Week in Review

A Saudi nuke?

Arnaud de Borchgrave, when he was editor in chief at The Washington Times, was the most demanding boss I ever worked for, almost impossible to satisfy no matter what we did.

But he also conducted himself with charm and professionalism, calling upon his many years of experience meeting and interviewing heads of state around the world.

And who can fail to admire a man who, at an age when he might well stay home and write memoirs, still is running off to the ends of the earth in search of news?

One of Mr. de Borchgrave’s favorite corners of the globe is South Asia, where he has traveled regularly over the years for both this newspaper and his current main employer, United Press International.

The U.S.-led war against Taliban forces in Afghanistan had barely begun when we received our first dispatch from Mr. de Borchgrave datelined from the Khyber Pass.

Weeks later, during the battle at Tora Bora, our editor at large was filing stories from the tribal areas just across the frontier in Pakistan — an area that was totally off-limits to foreigners and had not been reached by any other Western reporter.

Mr. de Borchgrave, obviously, has very good contacts in Pakistan. So when we received his dispatch on Monday saying Pakistan had agreed to give nuclear weapons technology to Saudi Arabia, we sat up and took notice.

We had already noticed that Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was in Pakistan, and had wondered what sort of business would have taken him to Islamabad.

But the sourcing on Mr. de Borchgrave’s report was not all we might like on a story of that importance; it came from only one individual described in the unedited story as “a ranking Pakistani source known to this correspondent for over a decade as a knowledgeable insider.”

Even the most reliable of sources have their own motives for passing on information of this kind, and they occasionally lie. On the other hand, Mr. de Borchgrave obviously had a long track record with this source and has been in the game long enough not to be easily taken in.

A little research

Story Continues →