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THE NEW WORKER

FACT
A aeoraiB AT LAKE
THE UNKNOWN
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
The C.I.A. and the Pentagon take another look at Al Qaeda and Iraq.
Issue of 2003-02-10
Posted 2003-02-03

In April of 1998, President Clinton sent his United Nations Ambassador, Bill
Richardson, to South Asia. Richardson's stops included New Delhi, Islamabad, and,
most unusually, Kabul, where he held the first (and, as it turned out, the last)
Cabinet-level negotiations between the United States and the Taliban leaders of
Afghanistan. Richardson, who is now the governor of New Mexico, is an effective
diplomat. (He returned to international diplomacy briefly last month, when he met
with two North Korean envoys in Santa Fe.) He is irreverent, and he is not timid,
and his trip might have been a diplomatic success if it had not been an intelligence
failure.
During the stop in New Delhi, Richardson met with officials of the new Hindu-
nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party. In one encounter, Richardson
asked the defense minister, George Fernandes, if his country planned to explode
any of its nuclear weapons. The Indians had not tested their bomb since 1974, but in
early 1998 the newspapers in New Delhi—and in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital—
were filled with speculation about the new government's intentions. The B.J.P. had
stated in its election platform that it would "not be dictated to by anybody in matters
of security and in the exercise of the nuclear option."
Fernandes, a self-described pacifist, told Richardson that India had no intention of
exploding a nuclear device. Then he changed the subject to the situation in Burma,
hi other meetings, Richardson was given the same soothing message, and the
mission to India was so relaxed that the Assistant Secretary of State, Karl
Inderfurth, who was managing the trip, spent part of one day trying to set up a
cricket demonstration for Richardson, a former minor-league baseball player. The
demonstration was interrupted only once, so that Richardson could receive a six-
minute intelligence briefing from a New Delhi-based C.I.A. officer.
I accompanied Richardson on the trip, and he allowed me to follow him into many
of his meetings, except for C.I.A. briefings. But it is clear that no one from the
C.I.A. told Richardson that the Indians were about to explode five nuclear devices
in the Rajasthan desert, which is what they did less than a month after the
delegation left South Asia. Not long ago, one of Richardson's former top aides,

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