Despite his years working in Pakistan’s nuclear establishment, Mahmood was also something of a kook, entertaining decidedly eccentric ideas about the role that Islamic spirits known as djinns supposedly might have in helping to solve the energy crisis. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a leading Pakistani nuclear scientist with a Ph.D. from MIT, recalls Mahmood as “a rather strange man” who also wrote a book about the supposed role that sunspots had played in influencing significant historical events such as the French Revolution. Hoodbhoy says that when Mahmood’s book on sunspots was published, “We had a rather unpleasant exchange of letters since he claimed that it was based on physics.”
Tiring of his religiosity and eccentricity, in 1999 Pakistani authorities quietly relieved Mahmood of his job as the head of a facility that produced weapons-grade plutonium. Mahmood then spent part of his retirement in Afghanistan helping the Taliban with his charity Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN, “Islamic Reconstruction”). But UTN’s charitable cover masked more ambitious plans. The charity aimed to establish uranium-mining facilities in Afghanistan, part of a larger plan to establish some type of nuclear program in the country. And at UTN’s offices in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban, reporters found a drawing of a balloon designed to deliver weaponized anthrax and documents about anthrax disease, items suggesting that UTN was not a conventional charity.
Dr. Mahmood failed polygraph tests about his meetings with al-Qaeda’s leaders once those encounters became known to U.S. and Pakistani investigators. The nuclear scientist had met with bin Laden over the course of two meetings just weeks before the 9/11 attacks, during which Mahmood had provided information to the al-Qaeda leader about the infrastructure needed for an atomic weapons program.
Veteran CIA officer Charles “Sam” Faddis was dispatched to Islamabad to get to the bottom of what exactly had taken place between bin Laden and Mahmood. Faddis says there was a great deal of urgency surrounding the investigation of Mahmood in the weeks immediately following 9/11: “People were legitimately thinking in the context of that time—they already have an atomic bomb. What if they already have one? What if it’s already moving? What if that’s the next thing that’s happening?”
Faddis spent many hours debriefing Mahmood over the course of the three months that he spent in Pakistan investigating the case. Faddis says the nuclear scientist “tried to paint this as almost as if this is a very normal thing to be sitting around just having a conversation with Osama bin Laden and he asks you about a nuclear weapon,” adding, with a tinge of sarcasm, “I mean, wouldn’t you tell him about nuclear weapons if you were having tea with Osama bin Laden?”
Bin Laden had claimed to Mahmood that he possessed fissile material suitable for an atomic device that a Central Asian jihadist group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, had provided al-Qaeda and he asked Mahmood if he could recruit other scientists who knew how to build a nuclear weapon. Bin Laden showed the Pakistani nuclear scientist some of the “fissile material,” which Mahmood quickly recognized to be only some formerly radioactive materials from a medical facility that were now “dead.” Faddis says, “It was a real medical source, but like with so many of those radiological materials, their half life is such that they don’t last very long.”
After a painstaking investigation of Mahmood, Faddis concluded: “There was no atomic bomb under construction; that we were nowhere close to anything remotely resembling that, but the real danger here was that we had this guy, with his influence and his connections and his cachet, sitting down talking about atomic bombs with Osama bin Laden, and if this thing hadn’t been squashed and had been allowed to just trundle along, and a few years had gone by, what we would have found was that in the interim, he would have brought in other people who knew very well how to build weapons.”
Following 9/11, additional worrisome evidence of al-Qaeda’s interest in mass casualty weaponry emerged. “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh told his interrogators that the second wave of al-Qaeda attacks on the United States would involve weapons of mass destruction (WMD), while several months later the operational manager of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, told Al Jazeera television that al-Qaeda had contemplated attacking American nuclear facilities. And the 9/11 hijackers had looked into purchasing crop-dusting planes in the States that they believed might be suitable for dispersing chemical or biological agents.
After the attacks on New York and Washington, al-Qaeda’s leaders also stepped up their rhetoric about their plans to use WMD. Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti who served as al-Qaeda’s official spokesman, wrote an essay on the organization’s website Al Neda (“The Call”) in June 2002 in which he laid out the case for al-Qaeda having the “right” to kill and maim millions of Americans using weapons of mass destruction. “The Americans have still not tasted from our hands what we have tasted from theirs. Those killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are but a tiny part of the exchange for those killed in Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, the Philippines, Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. We have not reached parity with them. We have the right to kill four million Americans—two million of them children.”
This statement was followed a year later by the fatwa of a Saudi cleric, Nasir bin Hamad al-Fahd, who gave religious sanction for the use of WMD to kill American civilians. In his May 2003 “Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels,” the cleric explained that large-scale slaughter of civilians was permissible because in the Prophet Mohammed’s time his commanders would employ “catapults and similar weapons that cause general destruction” when they were laying siege to cities. Never mind that seventh-century siege engines such as catapults generally killed a relatively small number of civilians while nuclear weapons can kill hundreds of thousands; al-Qaeda had now been given the religious sanction to use nukes against American civilians.
Leonid Smirnov is the world’s first known atomic thief. For decades during the Cold War, the unassuming lab worker labored at the Luch nuclear laboratories near Moscow. In 1992, as the Russian economy went into free fall following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Smirnov cooked up a scheme to stage a spectacular act of nuclear theft. By then Smirnov was a foreman at the lab so it was relatively easy for him to get his hands on highly enriched uranium, the same material that was used in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The risk was small as there were few security checks at the facility and Smirnov only stole tiny amounts of uranium that would not attract notice. He recalled, “I was the shift leader, so it wasn’t hard for me. The main thing was not to take too much.”
At the end of each working day Smirnov would save the pieces of uranium he had stolen and store them in vials that he would then smuggle out of the facility. Eventually Smirnov stole around three pounds of the uranium, about one-fortieth of the amount needed for a simple atomic weapon. (The “gun-type” atomic bomb, the simplest nuclear device, dropped on Hiroshima used around 130 pounds of highly enriched uranium.)
Smirnov lived in a dingy block of apartments in the shadow of the nuclear facility where he worked. Like much of the former Soviet Union, it is a grim place whose inhabitants wear an air of defeat, not least Smirnov himself, who lived there in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with his wife and two well-fed cats. Years after his theft was discovered Smirnov explained that his motives for carrying out his nuclear heist were quite pedestrian: “Mainly because I just wanted a little bit of money, to get a few material things; a refrigerator; a gas stove; fix up the apartment.”
While the Smirnov case seemed more pathetic than a real threat to global security, it underlined the fact that the desperate circumstances of many Russians after the fall of the communist regime might unleash a nightmarish supply of materials for nuclear weapons that could fall into the hands of terrorists. But who might be interested in this material? Terrorist groups have generally avoided acquiring or deploying any kind of WMD because the use of such weapons would likely eliminate whatever popular support or legitimacy they might enjoy. And the few terr
orist groups that have had an interest in developing such weapons have had scant success in their plans for mass murder. Still, al-Qaeda members dreamed of superweapons that would eliminate the United States and their other enemies at one stroke. That dream launched the organization on an ultimately ill-fated quest for not only nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological devices.
What distinguished al-Qaeda from other terrorist groups was that its leaders made it clear publicly that they would deploy such weapons without hesitation, despite the fact that privately some al-Qaeda leaders were aware that their WMD program was strictly an amateur affair. This was the mirror image of the Cold War, where the Soviets had enough nuclear devices to end civilization, yet their intentions about what they might do with those weapons were so opaque that the art of Kremlinology sprang up to divine what their plans might be. The Soviets had the capability to wipe out the United States, but never really had the intention to do so, while al-Qaeda’s leaders have often said they intend to kill millions of Americans, but their ability to do so has been nonexistent.
Bin Laden’s first public pronouncement about WMDs was his reaction to the news of an Indian nuclear test on May 11, 1998, at a remote desert test site less than one hundred miles from the Pakistani border. Three days later bin Laden issued a statement calling for an “Islamic” bomb: “We call upon the Muslim nation in general, and Pakistan and its army in particular; to prepare for the Jihad imposed by Allah. … This should include a nuclear force.”
The Indian nuclear test helped to provoke a lively debate within al-Qaeda about whether the group should acquire and deploy such weapons. Abu Walid al-Masri, the Egyptian editor of the Arabic-language magazine of the Taliban, recalled that al-Qaeda hard-liners, like the military commander Mohammed Atef, pushed for acquiring nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons capabilities. Another wing of al-Qaeda assessed, correctly as it turned out, that these types of weapons would only bring small tactical benefits because the group was likely only to acquire or build weapons that were quite primitive.
But even al-Qaeda’s “doves” understood that they should call those primitive devices “weapons of mass destruction” to create fear, knowing the psychological warfare advantage that seeming to possess WMD had against the West. In fact, ironically it was Western preoccupations with the danger posed by biological and chemical weapons that piqued al-Qaeda’s interest in them in the first place. On an al-Qaeda computer, recovered after the fall of the Taliban, Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote to Mohammed Atef on April 15, 1999, saying, “Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of [chemical and biological weapons] when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials.”
In the late 1990s al-Qaeda set up a secret WMD program innocuously code-named the “Yoghurt project” and earmarked a piddling $2,000–$4,000 as the budget for it. Bin Laden remained convinced that more conventional types of assaults on the United States would likely be more effective than crude WMD attacks, but he kept those doubts largely to himself. The Egyptian, Abu Walid al-Masri, recalled that bin Laden “refused to voice publicly his rejection of the idea, probably because of his extreme politeness with those around him.”
Despite the private doubts of its leader, al-Qaeda had long been in the market for nuclear or radioactive materials, as was revealed by the New York trial of the four men implicated in the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. At the trial, Jamal al-Fadl, an al-Qaeda member who had lived in Sudan in the mid-1990s and who later defected from the group, explained that he had witnessed al-Qaeda’s attempts to acquire uranium. Fadl said that members of al-Qaeda based in Khartoum were prepared to pay up to $1.5 million for a consignment of uranium and that he once saw a cylinder purporting to contain uranium that al-Qaeda members were contemplating buying. However, the deal seemed to have never gone through and, in any event, even if it did the sale of the “uranium” was one of the many times that al-Qaeda was scammed in its search for nuclear materials.
Bin Laden’s skepticism about WMD was not unfounded. Before 9/11 Taliban authorities had stockpiled a considerable quantity of radioactive materials seized or purchased from smugglers traveling from the Central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union. Mullah Khaksar, the Taliban deputy interior minister, recalled that some of his colleagues in Kandahar were even trafficking in capsules of “uranium” that they would sometimes stuff in a sock. Mullah Khaksar advised the Taliban leader Mullah Omar that the uranium trade was likely a scam, telling him, “Don’t spend money on this stuff. I don’t think it’s real.”
After the fall of the Taliban, American officials discovered an underground facility near Kandahar airport where uranium 238 was stored; it is used in nuclear processing but cannot be used in nuclear weapons (which require highly enriched uranium 235). Uranium 238 might, however, have been considered by the militants to be useful to make a radiological weapon.
Based on an analysis of the fatalities caused by an accident involving radioactive materials in Brazil in 1987, analysts writing for the U.S. National Defense University concluded that “some forms of radiological attack could kill tens or hundreds of people and sicken hundreds or thousands.” And the risk of a dirty bomb attack has grown rapidly in past years. In 1996 there were only some thirty incidents involving nuclear or radioactive smuggling, but in 2006 there were over 140.
Emblematic of the dangerous trade in radioactive materials suitable for a dirty bomb that were shipped out of the former Soviet Union was the truck loaded with some twenty tons of scrap metal that approached the busy Gisht-Kuprik border crossing on Uzbekistan’s border with Kazakhstan on March 30, 2000. When Uzbek border guards stopped the truck, their radiation detectors—issued to them two years earlier courtesy of U.S. Customs—went off, showing levels of radiation one hundred times above normal levels. When they checked the truck, under a pile of scrap metal the guards found ten lead-lined containers, the source of the radiation.
According to U.S. Customs officials who followed the case, inside the containers were likely spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor. Even more worrisome, the truck driver gave the Uzbek border guards paperwork for his cargo showing that the final destination for the shipment was Quetta in Pakistan, a city that is just across the Afghan border from Kandahar, which was then the headquarters of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. According to the truck driver’s shipping manifest, the firm that was supposed to receive the shipment in Quetta was listed as Ahmadjan Haji Mohamed, roughly the local equivalent of John Smith and quite likely a fictitious entity.
The Uzbek border guards did not have the authority to impound the truck but only to send it back across the border to Kazakhstan, where it promptly disappeared. It is quite likely that this shipment of highly radioactive material was destined for militants in Afghanistan, as Pakistan already had its own nuclear program and so would have had little need of spent fuel rods or other similar radioactive materials.
Bin Laden and Zawahiri’s portrayal of al-Qaeda’s nuclear capabilities in their post-9/11 statements to the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir was psychological warfare against the West and not based in any reality; there is not a shred of evidence that their quest for nukes ever got beyond the talking stage. And the whole notion of “missing” Russian nuclear suitcase bombs floating around for sale on the black market that Zawahiri mentioned to Hamid Mir is a Hollywood construct greeted with great skepticism by nuclear proliferation experts.
In 2002 the former UN weapons inspector David Albright examined all the available evidence about al-Qaeda’s nuclear research program and concluded it was virtually impossible for al-Qaeda to have acquired any type of nuclear weapon, while U.S. government analysts also came to the same conclusion. There is, however, evidence that the group was experimenting with crude chemical weapons, was exploring the use of biological weapons such as botulinum, salmonella, and anthrax, and also made multiple attempts to acquire radioactive materials suitable f
or a dirty bomb.
After the group moved from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, al-Qaeda members ramped up their WMD program, experimenting on dogs with some kind of chemical, possibly cyanide gas. An al-Qaeda videotape from this period shows a small white dog tied up inside a glass cage. A milky gas slowly filters into the cage. An Arabic-speaking man with an Egyptian accent says: “Start counting the time.” Nervous, the dog starts barking and then moaning. After flailing about for some minutes, it succumbs to the poisonous gas and stops moving. This experiment almost certainly occurred at the Darunta training camp near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, conducted by the Egyptian WMD experimenter Abu Khabab. The dogs that were used in these experiments were puppies from the litters of dogs kept by one of the al-Qaeda leader’s sons, Omar bin Laden, an animal lover. He pleaded with his father to stop the puppies from being killed for the chemical weapons tests, but his pleas were ignored.
In the late 1990s, Abu Khabab set up the terrorist group’s WMD research program. One of the fruits of this program was al-Qaeda’s seven-thousand-page Encyclopedia of Jihad, which was made available on CD in 1999 and devoted a chapter to how to develop chemical and biological weapons. This work has had wide distribution in jihadist circles.
Abu Khabab, by training a chemical engineer, taught hundreds of militants how to deploy poisons such as ricin and cyanide gas, and he singled out Uzbekistan, a country on Afghanistan’s northern border that was formerly part of the Soviet Union, as a possible source of chemical weapons. In an order he wrote on April 2, 2001, Abu Khabab directed, “Obtain the liquid and non-liquid chemicals as soon as possible from Uzbekistan because we need them. Take all necessary precautions to ensure the correct delivery of the materials and the lives of our men. Try and recruit Uzbek army individuals who are experienced in this field. Procure necessary face-masks, protective clothing and protective footwear.”
The Longest War Page 29
