Sibel Edmonds, one of the most important whistleblowers in today's world, has gained new attention now that the London Sunday Times has recently published her claims that Americans were part of a network that sold nuclear secrets to Turkish agents. The Turkish middlemen, she says, then sold the information to Pakistan and beyond.
Edmonds' information has been substantially corroborated from other sources. She gained it as an FBI translator of Turkish documents in the six months following 9/11, until she was fired from the job. The U.S. government has tried to silence her through a state secrets order and has never claimed that her information, already offered to Congress and to the 9/11 Commission, is untrue. In fact, the Office of the Inspector General found that complaints she made that led the FBI to fire her—complaints that a colleague was covering up illegal actions by Turkish citizens—were true.
Edmonds says, among other things, that grad students were recruited as moles in the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory and other American nuclear research facilities, and that senior Pentagon officials and other Americans (among whom she has elsewhere named former U.S. ambassador to Turkey Marc Grossman, who calls the allegations "stupid" and "ridiculous") were involved in the network that sold the Turks this classified information.
The nuclear secrets, the Times concludes, "were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist." (Khan, notorious for selling nuclear information to North Korea, Iran and Libya, has been the Dr. No of the international nuclear proliferation scene.) The Times said a CIA source confirmed Edmonds' claim that Turkish agents got sensitive nuclear information from the U.S. and "shared" it with Israel and Pakistan.
Edmonds' information, gleaned from translating four years' worth of taped conversations, embraced many areas of the world of international money laundering, drug sales and sales of information about non-nuclear as well as nuclear weapons. "Her story…" said the Times, "illustrates how Western government officials turned a blind eye, or even helped countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology."
