After June 2002: CIA Report on North Korea’s Pakistan Connection Withheld from Some Officials

A secret CIA report that says North Korea is enriching “significant quantities” of uranium and this is happening with Pakistan’s help (see June 2002) is withheld from some officials at the State Department. The report, which was drafted for the White House, is classified top secret sensitive compartmentalized information, and is not provided to the State Department’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), although it is highly significant for their work. Norm Wulf, the ACDA’s deputy assistant director, will suspect that John Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control, is involved in the withholding. Wulf will say that before Bolton arrived at the State Department in 2001, intelligence about North Korea’s enrichment program and links to Pakistan had been piling up on his desk for three years. However, by 2002 Wulf thinks that he is not getting all the information he should. “I became less and less trustful of the evidence and the more clever people who saw it in its original form. Between the raw intelligence and me were several filters. There were hostile relations between Bolton, his staff, and the non-proliferation bureau.” Authors Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark will say that the CIA report “had to be buried” because administration officials “only wanted Congress to focus on Iraq, as this was where [they] were determined that US forces should go. All other threats, especially those greater than Iraq, would have to be concealed, defused, or downplayed.” [Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 336-337] The CIA report will be revealed in the press in early 2003, just before the Iraq war begins. [New Yorker, 1/27/2003]