-kiloton bomb disguised in a suitcase or other everyday guise could kill as many as one million people in seconds and devastate Manhattan Island, some of the most precious real estate in America. And, if one is not enough, how many are too many? Two? Three? Four? We already know Osama bin Laden will not be satisfied with one million dead. If placed in the largest U.S. cities across the nation, it would be a simple matter to meet Al Qaeda’s horrific objective of killing four million Americans.
It is impossible to know how many Al Qaeda members have been recruited since 9/11. This fanatical and deadly organization could be ten times bigger—or more—than it was before 9/11. There is no question that Osama bin Laden is being protected in Pakistan. Three times as many Pakistanis trust Osama bin Laden to do the right thing than they do President Bush.
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Saudi Arabia supplied much of the funding to Dr. Abdul Qadeer “A. Q.” Khan to further Pakistan’s nuclear program. Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan was given the grand tour of Pakistan’s nuclear enrichment facilities in 1999. The prince invited Dr. Khan to visit Saudi Arabia. In the past ten years, Riyadh has bestowed roughly $1.2 billion worth of oil annually on Islamabad. The Saudi government has not been paid in return.
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U.S. intelligence agents intercepted a cargo ship bound to Libya from Malaysia in October 2003. The cargo hold contained boxes marked “Used Machinery.” Inside the boxes the agents discovered quantities of centrifuge parts used in the enrichment of uranium. The shipper: A. Q. Khan. The purchaser: Muammar al-Qaddafi.
This one incident revealed the reprehensible by-product of the international black market, the prolific trade in nuclear materials and technology. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, has referred to this as the “Wal-Mart of private-sector proliferation.”
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What was it that persuaded Muammar al-Qaddafi to open Libya to American intelligence officials and international weapons inspectors? Fear may have been the deciding factor. It is thought that al-Qaddafi was intent on avoiding retaliation, not if, but when terrorists use suitcase nuclear bombs against America. Al-Qaddafi would certainly have been on America’s short list of targets.
A
N
A
MERICAN
H
IROSHIMA?
One month after terrorists flew fuel-laden passenger jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was presented with an even more diabolical scenario. George Tenet, CIA director, informed the president at the daily intelligence briefing that “Dragonfire,” a CIA agent, relayed information that Al Qaeda operatives were in possession of a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, apparently stolen from the Russian arsenal. “Dragonfire” was convinced that the nuclear device was not only on American soil, but was, in fact, in New York City.
“It was brutal,” a U.S. official told
Time
. It was also highly classified and closely guarded. Under the aegis of the White House’s Counterterrorism Security Group, part of the National Security Council, the suspected nuke was kept secret so as not to panic the people of New York. Senior FBI officials were not in the loop. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani says he was never told about the threat. In the end, the investigators found nothing and concluded that Dragonfire’s information was false. But few of them slept better. They had made a chilling realization: if terrorists did manage to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the city, there was almost nothing anyone could do about it.
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Why is the thought of a terrorist organization possessing a nuclear weapon so frightening? America’s entire nuclear defense has always been based upon the premise of MAD, or the hope of intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles in flight through something like the “Star Wars” program of defense satellites. No country with nuclear weapons would dare attack America because they knew immediate retaliatory annihilation would result. However, a terrorist organization with no physical address, no telephone number, and no zip code would not fear such retaliation.
During the Dragonfire incident, President Bush’s first order was to Vice President Dick Cheney. He was dispatched from Washington DC to an unnamed site. Cheney would spend several weeks at the secret location. The president’s second order was to a group of Nuclear Emergency Support Team specialists (NEST). They were sent to New York City to hunt for the suspected weapon. (The operation was so top secret that no one, not even Rudolph Giuliani, mayor of New York City, was notified.) In another development, the CIA Counterterrorism Center had intercepted dialogue on Al Qaeda channels about an “American Hiroshima.”
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