The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  Any beliefs that Iraq was unique were erased by the discovery in May 1992 that another country was engaged in a secret program to build a nuclear weapon.

  NORTH KOREA had signed the nonproliferation treaty in 1985, after starting work on a large reactor near Yongbyon, an ancient city about sixty miles north of the capital, Pyongyang. Despite the treaty’s requirements, the North Koreans had stalled, refusing to grant the IAEA access to the new installation until 1992. By then, the huge nuclear complex covered fifty square miles, ringed by antiaircraft batteries and guard posts. Several hundred scientists and engineers lived in apartments within the complex, which also contained office buildings, industrial facilities, and a reprocessing plant where plutonium could be extracted from spent reactor fuel.

  Under North Korea’s agreement with the IAEA, the inspection was designed to establish benchmarks so the agency could ensure that the reactor was being used only for civilian purposes and that no fissile material was being diverted for military use. Not long into the inspection, it was discovered that some fissile material appeared to be missing already. The inspectors suspected any secret work would be under way close to the main reactor, so they identified three possible locations and asked for permission to inspect them. The North Koreans refused, claiming they were military installations and off-limits. The IAEA officials were highly skeptical, but they had no right to force the issue without actual evidence of a diversion. That evidence would come soon, however, and it would mark a dramatic change in the way business was conducted by the IAEA.

  In June 1992, the Americans provided senior officials at the agency with the proof they required: copies of satellite photos of the area surrounding the reactor at Yongbyon. It was the first time that anyone had shared such material with the agency. Said a senior IAEA official involved in the episode, “The pictures showed efforts to plant trees that were so hurried and sloppy that the trees were already dying a couple pictures later in the series. It was so, so obvious that they were concealing something.”

  The IAEA told the North Koreans again that they wanted to visit the suspect sites, warning that they would not take no for an answer. After the Koreans refused again, the agency requested a closed session of its board of governors. A large screen was set up at the front of the main auditorium where the thirty-five members of the board sat in curved rows. As the room darkened, the images from the American satellites were projected onto the screen to dramatic effect, showing sequential construction and concealment at three locations over a period of months. When the lights went up, the audience murmured about what they had just seen. Hans Blix followed with a short and pointed report on the initial discrepancies discovered by inspectors at Yongbyon. Faced with dramatic new evidence, and with Iraq fresh in their minds, the board members authorized a special inspection. Even the Chinese, North Korea’s closest allies, went along with the decision.

  The disclosure of the American satellite images to the IAEA board reflected a change that had started at the agency after the Iraq discoveries. After Iraq, Blix had begun encouraging member countries to share intelligence about suspected diversion of nuclear materials and possible clandestine activities with the agency’s staff. But he recognized that opening the door to outside intelligence agents carried dangers, too. “I insisted that this must be a one-way traffic,” said Blix. “The agency could not trade and exchange information. It was the organ of all the members and not the prolonged arm of individual states.” Blix hired a former intelligence official to serve as the liaison with foreign governments providing sensitive information and to make sure that intelligence was secure within the IAEA.

  When the North Koreans still refused to admit inspectors, the board found the country in noncompliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and referred the issue to the UN Security Council. In April 1994, after months of wrangling, the North Koreans withdrew from the IAEA and threatened to expel the agency’s inspectors and pull out of the nonproliferation treaty altogether, an action that highlighted one weakness of the treaty—that a country could provide ninety days’ notice and withdraw for “national security” reasons without repercussions. The United States regarded the prospect of a nuclear North Korea so seriously that President Bill Clinton’s senior advisers considered military strikes against its nuclear facilities. Only eleventh-hour talks between former president Jimmy Carter and President Kim Il Sung of North Korea defused the crisis. On October 21, 1994, North Korea agreed to freeze its plutonium-production program in exchange for fuel oil, economic cooperation, and the construction of two light-water reactors, which would be far harder to use in a weapons program. As part of the deal, American inspectors would be permitted to monitor the reactor at Yongbyon. No one knew how long the freeze would last, but a military strike had been avoided for the time being.

  The American monitors arrived in November. After three days of intense negotiations, the team boarded a dark-green, 1960s-era military helicopter emblazoned with the red-star emblem of North Korea for the trip to the complex. As the chopper swept across the mountainous terrain, Robert Alvarez from the U.S. Department of Energy sat next to Li Sang Gun, the director of the radiochemistry laboratory at Yongbyon. The Americans had been instructed by the State Department not to be too friendly because the countries remained technically at war. Li had maintained a stern visage during the three days of talks. But when the outgoing Alvarez struck up a conversation on the helicopter, he found that the Korean was sanguine, though willing to talk. Li’s memories of the Korean War were still sharp and painful, and he described the napalm attacks by American aircraft and other privations during the war. He said it would be a long time before North Koreans abandoned their hatred of the United States.

  When the helicopter landed, Alvarez saw the five-megawatt reactor and a handful of office buildings and other installations, all of which reminded him of an American nuclear-weapons site. The delegation was escorted to a darkened and icy lecture room, where the hosts explained that the lack of heat and electricity was the result of turning off the reactor. When Alvarez and his colleagues saw the reactor up close, they found that it resembled a 1950s British plant. Alvarez asked Li why his country had adopted that style of reactor, instead of the Russian model, and the Korean replied that the British version had been easier to build because “almost all of its important details had been available in the open literature of the ‘Atoms for Peace’ program since the late 1950s.”

  THE NORTH KOREA saga was still unfolding when South African president F. W. de Klerk presented the IAEA with another unpleasant surprise, announcing on March 24, 1993, that his country had dismantled six atomic weapons. There had been suspicions that South Africa was developing a nuclear arsenal for many years, but the IAEA had no authority to investigate because the country had not signed the nonproliferation treaty. In what was becoming an alarming pattern, the South Africans had acquired nuclear-research facilities under the guise of a civilian program. The nuclear cooperation between the United States and South Africa dated back to the waning days of World War II, when uranium ore was discovered in South Africa, after which it became one of the world’s leading uranium producers. In 1965, the United States supplied a reactor to the Pelindaba Nuclear Research Center and shipped South Africa one hundred kilograms of weapons-grade uranium to fuel it. By the time the international community imposed sanctions on South Africa in the seventies for its apartheid policies, the country had built a solid foundation of nuclear expertise. All that remained was to turn to the black market in Europe and the United States for additional materials as the needs arose. Machine tools, furnaces, and an extensive list of equipment for its weapons program were imported, often from the same companies and middlemen who were helping Pakistan and Iraq. Mohammed Farooq, the Indian expatriate who had organized the sale of Pakistani centrifuge technology to Iran in 1987, sold specialized furnaces to South Africa, and Gotthard Lerch, the German engineer, provided it with vacuum technology.

  In the end, external and
internal factors made South Africa the first nuclear state to disarm voluntarily. Soviet interventions in southern Africa had slowed dramatically in the middle 1980s, reducing the threat to South Africa, and when de Klerk was elected president in 1989 he initiated reforms to end the country’s isolation and allow it to return to good standing in the international community. De Klerk recognized that the nuclear arsenal was an obstacle, so he ordered its secret dismantling and simultaneously started negotiations to sign the nonproliferation treaty. But the South African leader also was motivated by the future rushing toward his apartheid government: Black South Africans, led by Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress, were on the verge of gaining control of the country, and de Klerk was determined that they not get their hands on a nuclear arsenal, too.

  At the height of its program, the South Africans had six nuclear devices and a partially completed seventh. Under de Klerk’s orders, the weapons were disassembled and the highly enriched uranium in their cores was melted down. Designs and other classified documents related to the weapons program were to be shredded, and weapons components were to be destroyed. Most of the work was done by 1991, when South Africa signed the nonproliferation treaty.

  THE LESSONS of North Korea and South Africa, and to a lesser extent Iraq, demonstrated that preventing proliferation and avoiding the unthinkable demanded addressing the root causes of why nations sought nuclear weapons, raising challenges beyond the scope of the IAEA and the nonproliferation treaty. Stopping the spread of nuclear weapons required tough and enforceable safeguards, but it also demanded that the Americans and other global actors address the issues of security and national prestige driving the new proliferators. While a nation’s motives are inevitably complex, the countries pursuing nuclear arsenals in the new age of proliferation faced enemies who might be deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation: India feared China, Pakistan feared India, and Israel was surrounded by hostile Arab countries. The Iraqi decision was based more on its desire to dominate the Middle East, but its program drove Iran to developing a matching arsenal. North Korea’s nuclear efforts were rooted in decades of fear of the United States; South Africa sought nuclear weapons after international sanctions left it isolated and vulnerable at a time when the Soviets were ramping up their influence in the neighborhood.

  WHILE THE IAEA and most of the world’s proliferation experts were focused on Iraq, North Korea, and South Africa, Khan was trying to help Iran work out the bugs in its centrifuge program. When reassembled at the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, some of the P-1 centrifuges he had supplied did not operate at all, and others spun briefly before flying out of balance. Despite the difficulties, the relationship did not end. Stymied by the international crackdown, Iranian nuclear experts had little choice but to consult Khan, flying him secretly to Tehran several times in that period.

  Ali Akbar Omid Mehr, a young Iranian diplomat, was preparing for his posting to Pakistan when he came across Khan’s name in Iranian government records in 1990. Before heading for the grimy frontier city of Peshawar with his wife and two daughters, Mehr had been in charge of the Pakistan desk at Iran’s Foreign Ministry and had had access to the “green book,” the official record of bilateral dealings between Iran and Pakistan. “I saw that Mr. A. Q. Khan had been given a villa near the Caspian Sea for his help to Iran,” Mehr said later. “The villa was a gift to him for services rendered.” The name didn’t mean anything to Mehr until he arrived in Peshawar a few months later. In the Iranian consulate offices there, he often heard discussions of nuclear cooperation between Iran and Pakistan, and Khan’s name was invariably at the center of the conversation.

  Mehr was a secular man who regarded himself as a professional diplomat. Early during his assignment in Peshawar, he ran afoul of the strictures imposed by Iran’s religious leaders, and he began to fear for his safety. Over several months, he hatched a secret and dangerous plan to seek refuge in a European country before he and his family were forced to return to Iran. He quietly accumulated cash and purchased airline tickets to Stockholm, where he planned to ask for asylum. Once the plans were in place, a Pakistani friend drove the Mehrs to the airport in Peshawar for the flight to Karachi, where they planned to catch a Scandinavian Airlines flight to the Swedish capital. The first leg went smoothly enough, but after boarding the plane for Stockholm, one of Mehr’s daughters noticed a familiar face a few rows behind them. When she told her father, he turned and saw two security officers from the consulate. Mehr realized that his getaway had been discovered, and his heart sank. Certain that the Iranian security police would be waiting for the family in Stockholm, he quietly summoned a flight attendant. By some small miracle, she believed the desperate man’s story and convinced the plane’s captain to divert the aircraft to Copenhagen, where Mehr and his wife and daughters were the only ones allowed to deplane. The Danish government eventually granted the family asylum and provided them with new identities. The Mehrs moved several times to avoid Iranian agents but eventually settled in a small house in a village about an hour outside Copenhagen. Mehr worked from time to time with the Danish security authorities through the 1990s and wrote a book about his experiences in post-Ayatollah Iran. Discovery by Iranian authorities remained a constant fear for the family.

  Mehr was not the only person who noted Khan’s involvement with Iran in the 1990s. Another defector, a former officer in the elite Revolutionary Guards named Hamid Reza Zakeri, had worked on security at Iran’s nuclear installations before leaving the country in 2002. During that time, he often saw Khan at these facilities. Zakeri, who was placed in a witness-protection program by the German authorities and testified in proceedings against a suspect in the September 11 attacks, provided a list of secret nuclear installations where he said he or his men had seen Khan working with Iranian counterparts.

  CHAPTER 19

  NUCLEAR NATIONALISM

  LATE IN 1992, CIA director Robert Gates found himself at the center of a fierce debate about the level of threat posed by Iran. Democrat Bill Clinton had defeated George Bush in November, and the incoming administration was weighing whether it could or should improve relations with Tehran, which had not resumed since the hostage crisis in 1979. American intelligence analysts and diplomats were divided over the intentions of Iran’s revolutionary leaders and the significance of its two-billion-dollar military buildup. The division was particularly sharp when it came to discerning the purpose of Iran’s renewed attempts to acquire nuclear technology.

  A year earlier, the secret National Intelligence Estimate concluded that some of Iran’s leaders were interested in developing nuclear weapons but that the program was too disorganized to be taken seriously. Gates, however, was of a different mind. A compact, tough-talking career CIA officer, Gates had a history of seeing the world through a bleak lens, and in the past he had been accused of slanting intelligence to justify a hard-line policy. Gates was first nominated as CIA director in 1987, but his name was withdrawn because of questions about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. When his name was put forth again in the fall of 1991, he underwent an extraordinary three weeks of confirmation hearings in which he was both praised and condemned. The chief criticism was that Gates had tailored intelligence on the military strength of the Soviet Union for years to exaggerate and prolong the threat and to justify higher spending on the U.S. military and the CIA itself, an accusation that he heatedly denied.

  Gates survived the bruising hearings and immediately began pushing a tougher position on Iran’s military intentions, particularly on the nuclear front. In March 1992, he testified before Congress that Iran was engaged in a suspicious pattern of procurement that could lead to developing a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade unless the flow of Western technology was stopped. He repeated his concern shortly after Clinton’s election, saying that Iran could pose a threat to the United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf within three to five years. Others within the intelligence community and at the State Department were less convin
ced that Iran was chasing a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials denounced the notion that they were interested in developing nuclear weapons. “We have no need for nuclear weapons,” a deputy foreign minister said in late November, calling the suspicions “a lie and a plot.”

  When Clinton took office in January 1993, Gates was replaced as CIA chief by R. James Woolsey Jr., but his warnings echoed on. There were some early successes in interrupting Iran’s purchases of nuclear technology. The Americans convinced Argentina not to sell equipment that would have enabled Iran to convert uranium ore to the uranium hexafluoride gas used in centrifuges, and they were pressuring the Chinese to delay the sale of a nuclear reactor. But the same loose control regime that Saddam Hussein had exploited still existed because the wider international community had not yet accepted the need for tighter regulations, and efforts at the IAEA were proceeding slowly. Plus, the Iranians had the added benefit of a blueprint for enriching uranium, courtesy of A. Q. Khan and his associates.

  The CIA had picked up evidence in 1988 that Khan had sold some centrifuge parts to Iran, but the intelligence indicated that Iranian scientists felt the Pakistani scientist had provided them with shoddy equipment and had therefore broken off any dealings with him. So instead of worrying about Khan and Pakistan, the American intelligence and counterproliferation apparatus was focused on Europe and nuclear scientists fleeing the collapsing Soviet Union. “In the 1990s, we were not terribly worried about A. Q. Khan and Iran,” said Bob Einhorn, a senior counterproliferation official at the State Department who had access to the intelligence gathered at the time. “In retrospect, we can see now what was happening. We had our eye on the wrong ball. In truth, we really underestimated what the Pakistanis were doing with their own nuclear program and we underestimated Khan. He is the one who really enabled Iran to make progress in developing a nuclear capability.”