The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets...And How We Could Have Stopped Him

by Douglas Frantz

  The police dismissed her death as an accident, but her mother said that her daughter had been receiving threatening telephone calls in the days before her death. The French press speculated that Israel was behind both killings, but the Israelis denied any involvement. “It’s getting so that whatever happens in the Middle East, we’re blamed for what we don’t do as well as what we do,” an official with the Israeli Foreign Office later complained.

  Despite the ruined reactor cores and the dead scientist, work continued at Osirak. By the summer of 1981, the reactor was nearing completion, and two hundred pounds of enriched-uranium fuel rods were being prepared for shipment to the site as the final step before activation. Frantic diplomatic efforts by Israel to stop the shipment failed, and Mossad estimated that Iraq could possess a nuclear weapon within a year of starting the reactor. The members of the Israeli cabinet met and concluded that they had to take action.

  On June 7, six of Israel’s American-built F-15 and eight of its F-16 jet fighters left the runway at Etzion Air Force Base in the Negev desert, bound for Tuwaitha. The F-16s had been stripped of some of their fuel tanks so each could carry two one-ton bombs, capable of destroying the huge concrete-and-steel reactor container. The F-15s were along to provide protection for a flight that would take them through Jordanian, Saudi, and Iraqi airspace. The formation roared low over the rooftops on the southeastern edge of Baghdad, and only moments later residents heard a series of thunderous explosions from the direction of Tuwaitha. The surprise attack wiped out the Osirak reactor and destroyed several nearby buildings that were part of the complex.

  It was a dramatic sabotage operation, one that risked world condemnation and possible retaliation. But the Israeli government wanted the world to see how it would treat efforts by any of its adversaries to develop a nuclear weapon. “For a long time we have been watching with growing concern the construction of the atomic reactor,” said a government statement. “From sources whose reliability is beyond any doubt, we learned that this reactor, despite its camouflage, is designed to produce atomic bombs.” The statement said the reactor would have been completed the following month and that the Israelis had acted before the uranium cores were installed to avoid radioactive fallout over Baghdad and other parts of the Middle East.

  Reviewing satellite photos and other information on July 1, American intelligence agencies concluded that the strike had caused long-term damage to Iraq’s nuclear program. “It will take Iraq several years to rebuild its nuclear facilities, even if Baghdad finds cooperative suppliers of nuclear technology,” the authors wrote. Still, the Americans recognized that Saddam would not abandon his goal of becoming a nuclear-weapons power. A top-secret report by the CIA in 1983 warned that the attack had not changed Iraq’s long-range nuclear ambitions. CIA analysts had not yet discovered a renewed nuclear program, but they pointed out that Baghdad had taken steps to obtain nuclear technology and material from abroad. The CIA speculated that there had been contacts between Iraq and Pakistan on nuclear matters, including the possible acquisition of equipment, but the analysts had no hard evidence of collaboration.

  The destruction of Osirak heightened Khan’s fears that Kahuta might be next, and he insisted that more antiaircraft batteries be installed around the perimeter of the plant. Publicly, in response to international concerns about what was happening at Kahuta, Khan replied, “The Islamic bomb is a figment of the Zionist mind.”

  CHAPTER 12

  CRIMES AND COVER-UPS

  PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR SHOPPING SPREE reached well beyond Europe. In July 1980, two government officials were sent to Canada on diplomatic visas, which said they were there to deal with internal matters at the consulate in Montreal. When Canadian authorities reviewed the visas, they became suspicious because the men worked for the PAEC. The Canadians had been worried about Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions since 1974, when the Indians diverted plutonium from their Canadian-supplied reactor for their first nuclear test. As a result, by the time the Pakistanis checked into the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, they were under surveillance.

  It took only a few days before the Canadians’ suspicions were confirmed. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police watched the men enter two small electronics stores owned by fellow Pakistanis. At each location, they bought a variety of electrical components manufactured by General Electric, Westinghouse, RCA, and Motorola, including high-frequency inverters that could be used in centrifuge operations. Most of the goods required an export license, but the shops packaged them for immediate shipment to Pakistan. The police intercepted the packages. When the Pakistani consulate learned the equipment had been seized, the two men used their diplomatic immunity to get on the next plane out of Canada. Suspecting Pakistan had not given up, police continued to keep the shops under surveillance. A month later, their patience paid off. Nineteen boxes of sophisticated electronics being prepared for shipment to Pakistan were seized, leading to the arrest of a Pakistani engineer and the owner one of the shops. When the Mounties examined records at the electronics stores, they found that ten shipments of inverters had already been shipped to Pakistan. Those records led to the arrest of a third man, Abdul Aziz Khan. Searching the engineer’s home, police discovered the letters that he had received from A. Q. Khan over the years. After the letters were translated from Urdu, the authorities found the men’s crude code for discussing progress at Kahuta and other nuclear installations, and they learned that Abdul Aziz Khan had sent technical literature on nuclear-related subjects to Pakistan.

  Abdul Aziz Khan was released after twenty-four hours because he could not be linked directly to the shipments. From the moment he walked out the door, however, the police were on his trail, watching as he went to the city’s cavernous central train station and wound his way among the shops and ticket offices before stopping at a row of lockers. He opened one of them, removed a medium-sized suitcase, and withdrew some papers. He tore the papers into pieces, threw them into a trash can, and left the station. One officer stayed behind to collect the discarded papers, and another followed the quarry to the bus terminal, where Khan boarded the airport bus. When he arrived there, police were waiting to arrest him. In his pocket they found an airline ticket to Pakistan.

  Reassembling the torn pages, police found a scientific paper describing advances in uranium enrichment, written by an American government scientist. The paper was available at research libraries. Abdul Aziz Khan claimed that he knew nothing about its contents or Pakistan’s nuclear industry. Still, Khan was charged with violating export laws, although when his case came to trial a few months later he continued to claim that he had no involvement with the nuclear industry and that a friend had asked him to get the inverters for a textile plant and a butter factory. The jury found that the correspondence with A. Q. Khan uncovered at Abdul Aziz Khan’s home did not amount to conclusive evidence and acquitted the engineer.

  The case illustrated the difficulty in prosecuting even someone caught red-handed, because of the dual civilian and military uses of the technology and the vagueness of export laws. “It does seem a bit of a laugher when you’re dealing with atomic-energy materials,” said Jack Waissman, one of the prosecutors. The sergeant who developed the case for the RCMP, Réné Garceau, said, “The whole thing was a farce.”

  The police had come across only a small portion of the Pakistani pipeline. Intelligence agencies, however, knew the operation was far larger. A secret analysis by MI6 conducted about the same time as Abdul Aziz Khan’s arrest described how the network was set up. “It is known that Pakistan is actively engaged in the construction of gas centrifuge plants required for the production of nuclear weapons grade highly enriched uranium and in the development and construction of nuclear explosive devices,” said the classified report. “To facilitate this, Pakistanis have at their disposal an effective and widespread network for the procurement overseas of equipment, components, materials and services required for these programmes. Not surprisingly, the end users, and destinations, of g
oods acquired through this Procurement Network are usually disguised.” Fifty-one companies, organizations, and fronts were being used as false destinations for the nuclear-related goods. Among them were well-known institutions like Quaid-i-Azam University and fronts with innocuous names like Northern Traders and Punjab Fertilizer Company.

  Despite the subterfuge, there were other opportunities to stop the supply chain. In one case, an American was charged with trying to ship a specialized metal used in nuclear installations to Pakistan. In another, a retired Pakistani army colonel described by authorities as a friend of President Zia’s was accused of shipping restricted high-tech goods. In neither case did the American government lodge a protest with Pakistan. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy adopted at the start of the Afghan war was holding firm, though one episode threatened to blow the lid off the charade.

  That case involved krytrons, which are inch-long cathode tubes developed as specialized high-speed switches for radar transmitters during World War II. The gas-filled devices turn extremely high voltages of electric current into a precise burst as short as one millionth of a second. The precision is essential to detonate a nuclear device, which relies on the simultaneous triggering of conventional explosives to unleash the critical mass of fissile material that leads to an atomic explosion. The tubes have limited civilian uses, and their essential role in nuclear weapons means that all exports require a government license, and each prospective sale is reviewed by the State Department.

  In the early 1980s, the Pakistanis had reached the critical point at which tests of their warhead design required a supply of krytrons, but the only company that manufactured them was the EG&G Corporation in Salem, Massachusetts. The attempt to get the krytrons was scarcely the stuff of James Bond. A Pakistani living in Houston named Nazir Ahmed Vaid had recently purchased a number of unregulated chemicals for the PAEC when he was asked to buy fifty krytrons by Siddique Butt, who had abandoned his diplomatic cover in Europe and returned home to continue his work. On October 18, 1983, Vaid walked into the EG&G offices dressed in traditional Pakistani garb. He said he was in the import-export business in Houston and Pakistan, and he wanted to place an order for fifty krytrons for Quaid-i-Azam University. Company officials were surprised and suspicious. No one had ever tried to buy these sophisticated devices over the counter, and the size of the order was unusual—the few businesses that use krytrons for civilian purposes need only a handful over the course of a year. When told that he needed an export license for the four thousand dollar order, Vaid asked the company to prepare the proper paperwork and said he would return when the krytrons were ready.

  EG&G officials contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI lacked jurisdiction, so the matter was turned over to the U.S. Customs Service. Agents from the Customs Service criminal-investigations division recognized the potential danger and set up a sting, telling EG&G officials to wait for Vaid to make contact again. When he called ten days later to check on the export license, Vaid was told that there would be a slight delay. Impatient and suddenly wary, he canceled the order.

  Customs thought they’d lost their prey, until October 31, when Vaid showed up at a small electrical-supply shop in Houston and placed a new order for krytrons. Presumably in hopes of avoiding scrutiny, he described the item only by its catalog number, KN 22, and specified that he intended to use them within the United States. Store owner Jerry Simon telephoned EG&G to place the large order and was told that it would take about six months to manufacture the krytrons. When Simon relayed the news, Vaid said he had to go to Pakistan on business in the interim and would pick up the devices when he got back.

  A second order for fifty krytrons in such a short period raised a red flag at EG&G, and company officials alerted the team from Customs. Customs agents approached Simon, who agreed to cooperate with a sting. When the krytrons arrived in April 1984, Vaid was still in Pakistan, but he got Simon’s message and relayed instructions to deliver them to a photocopying shop operated by a relative of Vaid’s. The deliveryman was an undercover customs agent, and the shop was placed under surveillance while the authorities waited for Vaid to return for the devices. Because possession of the devices domestically was not illegal, they would have to catch Vaid in the act of shipping the krytrons overseas. On June 22, three days after returning to Houston, Vaid appeared at the store and arranged to ship the tubes to Pakistan. The bill of lading identified the contents as office products, including “50 bulbs/switches.” An agent posing as a deliveryman picked up the sealed package at the photocopy shop and took it to the customs office. Opening the box, agents found the krytrons. A customs team went to Vaid’s Houston office and arrested him. In a briefcase confiscated at the office, agents found telexes indicating that Vaid intended to ship the krytrons to two people in Pakistan associated with the country’s nuclear program, Siddique Butt and an army colonel. Other documents showed that Vaid had made other purchases on behalf of the nuclear project.

  At a federal court hearing six days later, prosecutor Samuel Longoria told the magistrate that the krytrons had a direct use in nuclear munitions and that Vaid appeared to be a Pakistani agent. “We strongly suspect that Mr. Vaid is operating at the instance of the Pakistani government and that the purpose of the export of these krytrons was specifically for the Pakistani government’s use in obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he said. “The allegations in this complaint are not simply technical violations of United States export laws. The Department of State has serious concern regarding the nature and direction of Pakistan’s nuclear program.” The next month, a federal grand jury charged Vaid and two accomplices from the photocopy shop with conspiring to ship krytrons overseas without a license, specifying that they were “part of a firing set for a nuclear explosive device.”

  The case appeared to be a clear example of Pakistan’s nuclear intentions and its willingness to flout U.S. law. In the months that followed, however, the case took a strange turn. Federal prosecutors mysteriously agreed to rewrite the indictment, removing references to nuclear weapons and Vaid’s role as a Pakistani agent. In addition, the judge handling the case issued a gag order on everyone involved. Both developments were so unusual that Vaid’s own lawyer, William Burge, was surprised. He said he did not understand the government’s actions but assumed that the changes were orchestrated because Pakistan was an American ally. “The case apparently was embarrassing to the Government of Pakistan and they didn’t want any more publicity than was necessary,” said Burge.

  Vaid agreed to plead guilty to a single count. He still faced up to twelve years in prison, but the judge gave Vaid a two-year suspended sentence and ordered him deported to Pakistan. The judge took the trouble to underscore the innocent nature of the attempt to export the krytrons, saying at sentencing that he was “left with the impression that this man was not acting in any capacity as an enemy agent. He apparently had no malicious intent beyond trying to expedite what he thought was a business deal and trying to accommodate a customer and in doing so made a false report.”

  The Pakistani government had been busted, but the damning elements of the case were erased from the record. The concealment allowed the Reagan administration to maintain the fiction that Pakistan was not pursuing a nuclear weapon and kept American financial and military assistance flowing through Pakistani intelligence to the Muslim fighters in Afghanistan. After whitewashing the public record, Reagan sent Zia a top-secret letter warning him not to enrich uranium beyond 5 percent, the level that could be used in civilian power-generating plants. Exceeding 5 percent, Reagan said, would constitute crossing a “red line” and jeopardize the relationship between the two countries. Zia responded by promising not to go beyond the limit and repeating his assurance that Pakistan’s nuclear program was purely civilian.

  By this time the CIA had a nearly complete picture of what was going on and dutifully reported it to policymakers in Washington. Deane Hinton, who had replaced Spiers as the American ambassador in Islamabad, spelled o
ut the scope of the intelligence findings in late 1984 in a classified evaluation of Howard Hart, who was leaving Islamabad after serving as CIA station chief since 1981. As a young man, Hart had chosen the CIA over the Marines, but he retained a fascination with weaponry that made him the perfect person to oversee the supplying of guns and training for the Afghan mujahideen. Hart also paid attention to Pakistan’s nuclear efforts. Hinton wrote: “His collection efforts on the Pakistani effort to develop nuclear weapons is amazingly successful and disturbing. I would sleep better if he and his people did not find out so much about what is really going on in secret and contrary to President Zia’s assurances to us.” Yet the evidence provoked no action. In November, Richard Kennedy, the American ambassador at large for nonproliferation, gave an interview to the Pakistani press in which he publicly reassured the Pakistanis that Washington had no intention of confronting them. “We accept President Zia ul-Haq’s statement that Pakistan’s nuclear program is devoted entirely to power generation,” he said.

  Short of actually detonating a nuclear weapon, there seemed to be nothing that Pakistan could do to provoke sanctions from the Reagan administration. In fact, Munir Khan later said the warnings from American diplomats over the years had no effect on the country’s plans, save that they disclosed how much the Americans knew about what Pakistan was doing. The gap between what Washington knew and its public statements was growing larger, yet the Reagan administration accepted this act of geopolitical expedience.