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Richard Barlow
Richard Barlow is an American intelligence analyst and a former senior member of the counter-proliferation desk at the Central Intelligence Agency who lost his job when he acted as a whistleblower about the George H. W. Bush administration's misleading Congress over Pakistan's nuclear program. Following several investigations, he was vindicated in 1997; unable to collect a government pension, he lives in a motor home in Montana.
Career in government
Barlow entered the intelligence community with two years of work at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He then, in 1985, entered the CIA, where he collated and examined information about nuclear programs in the Third World. He worked on the National Intelligence Estimates, and won the CIA's Exceptional Accomplishment Award in 1988.[1] In 1989, Barlow transferred to the office of the Secretary of Defense, where he initiated an in-house intelligence analysis program. He was in a chain of command below Stephen J. Hadley, then Assistant Secretary of Defense; the Secretary of Defense was Dick Cheney. His early work included an effort to sound the alarm about the now-discredited Pakistani nuclear scientist and proliferator, Abdul Qadeer Khan. In particular, he discovered that Pakistan's nuclear program depended upon clandestine and illegal procurement activity within the United States.[2] The US administration, however, knew that this was the case; indeed, his report detailed occasions when the State Department under Ronald Reagan had actually helped it happen, warning targets of sealed arrest warrants in FBI operations and approving export licenses for restricted goods.[3]
Whistleblowing
During the debate over the sale of F-16s to Pakistan in 1989, the U.S. administration was constrained by the 1985 Pressler amendment of the Foreign Assistance Act which prohibited the sale of any matriel or armaments which might assist in the development or delivery of nuclear weapons. Barlow's analysis of Pakistan's nuclear program indicated that Pakistan possessed the capability to use the fighters to drop nuclear bombs, and the report which he submitted to Dick Cheney concluded that the F-16 sale indisputably violated the law. He drew on details available to the intelligence community about how Pakistan had used the F-16s it already possessed. Barlow then learned that Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Hughes had delivered testimony to Congress that stated the exact opposite, including the statement that using F-16s to deliver nuclear weapons "far exceeded the state of art in Pakistan," which Barlow knew to be untrue. Barlow believed that the details had been "willfully falsified by officials at the Office of the Secretary of Defense", including then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and then-Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Scooter Libby. On examining the archives he discovered that his reports were "mysteriously substituted or altered". Within days of Barlow's sharing his concerns with colleagues at the Department of Defense, he was fired.[4][5][6]
Richard Barlow
References
[1] The Washington Post (http:/ / www. washingtonpost. com/ wp-dyn/ content/ article/ 2007/ 07/ 06/ AR2007070602127_pf. html) [2] Raw Story (http:/ / rawstory. com/ news/ 2007/ They_sold_out_world_for_F16_0426. html) [3] Hindustan Times (http:/ / www. hindustantimes. com/ StoryPage/ StoryPage. aspx?id=ac764737-c552-4368-a841-23be59381441& MatchID1=4627& TeamID1=1& TeamID2=6& MatchType1=1& SeriesID1=1165& PrimaryID=4627& Headline=America+ fails+ the+ IQ+ test) [4] Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, Guardian UK, October 2007 (http:/ / www. guardian. co. uk/ world/ 2007/ oct/ 13/ usa. pakistan) [5] The Economist (http:/ / www. economist. com/ books/ displaystory. cfm?story_id=10424283) [6] Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker (http:/ / www. newyorker. com/ archive/ 1993/ 03/ 29/ 1993_03_29_056_TNY_CARDS_000363214?printable=true)
License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 //creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/