In a startling revelation, former CIA counterproliferation officer Richard Barlow has claimed that successive US Presidents continued to certify Pakistan as a non-nuclear state until 1989 — even though Washington’s own intelligence showed that US-supplied F-16 fighter jets had been modified to deliver nuclear weapons.Barlow, who tracked Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear program through the 1980s, said US officials were fully aware of Islamabad’s nuclear capabilities. “We knew that the F-16s were capable of delivering the Pakistani nuclear weapons as they existed at that time, without any doubt. It’s a hard engineering question, period. It had been looked at by the engineers and the physicists, not by me. There was that. Yet the government went ahead with the sale,” Barlow said in an interview with ANI.
He added that the Reagan and Bush administrations kept certifying that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weapons “all the way through 1989,” even as CIA assessments contradicted those claims. “The President continued to certify that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weapons all the way through 1989. Now, I mean, I can tell you that most of us in the CIA are not comfortable with that, to say the least. But we’re not elected officials,” Barlow said. “All we can do is provide the elected officials and senior policymakers with the best available intelligence information, which is accurate, and brief them accordingly. What they do after that is not our place; we’re not in control of that.”Barlow said the US intelligence community had long concluded that Pakistan’s F-16 fleet could deliver nuclear weapons, a finding later echoed in journalist Seymour Hersh’s 1993 article in The New Yorker. “You can read all about it in Seymour Hersh’s article in The New Yorker in 1993. They saw the intelligence community saw nuclear weapons moving to air bases and being put on F-16s, et cetera. You know, so the nuclear weapons that Pakistan did not possess, according to the President of the United States, were actually being stuck on,” Barlow said.The revelations trace back to the 1987 “Brass Tacks” crisis, when Pakistani scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan openly hinted at a nuclear deterrent amid heightened tensions with India. Barlow noted that the US technical experts had already verified Pakistan’s nuclear capability at that time.“To put it in a nutshell, there had been studies for years inside the intelligence community by experts, like national laboratories, etc. We knew all about the Pakistani nuclear weapons design, and we knew all about the F-16s, as you could imagine,” he said.‘Benazir was cut out of the loop’According to Barlow, then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had limited control over Pakistan’s nuclear program, which was effectively managed by General Mirza Aslam Beg and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The US, he said, only confronted Islamabad over the issue after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989.The US had kept the matter quiet during the Afghan war to secure Pakistan’s cooperation against the Soviet Union — a Cold War priority that overshadowed nuclear proliferation concerns.Additionally, talking about past India-Pakistan tensions, Barlow said that by 1990, tensions between India and Pakistan over the nuclear issue had reached alarming levels. The crisis was ultimately defused after then Defense Secretary Robert Gates was sent to New Delhi and Islamabad by President George HW Bush.He added that the 1990 standoff was “far more dangerous” than more recent India-Pakistan flare-ups due to poor command structures and limited communication. “There was a significantly greater chance of miscalculation in 1990 and miscommunication, among other issues. So I think that was a far more dangerous period,” he said.A cover-up?Barlow also discussed the Pressler Amendment, a 1985 US law requiring the President to certify annually that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear device to receive military aid.“After the 1990 nuclear crisis, my bosses at the agency refused to go along with any more certifications. Believe it or not, there were still people in the US government who wanted to certify under the Pressler Amendment,” he said. “They were having a collective heart attack because they knew it was over — the aid, et cetera.”Barlow also claimed that senior US State Department officials secretly tipped off Islamabad about an undercover American operation in the 1980s to arrest a retired Pakistani general involved in nuclear smuggling. The joint CIA–Customs sting had targeted Pakistani agent Arshad Parvez, who was attempting to purchase 25 metric tons of Maraging 350 steel — a key material for uranium enrichment — under the direction of Brigadier General Inam-ul-Haq. “He was supposed to show up in Pennsylvania… but Haq didn’t show up. And I learned that some people in the State Department had tipped off the Pakistani government to this arrest warrantBarlow said he was furious upon learning that officials within his own government had sabotaged the operation, describing his reaction as “ballistic.” The revelation, he said, pointed to how elements within Washington prioritized Pakistan’s cooperation in the Afghan war over enforcing non-proliferation laws. “These were people in my own government, the enemy within,” Barlow remarked, adding that such internal compromises weakened US efforts to curb Pakistan’s nuclear build-up during the 1980s.
