Nuclear Secrets for Sale; Please Contact the State Department (SALTSHAKER UPDATE)

Sibel Edmonds was vindicated, if I recall the story correctly, for blowing the whistle on illegal alien/ Hezbollah spy/ CIA clandestine service officer Nada Nadim Prouty.* Now she's after much bigger fish--more slimy and slippery, too:

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

There is so much shady stuff described in the article and on the chance that just a fourth of it is true, I'd take a couple of Tums before I hit that link if I were you.

Another thought: if this is true, I think we're about to see a return to an interest in the death penalty for treason:

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion.

If I follow her allegations, the information then went from the ISI to AQ Khan to...Iran, Libya, North Korea...

Hold hearings. I'll bring the torches.

* Google's not giving me ready confirmation of this but I seem to recall chatting with Bryan Preston about it and confirming that Prouty was the agent in Edmonds' complaint. I may be wrong and I'll try to link or update later.

MORE: This blogger, whom I don't know, thinks he has the name of the official; I obviously make no claim about whether he's right or not. It's not a banner-headline name, though I've heard it.

UPDATE: Couple of pinches of salt to take this with. First, as Sean M. points out in the comments, the Bradblog is a lefty who's updated to quote Larry "the Unstable Guy" Johnson and Larisa "Raw Story" Alexandrova.

Second, someone who knows about these things writes to ask whether someone could really get four compromised Ph.D. students cleared and placed to do this given the security procedures in place.

Yes, I think it still seems possible. First of all those are current procedures and I'm not sure what the time frame Edmonds is talking about might be, but I imagine they're stricter now than they were back in the Wen Ho Lee days at Los Alamos. And then-- well, like I said, Nada Nadim Prouty.

So I hope there are hearings on this and followup. Edmonds was right before, so this isn't the accusation of some random nut, though how much of it is true it's still too early to say.