Deception; Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons

New York: Walker & Company, 2007. Book Club Edition. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxii, 586 pages. Maps. Illustrations. Principal Characters. List of Abbreviations and Acronyms. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Adrian Levy (born 1965) is a journalist and film maker who currently writes for The Guardian. Specializing in long-form investigative work, his pieces most often filed from Asia are published in The Guardian's Weekend magazine. Levy's work has also appeared in The Observer, The Sunday Times magazine, as well as being syndicated in the US, Australasia and across Europe. Levy has also written non-fiction books. His fourth, entitled The Meadow, was published in paperback in 2013 by Harper Collins, in Britain. A fifth, The Siege, based around the attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, was published by Penguin in November 2013. Levy has also co-produced documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4, as well as broadcasting on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. Much of his work has been a collaboration with the journalist and author Cathy Scott-Clark. In 2009, Levy and Scott-Clark were jointly made British Journalist of the Year at the One World Media awards, having been British Foreign Journalist of the Year in 2004. They were runners-up in the British Press Awards as Feature Writer of the Year in 2006 and 2009. In 2013, they produced Kashmir's Torture Trail, a film for C4 Dispatches, won the Amnesty Media awards "best documentary". A second film for Dispatches, Chinese Murder Mystery, was long-listed for the BAFTAS. Having worked in Pakistan from 1996 onwards, Levy's third book was set there: Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy. Published in 2007, it revealed how Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistan metallurgist, stole nuclear secrets to build a bomb, before selling them around the world. However, Levy also revealed how the US had inadvertently armed countries President George W. Bush described as the axis of evil, by enabling Pakistan to arm itself while turning a blind eye as it sold on its know-how, Washington desiring to keep Islamabad as a key ally in Bush's War on Terror. Serialized by The Sunday Times, the book was a "pick of the year" by The Washington Post, and a finalist for the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature, presented by the Royal United Services Institute. Since then Levy together with Scott-Clark has produced for C4 Dispatches a documentary on the Islamic Republic's internal war on terror and its cost. They have also worked in the Swat Valley, for The Guardian, revealing the work of a specialist school, sponsored by the Pakistan military, as it attempts to rehabilitate would-be suicide bombers. Derived from a Kirkus review: British journalists Levy and Scott-Clark offer persuasive evidence that the United States looked the other way for years while Pakistan developed a nuclear bomb and exported weapons technology to Iran, North Korea and other enemies of the West. In the early 1970s, write the authors, Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan stole European centrifuge technology to enrich uranium and developed his secret research laboratory in Kahuta. Years later, the mercurial Khan would give a sham public confession to having run a black market in nuclear weapons on his own, when in fact he worked for Pakistan's military government. The authors provide detailed accounts of Khan's dealings with Western suppliers, his relations with a succession of his country's leaders and his wooing of customers in "Axis of Evil" and other nations. Most alarming are the deliberate efforts by U.S. administrations from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush to conceal the fact that Pakistan even had a nuclear bomb. Needing the Pakistanis as allies against the Soviets in Afghanistan and later in the "war on terror," the presidents lied to Congress that the Islamic nation had no nuclear weapons (making it possible to give Pakistan billions of dollars in aid, some of which Khan diverted to his nuclear program), helped Pakistan circumvent laws against procurement in the United States and destroyed documents that might shed light on the situation, all the while touting a non-proliferation policy. The silencing of former CIA and Pentagon analyst Richard Barlow, the leading in-house expert on Pakistan's weapons program, who fought to bring the truth to Congress, is one of many outrages recounted in this tale. The authors also note that the "greatest nuclear scandal of our age" continues, with Pakistan still buying and selling nuclear technology, heightening American vulnerability to nuclear terrorism. Simultaneously astonishing, maddening and absolutely frightening.