A more prosaic task for the working group was to understand the full scope of Pakistan’s enrichment program in order to assess how far along it was and what its vulnerabilities might be. For this, Gallucci turned to nuclear-weapons analysts at the CIA and experts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Berkeley, California. As proliferation concerns grew during the Cold War, the CIA had sought help from the weapons designers and other experts who worked for the giant lab, leading to the creation of a special-projects group known as Z Division. Its top-secret job was to provide the intelligence community and the State Department with the kinds of highly detailed technical assessments of foreign nuclear programs and weapons capabilities that could be made only by nuclear scientists. As time went on, Z Division grew within the laboratory, with teams assigned to specific regions and countries. The partnership allowed the CIA and other agencies to tap the reservoir of technical knowledge at Livermore, but the experts weren’t always right. Often there were disagreements between the analysts at the CIA and the scientists at Livermore and other laboratories.
That summer, Gallucci’s working group brought the top Z Division scientists and the senior CIA analysts together in a secure briefing room on the seventh floor of the State Department. Instead of disagreeing, both groups were unanimous in their assessment of Pakistan’s enrichment program: There was no threat, and it would take decades for Pakistan to master the arcane principles of developing centrifuges to enrich uranium. They were certain that the Pakistanis would never be up to the task because the country was too backward, no matter how much technology it smuggled in from Europe. There was arrogance in the assumption, best exemplified when one of the CIA analysts told Gallucci, “You should be happy that they are pursuing centrifuges, because they will never get those centrifuges to work.”
Doubt began to arise about that assessment by early 1979, when an American spy satellite above the Indian subcontinent beamed back images showing surprising progress—the roof was going on a massive installation situated on more than fifty acres and surrounded by high fences and antiaircraft batteries. The sheer size of the construction project caused Gallucci to go back to his experts for a second opinion. Pakistan appeared to have marshaled a huge effort to build the structure, and the question was, Would they have done so without some assurance that the centrifuges they planned to install would work? None of the experts was willing to abandon the idea that Pakistan wasn’t up to the technological challenge, but Gallucci felt that he could no longer count on Pakistan’s failure. He feared time was not on his side.
CHAPTER 10
A NUCLEAR COWSHED
DESPITE THE PROGRESS of the construction at Kahuta, Khan’s team was having trouble with the prototypes for the centrifuges that were to form the heart of the enrichment plant—they kept spinning out of balance and breaking loose from their moorings, sending technicians ducking for cover as the cylinders ricocheted through the test hall at Sihala. Some engineers thought they had identified the problem and come up with a solution. Because centrifuges spin at up to twice the speed of sound, the electricity that propels them has to flow at a consistent voltage. The slightest variation throws the machine out of balance and leads to potentially disastrous accidents. The cause of the voltage fluctuation was traced to the type of high-frequency inverter purchased the previous year from a German company. The engineers felt the device was inferior and told the boss that the only way to cure the problem was to find a better one. Khan relayed the assignment to Siddique Butt, who was rebuffed when he tried to buy more advanced inverters from a Dutch company on Khan’s list from Urenco.
In running the Pakistani pipeline, Butt had maintained security by using only fellow Pakistanis to place orders for technology. Under pressure to get the inverters, however, he took a chance and turned to an outsider. The man he chose was Abdus Salam, a Muslim of Indian origin who was a British citizen and ran a small electronics business in North London. At Butt’s request, Salam and a partner, a British engineer named Peter Griffin, set up a new company to place orders for top-quality inverters with the British subsidiary of Emerson Electric, the American firm that provided the devices to U.S. and British nuclear plants. Salam and Griffin started small, placing an initial order for thirty inverters after telling Emerson that the devices were for a textile plant in Pakistan. Emerson approved the first order. Before the initial shipment was made, Salam requested sixty more.
British export law did not prohibit the export of the inverters, and both shipments likely would have gone without notice except for an article published in the summer of 1978 in Nucleonics Week, a specialty publication for nuclear experts in and out of government. The article disclosed that the Emerson inverters were intended for use by Pakistan in a secret uranium-enrichment program for military purposes. The article’s sources were unclear, though Khan later blamed the German businessman whose company had filled the earlier order but lost the business because his inverters didn’t work.
Regardless of its origins, the scoop caught the attention of Frann Allaun, a Labor Party member of the British Parliament and an advocate of nuclear disarmament. His staff inquired with British export authorities and learned that Emerson was selling inverters to a Pakistani textile company. Allaun took to the floor of the House of Commons to denounce the transaction and the ineffectiveness of British export regulations. “Was the British Government aware that the firm Emerson Electric had supplied Pakistan with a quantity of special inverters for driving ultracentrifuges in a uranium-enrichment plant?” Allaun demanded. Later, the MP explained that he raised concerns because the inverters were identical to those used by the British Atomic Energy Authority, so he doubted they were destined for a textile plant. Despite the flap, Emerson officials shipped the first batch of thirty inverters.
The outcry forced the British government to conduct a quick investigation, leading export authorities to conclude that no law was violated. Still, the government had no desire to be seen as abetting Pakistan’s nuclear efforts, so high-frequency inverters were added quickly to the prohibited export list, and the second shipment was blocked. Tony Benn, the British energy minister, said the inverters were clearly intended for Pakistan’s bomb program, and the British action appeared to be too little and too late.
Still, Khan would need far more than thirty inverters. In letters to Abdul Aziz Khan, the Pakistani nuclear engineer living in Canada, late in 1978 and early in 1979, Khan complained that his engineers were running short of inverters, and he worried that the furious pace of work would be interrupted if a new supplier were not found soon. “Work is progressing satisfactorily, but the frustration is increasing,” Khan wrote. “It is just like a man who waited for thirty years but cannot wait for a few hours after the marriage ceremony. As now the work has started to progress and you can see the light through the tunnel, it is hard to wait till that time. We all want that instead of finishing the work tomorrow, we should finish it today.”
The letters to Aziz Khan provide an intriguing glimpse inside the program at a critical time. The United States and its allies were working to strengthen export laws, so in response A. Q. Khan was expanding his procurement operation outside the reach of the West, to the Soviet Union and China, an effort that he recounted in the letters, often resorting to an awkward code to conceal the topic. In describing apparent efforts to get centrifuge components from the Soviet Union, he wrote: “The dam is ready and a week ago we put the flow of water in it and now it is filled. It has become quite scenic. Presently we are trying to obtain some information about where we can get the fish and put them in it so that our angler friends could have a good time. Hopefully in winter there will be ducks from Russia.” In February 1979, he said construction was almost finished on the laboratories and administration building and that he expected the first technicians and engineers to be transferred to Kahuta by April.
The correspondence sometimes veered into personal matters, with Khan describing his heavy workload in the same paragraph in which
he recounted the slow progress on the new house he and Henny were building on Margalla Road in Islamabad’s most affluent neighborhood. The house was a symbol of Khan’s rising status and improved financial situation, but it was a headache, too. “Construction of the house is continuing,” he said. “Contractors keep on saying it is only a question of one or two months. These days it is nearly on the finishing stages, it is being polished, bathroom fixtures are being installed, doors are being installed.” He looked forward to moving into the house by spring, explaining that he had promised his daughters that they would be able to swim in the pool by April 1.
The controversy over the British inverters had done more than just threaten Khan’s centrifuge program. The Nucleonics Week article and Allaun’s outburst had attracted the attention of a number of European publications and television networks, which responded by assigning teams of investigative reporters to dig further into Pakistan’s procurement operation and its nuclear program. Khan had operated in relative secrecy since arriving home, but that came crashing down on March 28, 1979, when the German television network Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen broadcast a program disclosing that Khan had obtained access to centrifuge technology while working under contract to the Urenco consortium and taken it back to Pakistan. “Today, Dr. Khan is the director of the top-secret project for the construction of a similar plant in Pakistan,” said the program. More detailed broadcasts and investigative articles followed quickly, portraying Khan as a spy and a thief who had stolen the designs that had given Pakistan the keys to a nuclear arsenal. Exactly as Ruud Lubbers had feared years before, exposure of Khan’s misdeeds embarrassed the Dutch government and Urenco, prompting demands from their German and British partners to know what exactly had happened at FDO: How had a Pakistani scientist gained access to the sensitive centrifuge technology? How much he had learned? The Dutch tried to shift the blame from one agency to another in hopes outside interest would soon fade, but there was no quelling the storm, and its consequences turned personal for Khan.
Slightly more than three years after his return to Pakistan, Khan felt that he was on the verge of success at Kahuta, and he expected to be regarded as a national hero, not a thief. Khan thought of himself as a great scientist and a leader, someone who exercised almost total control over his environment, colleagues, and family. His self-image as well as his centrifuge program was threatened by these exposures, so Khan railed against the articles and broadcasts, insisting to anyone who would listen that he was the victim of a vicious smear campaign that sought to undermine not just him but the very idea that Muslims could build the bomb. His rage boiled over and provoked his first public response after an article in Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine. “I want to question the bloody holier-than-thou attitudes of the Americans and the British,” Khan wrote to the magazine, lashing out at his enemies in hyperbolic terms. “Are these bastards God-appointed guardians of the world to stockpile hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads and have they the God-given authority to carry out explosions every month? If we start a modest program, we are the Satans, the devils, and all the Western journalists consider it a crusade to publish fabricated and malicious stories about us.”
Khan’s wildest accusations were reserved for private correspondence with trusted friends. Writing to them, he added Jews to his list of tormentors and lamented the impact on his efforts. “American and Jewish [officials] have advertised my name and another and showing it on T.V. has created the problem of security, but we are working, depending on God,” he wrote in one tirade. “All our material has been stopped; everywhere they are making it delayed. The materials which we were buying from British and Americans have been stopped. Now we will have to do some work ourselves.” His troubles extended to relations with Munir Khan and the PAEC, too. “On one side the whole world is after us and on the other side the internal enemies are going to finish us,” he said. “But at least we have one satisfaction, that from one end to another end we have made other people sleepless.”
Despite the external pressure, Khan promised that he would provide the enriched uranium he had promised on time. He even found an upside in the bad publicity, telling his future biographer Zahid Malik that the press onslaught had served as a gigantic advertisement for Pakistan’s nuclear-procurement program. “Many suppliers approached us with details of the machinery and with figures and numbers of instruments and material they had sold to Almelo,” he said. “In the true sense of the word, they begged us to purchase their goods. And for the first time, the truth of the saying, ‘They will sell their mothers for money,’ dawned on me.”
The press accounts played a role in increasing the resolve of officials in Washington to stop Pakistan, and so did General Zia’s decision to execute former Prime Minister Bhutto on April 4. International legal observers had described Bhutto’s conviction for plotting to murder political opponents as a political act in itself. President Carter was outraged at the hanging. On April 6, a week after the German television program about Khan and two days after the execution, Carter announced that Washington was expanding the sanctions against Pakistan to withhold additional types of economic assistance. The amounts were relatively small—$40 million for the remainder of fiscal 1979 and $45 million for the following year—but the symbolism was strong. “U.S. laws require countries importing armaments components for atomic installations not subject to international security controls to be deprived of development funds,” Tom Reston, a State Department spokesman, said. “Our information is that Pakistan is developing a centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium. In the long term this might give Pakistan a nuclear weapon capability. According to our laws, we have decided to cut back significantly on development aid to Pakistan.”
Even the modest sanctions were major news in Pakistan, where they were regarded as not only a blow to the country’s economy but an insult to Zia. The Pakistan Foreign Ministry claimed that the Americans had singled out Pakistan because they wrongly believed that it was building nuclear devices for the Muslim world to use against the Israelis. As they would over and over, Pakistani officials maintained that their country’s nuclear program was a peaceful one, intended only to generate electricity. A Pakistani diplomat assigned to the embassy in Washington during this tumultuous period said later that he and his colleagues were instructed to lie about the country’s nuclear intentions. “Those of us who knew what was going on, we were given clear orders not to tell the truth to anyone, not other diplomats or U.S. officials or anyone,” said the diplomat, who had a long career in government service before retiring in the late 1990s.
Washington used its influence to stop the World Bank from making any further loans to Pakistan. Other countries agreed to modest restrictions, but few officials expected the sanctions to sway Pakistan, and simultaneous efforts were under way to find a carrot to accompany the stick. In an echo of the offer made in 1976 by Kissinger to Bhutto, the Pentagon proposed selling advanced F-16 fighter jets if Pakistan agreed to give up its weapons program and submit to outside verification. As with Kissinger’s proposed quid pro quo with Bhutto, the bargain seemed unlikely to deter the Pakistanis.
EFFORTS were under way on the diplomatic front, too. That summer, Carter appointed Gerard Smith, a retired diplomat, as his special envoy on nonproliferation. Smith had helped negotiate the first strategic arms limitation treaty, or SALT I, with the Soviets, and he had headed the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. On his first mission, he was sent to Europe to deliver the president’s warning about the threat posed by Pakistan’s nuclear efforts; accompanying him was Bob Gallucci. After stops for meetings in London and Paris, the two men headed to Vienna on June 25. Their arrival was timed to coincide with a regular meeting of the IAEA’s board of governors, a gathering of hundreds of diplomats that would provide some cover for the Americans. They wanted to present their case quietly to Sigvard Eklund, the director general of the IAEA, and convince him to back tough steps to isolate Pakistan and stop the flow of nuclear technology from IAE
A member countries. Eklund was a thoughtful Swedish nuclear scientist; although his worries about the spread of atomic weapons had deepened during the eighteen years he had been in charge of the IAEA, he remained a cautious international bureaucrat.
Smith and Gallucci slipped into the huge complex overlooking the Danube the next morning and went straight to Eklund’s office on the twenty-seventh floor. Smith cautioned the Swede that the information he was about to hear had to remain secret and turned the presentation over to Gallucci, who had a better grasp of the details and significance of the intelligence. He had to strike a balance between giving Eklund enough information to alarm him into taking the threat seriously without disclosing anything that would jeopardize the methods used by U.S. intelligence agencies. This was always a tricky balance and often a point of friction between intelligence agencies and policymakers. Gallucci’s version of what the United States knew about Pakistan was broad and heavily censored, but he promised there was clear evidence that Pakistan had not abandoned its attempts to reprocess spent fuel into plutonium for a nuclear weapon. But the more pressing concern, he told the silent Swede, was the ongoing project to enrich uranium, which had been in the news in recent weeks. He gave Eklund a sketchy but frightening outline of Pakistan’s progress, describing the construction at Kahuta. Lest the IAEA director had any remaining doubts, Gallucci said American intelligence had solid information that the Pakistanis were working on a nuclear-weapon design that would incorporate the enriched uranium from Kahuta.
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