Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), a leading Swiss daily has reported that Israel’s Mossad is suspected of having bombed and issued threats to German and Swiss companies that “energetically worked” to aid Pakistan in its quest to develop its nuclear weapons program in the 1980s.

In 1981, Israel had launched a daring air attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor about 10 miles (16 km) outside Baghdad in Iraq and it also viewed Islamabad acquiring nuclear capabilities as an “existential threat”.

The Jerusalem Post quoted a prominent Swiss daily report that “the suspicion that Mossad carried out the attacks and issued threats soon arose” after the three bombings in 1981 on three of these companies following an unsuccessful intervention by the United States to stop the activities”.

“For Israel, the prospect that Pakistan, for the first time, could become an Islamic State with an atomic bomb posed an existential threat,” Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ) reported on Sunday.

Pakistan on May 28, 1998, conducted five simultaneous underground nuclear tests at Ras Koh Hills in Chagai district of Baluchistan province. Codenamed Chagai-I. A second nuclear test, Chagai-II, followed on May 30 in the same year and Pakistan declared itself an Islamic Nuclear Powered State.

Pakistan was also involved in nuclear proliferation throughout the 1980s and it also helped the Islamic Republic of Iran develop nuclear weapons devices in which German and Swiss companies provided technical aid for their nuclear program.

The report which is now in the public domain claims, “New, previously unknown, documents from archives in Bern and Washington sharpen this picture,”.

NZZ report also mentions the role of disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist, the late Abdul Qadeer Khan, who with the help of the Pakistan Army traveled over Western Europe during the 1980s to secure technology and blueprints from Western institutions and companies to develop a nuclear bomb.

During this time, the US was closely involved in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet Union and did not make an effort to stop Pakistan’s “fast-moving efforts” to jumpstart its nuclear weapons program. However, it did try to convince German and Swiss governments to crack down on the aiding companies but was unsuccessful.

Suspected Mossad agents are then said to have “taken action” against the companies and the engineers involved in aiding Pakistan.

“A few months after the unsuccessful intervention of the American state department in Bonn and Bern, unknown perpetrators carried out explosive attacks on three of these companies – on February 20, 1981 on the house of a leading employee of Cora Engineering Chur; on May 18, 1981 on the factory building of the Walischmiller company in Markdorf and on November 6, 1981, on the engineering office of Heinz Mebus in Erlangen,” NZZ reported.

“The attack that we carried out against the Walischmiller company could happen to you too – this is how the Leybold-Heraeus administration office was intimidated.

“Siegfried Schertler, the owner of VAT at the time and his head salesman Tinner were called several times on their private lines. Schertler also reported to the Swiss Federal Police that the Israeli secret service had contacted him. This emerges from the investigation files, which the NZZ was able to see for the first time,” the report said.

“Many of these suppliers, mainly from Germany and Switzerland, soon entered into business worth millions with Pakistan: Leybold-Heraeus, Walischmiller, Cora Engineering Chur, Vakuum-Apparate-Technik (VAT, with the chief buyer Friedrich Tinner) or the Buchs metal works, to name a few.

“They benefited from an important circumstance: the German and Swiss authorities interpreted their dual-use provisions very generously: Most of the components that are required for uranium enrichment, for example, high-precision vacuum valves, are primarily used for civil purposes,” NZZ reported.

The National Security Archive in Washington has also recently published diplomatic correspondence from the US State Department from Bonn and Bern in 1980 bringing new information out which has now shed more light on how the West allowed Pakistan to acquire nuclear technology.

The report also indicated that Bern’s behavior, the erstwhile capital of West Germany as a “hands-off approach” and the local authorities were accused of “turning a blind eye” in these communications.

“In the now released dispatches, which were previously classified as secret, those companies are listed for the first time that the US has accused of supporting the Pakistani nuclear weapons program with their deliveries. The list included around half a dozen companies each from Germany and Switzerland,” the Swiss daily is said to have reported.

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