Al-Qaida’s nuclear ambitions
It is the story of al-Qaida’s efforts to acquire weapons or weapons technology from Pakistan that anchors the most chilling part of that section.

The terrorist network made two separate efforts to persuade Pakistani scientists to provide it with nuclear weapons from their stockpile of about 50 nuclear weapons, highly enriched uranium and plutonium, and vast weapons infrastructure.

In 1998, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida’s leader, was rebuffed, for unclear reasons. About two years later, he had better luck when al-Qaida reached out to a charity for Afghan refugees run by Pakistani nuclear scientists. Although some of the details of this effort have been previously reported, the extent of the effort went much further than what was publicly known.

In 2000, Tenet writes, the charity’s founder, Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mahmood, and others at Pakistan’s nuclear weapons agency agreed to help Mahmood in his effort to share weapons of mass destruction with the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan.

In fact, Tenet said, U.S. intelligence learned that bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s leader, had met with Mahmood and an aide in August 2001 in Afghanistan.

Tenet describes the initial Pakistani investigation as “ill-fated” and writes that the Pakistanis treated the charity officials with deference in their interrogations.

Showdown with Musharraf
So he went to Pakistan and met with Musharraf, warning about the outrage that would explode if it emerged that Pakistan was allowing nuclear scientists to help bin Laden acquire nuclear weapons.

Musharraf pooh-poohed the concerns, arguing that bin Laden and his associates were “men living in caves” who could not possibly take possession of such weapons, Tenet writes. Under interrogation, however, Mahmood subsequently confirmed the details of the August 2001 meeting with bin Laden.

At the same time, in the fall of 2001, Tenet writes, U.S. intelligence began picking up rumors from several reliable sources that a small nuclear device had been smuggled into the United States, for probable use in New York City. The Energy Department sent detection equipment to New York, he adds.

Tenet concludes that a nuclear detonation in a U.S. city is al-Qaida’s ultimate goal.

“I’m concerned this is where UBL and his operatives want to go,” he writes. “If they can arrange to set off a mushroom cloud, they make history. ... My deepest fear is that this exactly what they intend.”

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