While ElBaradei seemed prepared to give Iran the benefit of the doubt, he did speak out strongly to condemn Khan for helping both Libya and Iran, calling him the “chairman of the board” of a black-market network that sold nuclear equipment. When asked by a reporter whether Khan’s customers extended beyond North Korea, Iran, and Libya, he replied: “This is the million-dollar question, and it’s a very important question because we worry. . . . It is still an open question. We know that A. Q. Khan has not just been working for money. There is an ideology involved. We need to understand the motivations—we need to understand and try again to put some pieces of the puzzle together.”
ElBaradei preferred keeping the lines of communication open with Iran as the means of getting to the bottom of its nuclear efforts. But he recognized that the IAEA could not tread as softly when it came to uncovering the increasingly alarming trail laid down by Khan. At his request, the IAEA board of governors authorized him and his staff to initiate a formal investigation. ElBaradei had already assigned Heinonen and his small group of inspectors to compare the Libyan and Iranian programs, but the authorization prompted a more wide-ranging investigation. ElBaradei told Heinonen to unravel the inner workings of what the director general had begun referring to in public as a “nuclear Wal-Mart.”
The challenge exceeded anything the IAEA had undertaken in the past. Heinonen’s investigation would range across the globe as he tried to reconstruct the network’s activities step by step. Instead of subpoena power and the resources of the CIA or MI6, this band of trackers would depend only on its own resourcefulness and analytic skills. They would have to persuade network participants to point fingers at one another, and entice governments and companies to cooperate in the name of counterproliferation. Among his team members were Edwards, Bob Kelley, and Miharu Yonemura, a young Japanese woman who had joined the inspections division recently after working in her country’s nuclear program as a chemical engineer.
“Nobody has to talk to us,” Heinonen told the group in one of its early meetings. “We aren’t cops, and we don’t have the power to arrest anyone or make them talk. I don’t really care about putting people in jail. I just want to drive a stake through the heart of this network and make sure it doesn’t rise up again.”
Making matters harder, Khan had had months to cover his tracks. When the work at Natanz was disclosed publicly in August 2002, he had sensed that it could mean trouble and ordered Tahir to shred documents that linked their operation with Iran. The Pakistani scientist also urged the Iranian government not to cooperate with the IAEA. “Regrettably, they were destroying evidence well before the Libya disclosure,” said an American diplomat working in Vienna at the time. “They found out about the surveillance well before then.”
Prior to the news of the seizure of the BBC China becoming public, Tahir had learned from his Libyan contacts that his five crates from Kuala Lumpur had been removed before the ship arrived in Tripoli. Suspecting the worst, he had shredded more records and erased computer files at SMB Computers before going to Kuala Lumpur, where he expected his wife’s political connections would protect him. When word reached Urs Tinner that the shipment had been intercepted, he immediately packed his belongings and left Malaysia. Before departing for Switzerland, he removed the hard drive from his computer at Scomi and destroyed his personal files and other records.
It took longer for the alarm bells to ring in Johannesburg. But Gadhafi’s public announcement in December confirmed Johan Meyer’s suspicions that Libya was the customer for his apparatus. He telephoned Gerhard Wisser, the middleman, and Wisser rushed over to Tradefin. He ordered Meyer to destroy the system built for Libya. Send it to the smelter and melt it down, Wisser said. The stack of design drawings and the video from Pakistan, he demanded, should be committed to “an Easter bonfire.” Meyer was reluctant to destroy what he had come to regard as a masterpiece; he was able to disassociate the end use of the system from its beauty as an engineering accomplishment. Besides, he was still owed the final $150,000 payment, which was due on delivery of the eleven freight containers sitting in his factory. Determined to see the evidence destroyed, Wisser paid the remaining money to Meyer out of his own pocket. Still, Meyer refused. In his growing frustration, Wisser sent a text message to Meyer saying, “The bird must be destroyed, feathers and all.” In another, he wrote, “They have fed us to the dogs.”
THE BRITISH had pushed to close down Khan’s operation at the beginning of 2003, arguing that its activities had reached the point where it was too hard to control and too dangerous. George Tenet and Stephen Kappes had pushed back, demanding more time to gather more intelligence to eradicate every element of the network and stop Khan for good. The seizure of the cargo aboard the BBC China had forced Pervez Musharraf to act, but the question was how far the Pakistani leader could go in reining in his rogue scientist, who still maintained the title of presidential adviser. Since taking power, Musharraf had won financial concessions from the United States and international lenders by helping oust the Taliban in Afghanistan and playing a central role in Bush’s war on terror. But faced with political instability at home, Musharraf had resisted American calls to crack down on Islamic extremists, who numbered only a few thousand but had the potential to rally the masses against his government. The same reasoning had kept him from doing more than pushing Khan to the sidelines. But Libya changed the equation, and even before Gadhafi went public Colin Powell had warned Musharraf privately: “We know so much about this that we’re going to go public with it. You need to deal with this before you have to deal with it publicly.”
Musharraf was left with no choice except to take steps against Khan, but the question remained, how far could the Pakistani leader go? Musharraf had narrowly survived two recent attempts on his life by Islamic extremists. Appearing to do the bidding of the United States by imprisoning a Pakistani hero, even in the face of the Libyan disclosures, would stir greater resentment. At the same time, Musharraf did not want to jeopardize the three billion dollars in financial assistance earmarked for Pakistan by Washington. But another reason demanded even more caution: When Khan’s arrangement with Iran had started in 1987, some of Pakistan’s military leaders had blessed the deal and others had turned blind eyes. Pushing Khan too far might provoke public disclosures by the scientist that could damage the army and possibly Musharraf himself. “We stood before the world as the illicit source of nuclear technology for some of the world’s most dangerous regimes,” he later explained. “I had to move quickly and decisively to stop any further activity and to find out exactly what had happened.”
Musharraf polled a number of key advisers, all military officers like himself, and the consensus was that Khan had to be disciplined, though there was disagreement on how to go about it. Some generals wanted to imprison the scientist to send a clear message that Pakistan would not tolerate nuclear proliferation and reassure the international community that its arsenal was in safe hands. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Pakistani military leaders had gone on high alert in response to rumors that the American military was about to launch raids to take control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Others argued for leniency for Khan, fearing that the backlash from extremists might provoke a coup. Musharraf had to find a solution that would be accepted by Pakistani nationalists and the Americans.
In late December, Pakistani intelligence began quietly picking up scientists from Khan’s lab. As word of the detentions slipped out, there were rumors that the CIA and FBI were participating in the interrogations. Khan heard the whispers, but if he thought of running, he made no attempt to do so. As before, he expected to weather the storm. As many as thirty scientists were detained and held in so-called hot rooms, where temperatures topped one hundred degrees and questioning went on for days. In late January, the government announced that six senior officials from KRL were being detained on charges of being “responsible for directly and indirectly passing secret codes, nuclear material, substances, machinery, equipm
ent, components, information, documents, sketches, plans, models, articles and notes to foreign countries and individuals.” Khan was not among them, but three were directors and the others were retired military officers. Faced with criminal charges, they began to talk, implicating Khan and ultimately winning their own freedom.
Khan had been questioned initially in December by two Pakistani generals, who described the evidence against him from the Americans and his own associates. Khan had reacted angrily, shouting at them to leave his office. When Khan learned of the formal charges against his colleagues, he was still using his office in the presidential building and decided it was time to fight back. As he had many times before, he tried to use the press to tell his story and rally public support. He telephoned Hamid Mir, a journalist and longtime acquaintance, inviting him to the office. Mir found the scientist haggard and slightly disheveled but defiant as ever. Mir asked about the arrests and recounted an article in the Los Angeles Times that accused Khan of helping Iran and Libya. Khan replied with a bitter denunciation of the Western press, the United States, and his own government. “It’s all propaganda,” he ranted. “The ISI and the CIA, they want to kill me, get rid of me anyway they can. Musharraf will arrest me and turn me over to the Americans if he can, but I can stop him.”
Before Khan could say more, an ISI officer who had been eavesdropping from an adjoining office walked in and sat down without a word. Mir, experienced in the invisible lines drawn by the ISI over what could and could not be published, decided the interview had been off-the-record, finished his coffee, and left. Later, Mir offered an assessment: “He thought nobody could touch him because he is a hero. It was beyond his expectations that Musharraf could arrest him.”
But the curtain was about to fall on Khan’s traveling show. Early the next morning, plainclothes security agents arrived at his home, rousting him from breakfast and escorting him to a waiting car. Khan was driven to a secret location, where he was questioned by a team of senior officials from the ISI, who confronted him with evidence obtained from his former colleagues at the lab and from the Americans. There would be no hot room for the esteemed scientist, but neither would he be treated with kid gloves. Even faced with undeniable evidence, Khan resisted at first, clinging to his imperial manner and arguing forcefully that he was a national hero whose actions had all been undertaken for the benefit of Pakistan. “Who made the atom bomb?” he demanded. “I made it. Who made the missiles? I made them for you.” He railed against the Americans, claiming they had set him up because he had defied their nuclear monopoly and tried to spread the lethal secrets to other Muslim countries. But after three days of insistent questioning, the sixty-six-year-old Khan, exhausted and defeated, had had enough. He agreed to confess. A meeting was arranged with Musharraf in the president’s office at which Khan admitted that he had passed on Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. A bit of bravado remained in the defeated scientist, however, and he asked for a presidential pardon, citing all he had done for the country. Musharraf knew that the public would protest any prosecution, no matter what the facts were, and he agreed to consider the request. But he stipulated that Khan would have to sign a written confession, make a public apology, and accept an indefinite term of strict house arrest. In addition, Khan would be required to apologize on national television. But his written confession would remain secret.
The apology was scheduled for February 4. That morning, Musharraf gathered the country’s military and political leaders to brief them on Khan’s impending confession and get them to rubber-stamp his decision to pardon the scientist. A short time later, Khan was brought to Musharraf’s office, and the president informed him that he had agreed to pardon him. A photograph later distributed by the Pakistani government showed the two men seated uncomfortably in the president’s office, Musharraf in his military khakis looking sternly at Khan in a western suit. Khan left to take the short ride to the studios of the national television network, where he was given the text of the statement he was to read. Before the broadcast, Musharraf appeared before a room of Pakistani journalists to explain the historic event. He laid all the blame at Khan’s feet, telling the journalists: “Unfortunately, the entire proliferation took place under the orders and patronage of Dr. A. Q. Khan. I can say with certainty that no government official or military personnel were involved.” Rumors had swept Islamabad throughout the day, and a reporter told Musharraf he understood that Pakistan had been asked to take three steps beyond arresting Khan: hand over all of its nuclear records to the IAEA; submit to an impartial inquiry to determine whether the military assisted Khan; and allow the United Nations to intervene in Pakistan’s nuclear program.
“Negative to all three of them,” Musharraf said sharply. “We will do no such thing.”
A short time later, Khan appeared on television. He was somber and contrite, befitting the stage-managed event. Expressing “the deepest sense of sorrow, anguish, and regret,” he said, speaking in English and occasionally glancing nervously at his statement, “I want to atone for some of the anguish and pain that has been suffered by the people of Pakistan on account of the extremely unfortunate events of the last two months. I take full responsibility for my actions and seek your pardon.” Khan said that he and unnamed accomplices had passed on the weapons secrets without government authorization. “I wish to place on record that those of my subordinates who have accepted their role in the affair were acting in good faith like me, on my instructions,” he said, suddenly veering from the prepared text. Khan was supposed to acknowledge an “error of judgment,” and he had added the phrase “in good faith” in a last-ditch attempt to wrap himself in the cloak of patriotism.
The speech was short on specifics. He did not identify the recipients of the nuclear secrets, and he did not explain why he had sold them. His remarks raised as many questions as they answered, but Khan was hustled out of the building and was unlikely to be seen again in public. The fact that he delivered his confession in English, rather than Urdu, spoke volumes about the intended audience—the words were intended to reassure the international community that the Khan matter was over without riling the Pakistani masses. The next day, Musharraf called Khan a national hero, saying, “I revere him for his contribution to making the defense of the country impregnable.” Because of his contributions to Pakistan, Musharraf said, he and the government had decided to pardon Khan. The scientist would be confined to his house, kept in isolation with his wife, allowed no newspapers, television, or Internet, and held beyond the reach of the IAEA and American intelligence agents. The few people permitted to visit the once peripatetic merchant of death said they found him depressed and in deteriorating health, passing his time feeding the monkeys in the backyard and complaining that he was the victim of an American conspiracy.
Public reaction was muted, but those three words, “in good faith,” had struck a sympathetic chord. Islamic parties organized a handful of demonstrations in cities across the country, with protests carrying banners that read, “We want Qadeer Khan as President not Prisoner.” A leader of the Islamic opposition, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, demanded that Musharraf step down. General Hamid Gul, chief of the ISI when Khan first started sending nuclear technology to Iran, claimed that the Americans would use Khan’s confession to demand joint control over Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. The protests soon fizzled, but Pakistanis from all sides of the political spectrum believed that Khan was taking the fall for activities sanctioned by a succession of leaders, military and civilian alike. Zahid Malik, Khan’s biographer, put it this way: “As he said in his statement, he behaved in good faith. To me, those words mean a lot. Dr. Khan is a responsible person and he knew Pakistan was in a difficult position and it was good of him to step aside and not prolong this difficult issue.”
Khan’s quarantine benefited many. Feroz Khan, a former Pakistani general, explained that Musharraf and others were afraid of what Khan might say if he were allowed to speak to the IAEA or the CIA. Whether his a
ccusations would be true or not was immaterial, the former officer said. Lies would be enough to stir up more international condemnation for Pakistan and possibly endanger the country’s nuclear arsenal. Another former military officer who had worked with Khan said there was no question in his mind that Khan had acted with the knowledge of the generals. “If Khan sent a centrifuge out of the country, he didn’t carry it on his back,” said the retired general. “Of course the military knew. They helped him.”
There was another reason: Turning Khan over for a full debriefing by the United States or the IAEA would have risked exposing the remnants of the network at a time when Pakistan was still using them to buy technology and equipment to maintain and upgrade its nuclear arsenal. European intelligence agencies concluded that Pakistan’s shopping list was extensive, involving both spare parts for its existing program and new technology for expansion.
Unlike the initial interrogation, which was intended to force a confession, the postapology questioning by the Pakistani authorities was focused on extracting as much information as possible from Khan about his operation and determining who else had been involved. The two lead interrogators, a general and a senior ISI official, started out gently, but a few days into the questioning the atmosphere changed dramatically. The ISI learned that in December, as rumors of his possible arrest had circulated, Khan had given a thick stack of handwritten documents to his daughter Dina, who was visiting from London. He instructed her to take them back with her and keep them as an insurance policy. If the government went after her father, she was to turn them over to Simon Henderson, a British journalist who had interviewed Khan years earlier. The Pakistani government was unsure what was in the documents, but the big fear was that he had provided details—real or imagined—of who had approved his proliferation activities.
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