Book says Bhutto smuggled nuclear data

Supposedly gave secret information to North Korea

Benazir Bhutto, shown here at a 2007 news conference, told journalist Shyam Bhatia, a longtime friend, of her secret. (Mian Khursheed/reuters)

WASHINGTON - Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, on a state visit to North Korea in 1993, smuggled crucial data on uranium enrichment to help facilitate a missile deal with Pyongyang, according to a new book by a journalist who knew the slain politician well.

The assertion is based on conversations the author, Shyam Bhatia, had with Bhutto in 2003, in which she said she would tell him a secret "so significant that I had to promise never to reveal it, at least not during her lifetime," Bhatia writes in "Goodbye, Shahzadi," which was published in India last month.

Bhutto was slain in December while campaigning to win back the prime minister's post.

The account, if verified, could advance the timetable for North Korea's interest in uranium enrichment, a route to making a nuclear weapon.

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a research organization on nuclear weapons programs, said the assertion "makes sense," because there were signs of "funny procurements" in the late 1980s by North Korea that suggested a nascent effort to assemble a uranium enrichment project.

Pakistan - and, in particular, a nuclear smuggling ring run by Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who was instrumental in developing a Pakistani nuclear bomb - has long been suspected as a source of expertise for North Korea, but such high-level government involvement always has been denied.

In 2002, after observing a series of suspect North Korean purchases, the Bush administration accused Pyongyang of having a clandestine program to produce highly enriched uranium - a charge that helped sink a Clinton-era deal that had frozen North Korea's plutonium-based reactor.

North Korea insists that it had no such program, though it recently agreed to "acknowledge" US concerns as part of an agreement to disable its nuclear reactor.

Nadeem Kiani, spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy, denounced Bhatia's account as "an absurd and baseless claim," adding, "It has no iota of truth and not even worth commenting."

Bhatia is a London-based investigative reporter who has written four other books, including one of the earliest accounts of India's nuclear program. Bhatia said he first met Bhutto at Oxford University in 1974 and kept contact with her until just weeks before she was killed.

George Perkovich, a nuclear analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, knows Bhatia and cited his book in Perkovich's own study of the Indian program. "He is very smart, a serious guy, and the work he did on the Indian nuclear program has held up really well," Perkovich said.

Selig Harrison, a specialist on South Asia and North Korea at the Center for International Policy who has read the book, said Bhatia "is credible on Bhutto. . . . He knew her very well and is a reputable Indian journalist."

In his book, Bhatia writes that Bhutto brought up the North Korea visit during a discussion in 2003 about her difficulties with Pakistan's military. "Let me tell you something," she declared, before telling Bhatia to turn off his tape recorder. "I have done more for my country than all the military chiefs of Pakistan combined."

At the time, Pakistan was in desperate need of new missile technology that would counter improvements in India's missiles. Bhutto said she was asked to carry "critical nuclear data" to hand over in Pyongyang as part of a barter deal.