Richard Barlow

Richard Barlow is an American intelligence analyst and a former expert in nuclear non-proliferation for the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense. He lost his job and was subjected to a campaign of persecution and intimidation after he expressed concern to his managers in the US Department of Defense over testimony to the United States Congress that he believed to be false about Pakistan's nuclear weapon program during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. Since then, he has had occasional contract work for various federal agencies including the CIA, the State Department, the FBI and Sandia National Laboratories. In 2013 he had been unemployed since 2004 when his job at Sandia had been eliminated. "If they had busted those [Pakistani] networks," he told journalist Jeff Stein, "Iran would have no nuclear program, North Korea wouldn't have a uranium bomb, and Pakistan wouldn't have over a hundred nuclear weapons they are driving around in vans to hide from us."

College and early career

In 1980 Barlow wrote a political science honors thesis as a senior at Western Washington University in Bellingham discussing US failures in attempting to stop Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons. After a stint with the State Department's Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), he got a job in 1985 with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At the CIA he collated and examined information about nuclear programs in the Third World and contributed to the National Intelligence Estimates.

In mid-1986 Barlow became the CIA's delegate to the Nuclear Export Violations Working Group (N.E.V.W.G.), a newly formed top-secret panel that brought together the policy, law-enforcement, and intelligence communities in an effort to stop illegal American exports to non-nuclear nations. After a few failed sting operations, Barlow and others in the working group stopped sharing their plans with the State Department.

Events following dismissal

Barlow is not a whistleblower in the traditional sense, because he did not release classified information to the public. Instead, he lawfully disclosed in a classified briefing to a committee of the US Congress information that his management did not want shared with Congress. Because of his lawful and protected disclosures, he was fired for asking his managers to correct the record when blatantly false statements had been made to Congress.

This information became public as a result of a legal action that Barlow filed for wrongful termination. That suit received considerable attention, including from the United States Congress. In this he was defended by Paul Wolfowitz who said "there have been times on that issue when I specifically sensed that people thought we could somehow construct a policy on a house of cards that the Congress wouldn't know what the Pakistanis were doing". He concluded that the retaliation Barlow had faced was "wrong".

Following congressionally ordered investigations, the inspector general at the State Department concluded that Barlow had been fired as a reprisal. However, the inspectors general at the CIA and the Defense Department stated that the Pentagon was within its rights to fire Barlow. A final investigation by Congress' own Government Accountability Office was completed in 1997 and "largely vindicated" Barlow, who had his security clearance restored.

The activities of the Defense Department officials, however, including Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz and Hadley, were never investigated. Rep. Stephen Solarz, a major player in counter-proliferation, told Seymour Hersh for the latter's famous exposé of the Pakistani nuclear program that "If what Barlow says is true, this would have been a major scandal of Iran-Contra proportions, and the officials involved would have had to resign. We're not dealing with minor matters. Stopping the spread of nuclear weapons is one of the major foreign-policy issues of the nation—not to mention the law of the land." a biography of A.Q. Khan, caused a sensation in 2005 when they revealed that they had tracked him down to a motor home in Bozeman, Montana where he lived with two dogs.

Wider implications

Pakistan has been the center of the world's largest atomic black market, according to nuclear-proliferation expert Robert Gallucci, who served in several high ranking positions in the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Pakistan could not have entered that market without the violations of US law that Barlow tried to expose. "They were worried someone like Rich [Barlow], in his stickler approach, would insist that if there's going to be testimony on the Hill about the F-16 aircraft, that the answers be full and truthful. He was a thorn in their side, and they went after him. And they did a very good job of screwing up his life." Gallucci's comments were supported by similar remarks from Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight.

In 2007 a spokeswoman for Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a known champion of whistle-blowers, said the Senator is contacted each week by four new whistle-blowers looking for help. It's possible that all these whistle-blowers are wrong. It's also possible that the structure of the US political economy effectively forces incumbent public servants to routinely violate US and international law in pursuit of short-term objectives and persecute people like Barlow, who try to expose what they feel compelled to do.