At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  The terrorists are endlessly patient. The first plans to attack the World Trade Center were made a decade before the Twin Towers fell. The plot to bring down aircraft traveling between the United Kingdom and United States that was thwarted in the summer of 2006 parallels Project Bojinka. How hard is al-Qa’ida willing to work and how long are they willing to wait to pull off the ultimate attack? What was the attack Ayman al-Zawahiri described as “something better” when he called off the 2003 attack on the New York City subway?

  One mushroom cloud would change history. My deepest fear is that this is exactly what they intend.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Merchant of Death and the Colonel

  It is not always easy. Your successes are unheralded—your failures are trumpeted…. But I am sure you realize how important is your work, how essential—it is and how, in the long sweep of history, how significant your efforts will be judged.

  —President John F. Kennedy at CIA headquarters,

  November 28, 1961

  Almost a half century later, President Kennedy’s words still ring true. The problem is often of the intelligence community’s own creation. We are reluctant to talk publicly about our successes. Sometimes it is even useful to have positive accomplishments misperceived as failures, to throw foreign governments and rogue organizations off the scent.

  A couple of successful operations that took place during my tenure, however, did receive some limited positive public attention. The dismantling of the A. Q. Khan proliferation network and the disarming of Libya’s WMD programs are classic examples of the kinds of work that can and must be done by American intelligence if we are to avoid a catastrophic future. A. Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation network was a project we focused on during my entire seven-year tenure as DCI. Our efforts against this organization were among the closest-held secrets within the Agency. Often I would brief only the president on the progress we were making.

  Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist, was the father of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program. A. Q. Khan, as he is known, studied in Europe and earned a Ph.D. in Belgium in 1972. He worked in the nuclear energy industry in the Netherlands and returned to Pakistan in 1976 to help his country compete with India, which had just detonated its first nuclear device. Khan stole from his European bosses blueprints and information that would give Pakistan a jump-start in entering the nuclear age. (Indeed, Khan was convicted in absentia of nuclear espionage, in a Dutch court in 1983, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality two years later.)

  During the 1970s and ’80s, Khan led an aggressive effort to build a uranium-enrichment effort. So revered was he for his efforts that Pakistan eventually renamed its research facility the Khan Research Laboratory (KRL) in his honor.

  In 1979 the United States suspended military and economic assistance to Pakistan over concerns about the country’s attempts to make weapons-grade uranium. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, reports began to surface in the media and elsewhere that Pakistan had succeeded in producing enough fissile material to make its own bomb.

  For many years, there were rumors and bits of intelligence that Khan was sharing his deadly expertise beyond Pakistan’s borders. His range of international contacts was broad—in China, North Korea, and throughout the Muslim world. In some cases, there were indications that he was trading nuclear expertise and material for other military equipment—for example, aiding North Korea with its uranium-enrichment efforts in exchange for ballistic missile technology. It was extremely difficult to know exactly what he was up to, or to what extent his efforts were conducted at the behest and with the support of the Pakistani government. Khan was supposedly a simple government employee with only a modest salary. Yet he lived a lavish lifestyle and had an empire that kept expanding dramatically.

  Although CIA struggled to penetrate proliferation operations and learn about the depth of their dealings, there is a tension when investigating these kinds of networks. The natural instinct when you find some shred of intelligence about nuclear proliferation is to act immediately. But you must control that urge and be patient, to follow the links where they take you, so that when action is launched, you can hope to remove the network both root and branch, and not just pull off the top, allowing it to regenerate and grow again.

  In the late 1990s, the section within CIA’s Counterproliferation Division (CPD) in charge of this effort was run by a career intelligence officer who once told me that as a child the officer read a book on the bombing of Hiroshima and was awestruck by the devastation that a nuclear bomb could deliver. The book described how the blast from the thirteen-kiloton “Little Boy” bomb, which killed an estimated seventy thousand people, burned the image of three people’s shadows onto a wall. The individuals themselves were vaporized. That mental picture was seared into the officer’s consciousness and became part of the officer’s motivation, years later, to work to keep nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands.

  The small unit working this effort recognized that it would be impossible to penetrate proliferation networks using conventional intelligence-gathering tactics. Security considerations do not permit me to describe the techniques we used.

  Patiently, we put ourselves in a position to come in contact with individuals and organizations that we believed were part of the overall proliferation problem. As is so often the case, our colleagues in British intelligence joined us in our efforts and were critically important in working against this target.

  We discovered the extent of Khan’s hidden network, which stretched from Pakistan, to Europe, to the Middle East, to Asia. We pieced together a picture of the organization, revealing its subsidiaries, scientists, front companies, agents, finances, and manufacturing plants. Our spies gained access through a series of daring operations over several years.

  What we learned from our operations was extraordinary. We confirmed that Khan was delivering to his customers such things as illicit uranium centrifuges. A. Q. Khan was the mastermind behind proliferation efforts as far afield as North Korea, Iran, and South Africa. We briefed the president on what we had found.

  “Mr. President,” one of our officers said, “with the information we’ve just gotten our hands on—soup to nuts—about uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons design, we could make CIA its own nuclear state.”

  By mid-2003 we had learned quite a bit about locations where Khan’s network was producing equipment for uranium enrichment for some of his clients, and we were considering taking action against those sites. Doing so, however, might have dealt a temporary setback to Khan’s scheme but would not have prevented it from springing up again somewhere else. We therefore came up with a bold solution that involved a series of carefully orchestrated approaches to the network.

  What we uncovered proved that Khan and his associates were selling the blueprints for centrifuges to enrich uranium, as well as nuclear designs stolen from the Pakistani government. The network sold uranium hexafluoride, the gas that in the centrifuge process can be transformed into enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. Khan and his associates provided Iran, Libya, and North Korea with designs both for Pakistan’s older centrifuges and for newer, more efficient models. The network also made available to these countries components and, in some instances, complete centrifuges. Khan and his associates used a factory in Malaysia to manufacture key equipment. Other parts were obtained by network operatives based in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Khan’s deputy—a man named B. S. A. Tahir—ran a computer business in Dubai and used that as a front company for the Khan network, acting as the network’s chief financial officer and money launderer.

  We had the goods on A. Q. Khan and his cohorts and we had reached a point where we had to act, but there were still some important matters to resolve. It remained unclear to what extent Khan’s dealings were known and supported by his own government. It was our job to find out.

  Pakistan’s president Musharraf had heroically stepped up in the aftermath of 9/11 and helped us fight al-Qa
’ida and the Taliban. Now I was about to ask him to help take on a man who had, almost single-handedly, turned Pakistan into a nuclear power and was viewed as a national hero in his country.

  You don’t make those kinds of requests over the phone, and you certainly don’t make them in front of large groups of people. As it turned out, Musharraf was coming to New York City to attend the UN General Assembly, and I requested a one-on-one session with him for September 24, 2003. We met in his hotel suite. It was what we in the intelligence business called a “four eyes” meeting—just the two of us. No handlers, no note takers.

  I started by thanking him for his courageous support in the war on terrorism and told him I was now going to give him some bad news. “A. Q. Khan,” I said, “is betraying your country. He has stolen some of your nation’s most sensitive secrets and sold them to the highest bidders.” I went on: “Khan has stolen your nuclear weapons secrets. We know this, because we stole them from him.”

  I pulled out of my briefcase some blueprints and diagrams of nuclear designs stolen from the Pakistani government. I’m not a nuclear physicist, and neither is President Musharraf, but I had been briefed well enough by my team that I could point out markings on the drawings that would prove that these designs were supposed to be in a vault in Islamabad and not a hotel room in New York.

  I pulled out a blueprint of a Pakistani P1 centrifuge design. “He sold this to Iran.” Then I produced a design for the next-generation P2 centrifuge. “He has sold this to several countries.” Without pause, I laid before President Musharraf another document. “These are the drawings of a uranium processing plant that he sold to Libya.”

  There could be no doubt about the size and scope of the problem.

  Although he later described this as one of the most embarrassing moments of his presidency, Musharraf betrayed no emotion to me. I always found him to be a cool customer, someone who seems to be taking in every word you are saying.

  I told him that I knew that since March 2001 he had tried to restrict A. Q. Khan’s international travel. Then I gave him a lengthy list of dozens of foreign trips Khan had undertaken despite the restriction. Even as we spoke, Khan was on an international sales trip.

  “Mr. President,” I said, “if a country like Libya or Iran or, God forbid, an organization like al-Qa’ida, gets a working nuclear device and the world learns that it came from your country, I’m afraid the consequences would be devastating.”

  I suggested a few steps we could take jointly to find out the full extent of Khan’s corruption and to put an end to it once and for all.

  President Musharraf asked a few questions and then simply said, “Thank you, George, I will take care of this.”

  Not long after returning to Pakistan, President Musharraf twice narrowly averted being killed in al-Qa’ida–inspired assassination attempts.

  In December word leaked of a major investigation going on regarding the activities of the Khan Research Laboratory. On January 25, 2004, Pakistani investigators announced that Khan had provided unauthorized technical assistance to Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for tens of millions of dollars. Six days later, Khan was dismissed from his position as “science advisor” to Musharraf, to allow the investigation to continue. Then, in early February, the Pakistani government announced that Khan had signed a confession admitting to having aided Iran, Libya, and North Korea with designs and equipment for their nuclear weapons programs.

  Khan appeared on national television in Pakistan on February 4 and, speaking in English, made a three-minute speech. “I take full responsibility for my actions and seek your pardon,” he said. He expressed the deepest “sense of sorrow, anguish and regret,” saying that his actions were taken “in good faith” but were “errors in judgment.” He portrayed his actions as entirely his own. “There was never, ever any kind of authorization for these activities from the government.”

  The next day Musharraf pardoned him but placed him under permanent house arrest. While we would have preferred to see Khan face trial, and wanted to have U.S. and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigators extensively question him about his dealings, the outcome was still a major victory.

  In the new world of proliferation, nation states have been replaced by shadowy networks like Khan’s, capable of selling turnkey nuclear weapons programs to the highest bidders. Networks of bankers, lawyers, scientists, and industrialists offer one-stop shopping for those wishing to acquire the designs, feed materials, and manufacturing capabilities necessary for nuclear weapons production. With Khan’s assistance, small, backward countries could shave years off the time it takes to make nuclear weapons.

  A small group of our intelligence officers, working closely with our British allies, patiently pursued the Khan network for close to a decade. They succeeded brilliantly. On my next-to-last day as DCI, I went down to the small office and presented medals to the officer leading the effort and the entire team.

  What we don’t know is how many networks similar to Khan’s may still be out there—operating undetected—and offering deadly advice and supplies to anyone with the cash to pay for them. In the current marketplace, if you have a hundred million dollars, you can be your own nuclear power.

  The Khan network was closely intertwined with another major intelligence success. Through the work of U.S. and British intelligence, Libya, long a pariah state, had its weapons of mass destruction programs neutralized without the firing of a shot.

  CIA had been having clandestine meetings with senior Libyan officials since 1999. Our efforts were designed to try to resolve issues regarding terrorism and to learn what we could from the Libyans about various Islamic terrorist groups. These meetings, conducted with our British colleagues, were held in several European cities. The Libyan delegation was led by Col. Muammar al-Gadhafi’s chief of intelligence, Musa Kusa, who got a master’s degree from Michigan State University in 1978. Illustrative of the surreal world in which we had to operate, CIA officers found themselves exchanging pleasantries with the man who, by some accounts, was the mastermind behind the Pan Am 103 bombing in December 1988 that killed 270 people.

  These contacts continued for several years, up through the time that a Scottish court convicted one Libyan intelligence officer of complicity in the airline bombing and acquitted another. Libya’s cooperating with the Scottish tribunal, and other acts, were signs—admittedly faint—that Libya might be looking for a way off the terrorism limb they had climbed out on more than twenty years previously.

  Following the 9/11 attacks, Colonel Gadhafi publicly condemned the terrorists actions, calling them “terrible,” and announced that the Libyan people were ready to send humanitarian aid to America. That was an interesting sign.

  We exchanged some terrorist tracking data with Libya in the aftermath of September 11, but our focus was on pursuing al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan, and so the contacts subsided for a while. Then, in March of 2003, an envoy from Colonel Gadhafi made an informal approach to British officials. He said that Gadhafi was thinking about giving up his WMD programs and asked whether should Libya do so, would the West be willing to ease sanctions on his country.

  A senior British intelligence official flew to the United States just as the war in Iraq was starting. I met with him the next day. Five days later, I joined President Bush and British prime minister Blair at Camp David. Blair was accompanied by my counterpart, Sir Richard Dearlove. A “spy’s spy,” Sir Richard is one of the most skilled and talented intelligence officers I have ever worked with. Extraordinarily thoughtful and articulate, he had instant credibility with political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Although the bulk of our time was spent talking about Iraq, we also discussed Gadhafi’s surprising initiative. Here we were, just days after launching an invasion of Iraq that was inspired, at least in part, by our concerns about Saddam’s nuclear, biological, and chemical programs, and out of the blue, another rogue state wanted to talk about the possibility of coming clean on its own
programs.

  We debated what Gadhafi’s motivation might be. It seemed to us that the Libyans had come to the realization that they had gotten nothing out of their very expensive flirtation with WMD. They were struggling to find their place in the world—Libya was the odd man out in both the Arab and African worlds. You also couldn’t discount the effect that 150,000 U.S. troops positioned around Iraq might have on focusing the mind.

  Whatever the impetus, this was certainly an opportunity that we could not dismiss lightly. I returned from Camp David and called into my office Jim Pavitt and Steve Kappes, the top two officers in our clandestine service. I briefed them on the opening with Libya and told them that it needed to be handled at a high level and with the utmost discretion. Pavitt and I were up to our ears with Operation Iraqi Freedom, but we had the perfect candidate in Kappes. Steve is one of the most capable case officers I have been privileged to know. Fluent in Russian and Farsi, he had handled some of the toughest assignments that the Agency had to offer. I put the project in his hands and got back to worrying about Iraq. Together Kappes and a senior British counterpart were given the mission for their respective services. They set up a meeting with the Libyans to determine if they were really serious about renouncing their WMD programs.