‘Enemy within’: Ex-CIA officer says US tipped off Pakistani general before nuclear smuggling arrest

WASHINGTON: Former CIA officer Richard Barlow has revealed that senior officials in the US State Department secretly tipped off the Pakistani government about an undercover American operation to arrest a retired Pakistani general involved in nuclear smuggling during the 1980s.

In an interview, Barlow recounted that the operation, jointly run by the CIA and US Customs, was targeting a Pakistani agent named Arshad Parvez, who was attempting to purchase 25 metric tons of Maraging 350 steel, a critical material used in uranium enrichment, from a US steel company.

Barlow said Parvez was working under the direction of retired Brigadier General Inam-ul-Haq, a known procurement agent at that time for Pakistan’s Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), the two institutions responsible for the country’s clandestine nuclear weapons programme.

“We established the Nuclear Export Violations Working Group. Not long after that group was established, we had many other cases we were working on, but I was informed by someone in the Department of Energy that a Pakistani by the name of Arshad Parvez, who lived in Canada, had contacted a U.S. steel company seeking very large quantities, about 25 metric tons of Maraging 350 steel”, Barlow said.

#WATCH | Speaking on his exposing of how a Pakistani general who was supposed to be arrested for nuclear smuggling was secretly tipped off by U.S. officials, Former CIA Officer Richard Barlow says, “There was no doubt on that issue that they were agents of the Pakistani… pic.twitter.com/0c9AtfLdwU

— ANI (@ANI) November 7, 2025

“So, in that case, working with the Customs Service, we ran an undercover operation and eventually we arrested Parvez. He was being run by a retired Pakistani general named Inam-ul-Haq and he was supposed to show up in Pennsylvania at the steel company and there was a warrant for his arrest as well but Haq didn’t show up. And I learned that some people in the State Department had tipped off the Pakistani government to this arrest warrant”, he said.

Barlow, who investigated Pakistan’s nuclear procurement network during the Cold War, said the tip-off came from senior State Department officials, effectively derailing the US operation. He described his reaction to the betrayal as one of shock and outrage. “I was ballistic. These were people in my own government, the enemy within”, Barlow recalled.

According to Barlow, the case exposed how elements within the US administration prioritised Pakistan’s role in the Afghan war over enforcing American laws designed to curb nuclear proliferation. The incident, he said, deepened divisions between intelligence officers who wanted to stop Pakistan’s nuclear build-up and policymakers who wanted to maintain close ties with Islamabad during the Soviet-Afghan conflict.

He said that his team had collected overwhelming evidence linking the arrested agents to Pakistan’s nuclear establishment. “There was no doubt on that issue that they were agents of the Pakistani government. We had hard evidence of this. I mean, we got into all the pounds and pounds of documents and evidence and things that were said in undercover meetings that were taped”, Barlow said.

The exposure of the operation later led to outrage in the US Congress, prompting calls from lawmakers to suspend aid to Pakistan under non-proliferation laws such as the Solarz and Pressler Amendments.

“Those days, arrests were public in the United States. And so Congress learned of the arrest and you can go look at the, Washington Post and New York Times and newspapers all over the world, Congressman Solars and the other members of Congress on the committee interested in proliferation matters, they fully understood the implications of 25 tons of meraging 350 steel without a word from the CIA. And they called for a cutoff of aid immediately in the press. So, clearly the battle lines over Pakistan were drawn between the State Department and a section of the CIA that was monitoring proliferation”, Barlow added.

“It was not an intelligence failure. It was a policy failure. But despite the clear violation, the White House and the State Department found ways to keep military and financial aid flowing to Pakistan”, Barlow had earlier said in the interview. “I would agree that there was a time by 86, 87, where most of us believed that Pakistan had manufactured all the parts of a nuclear weapon. The lawyers were looking for every way around this”, Barlow said.

Barlow later testified before Congress alongside National Intelligence Officer David Einsel, whom he described as being closely tied to the White House and instructed not to jeopardise aid to the Afghan Mujahideen. His testimony exposed deep divisions within the US government over how to deal with Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions. “This was not an intelligence failure. This was a policy issue, a wink and a nod”, Barlow said.

He also described how the Reagan administration and the CIA’s operations wing prioritised the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan over non-proliferation. “The Cold Warriors were in charge. Fighting the Soviets was the number one issue. They didn’t think Pakistan obtaining nuclear weapons was a problem because they looked at everything through the Cold War lens”, Barlow said. (ANI)