US prevented nuclear war between India and Pakistan, claims Pompeo

India and Pakistan came close to a nuclear war four years ago, which was only averted when America intervened, Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state, has claimed.

In a new book, Pompeo says a “nuclear conflagration” almost occurred in 2019 after India launched airstrikes against militants in Pakistani territory in retaliation for an attack that killed 40 Indian troops in Kashmir. Pakistan then claimed it had shot down two Indian warplanes and captured a fighter pilot.

Pompeo, who was in Hanoi for a summit between Donald Trump, then US president, and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, at the time of the crisis, said he would “never forget the night” when he was woken by an urgent call from an Indian “counterpart”, who told him Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear strike.

 “I do not think the world properly knows just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear conflagration in February 2019,” Pompeo, who was America’s chief diplomat under Trump, writes in his memoir.

“India and Pakistan started threatening each other in connection with the decades-long dispute over the northern border region of Kashmir.”

Pompeo, 59, said the unnamed Indian official “believed the Pakistanis had begun to prepare their nuclear weapons for a strike. India, he informed me, was contemplating its own escalation.”

“I asked him to do nothing and give us a minute to sort things out,” Pompeo said.

American diplomats then persuaded both countries that neither was preparing to go nuclear, he writes.

“It took us a few hours — and remarkably good work by our teams on the ground in New Delhi and Islamabad — to convince each side that the other was not preparing for nuclear war. No other nation could have done what we did that night to avoid a horrible outcome,” Pompeo adds.

Pompeo writes that Pakistan “probably enabled” the Kashmir attack. He had spoken to General Qamar Javed Bajwa, then head of the army, who he described as “the actual leader of Pakistan”.

At the time of the tensions, Pompeo publicly defended India’s right to act after a Pakistan-based militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, carried out a suicide attack that killed Indian soldiers.

Pompeo ran the CIA from 2017 to 2018 before acting as secretary of state until Trump stood down. In his memoir, Never Give an Inch, he praised India and wrote of his desire for closer ties between the United States and Narendra Modi’s government “to counteract Chinese aggression”.

Pompeo, who is considered an outside candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, also claims that his hawkish stance towards Beijing, especially during the pandemic, did not go unnoticed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He writes that Trump once told him that President Xi “hates you”.

He said Trump told him to “shut the hell up for a while” after Pompeo blamed China for coronavirus and letting it spread across the world from Wuhan.

“I was not happy that the president had tweeted that the CCP was doing a good job on the virus and praised Xi,” Pompeo said. “But I understood the circumstances — we needed health equipment and were at the CCP’s mercy for it. I worked for the president and I would bide my time.”

Elsewhere in the book, Pompeo writes about meeting Kim in Pyongyang in March 2018 while he was still head of the CIA.

“’I didn’t think you’d show up. I know you’ve been trying to kill me,’” Pompeo quotes the North Korean leader as telling him. “I decided to lean in with a little humour of my own: ‘Mr Chairman, I’m still trying [to] kill you.’”

He adds that he offered to take Kim to “the nicest beach in Miami and smoke the best Cubanos in the world”, playing on his cigar-smoking habit.

Pompeo wrote that Kim replied: “I already have a great relationship with the Castros.”

He also writes that Trump asked Kim, 39, if he knew who Elton John was, as he tried to explain why he had called him “Little Rocket Man”. Trump claims to have named him after the singer’s 1972 hit Rocket Man.

Kim replied he was unfamiliar with the British singer during the exchange at a meeting in June 2018 in Singapore, Pompeo said.