Evidence links Libya uranium to North Korea

By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad
The New York Times

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A giant cask of uranium hexafluoride was turned over to the United States by the Libyans earlier this year as part of Col. Moammar Gadhafi's agreement to give up his nuclear program, and the Americans identified Pakistan as the likely source.

But in recent weeks, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found strong evidence that the uranium came from North Korea, basing its conclusion on interviews with members of the secret nuclear-supplier network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former head of Pakistan's main nuclear laboratory.

Two years ago, the United States said North Korea was working to build its own uranium-based nuclear weapons, which would require the same raw materials.

The uranium shipped to Libya could not be used as nuclear fuel unless it was enriched in centrifuges, which the Libyans were constructing as part of a $100 million program to purchase equipment from the Khan network.

If enriched, the fuel Libya obtained could produce a single nuclear weapon, experts said. But the Libyan discovery suggests North Korea may be capable of producing far larger quantities, especially because the country maintains huge mines that the Federation of American Scientists has described as containing "4 million tons of exploitable high-quality uranium."

The fresh intelligence on North Korea poses another challenge to the United States. The classified evidence — many details of which are sketchy — has touched off a race among the world's intelligence services to explore whether North Korea has made similar clandestine sales to other nations or to terror groups seeking atomic weapons.

"The North Koreans have been selling missiles for years to many countries," one senior Bush administration official said recently, referring to the country's well-known sales to Iran, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and other nations. "Now, we have to look at their trading network in a very different context, to see if something much worse was happening as well."

Iran has bought centrifuges from the Khan network, investigators think, but it has denied it is seeking a nuclear weapon.

Last year, Bush administration officials were warning that North Korea could make good on its threats to provide nuclear materials or weapons. But until a few weeks ago, U.S. officials said they had no evidence that the country was selling much beyond the missiles and missile technology that have long been among its chief exports.

Now, only weeks after Vice President Dick Cheney said "time is not on our side" in the North Korean nuclear crisis, the IAEA's discovery suggests North Korea has done just what many experts have warned: It has turned into a supplier of nuclear technology.
 
U.S. officials said the discovery of the North Korean connection came indirectly from Libya's decision to dismantle its nuclear program, and the ensuing drive to break up Khan's network.

The sources the agency has developed in the Khan network are considered reliable, a European diplomat said, but the experience of false and deliberately misleading reports about Iraq's weapons programs has made the international agency and the United States more cautious.

The agency hopes to confirm the finding with the North Koreans, but since IAEA inspectors were evicted Dec. 31, 2002, there has been virtually no contact with the North Korean government.

The emerging story of the North Korean sales also reveals another intelligence lapse: Though U.S. satellites monitor North Korea more carefully than almost any nation, intelligence officials apparently failed to detect the uranium shipments.

As recently as March, when the Bush administration invited reporters to a secure Y-12 nuclear facility in Tennessee to view the nuclear hardware turned over by Libya, a senior administration official said that Libya's uranium had likely come from Pakistan.

U.S. officials said they are backing away from that statement while they seek to verify the new evidence.

As the IAEA continues its investigation, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Energy Department and the State Department's intelligence unit are engaged in what one official called "two or three separate reviews" of the U.S. assessment of the size of North Korea's nuclear arsenal.

Their main focus is North Korea's plutonium program, which was restarted after international atomic inspectors were thrown out of the country 17 months ago.

Since then, according to North Korea, it has turned into bomb fuel all of the nuclear fuel rods that the international agency had under its supervision.

Also yesterday, a senior aide to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in Beijing after a mission to North Korea and said "hopeful signs" had emerged in talks on the aid package that Pyongyang wants in exchange for freezing and dismantling its nuclear program.

Maurice Strong, U.N. undersecretary-general who is Annan's special envoy on North Korea, said he is putting together an international team of "leading energy experts" to help North Korea deal with energy shortfalls crippling its economy.

Material from Knight Ridder Newspapers is included in this report.