Swiss nuclear smuggling suspect claims CIA link

A Swiss man suspected of being involved in the world’s biggest nuclear smuggling ring claims he supplied the CIA with information that led to the breakup of the black market nuclear network led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

In a documentary to air on Swiss TV station SF1, Urs Tinner says he tipped off U.S. intelligence about a delivery of centrifuge parts meant for Libya’s nuclear weapons program.

The shipment was seized at the Italian port of Taranto in 2003, forcing Libya to admit and eventually renounce its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.

The 43-year-old Tinner is suspected, along with his brother Marco and father Friedrich, of supplying Khan’s clandestine network with technical know-how and equipment that was used to make gas centrifuges.

Khan – the creator of Pakistan’s atomic bomb – sold the centrifuges for secret nuclear weapons programs in countries that included Libya and Iran before his operation was disrupted in 2003.

Tinner was freed by Swiss authorities last month after almost five years in investigative detention and has yet to be charged.

Tinner’s account echoes that of the book “The Nuclear Jihadist,” by U.S. investigative reporters Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. Frantz says, based on interviews with sources in the U.S. intelligence community, Urs Tinner was recruited by the CIA as early as 2000.

A CIA spokesman, George Little, refused to discuss the Tinner case. The agency has said in the past that “the disruption of the A.Q. Khan network was a genuine intelligence success, one in which the CIA played a key role.”