The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  Going full speed meant not only acquiring the equipment and technology but also developing a cadre of trained scientists and technicians almost from scratch. “A country which could not make sewing needles, good and durable bicycles or even ordinary durable roads was embarking on one of the latest and most difficult technologies,” Khan observed later. But a pool of candidates existed, provided he could persuade them to come home. Like Khan, hundreds of bright young Pakistanis had enrolled in advanced science programs at universities in Europe and North America, with the government’s encouragement. The United States alone had trained more than one hundred Pakistani scientists in nuclear specialties as part of Atoms for Peace. As Khan had discovered himself, there were few job opportunities in Pakistan for well-educated young Pakistanis, so most of them had remained abroad. The enormous challenge of the nuclear program opened the possibility of a technical career at home and, coupled with a bottomless pocketbook and patriotic appeal, Khan began to lure back many of the scientists, engineers, and technicians he needed.

  Much of the recruitment was done through advertisements in small newspapers aimed at the Pakistani community living abroad. The effort was organized by the Pakistani diplomatic missions, and the fruits of the recruiting were to be shared by Khan’s program and the PAEC. A typical ad, placed in a Canadian newspaper called the Crescent, invited scientists and engineers of Pakistani origin to come home to share their knowledge as the country embarked on new ventures in challenging scientific fields. There was no suggestion that the projects had anything to do with weapons. Applicants were instructed to apply at the embassy in Ottawa. Candidates were divided according to specialty, and those with backgrounds in physics or nuclear science were asked about their knowledge of uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the two versions of fissile material used in weapons. Anyone who was interviewed at that point would have had a pretty good idea of what was going on.

  Competing with the atomic-energy commission for the most promising recruits, Khan didn’t hesitate to get involved personally and use his experience as an example of how returnees could make a difference. In a letter in 1977 to Abdul Aziz Khan, a soft-spoken Pakistani electrical engineer living in Canada, Khan appealed to his sense of patriotism and promised him a role in a project of national importance. Reluctant to leave Canada, where he had citizenship, and sensing something was amiss, the engineer declined the offer. He later agreed to collect technical literature and use his vacations to travel to Pakistan to help train engineers for the centrifuge program, but he rejected the offer of first-class tickets to Pakistan and large sums of money, saying he wanted to avoid attracting the attention of Canadian authorities.

  Aziz Khan went to Pakistan in the spring of 1978, visiting Kahuta and other facilities and meeting a handful of scientists and technicians who had returned permanently. A. Q. Khan described his band of workers as “crazy people” who were “working day and night,” buoyed by the heady progress being made on the centrifuges and other technical aspects. Not every returnee could handle the workload or living conditions. One scientist who had been living in London had come primarily for the money, but his wife was unable to adjust to life in Pakistan, and the couple fought so bitterly that Khan dismissed him. “It is . . . the bad luck of this country that people do not want to stay here,” Khan wrote to his Canadian pen pal in early 1979. “When one leaves he does not want to come back.” In an apparent reference to his continuing feud with Munir Khan, he said that some people were trying to force him out of his job, but he vowed to remain until the task was finished.

  No influx of expatriates could provide the full range of expertise required to start an enrichment program from scratch, so Khan called on the fraternity of European engineers, salesmen, and middlemen from his Urenco days to come to Pakistan to train what Khan called “local boys” on the sophisticated machinery being assembled at Kahuta. The visitors came from the most advanced countries in the world—places such as Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Russia, and Japan, as well as China and the Middle East. The extent of the outside help did not escape the notice of Western intelligence agencies, but no one was willing to take the action that could have shut down or at least delayed Pakistan’s rush to the bomb because they underestimated its nuclear capabilities.

  CHAPTER 9

  ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE

  THE U.S. EMBASSY in Islamabad—set amid a thirty-two-acre compound graced by a swimming pool and private club and surrounded by a high wall—employed about 150 diplomats, administrators, aid workers, and assorted spies. The CIA station was tucked away on the third floor, the walls of its warren of offices lined with locked file cabinets, a vault, and shredders. A small, gas-fired incinerator stood ready for burning the most sensitive classified material in the event an attack shut down the electricity. The station was usually home to three or four full-time case agents, who ran a network of operatives within the country. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Pakistan had served primarily as a listening post on Soviet activities in Central Asia and on the Chinese. American U-2s flew secretly out of a base in the northwestern city of Peshawar, and CIA agents moved about Islamabad with relative freedom, maintaining cordial relations with their counterparts at ISI.

  When American policymakers began to worry that Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons after the Indian detonation, the CIA was in a good position to put its ear to the ground. The agents used their contacts and ability to get around the country to achieve some notable successes in the early going, managing to recruit at least one worker inside the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and a string of informants elsewhere. The CIA knew when Chinese nuclear engineers started visiting several nuclear- and conventional-weapons facilities, and they were informed when Libyan couriers arrived by commercial aircraft, carrying suitcases filled with what was rumored to be cash. The CIA reported back to Washington that Colonel Gadhafi appeared to be fulfilling his pledge to help pay for the Islamic bomb. There was a slight hiccup in the summer of 1975 when the PAEC worker was detained by the ISI, but the Pakistani authorities never connected the scientist to the CIA, so the game went on.

  A. Q. Khan first appeared on the radar of the CIA agents in Islamabad in early 1976. After Khan failed to return to his job at FDO, the Dutch security service assumed that he had bolted and notified the local CIA chief in the Netherlands. The information quickly circled back through CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and arrived on the third floor of the embassy in Islamabad. The CIA and others in Washington failed to recognize Khan’s significance, regarding him as a minor player even after his formal resignation from FDO.

  Near the end of 1977, a CIA officer in Islamabad was told by a source that construction had started on a huge installation near Kahuta. The informant said the plant was to be a production center for enriched uranium as part of the country’s weapons program, prompting an urgent cable to CIA headquarters. Spy satellites were redirected to photograph the location, providing CIA analysts with surprising images of a vast complex going up in the middle of nowhere. The warning, coupled with the huge amount of centrifuge-related technology arriving in Pakistan, indicated that something was clearly brewing. But the CIA technical analysts at Langley were convinced Pakistan did not have the technological or scientific base to get far in the complicated field of uranium enrichment, so the Islamabad station was instructed only to keep an eye on the construction at Kahuta.

  The threat of nuclear proliferation was being taken more seriously in Washington. In the spring of 1977, Len Weiss flew to Paris to meet with senior French nuclear officials to relay John Glenn’s opposition to the pending sale of the reprocessing plant to Pakistan. His most important meeting was with Bertrand Goldschmidt, one of the directors of the French nuclear agency and a physicist with a worldwide reputation. Even before Weiss finished laying out Glenn’s concerns, Goldschmidt said the French had decided to stop the transaction. Weiss was surprised and pleased, but his mood soured a bit when Goldschmidt told him that unfortunately the French
company involved in the deal had already sold Pakistan the blueprints for the plant. Getting them back, he said, would be impossible.

  Weiss paused to consider the implications, unsure of how much damage had been done. “What stops them from going ahead with the reprocessing plant and eventually building a bomb?” he asked.

  “We didn’t give them critical pieces of equipment,” Goldschmidt said. The French had not yet provided Pakistan with a device known as a “chopper,” which sliced the highly radioactive spent fuel rods into pieces as part of producing plutonium. The Pakistanis would have to find another source for the chopper, which could add years to the effort. Weiss found some solace in Goldschmidt’s revelation, but it also planted a seed in his mind: What if the reprocessing plant was not the true focus of the Pakistani nuclear plans? What if the plutonium route was a ruse? What if, while the United States spent precious diplomatic capital and intelligence resources trying to stop the French deal, Pakistan had another option for developing a weapon? As a scientist, Weiss was trained to look at issues from unorthodox angles. His method of evaluating a problem emphasized starting with a set of facts and following them wherever they led, without trying to fit them into a predetermined pattern. He therefore saw the situation differently from politicians or intelligence agents. Based on CIA reports and classified briefings over the previous year, Weiss knew that Pakistan was pursuing uranium enrichment at some level. Perhaps, he began to think, enrichment was the real way the Pakistanis planned to produce fissile material.

  Weiss headed back to Washington to put the finishing touches on an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act. The legislation threatened to bring sanctions against countries that acquired or sold nuclear-reprocessing technology with or without IAEA safeguards, which meant Pakistan and France both could face U.S. sanctions if their transaction went forward. Passed in August 1977 and signed into law by President Carter, the measure became known as the Glenn amendment.

  But Weiss continued to worry, particularly as more information came to him about the expanding Pakistani procurement network. Sifting through reams of intelligence reports and ordering briefings from the CIA and the National Security Agency, Weiss began to assemble a clear picture of an enrichment operation that was far larger and potentially more dangerous than anyone had imagined previously. Weiss felt alarm bells should have been ringing, and he wasn’t sure why they were not.

  In the midst of his research, Weiss encountered the name of A. Q. Khan. Either a CIA briefer or an analyst’s report mentioned the Pakistani scientist, explaining that he had stolen material from an advanced European centrifuge project and appeared to be playing a role in Pakistan’s procurement effort. The NSA had even monitored telephone conversations in which Khan discussed specifications of certain equipment. His trips to Swiss and German high-tech companies had been documented, too. Khan was one of many people identified in the intelligence reports, but the name stuck with Weiss because of his concerns about enrichment. “Actionable intelligence was there, right from the beginning,” said Weiss. “Inverters from England, maraging steel, Swiss valves—we knew about this at the time it was going on.”

  “Actionable intelligence” describes information regarded as solid enough to demand a response. Based on what he had seen, Weiss believed the Ford administration could have cut off assistance to Pakistan under the terms of the Symington amendment a year earlier. So he used his influence with Glenn to try to push the Carter administration to act, playing a key role in persuading President Carter to shut off most economic assistance and all military sales to Pakistan in the fall of 1977. Carter was worried about Pakistan’s nuclear program, and he also had been angered that summer about Zia’s coup. As a result, relations between the United States and Pakistan went into a tailspin, albeit a temporary one.

  Earlier that year, Weiss had drafted an important piece of legislation, known as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, which imposed new restrictions on U.S. nuclear exports and aimed to reverse the drive by a number of countries to build enrichment and reprocessing facilities. He was not naïve enough to believe that sanctions alone could stop a country determined to build the bomb, but he was confident that restrictions could delay the process, perhaps allowing the international community additional time to step in. He knew that the real solution was to address the underlying political and security motivations that led countries to acquire nuclear weapons.

  Despite his reservations about the impact of the legislation, Weiss felt his trust in Glenn had been affirmed. He went ahead and resigned his tenured post at the University of Maryland and signed on full-time with the senator from Ohio. In the years that followed, he was to become one of the Senate’s most influential staff members on nuclear proliferation, staying on the trail of A. Q. Khan.

  IN WASHINGTON’S Foggy Bottom neighborhood, someone else was absorbing the same intelligence dispatches about Pakistan’s purchases of enrichment-related equipment in Europe. Bob Gallucci had left the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency for the State Department, where he was a division chief in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Known as INR, the bureau was a fraction of the size of the CIA or NSA, and the people who worked there were not spies. Instead, INR drew on classified information generated by the U.S. intelligence community to develop policies and guidance for American diplomats in Washington and worldwide. Gallucci’s specialty was proliferation, and he and his analysts were focused on India and Pakistan.

  Pakistan was overtaking India as a source of worry. On January 1, 1978, President Carter traveled to New Delhi for a two-day visit. Normally, the president would have stopped next door in Pakistan, if only out of courtesy, but Carter snubbed Zia by deciding to skip his country. The American president rubbed salt in the Pakistani’s wound by praising India’s human-rights record and its democracy, capping the trip by signing a declaration with Indian prime minister Morarji Desai that affirmed the commitment of both countries to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons. Carter’s visit and Desai’s long-standing opposition to nuclear weapons put India’s weapons program into what Gallucci called a “cryogenic freeze.”

  The American-Indian agreement signaled genuine progress, but it depended on stopping Pakistan’s nuclear efforts, too. If Pakistan tested a nuclear weapon, India would resurrect its program. On his way home from India, Carter stopped in Paris to meet with French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and discuss U.S. concerns about Pakistan. The French had already promised privately not to proceed with the sale of the reprocessing plant, but Carter was eager to get a formal agreement. D’Estaing agreed to make the decision official, but he insisted on waiting long enough to make it seem as if France was not submitting to American pressure. Six months later, the French Council on Nuclear Policy declared the contract with Pakistan null and void.

  By then, the French decision was not a surprise, but it still constituted a setback for Islamabad. In preparation for the French action, Pakistan had been devoting more of its resources to Khan and his enrichment program, a shift that was monitored by CIA stations across Europe. Gallucci was reading the new intelligence with increasing alarm, particularly reports about the new profile of A. Q. Khan. “He was all over the place,” Gallucci said. “Did the CIA know exactly what he was doing? Probably not. But it was clear he was up to something. I think we had a pretty good handle on his stuff.”

  The Carter administration was at a critical juncture, if it had the will to stop the Pakistani march toward nuclear weapons. The intelligence agencies, led by the CIA and NSA, had provided undeniable evidence of what the Pakistanis were doing. Congress was aware of the threat, and the president had already been concerned enough to impose sanctions. The outcome hinged on taking significant action to stop Pakistan by stepping up enforcement of export regulations and enlisting American allies in the effort. If those steps failed, some in the American government were prepared to consider more drastic action.

  In mid-1978, a working group was convened within the State Departm
ent to try to find a way to thwart Pakistan. But the question was how. Relations with Zia were terrible, so there was little hope of gaining political leverage. In the midst of the discussion of various options, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance took the highly unusual step of asking his diplomats to develop an outline of the pros and cons of launching air strikes to level the construction under way at Kahuta. Vance recognized the risk he was taking in even asking for the information, so he put the request in the form of a private memo, to avoid embarrassment if word leaked. After reviewing the outline developed by his staff, Vance abandoned the idea as too fraught with political danger, including the possibility of touching off a major conflict in South Asia. Despite the precautions, word did leak to the Pakistanis, and they responded by installing French-made antiaircraft-missile batteries around the perimeter of the complex.

  Another option that was debated in the most hushed terms was a plan to assassinate Khan. “Many of us wondered why somebody doesn’t just stop this guy,” said Gallucci. “It wouldn’t be us, but somebody.” That option, too, was never acted on, but years later another senior government official at the time rued the decision not to kill the Pakistani scientist. “The best thing would have been to take Khan into an alley somewhere and put a bullet in his head,” he said.