I don’t know what to make of this essay. You should never judge people by how they come across in print. Especially when the print in question was written about them by somebody else.

But as I read this essay profiling Aaron Cohen I was inclined to dislike him. He just struck me as the kind of guy who might make stuff up.

In fairness to Cohen though, his personality also reminds me an awful lot of a man called John Fairfield who rescued a lot of slaves in the mid 1800s. Fairfield was always showing off his bullet wounds and talking up all his close calls and he was definitely for real. So maybe Cohen is too.

Why worry about this question? Well, how much credibility you are willing to give to Cohen makes a big difference on what you think of this passage from the essay that I linked to above….

Later that day, Cohen was taken to see the area’s uranium mines — where the Shans told him soil samples had been extracted by the Russians as well as A.Q. Khan, the well-known Pakistani nuclear-weapons-scientist-turned-dealer: “These mounds are everywhere, where samples were being unearthed by other partners as well, including the Iranians and the North Koreans… I am the only Westerner [to see this],” Cohen wrote.

The intelligence minister then handed Cohen documentation of Khan’s entries into Myanmar and told him that the SPDC was selling Shan uranium to the Iranians, who were processing it into material for nuclear weapons. The route from Myanmar, the minister showed him, led straight through China to Natanz, Iran. “I’m no expert on weapons-grade uranium,” Cohen admits. “But they wanted me to leave with samples of what I saw.” Restating his human-rights mission, Cohen refused to discuss transport of the nuclear material. (“It’s a death wish to have that kind of stuff on you,” he says.) But he agreed to put a stack of evidence, including photographs of the Burmese and Iranian facilities, in the right hands when he returned to Thailand and the U.S.

A.Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program, confessed in 2004 to having been the mastermind behind a clandestine network of nuclear-arms proliferation that stretched from Pakistan through Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His network sold blueprints for centrifuges to enrich uranium as well as illicit uranium centrifuges and uranium hexafluoride — the gas that can be transformed into enriched uranium for nuclear bombs.

Khan is already known to have provided complete centrifuge systems to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He was pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and sentenced to house arrest after declaring on television that Musharraf’s government had not played a role in his schemes. Western governments have been denied access to Khan, but the British think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies recently published a report indicating that Khan’s network is very much alive, even without its decapitated head.

Eerily, the Pakistan-Myanmar link is backed up by a 2002 Wall Street Journal article detailing Myanmar’s nuclear ambitions: “The program drew scrutiny recently after two Pakistani nuclear scientists, with long experience at two of their country’s most secret nuclear installations, showed up in Myanmar after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. Asian and European intelligence officials say Suleiman Asad and Muhammed Ali Mukhtar left Pakistan for Myanmar when the U.S grew interested in interrogating them about their alleged links to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, who Washington believes wants to develop a nuclear weapon.”

Burmese exile magazines, blogs and Web sites are rife with alleged wicked SPDC plots. But one question pops up over and over: Is there a link between Myanmar, which mines and refines uranium ore, and Iran, which requires uranium for its own nuclear projects? And, specifically, is Burmese yellowcake finding its way to uranium centrifuges in Natanz, Iran?

Cohen’s testimony suggests that the answer may be yes. From the mining sites, he was taken to meet several Shan men who said they worked as drivers for the SPDC at clandestine nuclear processing facilities near Taungdwingyi, Chauk and Lanwya. These men swore to Cohen that the SPDC was overseeing the production of yellowcake there and in several other locations, then transporting it on North Korean and Iranian ships as well as over land through China and Afghanistan, via a courier network, to the (then secret) underground Iranian plant in Natanz. They handed Cohen the coordinates for the facilities, saying that as ethnic Shans they could no longer do this work for a regime that was systematically attempting to wipe out their people. They had thrown their support behind the Shan State Army, they said, and wished him luck.

A few weeks later, Cohen hand-delivered that information to a source at the Pentagon. The following day (April 19), the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Iran was running more than 1,300 centrifuges at its underground plant in Natanz (latest estimates put it closer to 3,000). Iran’s plan to install 50,000 centrifuges there to enrich uranium made headlines, with the BBC running satellite photographs of the facility. But no major media outlet noted the Myanmar connection, and the story was soon buried in the subsequent frenzy over the Virginia Tech massacre.

There is more in the essay, but you get the picture. The question is, how much of it should we believe?