Seymour Hersh, "The Risks of Pakistan's Nuclear Arsenal," The New Yorker, October 29, 2001: http://cryptome.org/paki-nukes.htm "In recent weeks an ilite Pentagon undercover unit -- trained to slip into foreign countries and find suspected nuclear weapons, and disarm them if necessary -- has explored plans for an operation inside Pakistan. In 1998, Pakistan successfully tested a nuclear device, heralded as the Islamic world's first atomic bomb. According to United States government estimates, Pakistan now has at least twenty-four warheads, which can be delivered by intermediate-range missiles and a fleet of F-16 aircraft. Some of the government's most experienced South Asia experts have doubts about Musharraf's ability to maintain control over the military and its nuclear arsenal in the event of a coup; there are also fears that a dissident group of fundamentalist officers might try to seize a warhead. The Army and the influential Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., have long-standing religious and personal ties to many of the leaders of the Taliban, dating back to Afghanistan's war against the Soviet Union in the nineteen-eighties, when Pakistan was the main conduit for American support. The crisis may bring into play the ilite unit, operating under Pentagon control with C.I.A. assistance, whose mission it is to destroy nuclear facilities, past and present government officials told me. 'They're good,' one American said. 'If they screw up, they die. They've had good success in proving the negative' -- that is, in determining that suspected facilities were not nuclear-related. The American team is apparently getting help from Israel's most successful special-operations unit, the storied Sayeret Matkal, also known as Unit 262, a deep-penetration unit that has been involved in assassinations, the theft of foreign signals-intelligence materials, and the theft and destruction of foreign nuclear weaponry. Members of the Israeli unit arrived in the United States a few days after September 11th, an informed source said, and as of last week were training with American special-forces units at undisclosed locations."