The IAEA sent an official letter to the Pakistani government inquiring about the suspected offer. The PAEC replied that the entire incident must have been a hoax and flatly denied that Khan could have been involved in any attempt to transfer nuclear technology out of the country.
The trail had gone cold. Baute and the other team members had no doubt that the proposal was a legitimate attempt by Khan to sell his nuclear know-how to Iraq—they just couldn’t prove it. “I absolutely believe the Khan offer to Iraq was real,” he said. “All of us close to the question believe it was real. The name of Khan was not guessing by someone making up a fictitious proposal. The Khan network is clearly not a twenty-first-century operation. Clearly it was several decades old, based on dual-use technology taken from the Pakistani program and offered to other countries.”
In a last-ditch effort, IAEA officials sent copies of the documents to American intelligence for additional evaluation. Baute thought that if anyone could get to the bottom of the story, it would be the Americans. The IAEA never got a response, leaving Baute to wonder whether the Americans had taken the prospect seriously.
Hussein Kamel never got the chance to say whether he had heard of the Khan offer. Six months after defecting, and before Baute could question him, the general was persuaded that he had been forgiven and would be welcome to return to Baghdad. Within days, he and every family member who had come home with him were executed.
INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION is rarely definitive. Western intelligence agencies and the IAEA were monitoring an array of individuals, groups, and twelve countries suspected of trafficking in nuclear technology. Patterns emerged over time as undercover operatives and deskbound analysts formed a picture of what was going on by connecting seemingly isolated incidents or disclosures. In Khan’s case, American intelligence agencies had enough evidence to suspect that he was providing nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea, both regimes that were inimical to America. The suspected offer to the Iraqis was another clue.
Despite mounting circumstantial evidence, there was no concerted effort to act on the information and no push to understand the full extent of what Khan was doing or to try to close him down. “Certainly we had questions about A. Q. going way back about his predisposition to share information and technology,” said a veteran counterproliferation official from the State Department. “Part of the problem with determining who knew what and when is that you get little pieces and then you get more and more pieces. You never get the whole thing dumped in your lap. And in this case, there are so many layers that we had difficulty seeing the whole picture.”
What was happening was a repetition of the opportunity missed twenty years earlier in the Netherlands. The CIA and other intelligence agencies were content to keep watching Khan, collecting tidbits from intercepted telephone conversations and isolated information from people with peripheral involvement. Admittedly, the picture was incomplete and Khan was a difficult target, protected by the Pakistani government. Plus, the days when Milt Bearden and the CIA had free rein inside Pakistan were over, and penetrating the Khan group was difficult. Normally, a CIA case officer would try to develop an informant by exploiting a grievance or offering money for information, but even as the network began shipping equipment to Iran, it remained restricted to a relatively small number of well-paid Pakistani insiders beholden to Khan and a handful of outsiders whose livelihood depended on the black market. The goal of the Pakistani military and intelligence service was to protect Khan, not expose him and possibly jeopardize its atomic arsenal.
“Khan was the subject of intense scrutiny by the U.S. and others,” said a former CIA case officer who was involved in recruiting informants in Pakistan. “He was pretty savvy in the way he set up his network. He used offices and faxes for a short amount of time and then moved on. He also did much of the negotiating himself. A flood of arcane and highly technical bits of information have to be analyzed to create a picture. One issue that U.S. intelligence struggles with is the inability to analyze technical information. After the Indian nuclear tests in 1974, the CIA realized that it had to bring in experts from the national weapons laboratories to look at the information they were getting to make sense out of it, but that wasn’t always done.”
Other factors played a role in the failure to stop Khan. Confronting the Pakistani government could have meant disclosing sensitive information that jeopardized American intelligence-gathering methods. The National Security Agency, which operates clandestine listening posts worldwide to monitor telephone conversations and other communications, was reluctant to disclose anything that might expose a billion-dollar electronic collection system aimed at Pakistan. The Clinton administration made procedural attempts to encourage Pakistan to rein in the nuclear scientist, sending official letters of complaint and occasional delegations of State Department officials to raise the issue in a general fashion. But because the American protests contained no specific allegations, Khan turned the accusations to his advantage, portraying himself as the victim of Western propaganda, just as he had when confronted by the Dutch charges two decades earlier.
The Americans were not the only ones who were concerned. The Japanese government complained to Islamabad about Pakistan’s relationship with North Korea, telling a senior Pakistani military official that the technological exchanges extended beyond missiles to the nuclear arena. After returning to Islamabad, the officer described his encounter to a meeting of high-level military and political leaders, which included Khan.
“These are lies, outrageous lies,” Khan thundered as he jumped from his seat. “This is nothing more than Western propaganda to attack me and our country. The Americans are behind these lies.”
Khan’s outburst was a product of several factors. He had developed a genuine hatred of the United States, believing he had been branded a criminal. He often complained to associates that the Americans had been responsible for the deaths of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Zia because of their nuclear aspirations, and he told them that he feared he was next on the hit list.
CHAPTER 21
A MYSTERIOUS MURDER
FROM THE WINDOW OF KHAN’S HOTEL, the Bosporus was as gray as the sky. It was a long time since the room-service waiter had left behind a Turkish breakfast of sliced melon and white cheese, olives, tomatoes, and flat bread that did not appeal to Khan. He had not come to Istanbul in the summer of 1997, however, for either the view or the food. Like countless people before him, intrigue had brought Khan to the teeming, anonymous city straddling Europe and Asia.
Khan was sixty-one years old, still erect and handsome but growing fleshy from the banquet circuit and too much of his own fried chicken. His old sense of his modest beginnings was long forgotten. These days, he was comfortable with the elite from the scientific, business, and political worlds. With underlings, he remained a stern taskmaster who never liked to ask twice for something to be done. Just a year earlier, he had been honored yet again by the government, this time on the twentieth anniversary of the groundbreaking at Kahuta. His acceptance speech was testimony to his high stature and rampant immodesty. “The gigantic pace with which the Kahuta plant was established has always amazed and enthralled people,” he said. “I have been inquired of by countless people on this particular point, as it is really hard to believe that something that took two decades in the most modern countries of the world was accomplished in a record time of only six years. . . . Kahuta is an all-Pakistani effort and is a symbol of a poor and developing country’s determination and defiance to submitting to blackmail and bullying.”
By the time he arrived in Istanbul in the summer of 1997, however, Khan was tired, and the weariness showed. The internal battles with the Pakistani nuclear establishment had worn him out, and so had his travels throughout the Middle East and Africa. He kept an apartment in Dubai to oversee the Iran deal. He was building a twenty-four-room hotel in Timbuktu, the legendarily remote former trading center in the West African country of Mali. He planned to name it the H
otel Hendrina Khan, after his wife, and ordered a Pakistani Air Force cargo plane to fly in a load of furniture from Karachi. Sometimes Khan talked of retiring to a life of fishing and reading, perhaps spending some of his time in Mali, but in the end his appetite for power kept him in the game.
Khan spent most of the time he was on the road trying to persuade other Muslim countries to buy his nuclear wares. In the last year alone, he had made dozens of trips, often with an entourage that included a personal physician and security officer from Kahuta as well as friends like Tahir and Henk Slebos. To whet the appetite of potential customers, Khan liked to play a video produced at Khan Research Laboratories, which portrayed Khan in his trademark khaki suit as Pakistan’s stalwart deterrent against an aggressive India. Through his efforts, the voice-over said, Pakistan had performed “no less than a miracle” in joining the world’s nuclear elite. After panning through the centrifuge halls and research labs at Kahuta, the camera focused on Khan sitting in his office. He explained that the lab had enriched uranium by 1981 and produced enough HEU for a weapon by 1983. “On December 10, 1984, I wrote a letter to President Zia saying we are now in a position to detonate a nuclear device on the least notice,” he said, his face serious. The message could hardly be clearer for prospective customers: Khan had done it for Pakistan, and he could do it for you.
Khan made several trips to Syria in the 1990s, meeting with government officials and lecturing on nuclear weapons at Damascus University. In one speech, he told his audience that Syria should protect itself from the United States by acquiring nuclear weapons. The pitch was the same in other Islamic cities, from Istanbul and Dubai to Khartoum and Riyadh. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the minister of information for the United Arab Emirates, visited Khan’s lab, and Khan offered to train UAE technicians in nuclear technology. In Saudi Arabia, he delivered his message to members of the royal family, several of whom expressed interest in acquiring nuclear weapons. The Saudis had helped finance the start of Pakistan’s nuclear efforts and had secretly purchased Chinese missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. But the Saudis, comfortable within the cocoon spun from their oil wealth, were cautious, and they initially rejected an invitation from Khan for Prince Sultan bin Abd al-Aziz, the Saudi defense minister, to visit Kahuta. Later the prince did take the tour, with Khan as his personal guide, but he continued to deny any interest in its nuclear work for his own country.
Libya, too, was resistant in the beginning. Khan had flown through Tripoli several times on his way to Timbuktu and other places in Africa. As early as 1995, he used his international reputation to try to get an audience with Colonel Moammar Gadhafi. Like the Saudis, Gadhafi had helped bankroll the early days of Pakistan’s nuclear program, and Khan figured the Libyan might be interested in buying his own. Despite a series of meetings with officials of increasing rank, Khan never got to see the Libyan leader, who always seemed to be unreachable at some desert oasis. In early 1997, the scientist submitted a written description of his proposal to a senior Gadhafi aide. A few weeks later, Khan heard back: Gadhafi was interested. A Libyan official invited Khan to meet with representatives of Libya’s nuclear program on the sidelines of a conference in Istanbul. At the time, Turkey was ruled by a coalition government with a prime minister, Necmettia Erbakan, who was promoting stronger ties with Libya and other Arab countries, so it was a natural spot for both the conference and the rendezvous.
Khan had picked up Tahir in Dubai, and they had flown to Istanbul together. Shortly before noon on the designated day, Khan and his young associate climbed into a waiting car and crossed the high bridge spanning the Bosporus, entering the more residential confines of the city’s Asian side. They arrived at a small, anonymous café on a winding street. Waiting for them were two Libyans; Mohammad Matuq Mohammad, the head of the country’s secret nuclear program, and a technician who gave his name only as Karim. Mohammad greeted Khan and Tahir, using American English he had learned studying physics in the United States in the early 1970s. Khan, Mohammad, and Karim sat down for their discussion, and Tahir moved to a small table nearby.
Gadhafi was regarded by the West as the leading sponsor of international terrorism; in their eyes, he was a man with blood on his hands. He had provided weapons to the Irish Republican Army and regularly ordered the assassination of Libyan dissidents in Europe. He was blamed also for a disco bombing in Berlin in 1986 that had killed two U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman and injured 230 people. In retaliation, President Reagan had ordered air strikes against two suspected Gadhafi residences in Libya, killing at least fifteen people, including Gadhafi’s fifteen-month-old adopted daughter, but missing the main target. Libya also was suspected of planning the explosion of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, which killed 270 people, most of them Americans. A year later, Libya was blamed for the downing of a French airliner over Niger, in which 170 people died.
Gadhafi had been trying secretly for years to develop an atomic bomb. In the early 1980s, Libya had set up a pilot uranium-conversion facility with equipment purchased abroad. A German aviation expert had struggled to perfect centrifuge technology, and the program had stalled. What Khan had offered in his written proposal a few weeks earlier seemed to be a ticket to the elite nuclear club. In the café that day, Khan outlined his ambitious program for Libya, explaining to Mohammad and Karim that he and his network could supply an off-the-shelf nuclear-production facility, capable of turning out three or four nuclear weapons per year, taking Libya from a nuclear wannabe to a nuclear power in a matter of years. He described how he was assisting Iran in its secret effort and promised that his network could deliver similar goods to Gadhafi. The Libyans had studied the written proposal beforehand and had received preliminary approval from Gadhafi to proceed if the deal sounded legitimate. It did, they decided, and they arranged for a second meeting a few weeks later in Dubai to work out the logistics and talk about price.
The Libyan deal would dwarf Khan’s arrangement with Iran and represented a challenge almost as great as the one he had undertaken in Pakistan. This time, however, he would not be starting from scratch. The Iranians and North Koreans were skilled scientists, but Libya lacked even a basic scientific and industrial infrastructure. Out of necessity, Khan would be supplying the entire operation, nuts to bolts, which would require expanding his network, reenlisting old members, and seeking out new accomplices. Complete factories would have to be built surreptitiously to produce the tens of thousands of centrifuges, a massive uranium-conversion plant would be set up, and explosive tests would have to be conducted to perfect the final bomb. As he discussed the idea with Tahir, Khan estimated a start-to-finish bomb factory would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but he knew Gadhafi had the oil money to foot the bill. When Mohammad and Karim arrived for the second meeting in Dubai, they brought Gadhafi’s formal blessing, a shopping list, and a down payment of several million dollars. Before the end of 1997, the first twenty assembled P-1 centrifuges, components for another two hundred centrifuges, and other equipment had arrived in Tripoli via sea shipments from Karachi. The wooden crates were accompanied by false invoices, which described the contents as agricultural machinery.
The network continued to supply nuclear technology to Iran, and Khan traveled to various locations there to solve technical problems. In the meantime, he was also making frequent visits to North Korea, where work was under way on an underground enrichment facility, which would use his centrifuge technology. But the Libyan deal was different because it represented a quantum leap in scope and complexity. Khan relished the new challenge, and the potential fortune, at least partly because things were not going well back home.
IN ISLAMABAD, Benazir Bhutto had been booted out of office for a second time in late 1996 after President Farooq Leghari, acting on orders from the military, accused her of corruption. It was the fourth consecutive government pushed out by the military, and it kicked off a new round of musical chairs. Nawaz Sharif, who had replaced Bhutto aft
er she was dismissed the first time, was elected prime minister in February 1997. Sharif was widely regarded as a creature of the military, and his independence was to be challenged the following year.
In the spring of 1998, the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party won elections in India, elevating Atal Behari Vajpayee to the prime minister’s office. Vajpayee was intent on demonstrating India’s nuclear power, and on May 11 the country detonated three atomic devices underground, followed by two more two days later. A video of the first detonation released by the government showed the countdown followed by a deep boom that shook the earth and sent forth a huge cloud of dust.
Testing nuclear weapons can yield important information about how weapons work, and the five nuclear powers all tested devices at various stages of their development. Physicists have debated whether a nuclear weapon can be considered reliable without tests. But tests have a political dimension, too, serving to notify the world that a country has achieved nuclear status. The most dramatic example of a politically motivated test occurred in 1961 when the Soviet Union detonated the largest nuclear bomb ever created, the fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba. The device was impractical because of its weight and size, but the test was seen as a demonstration of Soviet military and scientific prowess. On the other side of the equation, Israel refrained from testing its nuclear weapons even as its arsenal grew to more than one hundred bombs through the 1990s. Israelis knew that a public announcement of its bomb would antagonize its Arab neighbors and jeopardize the billions of dollars’ worth of assistance it received from the United States.
Vajpayee had decided that the test was worth the risk for India, despite its dependence on international lenders. The international community and American intelligence were taken by surprise. No one expected Vajpayee to take such a dramatic step so soon after taking office. Clinton announced an immediate suspension of aid to India and pledged to oppose more than one billion dollars’ worth of loans from the World Bank and other international lending agencies. Clinton then turned his attention to Pakistan and tried to persuade it not to raise the risk of nuclear confrontation further by doing its own tests. Clinton telephoned Sharif four times in the days after the Indian tests to urge restraint and offer a package of incentives to stand down. Clinton promised to write off American loans, repeal the Pressler and Solarz amendments, and seek congressional approval for new military assistance.
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