Scientists See Holes In Defector's Tale

The State Department has strong doubts about claims by a Pakistani man that Pakistani officials had discussed a pre-emptive nuclear attack on India, a department official said Tuesday.

The official, asking not to be identified, said the department's skepticism about the Pakistani, Iftikhar Khan Chaudhary, tracks closely with that of independent scientists who have interviewed him.

It is fairly clear that Khan is not who he said he was, the official said.

Khan, who claimed to be a nuclear scientist, said last week he had fled to the United States in search of political asylum to protest Pakistan's alleged plans to carry out a nuclear strike. But doubts about his story have been rife since he first told it.

Frank von Hippel of the anti-nuclear Federation of American Scientists told The Washington Post he and several associates interviewed Khan for an hour Monday.

"Everything was wrong," von Hippel told The Post. "He doesn't know the most elementary facts about what a nuclear reactor is."

Disputing Khan's claims that he has a graduate education, von Hippel said, "Our guess is that he doesn't have more than a high school education."

Responding to those comments, Khan told The Post he had been "very tense" and didn't remember enough about his physics courses to be able to respond to the questions posed by von Hippel and his colleagues.

Khan's own father has disavowed his son's story, saying he had studied business and was not a scientist.