Two months after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, Dick Cheney was told about a meeting that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had had a month before the attacks around a campfire in Kandahar with Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a past chairman of Pakistan's atomic energy commission. Cheney's intelligence advisers began speculating about the probability that Mahmood was offering to assist al-Qaida in obtaining information that might enable them to construct or acquire a nuclear device. Mahmood was a founding member of UTN (Umma Tameer-e-Nau, or 'Islamic Revival'). A Libyan informant told the CIA that UTN had approached Libya at one stage, to ask whether Libya wanted their help in building nuclear weapons. Had UTN made a similar offer to al-Qaida? Or was there some other reason for the meeting?

LRB 10 April 2008 | PDF Download