Secret Nuke Takeout Team

[John Young]

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."