(Washington) The former head of US diplomacy under Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, says in a book published Tuesday that India and Pakistan were on the verge of a nuclear confrontation in 2019 and that the United States then allowed to avoid escalation.
“I don’t think the world really realizes how the India-Pakistan rivalry could have come so close to boiling over into a nuclear clash in February 2019,” Mr. Pompeo writes in his book “Never Give an Inch” ( “Never give an inch”).
India launched airstrikes in February 2019 in Pakistani territory in retaliation for a suicide attack that killed 41 Indian paramilitaries in Kashmir. Pakistan retaliated by shooting down an Indian plane and capturing the pilot.
Mr. Pompeo, who was in Hanoi for a summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, said he was awakened by an urgent phone call from a senior Indian official.
“He thought the Pakistanis had started preparing their nuclear weapons for a strike. India, he informed me, was studying its own response,” writes the man who also led the CIA under Donald Trump.
“I asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to try to figure it out. »
According to Mike Pompeo, American diplomats then succeeded in convincing the two countries that neither was preparing a nuclear attack.
“No other country could have done what we did that night,” he adds.
At the time, the head of American diplomacy publicly supported India’s right to defend itself.
India and then Pakistan tested atomic bombs in 1998, prompting then-US President Bill Clinton to say that Kashmir was “the most dangerous place in the world”.
This Himalayan region claimed by India and Pakistan has been the scene of several wars for its control since the partition of the British Indian Empire in 1947.
“You are trying to kill me”
In his book, Mr. Pompeo also describes at length relations with North Korea and the preparation of the three summit meetings between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.
He says he secretly met Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang in March 2018, when he was still director of the CIA.
“I didn’t think you would come. I know you are trying to kill me,” the North Korean leader allegedly told him.
Also deciding to “have a little humor”, he would have replied: “Mr. President, I am still trying to kill you. »
Mike Pompeo details how Kim Jong-un was worried about China’s aims, to the point of saying that he “needed the Americans in South Korea to protect himself” from the Chinese Communist Party.
In reference to the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, killed and dismembered in 2018 in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, he defends tooth and nail relations with Saudi Arabia, even congratulating himself for having been able to give “a middle finger to the Washington Post and the New York Times” on his way to Riyadh a few days after the assassination.
Mr. Pompeo is still ironic about the status of “journalist” of Mr. Khashoggi, erected according to him by the media as a kind of “Saudi Bob Woodward who became a martyr for having courageously criticized the Saudi royal family”.
The journalist’s Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, said she was “horrified” by the remarks in a tweet.