The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  In 1982, prosecutors charged Khan with stealing classified information. From the start, the case was weak. Not even Frits Veerman could say conclusively that he had seen Khan take classified material from FDO or Almelo because he had not looked closely at the documents he had seen at Khan’s home. Instead, the charges relied on two letters that Khan had written after his return to Pakistan, seeking classified information about centrifuge components. The Dutch government tried to serve court papers on Khan by delivering the summons to the Pakistani Foreign Office in Islamabad. A month later, the Foreign Office returned the undelivered summons to the Dutch embassy, saying that Khan could not travel because of national-security concerns related to his work. And yet Khan continued to travel extensively to other countries and even made a couple of clandestine visits to his relatives in the Netherlands.

  The Dutch put Khan on trial in absentia, beginning on November 14, 1983. Khan said later that he did not learn of the charges against him until three days before the trial started, when Henk Slebos arrived in Islamabad with a copy of an Amsterdam newspaper that contained a story about the proceedings. Khan said that he sent a telegram to the Dutch authorities, explaining that he had not been notified of the charges or the trial and asking for a delay. Despite his protest, the trial went forward, and Khan was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.

  Khan later railed to his biographer that the proceedings were rigged against him. “This court was comprised of three judges, and was presided over by a woman who was a Jew,” Khan said. “Another of the judges was also a Jew. It looked as if the court was presided over by the Israeli prime minister and its verdict written in Tel Aviv.”

  The conviction was a blow. The notion that he had stolen the plans contradicted his self-created image as a scientist whose brilliance and innovation were leading Pakistan into the nuclear elite. He hired lawyers in the Netherlands to appeal his conviction and was so determined to clear his name that he started his own search for information that he believed would exonerate him. Eventually, he located a reference to an academic article that he thought would buttress his case that the information he sought from Veerman was available to the general public, but when he tried to get a copy of the article from the library of the PAEC, he found his access blocked: His old rival Munir Khan had ordered his agency to withhold any support from A. Q. Khan because his actions had embarrassed the government and endangered the weapons program.

  Khan returned home that night in a rage, berating Munir Khan and others in the Pakistani nuclear establishment for jealously attempting to thwart him. Henny had never seen her husband so angry. “I would never have imagined that this sort of thing could happen to you,” she told him. “Perhaps we should pack up and go back to Holland.” The suggestion was naïve at best and an indication that Henny was not fully aware of what her husband had done in Amsterdam or what he was doing at Kahuta. Khan knew going back meant the possibility of prison, so he decided to find another way to clear his reputation.

  IN JULY 1982, Bob Gallucci was at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research when he wrote a top-secret memo outlining the ways in which Pakistan had violated the three-pronged agreement it had reached with the Reagan administration to stop work on a nuclear weapon. “It was the best memo of my life,” Gallucci recalled with some pride. “It was the only top-secret memo I ever originated. I never saw it again after I sent it off.” More than two decades later, however, he still remembered the main points. Zia and his government, he had written, had crossed all three red lines drawn by the administration when it approved the $3.2 billion aid package in 1981. “We said that you will not manufacture nuclear weapons, you will not transfer nuclear technology, and you will not embarrass the president over this issue,” said Gallucci. Pakistan was violating all three provisions, regularly and routinely.

  The following year, Gallucci and his staff prepared a twelve-page report that was both blunt and thorough in assessing Pakistan’s nuclear program and Khan’s critical role. “There is unambiguous evidence that Pakistan is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons development program,” said the opening paragraph. “Pakistan’s near-term goal is evidently to have a nuclear test capability, enabling it to explode a nuclear device if Zia decides it’s appropriate for diplomatic and domestic political gains. Pakistan’s long-term goal is to establish a nuclear deterrent to aggression by India, which remains Pakistan’s greatest security concern.” The report said the plutonium and uranium-enrichment projects were having technical difficulties but predicted that both operations would ultimately succeed. Khan’s clandestine activities were described in varying amounts of detail, from his theft of plans from Urenco to his reliance on the pipeline. The report said Kahuta was too large for only research and development and pointed out that the IAEA was forbidden to enter the complex. “We believe the ultimate application of the enriched uranium produced at Kahuta, which is unsafeguarded, is clearly nuclear weapons,” it said. Kahuta would produce enough highly enriched uranium for Pakistan’s first atomic bomb within two to three years, according to the report’s calculations, and it would eventually turn out enough highly enriched uranium for several devices per year.

  A secret CIA report dated May 20, 1983, also confirmed that Pakistan was on course to develop a nuclear weapon. “In our view, Zia and his advisers continue to believe that they must acquire nuclear weapons,” said the CIA analysis. “We have detected continuation of longstanding efforts to acquire components for nuclear devices.”

  The CIA and the State Department delivered the truth about Pakistan to President Reagan and his advisers, who chose to ignore it in favor of routing the Soviets in Afghanistan.

  Pakistan’s desire for a nuclear arsenal was intended to deter India, but deterrence does not work if no one knows you have the bomb. For several years, some elements within the ISI had argued for orchestrated leaks to let the Indians know that Pakistan had gone nuclear, too. In early 1984, Zia and his military advisers decided that a little boasting was in order, and Khan was chosen as the messenger. In February, Khan gave an interview to an Urdu-language newspaper in which he bragged about his work. “By the grace of God, Pakistan is now among the few countries in the world that can efficiently enrich uranium,” he said. Asked specifically if Pakistan could manufacture an atomic bomb, the scientist said: “In brief, Pakistan has a proficient and patriotic team capable of performing the most difficult tasks. Forty years ago no one was familiar with the secrets of the atom bomb and education was not so widespread, but American scientists did the job. Today, 40 years later, we have ended their monopoly in this most difficult field of the enrichment of uranium in only 10 years. This job is undoubtedly not beyond our reach.” In an article published in the same newspaper the following day, Khan went further, suggesting that Pakistan could achieve nuclear capability without an actual test by conducting experiments and nonnuclear explosions.

  Pakistan’s small English-language press operated with a certain amount of freedom because its readership was restricted to the educated elite and foreigners, but the government maintained tight control over the Urdu press because it reached the masses. The intelligence agency had helped set up Khan’s interview on the assumption that its distribution would be restricted to the Urdu press, which was monitored by Indian intelligence. What the Pakistanis had not counted on was that the news would spill over into the English-language press not only in Pakistan but worldwide. When Khan’s assertion reached foreign capitals, it created a furor that forced Zia to call a press conference to try to avoid antagonizing or embarrassing the Reagan administration further. “Pakistan has acquired very modest research and development capability of uranium enrichment . . . for peaceful purposes,” he said, contradicting his own senior nuclear scientist.

  The denial did not stop some U.S. congressmen from calling attention to the wealth of information attesting to Pakistan’s push toward the bomb. On June 20, 1984, Senator Cranston took to the Senate floor and delivered a blistering
and prescient attack on Pakistan and the Reagan administration. He said government officials had told him that Pakistan could turn out at least a dozen atomic weapons within the next three to five years, setting the stage for nuclear war with India. The program, he said, had been subsidized with American finances and misrepresented by the Reagan administration. Cranston warned that Khan and other Pakistani scientists could turn the country into a distribution point for nuclear technology, sharing it with other Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Libya. Cranston put his finger on the central dilemma. “As with India and Israel, we may never be able to say exactly when it was that Pakistan crossed the threshold to achieve a nuclear-weapons capability, or exactly how many bombs they might have in hand at a given time,” he said. “The point is that they now have what they need to produce their own nuclear weapons.”

  LEN WEISS worked closely with Cranston’s staff on proliferation legislation and listened to the senator’s speech with the knowledge that the charges were true. A recent classified briefing from the CIA had escalated his worries about Pakistan and the potential for nuclear war on the subcontinent. U.S. intelligence had learned that Pakistan was planning to retrofit its F-16s to carry nuclear weapons, and Pakistani pilots were learning the “dive-and-drop” maneuvers necessary to release nuclear payloads and escape the ensuing fireball. At the same time, senior Pentagon officials were telling Congress exactly the opposite in public sessions and closed briefings. The military officers said that F-16s could not be equipped to deliver nuclear weapons. The discrepancy was critical because India and its chief ally, the Soviet Union, would erupt if they discovered that Pakistan was outfitting American-supplied aircraft thus.

  Weiss had limited means of determining who was telling the truth, though he was certain Congress was not getting the whole story. After eight years on Capitol Hill, Weiss recognized that little could be done to change the administration’s policy as long as the Soviets remained in Afghanistan. Still, the mounting lies ate at him. “This is part of a pattern of clear-cut examples of where the government of Pakistan was in violation of the law and the United States didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “It is not an intelligence failure. It is a policy failure. They knew but refused to act on it because they had a more important agenda when it came to the Pakistanis.”

  Someone else in Washington had noticed the pattern, too. Richard Barlow was a newly minted CIA analyst whose job was to monitor and assess sensitive diplomatic information and top-secret intelligence reports, to determine which countries were trying to develop nuclear weapons. One of the blips looming on his radar was Pakistan and, though he was new in his job, he was not a neophyte when it came to the Pakistanis. In his senior honors thesis at Western Washington University in 1980, Barlow had used press and academic articles and testimony from congressional hearings to conclude that Pakistan was acquiring the knowledge and technology for a nuclear-weapons program with little interference from the U.S. government. “The failure of the government to prevent such clandestine activities, indeed to even provide the equipment for them, would seem to indicate an intelligence failure of major proportions or a failure of capability,” the young student wrote. “In fact, Pakistan’s success was neither. It was a clear cut failure of policy perpetuated by the consumers of intelligence, not intelligence staff.”

  But Barlow was in the real world now, and he was about to plunge into the treacherous gap between those who collect intelligence and those who twist it to suit their own purposes.

  CHAPTER 13

  NUCLEAR AMBIGUITY

  THE SON AND GRANDSON of New York City surgeons, Rich Barlow exhibited an independent streak in his teenage years. When he graduated from the elite Ethical Culture School in New York in the early 1970s, Barlow was the only member of his class who refused to go to college immediately, preferring to work for a collection agency and later as assistant manager of a bicycle store. His goal was to get out of New York City, and in 1976 he enrolled in Western Washington University in Bellingham. His father tried to insist that Barlow carry on the family’s medical tradition, and in a compromise the young rebel agreed to major in science. Barlow struggled with the courses and soon switched to political science and international relations, where he turned out to be a stellar student.

  Nuclear power caught his eye in 1977 when the State of Washington was embroiled in a controversy over plans to develop several nuclear plants to generate electricity. Barlow got a summer internship in the local congressman’s office and, in a brazen move, used the position to get in touch with a senior military-intelligence official in Washington, D.C., for help on his senior thesis about the relationship between intelligence gathering and proliferation policy. “The general was amused to be questioned by a kid,” Barlow said later. “But he still gave me valuable tidbits about Pakistan.”

  The experience shaped Barlow’s future both in terms of his professional interests and his determination to use unconventional means to get to the bottom of an issue. His thesis earned an A and appeared to reflect a deeper knowledge of the dangers of proliferation than that of the average member of Congress. After graduating in 1980, Barlow used contacts in Washington to get an internship with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The agency had been established in 1961 primarily to negotiate treaties with the Soviets on banning nuclear tests and chemical and biological weapons, but over the years its mission had expanded to cover broader aspects of proliferation policy. Barlow worked days at the agency as an intelligence officer specializing in Pakistan and attended graduate school at Georgetown University at night. When the internship ended, Barlow had developed enough expertise on proliferation and Pakistan that he was offered a full-time job. Before Barlow got through the probationary period, however, President Reagan put the agency on his hit list, and Barlow’s position was eliminated.

  Not sure of his next step, Barlow moved to a small town in Connecticut with his college sweetheart, Cindy, and took a series of odd jobs, such as mucking out horse barns and working as a butcher in a supermarket. He got married in 1983 and returned to Bellingham a short time later, where he took another job that did not reflect his real interests: advertising copywriter. That’s where he was in 1984 when he got an unexpected telephone call from a man who identified himself as a recruiter for the CIA. Barlow jumped at the chance, and a few days later he received a plain envelope containing a formal inquiry from the CIA about his willingness to sign up. The weeks and months that followed were a crash course in how the nation’s intelligence service vets a potential agent. Barlow had a series of clandestine meetings with anonymous case officers at hotels in and around Bellingham and answered earnestly as they probed his background and his motivation for joining the agency. He was, he told them, a patriot who was worried deeply about the threat of nuclear proliferation. Eventually, he flew to Washington for a series of psychological examinations and polygraph tests. Finally, he was offered a job with the CIA in 1985.

  Barlow seemed a perfect fit for the role of undercover agent. Slender and handsome, with light-brown hair and an easy banter, he has the ability to put people at ease in any situation. His new employers considered training him as a case officer within its directorate of operations. The D.O., as it is called, was the covert arm of the CIA, and its members were the agency’s core, men and women responsible for collecting foreign intelligence through classic spying operations. They operated in the field, often developing disdain for the analysts, many of whom sit safely behind desks in the CIA’s sprawling campuslike headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But Barlow’s knowledge of proliferation led him to the analytical side of the shop, where he was assigned to the agency’s directorate of intelligence, the analytical arm. Its mission is to provide timely, accurate, and objective analysis of national-security threats and foreign-policy issues facing the United States. Barlow went to work initially in the office of global issues, which monitored proliferation and a host of other security matters. His job was to cover an area with which h
e was already familiar: the nuclear-proliferation threat from Pakistan. As it turned out, the time he had spent studying chemistry and physics in college served him well, as he underwent training in nuclear technology at the national weapons laboratories and developed an expertise in the scientific aspects of atomic weapons. He received security clearances that entitled him to see some of the most secret information the country possessed. His job was to digest the sensitive diplomatic and intelligence reports from the field and develop the most accurate assessment possible of Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities.

  Barlow stood out early as an analyst because of his ability to absorb vast amounts of complex data and produce a cogent analysis of what they meant for operational use. He was an activist in a field where many were passive readers. “He brought the agency a unique skill,” said Richard Kerr, who was the CIA associate deputy director for intelligence when Barlow arrived at the agency. “He was an investigative analyst. It was a different kind of skill from the kind we had historically used.” He was soon moved to the elite office of scientific and weapons research, which housed the CIA’s technical experts.