George Tenet

Washington, Feb. 23 (Reuters): CIA director George Tenet visited Pakistan and Iraq earlier this month, but did not speak to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein who is in American custody, a US official said yesterday.

Tenet met Pakistani officials during a visit to Islamabad the week before last, the official said on condition of anonymity.

The official would not comment on the substance of the meetings, but they likely to have included discussions of the revelations about Pakistan’s role in the nuclear black market after scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan confessed to selling nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea.

Tenet also is likely to have discussed terrorism as the US continues to hunt for members of the al Qaida, including its leader Osama bin Laden who is believed to be hiding in the mountainous border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pakistani authorities are gearing up for a drive against al Qaida and Taliban militants in remote western tribal areas and have sought the deployment of more paramilitary troops, officials in the region say.

A brigade from the Pakistani army is in the tribal region of Waziristan adjacent to the Afghan border where for weeks authorities have been pressuring tribesmen to stop sheltering al Qaida suspects and Taliban fighters. Tenet, during the same trip, also stopped in Iraq but did not talk to Saddam, the US official said.

Red Cross officials visited Saddam on Saturday for the first time since US forces captured him in December and said they would pass on a letter he wrote for his daughters.

The CIA replaced its Baghdad station chief in December with one of its most experienced officers to oversee what has become the spy agency’s largest in-country presence in history.

Dubbing Pakistan scientist A.Q. Khan’s recent confessions as a “cover up”, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has said many believed that President Pervez Musharraf was involved in the scandal over the leakage of nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea.

“Many of us believe that Musharraf himself is involved,” Bhutto told the BBC adding that “Dr Khan could not have done this on his own. There are certainly other people involved”.

Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, said she wanted to know whether there was a change in policy since as Prime Minister, she had pursued a policy of no export of nuclear technology. “I would like to know whether the President or the Prime Minister changed that policy or whether the army acted in defiance of the President or the Prime Minister or whether the intelligence acted as an independent operator,” she said.

“Musharraf would like the world to believe that Khan is responsible for the export of nuclear technology. But nobody in Pakistan buys that,” she said.

“We believe there is a cover up and we want the real culprits identified so that this can never happen again,” she said.