Mid-1986 and After: Interagency Nuclear Weapons Group Comes to View State Department as ‘Security Problem’

CIA manager Richard Kerr. [Source: CIA]Officials designated to the Nuclear Export Violations Working Group (NEVWG), a top-secret panel aiming to prevent nuclear weapons technology being exported from the US, become suspicious of the State Department, and try not to share information with it. The panel, formed in mid-1986, brings together experts from the policy, law-enforcement, and intelligence communities. The group is suspicious of the State Department because it has a reputation for tipping off Pakistan about surveillance of Pakistani buyers of nuclear weapons technology in the US by sending diplomatic protests to the Pakistani government. A senior Customs Service official will say, “The State Department constituted a security problem for us.” One analyst will say of an operation to catch Pakistani agents in the US (see Before July 1987), “We were sure they’d manage to screw it up.” At one point CIA manager Richard Kerr summons senior State Department officials to a meeting for a “pointed discussion” about the steady flow of protests to Pakistan. Kerr will later say that the State Department is “extremely active” in the matter, but “What they were doing it for was to persuade the Pakistanis to stop.” [New Yorker, 3/29/1993]