the game of chess continues...

[Guest guest]

By Ben Fenton

(Filed: 29/10/2001)

An elite American military unit is preparing for possible incursion into

Pakistan in order to steal its nuclear weapons arsenal, it is reported today.

The special forces unit is training with Israel's most trusted anti-terrorist

unit, and would be called into action in the event that Gen Pervaiz Musharraf

lost power in Pakistan, the New Yorker magazine said.

The CIA believes that Pakistani army officers sympathetic to the Taliban could

pose a threat to Gen Musharraf, and that some of the country's estimated 24

nuclear warheads could be stolen by renegades within Pakistan's intelligence

service, the ISI.

Seymour Hersch, a journalist whose reporting on the post-September 11 crisis has

been broadly accurate so far, said that members of Israel's Unit 262, or Sayeret

Matkal, came to America soon after the attacks and have been training with

Pentagon special forces.

Mr Hersch quoted a "senior military officer" as confirming that intense planning

was going on for the "exfiltration" - theft - of warheads. But there are doubts

about whether the CIA - or any other intelligence agency - knows the exact

location of Pakistan's warheads, which were first tested, to the surprise of

American intelligence agencies, in 1998.

The fear that Gen Musharraf could lose control of the country and some or all of

the warheads is based on the close links between the ISI and the Taliban. Last

week, the Pakistani president dismissed such concerns. "We have an excellent

command-and-control system which we have evolved, and there is no question of

their falling into the hands of any fundamentalists," Gen Musharraf said.

Pakistan is thought to have a number of intermediate-range missiles to carry

its warheads as well as using F-16 fighter-bombers.

There are a number of possible targets for the use of these weapons by renegades

sympathetic to the Islamic extremists in Afghanistan. These include India,

itself a nuclear power, or the four American aircraft carriers and British

vessels currently cruising off Pakistan's coastline as bases for air and

commando attacks on the Taliban and al-Qa'eda.