In his new book Never Give An Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, which hit the market on Tuesday, Pompeo said the incident occurred while he was in Hanoi for the February 27-28 US-North Korea summit. He said that his team worked through the night with both India and Pakistan to defuse the crisis. Pompeo writes in his book, ‘I don’t think the world knows exactly how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to a nuclear attack in February 2019.’
‘I’ll never forget that night’
He said that the truth is that I do not even know the exact answer, I just know that it was very close. Indian fighter jets had destroyed a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp in Pakistan’s Balakot in February 2019 in response to the Pulwama terror attack that killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel. Pompeo said, ‘I’ll never forget that night when I was in Hanoi, Vietnam.’
America asked for time to fix everything
He said it was not enough to hold talks with the North Koreans on nuclear weapons as India and Pakistan started threatening each other over the decades-long dispute over the Kashmir region on the northern border. He wrote, ‘Woke up to talk with my Indian counterpart in Hanoi. He believed that the Pakistanis had started preparing their nuclear weapons for the attack. He informed me that India is considering its response. I told them not to do anything and give us some time to fix everything.
