The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  Eklund knew that the French had not provided Pakistan with all of the technology necessary to reprocess plutonium into usable fissile material, so he was less worried about that part of the briefing. The progress on uranium enrichment concerned him more. “Does Pakistan have the technical capability to manufacture centrifuge machines?” he asked the two Americans.

  Gallucci said that the complexity and extent of Pakistan’s shopping list indicated that they were making good progress on centrifuges and that it was likely that Islamabad could soon be producing large quantities of weapons-grade uranium. This assessment was a dramatic turnaround from the recent days when the CIA and Livermore were downplaying Pakistan’s ability to master enrichment, and it underscored the peril of underestimating the skill and tenacity of Pakistan’s nuclear establishment.

  Eklund was in a quandary. The IAEA was restricted in its ability to inspect nuclear facilities in Pakistan because the country had not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Though the Canadian-built reactor in Karachi and the small U.S.-supplied research reactor were under IAEA safeguards, Kahuta and the rest of the country were off-limits to agency inspectors. Twenty-four years after its creation, the world’s nuclear watchdog relied almost entirely on the voluntary declarations of its member countries and occasional intelligence passed on by the United States and others. Eklund said he had already written to Pakistan to inquire about the news reports, and the government had assured him that no nuclear installation was being operated outside the safeguards agreement and that it had no secret program.

  Faced with the American intelligence, however, Eklund began to doubt that the Pakistanis were telling the truth. He agreed that the situation was extremely serious, but he recognized that the IAEA had no real way to stop the Pakistanis. “The only chance of stopping the Pakistanis would be to give wide publicity to the information, which might lead the responsible countries of the world to put enough pressure on them to stop the program,” he told Smith and Gallucci.

  Smith said it might be effective in the future, but for the time being the American government did not want its secret information getting out.

  “May I discuss this information with members of my staff?” Eklund asked.

  “Unfortunately, no, not at this time,” said Smith.

  A troubled Eklund spent the next day pondering the warning. The contradiction between what Pakistan was telling the IAEA and what the Americans were claiming exposed a dangerous gap that was a continuing, nagging problem for the IAEA. Designed primarily to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, the agency lacked investigative facilities or enforcement authority. Increasing the agency’s authority was problematic because it was controlled by a board of governors whose thirty-five members were chosen from the agency’s overall membership. Few of those countries were willing to sacrifice their sovereign rights to make the IAEA more effective, and some of them were downright hostile; Pakistan, India, and Israel were all IAEA members.

  Two days later, Eklund requested a second session with Smith and Gallucci. The IAEA chief was struggling for a strategy. In the conference room outside his office, he told Smith that economic and military sanctions were unlikely to be effective because of Pakistan’s access to oil revenue from some of its fellow Islamic countries. “Muslim solidarity might mean that countries such as Libya would be willing to finance the project and might want to use nuclear weapons in the Middle East,” he said. The United Nations Security Council was the forum of last resort for bringing pressure on rogue countries, but Eklund said the chances of success there were not good. He repeated his belief that publicizing key portions of the evidence offered the best chance of stopping them.

  Smith again rejected the suggestion. “I feel we still have some time,” he said. “I doubt if the Pakistanis will be able to explode a device for two or three years.”

  “That is not so much time,” Eklund replied, adding, “The more work the Pakistanis do, the harder it will be to stop them.”

  The clock was ticking. Planners at the Pentagon were already developing a strategy for an air assault on Kahuta and other nuclear sites in Pakistan if the diplomatic route failed. On August 12, 1979, The New York Times reported that Smith was directing an interagency task force developing a military strike as a last resort. The article hit like a bombshell in Pakistan, forcing the United States to issue a categorical denial that it had any intentions of an armed attack. But the Americans were not the only ones who regarded Pakistan’s nuclear program as a threat that might merit military action. Israel was secretly considering air strikes against the same targets, fearing that Pakistan was building an “Islamic bomb” that could erase Israel from the map.

  On September 13, senior U.S. officials met for two days of closed-door sessions about the growing threat from Pakistan in the secure conference room on the seventh floor at the State Department. Among those who attended were Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, former President Ford’s national-security adviser and a member of President Carter’s nonproliferation advisory council; General George Seignious, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; several analysts from INR; and a number of other intelligence analysts. The talk was blunt, and the results were classified. Over two days, the discussion made clear that U.S. officials were aware of the broad strokes of Pakistan’s enrichment program. They reviewed Khan’s theft of Urenco plans and his high-tech shopping spree in Europe. Tougher export controls might slow down Pakistan but probably would not stop it. The consensus was that Pakistan was several years away from manufacturing a nuclear weapon, though some participants were concerned that Pakistan might set off some type of improvised nuclear explosion in the coming weeks for political purposes. Zia was running for election to the office he had grabbed, and a show of strength could assure him of victory that November.

  Conventional wisdom was that Israel possessed nuclear weapons, but the Israelis maintained an official policy of nuclear ambiguity—the mere threat was enough to keep its enemies from launching an attack anything short of completely destroying the Jewish state. Pakistan’s position was different: The Indian nuclear explosion in 1974 was a direct challenge that demanded a response for purposes of national honor as much as actual deterrence of the Indians, whose conventional forces far outnumbered those of Pakistan.

  “This is a railroad train that is going down the track very fast, and I am not sure anything will turn it off,” said Charles N. Van Doren, assistant director of the arms-control agency.

  No one was able to offer a solution. Some agreed with Van Doren that it was probably too late and the best the United States could do was delay the day Pakistan got the bomb. Others argued that a strong security guarantee from Washington might convince Pakistan that it did not need nuclear weapons to counter the threat from India.

  The same challenge hung over talks that occurred a month later in the same conference room. In mid-October, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Pakistani foreign minister Agha Shahi met to discuss the deteriorating relations between the two countries. The American-imposed sanctions were damaging Pakistan’s economy, and Shahi was desperate to win some sort of concession in advance of the elections at home. He complained that the restrictions threatened the country’s stability, and he said General Zia and Pakistan’s military leaders were very concerned by the reports that the United States was considering an attack on the country’s nuclear installations. Vance assured Shahi that no military action was planned, but he refused to back down on the issue of economic and military sanctions until Pakistan abandoned its nuclear efforts. Without acknowledging that Pakistan was pursuing nuclear weapons, Shahi asked Vance whether the United States would provide Pakistan with a security guarantee similar to the agreement that committed the Americans to defending any NATO member attacked from the outside. This, he suggested, would go a long way toward easing Pakistan’s fears of India and, implicitly, remove the need for a nuclear arsenal. Vance replied that Washington valued its alliance with Pakistan and he hop
ed that ties could return to normal soon, but the United States could not provide such an assurance.

  Gallucci was in the room during the talks with Shahi, and later he discussed the dilemma with colleagues, reaching a consensus that the outlook for stopping Pakistan was grim. The two options appeared to be equally unpalatable: A military attack, even if successful, would enrage the Muslim world; the NATO-like security guarantee could involve the United States in war in a place where its national interests were not strong enough to justify it. Even without war, such a pledge would outrage India at a time when the administration was rebuilding its ties to the world’s largest democracy.

  By this time, Gallucci knew more about the Pakistani nuclear program than did anyone at the State Department. During one of his many trips to Islamabad, he had taken along satellite photos of Kahuta to show Zia. The Pakistani leader scoffed at the images, saying they depicted nothing more than a cowshed. Curious to see for himself, Gallucci had persuaded the American ambassador to allow the embassy’s political officer, Marc Grossman, to accompany him on a drive to Kahuta. Accompanied by an intelligence officer, the pair drove an embassy jeep to the barbed-wire fence surrounding the complex, where Grossman talked his way past the guard shack by claiming that they were going for a picnic on one of the hilltops. Once inside the perimeter, they glimpsed some of the construction work under way and snapped some quick photographs before caution prevailed and they left. The Pakistanis later learned of the so-called picnic but took no action against the Americans. A week after the Gallucci-Grossman incursion, however, the French ambassador tried to repeat the visit. This time, the Pakistanis were on alert, and the ambassador and his driver were beaten badly by the guards.

  When Zia learned of this, he told a British reporter, “I wish it had been the American bastard.”

  CHAPTER 11

  SEE NO EVIL

  ON NOVEMBER 21, 1979, residents and shopkeepers in the garrison town of Rawalpindi awoke to a startling sight: the country’s military strongman, President Zia ul-Haq, riding a bicycle through streets jammed with buses, cars, and motorized rickshaws. As Zia, surrounded by a small army of bodyguards, pedaled to promote an alternative form of transportation, the radio reported accusations that infidels had taken control of the sacred Grand Mosque in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, the holiest site in Islam. Saudi national guardsmen had surrounded the mosque, and the occupiers had opened fire with automatic weapons, resulting in a bloodbath. Zia was mobbed by angry people shouting questions about the still-unfolding drama when he paused outside a local market. He inflamed the crowd by telling them that the United States was behind the attack at a site so revered that non-Muslims are not even allowed to enter it.

  Anti-American sentiment was already red-hot in the Muslim world, ignited by events in Iran fewer than three weeks earlier. On November 4, militant Iranian students had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and taken sixty-six diplomats, military personnel, and others hostage. The students, incited by fiery rhetoric from religious leaders, were angered by decades of American interference in Iran’s internal affairs, dating to the 1953 coup that overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and reinstalled the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, a man widely reviled in the country. The CIA and British intelligence had organized the coup after Mossadegh nationalized Iranian oil, and secret documents later declassified showed that the Americans and British were determined to maintain Western control over Iranian oil. The student takeover of the American embassy twenty-six years later, perhaps the first instance of what would become known as “blowback,” quickly escalated into an international crisis. The streets of Arab capitals filled with outraged protestors chanting “Death to America,” provoked by the glowering, black-turbaned Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose sermons pushed the debate beyond the political realm and provided a theological basis for using violence and terrorism against perceived enemies of Islam. “Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword,” Khomeini said in sermons broadcast throughout the Middle East. “People cannot be made obedient except with the sword. The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors.”

  The mood on the streets of Pakistan was ripe for Zia’s accusation, and within minutes a huge throng began marching toward the American embassy, several miles away. With each block along the route, the crowd grew more unruly and threatening. As they neared the embassy compound, the protestors were joined by students from Quaid-i-Azam University, where militant students had recently taken control of the student union and begun persecuting secular-minded professors and vilifying women who refused to wear the veil.

  When the mob reached the embassy, its fury boiled over into a full-blown siege. Young men tore down part of the outer wall, flooded into the compound, and set fire to the main building. The six Marine guards were easily overwhelmed and retreated into the embassy. As the mayhem raged, the 139 American and Pakistani employees trapped inside fled to the third floor and huddled inside a secure vault.

  Stephen Crowley, a young Marine, rushed to the roof of the embassy to report on the melee below. Blond and six-foot-six, he was an easy target—a rioter shot him in the head. Other Marines hauled him down to the third floor and into the vault, where Fran Fields, a registered nurse and the wife of an embassy officer, fitted an oxygen mask to his face as blood pooled around his head. Inside the vault, people arranged themselves in groups by blood type, so Crowley could get an immediate transfusion in case they were rescued.

  The ambassador, Arthur Hummel Jr., and the CIA station chief, John Reagan, pleaded by telephone with the Pakistani government to send troops to protect them. At one point, a Pakistani military helicopter circled the compound, its pilot nearly blinded by the smoke rising from fires. Still, no help arrived, even though Pakistani troops were stationed in a barracks less than half an hour away. The first contingent did not show up for more than five hours, as the embassy smoldered and the rioters were dispersing. In the interim, Crowley died, and another American, Army warrant officer Brian Ellis, and two Pakistani employees were killed. All six buildings inside the compound had been destroyed.

  Instead of outrage, official reaction from Washington was muted. Everyone from President Carter on down remained obsessed with the ongoing hostage crisis in Iran, so instead of condemning what happened in Islamabad, Carter telephoned Zia to thank him for his assistance. No one challenged the Pakistani president’s false assertion that Americans were behind the Mecca attack, which was actually carried out by a disgruntled Islamic theology student and his fundamentalist followers. No one contradicted the Pakistani ambassador in Washington when he crowed that his country’s troops had responded promptly to the assault on the embassy in Islamabad. The State Department, however, ordered all nonessential personnel evacuated from Pakistan. The diplomats and CIA agents who stayed behind were bitter because they knew a much greater death toll had been only narrowly averted.

  Carter and his administration feared that challenging Zia would drive him deeper into the camp of the Islamic fundamentalists gaining power in Pakistan and across the Muslim world. After assuming the presidency, Zia had courted political support from religious militants by promising a “genuine Islamic order.” He had approved amputations for thieves and floggings for adulterers, both traditional punishments under Sharia law. He had also authorized the establishment of hundreds of religious schools across the country, where the curriculum included virulent doses of anti-American and anti-Israeli teachings. The proliferation of these schools was to play a major role in the spread of religious extremism across Pakistan.

  Following Zia’s election, the State Department’s INR produced an analysis examining how far toward religious extremism he might take the country, and whether such a movement would raise the risk for the region dramatically by bringing nuclear weapons into the equation. The report found that the Koran could be interpreted to justify the use of terror in a holy war and that Zia and othe
r members of Pakistan’s military elite regarded an atomic bomb as the ultimate weapon of terror. “This concept leads strategists to maintain the importance of a nuclear deterrent, the weapon most capable of weakening the enemy’s self-confidence and leading in turn to his utter defeat,” said the study. “Thus, as one officer put it: ‘Nuclear weapons are modern terror weapons, and Islam enjoins us to strike terror into the heart of the enemy.’ The weapon that at first glance seems to be the most undisciplined one thus is placed within rigid theological-ideological boundaries.”

  AS CARTER and his aides grappled with the hostage crisis, another momentous event took place on Christmas Eve when the first planeloads of Soviet troops landed at Kabul International Airport in Afghanistan. By early Christmas morning, Soviet tanks were rolling across pontoon bridges in the north, and army troops were fanning out across the country. The CIA had been watching Soviet troop deployments and had already warned that an invasion was imminent. Rather than a threat, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the president’s national-security adviser, saw the invasion as an opportunity. He regarded it as a desperate act by the Soviets to prop up the puppet regime they had established in Kabul and saw a chance for the United States to confront the Soviets through proxies. The rebellious forces with whom the Americans were about to throw in their lot were dominated by devout Muslims who were angered by efforts by the Soviet-backed government to undertake numerous reforms, including educating women, abolishing arranged marriages, and banning dowries.

  Carter had authorized a secret assistance program to the disorganized Afghan rebels the previous summer, in advance of the Soviet invasion. Now that the Soviets had made their move, Brzezinski wondered how far he could go without provoking a confrontation with Moscow. The day after Christmas, he wrote a memo to Carter outlining a plan to increase the covert backing to make sure the Afghan resistance survived the invasion. Some resources would come from U.S. coffers, but Brzezinski proposed seeking additional help from Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Because of Pakistan’s proximity to Afghanistan, enlisting it was critical to the plan, even if it meant sacrificing one of Carter’s signature policies by reversing American opposition to Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions. “To make the above possible, we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels,” he wrote. “This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.”