Podcast of Collins and Frantz Seminar:

The CIA's Secret Hunt for Nuclear Traffickers

Veteran investigative journalists Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz addressed a seminar of the Managing the Atom project at Harvard Kennedy School on Nov. 15 on what they found during their years of research into the U.S. hunt for nuclear traffickers.

Here are links to two podcast recordings from that event -- their remarks to the seminar, and the question-and-answer session with the audience, which included fellows from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School.

Collins and Frantz earned strong reviews for their 2011 book, Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking. That book followed up the in-depth work they did to produce their 2007 book, The Nuclear Jihadist (published in paperback as The Man From Pakistan), a study of the nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan and his dangerous global proliferation network that fed nuclear programs in Iran, Libya and North Korea – at the least.

During the seminar, Collins and Frantz fleshed out their argument that the CIA waited far too long before finally opting to shut down the Khan network, preferring to keep monitoring the network’s operatives and gathering more intelligence rather than dismantling it. They argued that institutional errors and misguided policy choices along the way contributed to proliferation rather than slowed it.