‘Knew F-16s could deliver nukes’: Ex-CIA officer makes major claim on Pakistan; recalls warning of ‘enemy within’

In a startling revelation, former CIA counterproliferation officer Richard Barlow has claimed that successive US Presidents continued to certify Pakistan as a non-nuclear state until 1989 — even though Washington’s own intelligence showed that US-supplied F-16 fighter jets had been modified to deliver nuclear weapons. Barlow, who tracked Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear program through the 1980s, said US officials were fully aware of Islamabad’s nuclear capabilities. “We knew that the F-16s were capable of delivering the Pakistani nuclear weapons as they existed at that time, without any doubt. It’s a hard engineering question, period. It had been looked at by the engineers and the physicists, not by me. There was that. Yet the government went ahead with the sale,” Barlow said in an interv