Khan flew home for a Christmas break in 1974 and managed to get a personal audience with the prime minister. There he made a case for uranium that changed the course of history. Bhutto had been committed to the same route that Israel had taken: diverting plutonium from a nuclear reactor. In this case, it was Pakistan’s new 137-megawatt reactor at Karachi. But after listening to Khan’s briefing, Bhutto became convinced that it would be easier and safer to pursue a uranium solution. The material was safer to handle, for one thing. And it could also be concealed more easily from Western spies.
Bhutto authorized Project 706 in which army units were dispatched to the Siwalik Hills to secure deposits of low-grade uranium ore, and ground was cleared for an enrichment plant in the desert near Rawalpindi. But as the Manhattan Project scientists had learned in the United States thirty years before, enrichment is a job of titanic industrial proportions. The gas centrifuge method sought by Pakistan would require a pipeline of thousands of centrifuges through which a thick cloud of gaseous uranium would be forced.
From the outside a centrifuge looks a bit like an elongated scuba tank. Inside is a steel or aluminum rotor that spins at fifteen hundred revolutions a minute, driving a slow but effective wedge between U-238 and its lighter (and more volatile) cousin U-235, a bit like a churn that separates butter from milk. The working parts of a gas centrifuge—the rotors, molecular pumps, suspension bearings, and baffles—must have precise metallic alloys and exact designs because the centrifuge turns at a velocity of near the speed of sound and must spin continuously for years. An imbalance as tiny as a microgram can cause the whole thing to whiz off its bearings and make a spectacular crash. The International Atomic Energy Agency restricts the export of centrifuge parts to guard against the possibility that someone might try a feat of reverse engineering. But just as Israel found a way to move a few hundred barrels of uranium into the Mediterranean, where they could be quietly transferred, A. Q. Khan found a vulnerability that could be exploited.
Khan began to steal materials and blueprints from his employer and funnel them to Pakistan via diplomatic pouch from the embassy in Amsterdam. He also had a close friendship with Frits Veerman, a co-worker and photographer, whom he asked, with increasing frequency, to take photographs of highly sensitive equipment. Veerman assumed that Khan’s project was authorized and, in any case, he had no reason then to question his friend’s motives. The two men enjoyed ogling pretty girls on Amsterdam streets as much as the newest enrichment gadget at the lab. Veerman was an occasional dinner guest at Khan’s house—the menu usually involved barbecued chicken and rice cooked by Khan’s South African wife, Hendrina—but eventually Veerman began to suspect something was amiss with his friend.
“Top-secret centrifuge drawings were lying around in Abdul’s house,” he recalled to an interviewer years later. “They were only supposed to be used at the plant and stored in vaults there afterwards. That was my biggest worry. What was he doing with those drawings? All the little pieces of the jigsaw put together made me reach the conclusion that Abdul was spying.”
Veerman tried to sound the alarm. First he made an anonymous call to the authorities from a pay phone. When that failed, he went to the manager of the laboratory and was reprimanded for making wild allegations. Khan was nevertheless transferred to a management job, where he had no more direct contact with sensitive equipment. But his dirty work was already finished: He had the technical specifications for a factory that would allow any nation to fashion an atomic bomb out of raw uranium.
At Christmas 1975, one year after his private meeting with Bhutto, he flew back to Pakistan on a routine vacation and did not return. Hendrina wrote a letter to a friend explaining that her husband had gotten sick, delaying their return. He mailed in his resignation two months later. Bigger things were now in store. Khan founded Engineering Research Laboratories, a company with a remit directly from the prime minister to build an enrichment plant inside an unruly agrarian country where most people lived in poverty and running water was a luxury. Khan himself later marveled that a nation that could not even manufacture sewing needles or bicycles was attempting to reproduce the most futuristic technology on the planet.
A good set of drawings had been cribbed from the Dutch, but Khan didn’t yet have all the machinery. This problem, too, called for deceptive tactics. Khan and some associates took advantage of weak export laws to buy, from Swiss and German companies, parts that could be used for innocent purposes as well as for uranium enrichment—high-strength aluminum tubes, for instance. There were guidelines from the IAEA for the exports of these “dual use” technologies, but governments were spotty about enforcing them, and Khan found them easy to circumvent. He would often hide a critical purchase within a long shopping list of innocuous items, for example, or have the equipment shipped to phony buyers in different countries to disguise their true destination. Some metallic components were acquired as “sales samples” and then taken to his lab in the town of Kahuta for study and reproduction.
Khan was also willing to pay well above the market price, which should have raised suspicions but instead made him a favored customer of European firms eager for overseas accounts. Tracing Khan’s trail many years later, a team from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) concluded that Western greed played a major role in Pakistan’s fortunes, as did hubris. “Many industrialists reasoned that ‘if we do not do it, others will,’ and deliberately violated the law. A willful naivety and arrogant skepticism about Pakistan’s ability to put sophisticated machinery to military use also played a role.”
The centrifuges turned, and the uranium poured out. By 1984, Khan claimed that Pakistan was ready to set off an atomic bomb with a notice of only one week. This may have been only a slight exaggeration. Less than two years later, the CIA reported that Pakistan was “two screwdriver turns” away from arming a weapon, which had likely been cold-tested at Kahuta. When India’s military held a provocative exercise near the border, Khan felt confident enough to brag to a reporter, “They told us Pakistan could never produce the bomb, and they doubted my capabilities, but they now know we have done it.”
He then made a statement to a newspaper that put him in a role as the nuclear mouthpiece for the government. “Nobody can undo Pakistan or take us for granted,” he said. “We are here to stay, and let it be clear that we shall use the bomb if our existence is threatened.” Khan tried to complain he had been misquoted, but it happened to have been the truth. Earlier exposés about the program in the German media had only helped him, as new European firms starting calling on him with offers to sell dual-use products. “In the true sense of the word, they begged us to purchase their goods,” he said later. “And for the first time, the truth of the saying ‘They will sell their mothers for money’ dawned on me.”
Pakistan emerged from the nuclear shadows in full in 1998, when it tested five weapons inside a mountain bore and left clear seismic evidence of its new powers. This was the first time an Islamic government—and a poor one at that—had direct control of the tools of doomsday, and it created an enormous burst of national pride and confidence. Pakistan now had the ultimate negotiating tool in world affairs. Khan was hailed as a genius and was venerated in a cultish way that perhaps only a Manhattan Project scientist might have recognized: celebrated for birthing a tool of death. Schools and cricket teams were named for him; boys wanted to be him when they grew up. He could not go to a restaurant without somebody buying him dinner. Outstretched hands greeted him wherever he went. Khan told an interviewer: “If I escort my wife to the plane when she’s flying somewhere, the crew will take notice of who she is and she will receive VIP treatment from the moment she steps on the plane. As for me, I can’t even stop by the roadside at a small hut to drink chai without someone paying for me. People go out of their way to show their love and respect for me.” For a beleaguered nation, resentful of Western technological suzerainty, Khan and his uranium bombs seemed to provide an avenue of hope
: a sense that Pakistan, too, belonged in an elite group along with its hated neighbor to the east with which it shared a 1,800-mile border—about 200 miles shorter than the border between the United States and Mexico—and only a single connection with a paved road.
Paid handsomely by a grateful government, Khan built a lakeshore mansion outside Rawalpindi, not far from the uranium fields. He gave cash to charitable foundations, funded mosques, was photographed feeding his pet monkeys (a daily diversion), and continued his work in the national labs, which had been renamed Khan Research Laboratories in his honor. In the romantic city of Timbuktu in Mali, he built a luxury hotel and named it after his wife. A Pakistani air force C-130 cargo plane was used to ship exotic wooden furniture from Islamabad to the hotel lobby. Dissidents in Pakistan claimed that the Hendrina Khan hotel was supposed to have been a base for desert uranium prospecting; this remains unproved.
“In his middle age he had become a fleshy, banquet-fed man, unused to criticism, and outrageously self-satisfied,” wrote the journalist William Langewiesche. “Accompanied by his security detail, he went around Pakistan accepting awards and words of praise, passing out pictures of himself, and holding forth on diverse subjects—science, education, health, history, world politics, poetry, and (his favorite) the magnitude of his achievements.” He bribed local journalists to write puff pieces on him and reportedly endowed several charities on the condition that they shower him with awards.
Khan might have remained this way, a benevolent combination of nuclear avatar and National Uncle, but something had been driving him to keep pushing his mandate. Though he had been convicted in absentia of “attempted espionage” back in Holland, he always denied stealing any blueprints and resented the implication that his own talents lay in burglary rather than honest science. This was too much for his ego to bear. “Khan felt his capabilities had been insulted,” said the IISS experts. “He may also have felt a genuine sense of injustice and a victim of hypocrisy given the high number of Western industrialists who were more than ready to do business with him.”
There was also the inherent hypocrisy of the nonproliferation treaty to consider. In the eyes of Khan and most Pakistanis, the Americans and the other first-class powers were ready to shake their fingers at any nation that wanted to develop a nuclear security blanket, yet they maintained huge arsenals of their own. This was a special affront to the Muslim nations of the world, which had been the intellectual and military masters of the globe in the ninth century but now saw themselves under the nuclear boot heel of the West.
Though he prayed five times a day and made public thanks to Allah for his good fortune, Khan was no fundamentalist. He also displayed no interest in sharing his technology with terrorists. But he believed in Pakistan’s right to enrich its own uranium and command its own respect, just as other beaten-down nations had the right to do.
Whatever his motivations—narcissism, profit, altruism, revenge—Khan and his employees had been making undercover sales of Pakistan’s uranium and nuclear goods to a variety of pariah countries, including Iran, Libya, and North Korea, for more than fifteen years before the network was finally undone by the seizure of a ship in a Mediterranean port.
The band of dealers now known as the A. Q. Khan Network or, more flippantly, as the Nuclear Wal-Mart, apparently made their maiden sales call in 1987 with an offer to sell a sample of centrifuge parts and plant drawings to Iran. It was basically the same atomic starter kit that Khan had smuggled out of Europe in the previous decade. Iran was then locked in a stalemated border war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and was looking for a way to show an advantage. Iran bought a portion of this shopping list for $3 million and went to work.
That was only the beginning. Khan began to make phone calls to his old contacts at the European suppliers and shell companies he had used to build Pakistan’s enrichment plant—only now he was interested in exporting, not importing. The beneficiaries would be any nation that wanted to make a deal with him. As it had been before, his favorite tool was uranium. Plutonium was never an item that Khan wanted to trade, as it required care in handling and could kill its courier. It was also beyond his level of technical understanding.
A top customer was North Korea, which traded some of its ballistic No-dong missiles for, as Khan later confessed, “old and discarded centrifuge and enrichment machines together with sets of drawings, sketches, technical data” and uranium hexafluoride gas. These castoffs were not enough to create the ball of uranium required for critical mass, but the paranoid Kim Il Sung—“Dear Leader” to his people—apparently tried to reverse engineer an enrichment plant of his own. Khan personally traveled to at least eighteen different countries in an apparent attempt to drum up new Third World customers for his nuclear goods, and visits to Nigeria and Niger may have been part of a plan to secure an underground stream of raw uranium ore.
The network operated under the cover of the Khan Research Laboratories, which boasted its own schools, hospitals, and a cricket team and blatantly advertised its services with glossy brochures and a sales video in which Khan’s own voice is heard. “Together we can really work wonders,” he says. The degree to which the Pakistani government knew of his activities is still a matter of conjecture, but it is beyond question that the head of the nation’s nuclear program was given wide latitude to do what he pleased, and without monitoring or challenge. “Khan had a complete blank check,” a top military aide later told a reporter. “He could do anything. He could go anywhere. He could buy anything at any price.” If A. Q. Khan felt any guilt, he never showed it. “Who the hell is going to use nuclear weapons?” he reportedly said. “I see them as peace guarantors.”
Khan chose a logical place to consummate most of his deals: Dubai, known as “Manhattan in the desert,” home to a row of luxury high-rises, shopping malls, gold markets, and a busy airport ringed with free-trade zones. The richest city in the United Arab Emirates, formerly a sleepy outpost for pearl divers, began its climb to international prominence in the 1970s when the ruling al-Maktoum family made the decision to reinvest the emirate’s modest oil royalties in the infrastructure, particularly the $3 billion shipping terminal. A favorable tax climate and a strategic location between China and the West added to its allure as a laissez-faire trading and financial center. A quarter of the world’s construction cranes are now in Dubai, as is the world’s tallest skyscraper, three artificial islands in the shape of palm trees, battalions of luxury cars on the freshly paved roads, an indoor snow-skiing mountain, an underwater hotel, and a massive amusement park called Dubailand, which, when completed, will be larger in area than the principality of Monaco. The U.S. Navy uses Dubai as a maintenance center; it is its most frequently visited port outside the continental United States.
But an atmosphere of perfidy still lingers in the desert city-state. The steel-and-glass downtown is bisected by an anemic waterway nicknamed “Smuggler’s Creek,” a reference to the place’s history as a base for the wooden dhows that shipped liquor, soap, appliances, and other goods around the Arab world, sometimes behind false bulkheads in order to dodge taxes. The river of money flowing through Dubai conceals a significant trickle of illicit commerce. Mafia figures from Russia and India have been known to park their earnings in some of the splendorous real-estate developments on the shores of the Persian Gulf. Most of the funds for the September 11 hijack plot were wired from Dubai banks. Blood diamonds, stolen property, and sensitive military technology pass through the city under the names of dummy corporations. The local police lack the budget or the mandate to do much about these things.
John Cassara, a former U.S. Treasury official, wrote that he once tried to explain to a Dubai broker the necessity of making accurate invoices to show the customs agents. “With complete and obviously sincere innocence, he told me, ‘Mr. John, money laundering? But that’s what we do.’ ”
This was the perfect place for A. Q. Khan, who rented a penthouse apartment for himself and began to make deals.
&nbs
p; As many as thirty shell companies may have stored or shipped his atomic material at one time or another. Skyscraper hotel rooms were occasionally used as meeting spots. Khan’s most trusted subordinate, Buhary Syed Ali Tahir, acted as the network’s Dubai branch manager. His job as the director of a family-run computer importer named SMB Group gave him the necessary cover.
Through Tahir’s office, the network began doing uranium-related business with Libya’s eccentric Mu’ammar al-Gadhafi, who had always had imperial designs on North Africa. In 1971, he had launched an invasion of Chad in a bid to gain control of a desert said to be rich with uranium. The adventure turned the dirt-poor Chad into an even more desiccated wreck and ended in an expensive defeat for Gadhafi. He later managed to purchase 2,263 tons of yellowcake from Niger, but he lacked any mechanism for improving it to weapons grade. Khan agreed to sell him centrifuges for use at a plant on the outskirts of Tripoli that could have produced up to ten bombs per year. The deal also involved the transfer of design papers (which came wrapped in a plastic bag from a dry cleaner), containers of uranium hexafluoride gas, and a steel device to feed the heavy gas to and remove it from a centrifuge. This last gadget was allegedly manufactured inside an ordinary-looking industrial shed in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, by a company called TradeFin and under the supervision of a Swiss citizen named Daniel Gieges. The device was two stories tall. Employees nicknamed it “the Beast.”
Libya might have succeeded at threatening the world with its own bomb by 2008 if Western intelligence agencies hadn’t been paying attention. The CIA had begun assembling a file on A. Q. Khan almost from the day he left Holland, and reportedly told Dutch investigators not to arrest him in the mid-1970s because it wanted to keep him under surveillance. The case for arresting him was strengthened after IAEA inspectors made a visit to Iran’s enrichment plant and found Pakistani designs. When U.S. officials learned in October 2003 that crates of centrifuges marked as “used machine parts” were on a freighter called the BBC China and heading for Libya, they persuaded the ship’s owners to divert it to the port of Taranto in Italy, where it could be boarded and inspected. The paper trail pointed toward Tahir’s shady computer company in Dubai. This embarrassment caused Gadhafi to make a spectacle of renouncing his weapons program (“This was like killing my own baby,” lamented his nuclear chief) and mending a toxic relationship with the United States, one that had lasted for more than two decades.
Tom Zoellner Page 15
