CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
[ WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2002 02:32:13 PM ]WASHINGTON: North Korea is in possession of nuclear bombs made with help from Pakistani engineers, a spy who has defected from the communist country has disclosed.
Kenki Aoyama, an Osaka-born North Korean spy who has fled to Tokyo via Beijing has told the Japanese and Western media that he personally ran into a group of 30 to 40 visiting Pakistani engineers who were helping Pyongyang's nuclear program in the mid-1990s.
Soon after, around 1996, North Korea acquired the centrifuges needed to enrich the uranium that goes into the bombs. Pakistan's nuclear program revolves almost entirely around the centrifuge method.
"They were there to exchange technologies," Aoyama told The Washington Post correspondent in Tokyo, following similar reports in the Japanese media. "The Pakistanis came to learn our missile technology. Pakistan, naturally, gave North Korea nuclear technology in return."
US officials have broadly confirmed that such nukes-for-missiles exchanges took place in the 1990s but insist Pakistan has since closed the tap. Washington also believes North Korea does not have fully fabricated nuclear weapons, even as the renegade communist regime itself first confirmed it had the bombs and then denied it.
But Aoyama's accounts suggest North Korea achieved the nuclear holy grail and the ceasing of Pakistani help may have come too late to save Japan, South Korea and a 100,000 US troops from the heebee-jeebies arising from atomic bombs in the hands of the renegade regime in Pyongyang.
According to Aoyama, who uses a false named for fear of being hunted down, he was able to confirm that Pyongyang had achieved its objective when he ran into a North Korean scientist he knew at a bar in Beijing. The man looked terrible, thin and wan. His eyebrows had disappeared from accidental radiation, Aoyama told The Washington Post.
"I said, 'Are you still working on it?' "Aoyama recalled in the Post.
"No," came the reply. "It's done. We succeeded."
"It" was a nuclear bomb, and Aoyama said the man told him that Pyongyang's long quest to obtain an atomic weapon had been achieved.
Separately, Indian intelligence agencies also have information pinpointing the precise dates that Pakistan's nuclear scientist A Q Khan visited North Korea for collaboration on the bomb project. That information is being shared with the United States, officials in New Delhi said.
US intelligence agencies have also tracked Pakistani movements, including the abuse of the C-130s transport planes it supplied, but American security officials say the Pakistanis would most certainly have manipulated the flight manifests.
Aoyama defected to Tokyo some three years back and says he has since been telling the Japanese intelligence agencies about North Korea's bomb and missile program. Tokyo initially bought into the story and kept him on its payroll while debriefing him. He was even asked to testify before the Japanese parliament.
But in recent days, the establishment has begun to raise questions about his credibility even as Aoyama has been writing in the media, giving interviews, and consorting with the Opposition parties in Japan.
It appears the ruling party in Japan, which has been building bridges with North Korea, does not want to countenance any disclosures that might jeopardize its diplomatic efforts even though a nuclear weapon with Pyongyang would completely change the dynamics of the region.
US efforts to negotiate and buy-out North Korea's full blown program while it decimates Iraq's less-developed plans may have something to do with Tokyo's reluctance to air Aoyama's story.