April 28, 2003
Last week, the Sunday Independent published a front page story,Sutherland sold reactors to 'axis of evil' describing how Peter Sutherland (former chairman of GATT and Irish EU commissioner, and current chairman of Goldman Sachs ) and Donald Rumsfeld helped to sell 2 nuclear reactors to North Korea.
The Sutherland/Rumsfeld reactors were fitted with monitoring cameras which provided intelligence to western powers, but the North Koreans started to remove them in December last year. It has not been possible to verify their claims about their growing nuclear capability.
The impression was given in the article that there was something amiss about the transaction. Sutherland's role was that he works for ABB who actually supplied the reactors.
In 1998, Mr Rumsfeld himself used his position as chairman of the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission to warn: "North Korea maintains an active weapons of mass destruction programme, including a nuclear weapons programme." Less than two years later he and Sutherland were openly selling the 'rogue state' $200m worth of nuclear kit.
It seemed unbelievable. One of Ireland's leading businessmen involved in shady deals of nuclear components to a dodgy government. Funnily enough, one of the Independent's senior journalists, Sam Smyth, seemed very reluctant to discuss the scoop on his Sunday radio show on TodayFM last Sunday. And for good reason. Yesterday, The Sunday Independent published a front page retraction, adding that they had paid a substantial sum to a charity of Mr. Sutherland's choice.
The sale of the equipment had indeed taken place. But it wasn't a secret deal - it was part of the Framework Agreement that the US (along with the EU, South Korea and Japan) had brokered with in an attempt to stop the North Korea developing nukes or building their own nuclear powerplant.
All this information is available on ABB's website. If you type North Korea into their search function on the ABB homepage, the second result describes the entire deal and its background. The mystery is how such a badly-researched story ended up on the front page of the paper. One minute on the internet would have saved the Sunday Independent a lot of money and embarrassment. Assuming of course that there are journalists on the Sunday Independent that have heard of the internet...
UPDATE May 1st, 2003
Fortune (Via MetaFilter) has picked up on Donald Rumsfeld 's involvement in the sale. It focuses on the fact that, given that most Republican party politicians were dead against the Framework deal (signed by Clinton), it was embarrassing for Rumsfeld to be involved in the ABB sale. It doesn't cover anything that wasn't in the Sunday Independent story last week, but has different emphasis;- it just focuses on the Rumsfeld issue, rather than try (and fail) to create an Irish angle.