The CIA recruited a family of Swiss engineers to help it thwart the Libyan and Iranian nuclear programs as well as an underground supply network of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the New York Times reported on its Web site late on Sunday. The newspaper said the operation involved Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, who have been accused in Switzerland of dealing with rogue nations seeking nuclear equipment and expertise.
But the case has been hampered by the destruction of relevant documents, which was done, Swiss officials said, to prevent their falling into terrorist hands.
But the Times said the real reason for the destruction was pressure from the CIA, which feared that its ties with the Tinners would be exposed.
Over four years, the CIA paid the Tinners US$10 million, some of which was delivered to them in a suitcase stuffed with cash, the Times said, citing unnamed officials. In return, it said, the Tinners delivered a flow of secret information that helped end Libya’s nuclear weapons program, reveal Iran’s atomic efforts and undo Khan’s nuclear supply network.
The Tinners also played an important role in a clandestine US operation to funnel sabotaged nuclear equipment to Libya and Iran, the Times said.
Friedrich Tinner began working with Khan in the mid-1970s, using his expertise in vacuum technology to help Khan’s develop atomic centrifuges, the report said. But in 2000, the CIA recruited his son, Urs Tinner, who eventually persuaded his father and younger brother to join him as moles. As part of their services, the Tinners helped the CIA sabotage atomic gear bound for Libya and Iran, the report said.
In 2003 and 2004, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors discovered vacuum pumps delivered to Iran and Libya that had been damaged cleverly so that they looked perfectly fine but failed to operate properly, the Times. They traced the defective parts from Pfeiffer Vacuum in Germany to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS