Advertisement ::

Enlarge Cartoon

Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The New York Times/IHT today are both running a major story on the Swiss Tinner family of engineers and their CIA connections, focusing on the dismay in Europe over files destroyed by the Swiss government, in connection with the case. The story is a long and complicated saga of spying and black market dealings in nuclear power that centres around the current legal investigation in Switzerland of Friedrich Tinner and his two sons Urs and Marco, who are suspected of having too-close ties to Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan, described by the New York Times as the country’s “bomb pioneer turned nuclear black marketeer.”  They were arrested in 2006 and the father was later released but the two sons are still in prison pending the investigation – but no charges have been pressed. The thrust of the New York Times story is that they were in the pay of the CIA and that Switzerland, under pressure from the US government, not only destroyed the files but could well free the brothers.

Swiss President Pascal Couchepin announced in May that the Swiss government had indeed destroyed files related to the case, confirming rumours to that effect. One sources of the rumours appears to have been the Swiss judged assigned to investigate the case. Couchepin gave as a rationale that it was important the files never fall into the hands of terrorists. But, according to the newspaper’s team, which has continued to interview European diplomats and nuclear experts since May, there are strong fears throughout Europe that the CIA is covering its tracks and Switzerland has been too quick to help.

• Background blog post at ArmsControlWonk (Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation: personal blog)
• “Did Switzerland give in to US pressure?” 30 May 2008, swissinfo
• “Cabinet comes under fire over shredded documents,” 3 June 2008, swissinfo, featuring the reaction of Dick Marty, best known for his uncovering of the CIA secret “rendition” flights over Europe
  
• Related story, WRS radio interview with Doug Frantz, author of The Nuclear Jihadist, a book about the Tinners, May 2008