April 1981: US Knows All about Swiss Firm’s Deliveries for Pakistan’s Nuclear Program

The Swiss firm CORA engineering finds that US intelligence has a comprehensive file on its shipments to Pakistan to aid A. Q. Khan’s nuclear weapons program. The discovery is made after the company is bombed by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad (see February 20, 1981). CORA official Rudolf Walti will comment, “When the company was cited to the Swiss government [for supplying technology to manufacture nuclear weapons to Pakistan] we discovered that the Americans had such good records of what we were doing that if we ever lost our own files we could always go and ask them to use theirs.” Authors Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark will comment, “However, this information had been kept highly classified [in the US] lest it undermine the aid train that had started to leave for Pakistan.” [Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 87, 476]