Inside Burma’s black box

Sai Thein Win

A former Army major has courageously parted the curtains on what looks like secret efforts at missile and nuclear activity in Burma. Sai Thein Win delivered to a dissident group, the Democratic Voice of Burma, a fascinating cache of color photographs and personal recollections that reinforce the suspicion that the generals who run the country have launched a primitive quest for nuclear weapons.

Looking at the evidence, retired United Nations weapons inspector Robert E. Kelley wrote: “Photographs could be faked, but there are so many and they are so consistent with other information and within themselves that they lead to a high degree of confidence that Burma is pursuing nuclear technology.” Kelley’s report, co-written with Ali Fowle of Democratic Voice of Burma, can be found here, and a discussion of the technical side at Arms Control Wonk.

Aside from the revelatory nature of the materials, what’s so interesting about Sai Thein Win’s cache is that he decided to bring it out. He reminds us that despite the very best technology in intelligence and monitoring — satellite imagery and listening devices — there’s tremendous value in the eyewitness account of a participant in a closed state like Burma, also known as Myanmar.

Some of the snapshots inside the Burmese program — pieces of equipment, drawings and such — could never have been captured by a satellite. Sai Thein Win was not a nuclear expert, but a missile engineer, and in some cases he is reporting on overheard conversations or trying to puzzle out bits and pieces of evidence. Nonetheless, the generals who rule the country must be just fuming.

The disclosures recall another case more than 20 years ago. On a drizzly cold October day in 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik, director of a top-secret Soviet biological weapons facility, defected to Britain. When he got settled in a safe house, what he described was nothing short of astounding.

For many years, Western intelligence agencies puzzled over hints the Soviets possessed a germ warfare program, but lacked solid proof. (The satellite images didn’t show what was going on inside laboratory test tubes.) The thinking among many analysts and policymakers in the West was that nuclear weapons were so devastating, they trumped all. The analysts assumed the Soviets had reached a similar conclusion.

As I described in The Dead Hand, Pasechnik changed all that. He disclosed the Soviets were working on pathogens as strategic weapons, and that they had built a hidden archipelago of laboratories and industrial plants in violation of their treaty obligations. He revealed a different Soviet mindset than the West had assumed existed for many years.

Despite our advanced efforts to glean understanding from the hard data of satellites and intercepts, the greater challenge is to get inside the minds of people, to figure out what leaders are thinking, especially those who cherish deception and mask their ambitions. Sometimes this information comes by good intelligence work, and sometimes it spills out quite in the open.

Sai Thein Win took his evidence to a dissident group and they used nongovernmental experts to analyze it. Others have taken their case to the press, or to intelligence agencies. Almost all the people who do this go through deep emotional turmoil and have widely varying motivations, including antipathy to the state they are betraying. They also seem to possess some deep well of trust that those who receive their information will do the right thing. In the end, the world’s ability to stop proliferation may depend on insiders continuing to walk away from secret weapons programs, a process sometimes called "societal verification."

The Burma file offers a valuable clue about the world we live in today. Instead of trying to isolate our adversaries, we should do what we can to generate winds of glasnost or openness in those states which have something to hide.

This is the age of two powerful revolutions: information and globalization. With illicit weapons threats more diffuse than during the Cold War, it is never going to be easy to detect them. Yet the information and globalization revolutions should not frighten us. The trick is to harness them. Instead of “containment,” cutting ourselves off from places like Iran and North Korea, we ought to be everywhere, sitting in the cafes and apartments, walking down alleys and doing business with all kinds of people, keeping our ears to the ground. The best information often comes from the hard detective work of diplomacy and intelligence, the one-to-one contacts and acute observations that only people can make.

Some of those who show up in cafes will be seeking pay and a comfortable retirement abroad. Others will act out of conscience. The important point is that someone be there to listen.

Certainly there will be dead ends, deceptions, blunders and cover-ups. It was hard, unforgiving work to figure out the intentions of Soviet leaders during the Cold War, and not always successful. Yet we have more tools today than ever before.

Who will be having coffee with the next Sai Thein Win?