Peter Baker reports for the Washington Post. Excerpt:
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – It didn’t seem all that strange to his son when Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood began spending part of his retirement in Afghanistan working on charity projects. But he was curious enough after one of those trips to ask his father if he had met Osama bin Laden there. “He said no,” the son recalled.
Only after his father was arrested did Asim Mahmood learn the truth. His father had met with bin Laden twice. “What were you doing with him?” Asim said he demanded. “Why did you meet with him?”
Those are the same questions still being asked by intelligence officials here and in Washington. Mahmood was no ordinary retiree-philanthropist but one of the top nuclear scientists in Pakistan. In addition to lying to his son, intelligence officials concluded, Mahmood had failed a half-dozen lie detector tests they gave him.
The mysterious case of the Pakistani scientist touched off alarms in the West, and CIA Director George J. Tenet raced to Islamabad to personally look into the matter last fall. But four months of investigation by U.S. and Pakistani authorities have failed to yield a definitive explanation of what Mahmood was doing in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Was he handing over nuclear secrets to bin Laden, or has he been caught up in an investigation built largely on suspicion and circumstance?
Pakistani authorities maintain that whatever he might have discussed with bin Laden, Mahmood did not possess the specialized knowledge necessary to build a weapon by himself, and they decided in January not to prosecute.
Yet U.S. officials said they remain dissatisfied and have pressed Pakistan to keep Mahmood under wraps. He remains on the U.S. list of designated terrorists, his assets have been frozen and he lives under a form of house arrest with a guard watching over him 24 hours a day.
…
A U.S. source said Mahmood failed polygraph examinations during his questioning. Asim Mahmood confirmed that his father took “six or seven” lie detector tests and failed, but he called the technology unreliable. Although he said his father initially lied to him about bin Laden, Asim Mahmood said he has accepted his father’s explanation that the whole situation was misinterpreted. Asim Mahmood also acknowledged that a diagram describing a helium balloon to disperse anthrax spores was found last fall in the building that housed his father’s charity in Kabul, but he said it was planted by authorities after the building was abandoned.
Criminal investigations and intelligence operations should not be allowed to be influenced by a superstitious belief in polygraphy.