“Now you have got your daughter involved,” one of the interrogators told Khan angrily. “So far we have left your family alone, but don’t expect any leniency now.”
Khan had remained composed and unrepentant until that point, but the threat caused him to collapse in sobs. After being pushed harder, he agreed to telephone Dina and order her to destroy the documents. As the intelligence officers sat beside him, Khan dialed London. When Dina answered, he told her to destroy the records—three times in three languages: Urdu, English, and Dutch. The ISI official grabbed the telephone from him and demanded to know what Khan had said in Dutch, which no one else in the room understood. Khan explained that it was a code—if he spoke to Dina in Dutch, he said, she would know to obey his instructions.
Dina said her father had given her only a letter addressed to Henny. “At that time he was worried that he was going to be made to take the fall for the erupting nuclear scandal (a fear which later proved correct),” she wrote in a statement made public two years later. “The letter gave his version of what actually transpired and requested my mother to release those details in the event of my father being killed or made to disappear. The letter mentioned people and places, but had absolutely NO nuclear blueprints or information.”
But a close friend of Khan’s maintained that the scientist had given his daughter a far more extensive document, nearly one hundred pages that constituted an autobiographical account of Khan’s proliferation activities over the years. Its fate remains unknown.
THE NET was closing elsewhere, too. Like Pakistan, Malaysia had been contacted before the Libyan announcement because of the importance of B.S.A. Tahir to the investigation. A month after the BBC China was diverted, on the evening of November 10, 2003, a CIA agent and an MI6 agent met with the director of Malaysia’s Special Branch, the national-security force. They said Tahir, a forty-four-year-old Sri Lankan married to a Malaysian, was the target of an ongoing investigation of the transfer of nuclear technology from Malaysia to other countries. While Malaysia has no nuclear industry, the agents explained that Tahir had used a local company owned in part by the only son of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi. The security chief instantly understood the implications if he refused to cooperate, and the next day he informed the prime minister, who told him to help the United States and Britain in every way possible. Tahir was placed under surveillance for the next month, and he was taken into custody following the Libyan announcement. The charge was violating the National Security Act, a vague accusation that allowed the authorities to detain him indefinitely without the unpleasantries of a public trial that might implicate the prime minister’s son and other Malaysians. Tahir was held in isolation, with even his wife refused permission to visit him. Tahir had never been a hard man or a principled one, so within days, he drafted a detailed statement for the Malaysian police outlining the entire operation within the country and describing much of the network’s operations elsewhere. The confession didn’t win Tahir his freedom, but the sanitized, twelve-page version posted on the Internet by the government named enough names to justify arrests by authorities in other countries.
Gotthard Lerch, the German engineer, was arrested in Switzerland on charges of shipping controlled goods to Libya in exchange for thirty-one million dollars. Wisser, Meyer, and a third, South African engineer Daniel Geiges, were arrested in Johannesburg. When police raided Meyer’s factory, they found the eleven containers with the superstructure for Libya’s enrichment plant along with five trunks filled with photographs, designs, manuals, and other documents from Khan. Gunes Cire, one of the Turks identified by Tahir as a supplier to the Libyan program, died of a heart attack after reading about the accusations against him in an Istanbul newspaper.
The Tinners remained free, but they were frightened of being swept up. The Germans were preparing a case against Friedrich and Urs Tinner, who feared extradition. Mad Dog urged Urs to stay put, explaining that it was unlikely the Swiss would extradite him, even if he was charged. The Swiss government sent a message to Washington seeking information on the Tinners but received no response. They repeated the request three times over the next few months, always with the same result. The CIA had no interest in providing information that would expose one of its sources and the fact that it had been gathering inside information on the Khan network for years. The idea of a public trial of one of their key informants was out of the question. While the CIA did not want to help the Swiss, it was in the American interest to keep the pressure on Iran, so the agency decided to use the Tinners to get information to the IAEA. The former Vienna station chief, by now a senior official at Langley, assigned an agent in Vienna to contact Olli Heinonen with an offer of help on the investigation into the Khan network. “Keep us out of the conversation,” he told her.
CHAPTER 30
WHO’S NEXT?
THE INVESTIGATION OF THE KHAN NETWORK was even larger and more complex than Olli Heinonen envisioned. From the outset, many of the companies, governments, and people involved refused to cooperate. The Pakistanis informed the IAEA that Khan was off-limits. Tahir’s statement to Malaysian police offered clues that could unravel much of the operation—he had implicated a dozen and outlined their roles—but attempts to interview him were rebuffed by Malaysian authorities, who did not want to embarrass their country or highlight Tahir’s political connections. Investigators in Germany, Switzerland, and South Africa were gathering their own evidence for criminal cases, so their cooperation was restricted. The Americans remained tightfisted with information, passing on occasional tidbits that focused attention on Iran’s program while withholding the full scope of what they had learned about Khan’s operation.
Despite the difficulties, the IAEA team was building a growing list of suspected participants. The best information came from the Libyan documents, which enabled Miharu Yonemura to construct a giant matrix of suppliers and front men. More names were added by sifting through files at the IAEA and articles in the international press. Sometimes help came from unexpected places. The Iranians provided the names of three Germans they claimed were involved in the earliest deal to buy centrifuges. Even the Pakistanis offered grudging assistance, though they continued to deny any official involvement in Khan’s activities. Pakistan sent some centrifuge components from Kahuta to Vienna, where IAEA scientists matched them to the traces of HEU discovered at Kalaye. On another occasion, a visiting Pakistani nuclear specialist quietly handed Heinonen a piece of paper with the names of fifteen Europeans suspected of helping Khan on the Libyan project. Heinonen assumed the Pakistanis wanted to divert attention from Khan’s role by drawing attention to others.
Still, Heinonen was far from developing a complete picture of how Khan operated, and some of the gaps were alarming. Comparing invoices discovered in Dubai with the inventory of equipment found in Libya, Heinonen found a disturbing discrepancy: A shipment destined for Libya had traveled from Malaysia to Dubai before disappearing into the ether in mid-2003. The manifest for the shipment listed centrifuge components and precision tools to manufacture them. The missing shipment fed the growing suspicion that there was a mystery customer or a secret, parallel program inside Iran run by the military.
Frustrated by the slow pace and lack of full cooperation, Heinonen had begun to fear that the chances of finding the elusive other customer were slipping away, when a woman telephoned his office in May. She refused to give her name, but she clearly knew a lot about him and his investigation. After a bit of sparring, she said she was calling because she had information that could open new doors in the inquiry. She asked if Heinonen would meet her. Six months earlier, Heinonen would never have considered agreeing to meet a strange woman at a coffee shop, but the investigation had changed the way he saw the world. The scientist’s caution had been replaced by an investigator’s determination to get to the bottom of the case, regardless of the means.
CIA, Heinonen thought as he hung up. He had dealt with enough Americans to recognize the accent, and he assumed
the intelligence agency was monitoring his progress through moles inside the IAEA and taps on his telephone and e-mail. At one point, he had given ElBaradei some sensitive information in a telephone call, and a few days later American diplomats let slip that they knew the same information. After a series of similar minor but troubling episodes, Heinonen instructed IAEA computer technicians to install encryption software on the computers and cell phones in the hopes of keeping out the electronic snoops.
Face-to-face at Starbucks, the woman provided no more information about herself, but Heinonen didn’t care. He was willing to play her game to get the information he needed. Twenty minutes or so into the conversation, with the coffee gone cold, the woman said she could set up a meeting between Heinonen and the Tinners. Heinonen recognized the name immediately from the Malaysian police report on Tahir’s confession, and from his own research Heinonen knew that the Tinners had a long connection with Pakistan’s nuclear program. The pleasant-looking woman was offering perhaps the biggest break yet. Heinonen said he would be happy to talk with them, and she promised to call as soon as she could arrange the meeting.
A few days later, the woman telephoned and instructed Heinonen to go to the InterContinental Hotel, across a boulevard from the grassy knolls and formal gardens of Vienna’s Stadtpark. Following instructions, he arrived alone and went to the designated room on an upper floor and knocked. The door was opened by a man in his late sixties or early seventies who introduced himself in German as Friedrich Tinner and invited Heinonen in. Seated on a couch were two men in their late thirties or early forties; Tinner introduced them as his two sons, Marco and Urs. The Tinners fidgeted and tried to avoid eye contact, clearly uncomfortable sitting in the same room as a senior IAEA official. Heinonen didn’t know how the woman had persuaded them to talk, but he assumed the CIA held some threat over their heads. The conversation was formal and guarded, neither side giving up much. Heinonen wanted to persuade the Tinners that they could trust him with their nuclear secrets, without giving up any leverage by disclosing how little he really knew about the network. The Tinners had grown rich and avoided trouble with the authorities by never trusting anyone. Friedrich and Marco had been surprised when Urs confessed that he had helped the CIA, but with the German authorities breathing down their necks, they hoped cooperating with the IAEA might offer some protection. The talk concentrated on the centrifuge technology sold to Libya, where the role of the network was clearest. Heinonen was careful not to press for too much detail, particularly about any other possible customers. After an hour or so, Friedrich agreed that they would meet again for a lengthier and more detailed conversation. He said the woman would call Heinonen with the time and place.
The second session was set up a few days later at the InterContinental, and Heinonen received the okay from the woman to bring Trevor Edwards, his centrifuge expert. Heinonen and Edwards listened intently as the Tinners described the arrangements with Libya and the technical aspects of the P-1 and P-2 centrifuges. Marco acknowledged building five thousand centrifuge parts in Switzerland and shipping them to his brother in Dubai. Asked about Iran, they denied that they had anything to do with sending equipment there. But under polite but persistent questioning, the architecture of the network emerged. The Tinners listed the names and companies of other participants and talked about the South African portion of the project, something that was still a mystery to Heinonen. They had brought along papers, including a list of the warehouses and offices in Dubai that the network had used to store equipment en route to Libya. When the missing shipment from mid-2003 came up, the Tinners said they had no idea where it had gone. Friedrich speculated that Tahir or Khan had cheated Libya by rerouting the equipment to another customer, but he said he had no idea who that might have been. The Tinners laughed about Khan’s mistress in Dubai, saying she was a plain woman whose charms eluded them.
The conversation grew more relaxed after a room-service lunch, which was when Urs dropped a bombshell. After he fled Malaysia in October 2003, he said, Khan telephoned and told him to go to Dubai. Once there, he was instructed to make electronic copies of a particular set of drawings in a special locked filing cabinet inside Khan’s apartment. When he got to Dubai, Urs said, he expected to find centrifuge drawings or something like that. Instead, he found what appeared to be complicated schematics and plans for what looked like a warhead. Still, he followed instructions, scanning the papers onto computer discs and mailing them in separate packages to Khan and Tahir. None of the Tinners had direct experience with nuclear weapons, but Urs had a good technical mind, and from his description of the plans Heinonen was certain he had copied the design for the same Chinese atomic warhead that Khan had delivered to Libya. Therefore, the detailed plans for a proven nuclear weapon were almost certainly still out there, available to anyone with a computer and enough money.
Heinonen bowed out of the session a few minutes later, anxious to report to Goldschmidt and ElBaradei. Edwards stayed behind into the night and throughout the next day to talk about technical data. In the meantime, Heinonen and Yonemura arranged to fly to Dubai to inspect the warehouses and offices identified by the Tinners. Tahir had packed up months earlier, and new tenants had moved into the spaces, but the two IAEA officials managed to talk their way into most of the locations. Though everything of obvious interest had been cleared out, that didn’t mean all the evidence was gone. Yonemura had brought along an environmental-sampling kit to test for the presence of enriched uranium. She wiped down surfaces in every building. This wasn’t a formal inspection, so they took the swabs to the IAEA lab for testing, with instructions that it was a rush order. The results were back within days, registering traces of weapons-grade uranium. The tests did not indicate how much HEU might have been stored in Dubai, where it was from, or where it was going. It could have been merely particles from contaminated centrifuge parts on the way from Pakistan to Iran or Libya. Or it could have been enough material for a nuclear weapon on its way to an unknown customer.
Where to search? Khan had made forty-one trips to Dubai and traveled to eighteen other countries in the ten years before he was placed under house arrest. Among them were a handful of Islamic countries regarded as likely customers, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, and Turkey. Saudi Arabia was the name most often mentioned, though the evidence was scant. The Saudis had helped finance the early stages of Pakistan’s nuclear program and bought nuclear-capable missiles from the Chinese. The Saudi defense minister had been one of the few foreigners permitted to tour the inner sanctums of Khan Research Laboratories. On a visit to Riyadh in September 2000, Khan told an audience at the Hyatt Regency Hotel marking the joint celebration of Pakistani and Saudi national days, “Thanks to the kingdom’s assistance for various development projects, we were able to divert our own resources to the nuclear program.”
There were other reasons for suspicion. In 1994, Mohammed Khilewi, a senior member of the Saudi delegation to the United Nations, had defected and claimed that he had more than ten thousand documents detailing Saudi financial aid to Pakistan and its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Awash in oil money but technologically backward, Saudia Arabia, Khilewi said, had set aside huge sums to acquire nuclear technology and possibly weapons. Recent political developments in the Middle East contributed to a circumstantial case. Relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States had deteriorated since September 11 because fifteen of the nineteen hijackers that day were Saudis. While the Americans professed to remain strong allies, some Saudis held doubts about the reliability of the kingdom’s protector. The fears of the Saudi royal family were also fueled by rising attacks from Islamic extremists inside the country.
“These fears contribute to Saudi Arabia’s desire to acquire nuclear capability and to supply the entire Arab Gulf with a defense umbrella,” said Richard Russell, a former CIA analyst. “The Saudis are worried that they might get left behind, particularly since Iran seems destined to possess nuclear weapons.” Russell conceded, howe
ver, that he was only speculating, and there was no evidence that the Saudis had sampled Khan’s wares or were pursuing an atomic bomb through other avenues.
As long as the Tinners kept talking, Heinonen held out hope of picking up enough pieces of the puzzle to determine whether there was another customer and who it was. Following the two sessions in Vienna, Heinonen and Edwards drove to Innsbruck to meet the Swiss technicians for a couple of days in July. Progress was slow, and Heinonen and Edwards were still trying to build trust with the Tinners, listening to Friedrich describe his world-class orchid collection and feigning interest in the details of Urs’s divorce from his Russian wife. “The father is a tough guy,” Heinonen said. “He is nice at the lunch table, but what he has done to his sons and family shows you that he is tough. They are an old Swiss-German family, and the father is the boss.”
The conversations covered both the technical and financial workings of the network and gave Heinonen and Edwards a window on the dynamics within the closed circle of men who were simultaneously partners and rivals, dependent on one another without ever trusting anyone. The recollections of payments to specific middlemen for specific equipment allowed Yonemura to match the money with bank records obtained from Libya and a handful of financial institutions that were cooperating quietly with the IAEA. Yonemura carried an electronic organizer in which she kept a record of the transactions, which by now involved tens of millions of dollars bouncing from one secrecy haven to another, from Switzerland to Liechtenstein, from Dubai to Macao, from Hong Kong to Singapore. In one instance, she tracked a payment of three million euros through a bank account in Dubai in Tahir’s name to a second bank in Switzerland, where it was divvied up and transferred to three separate accounts. But the well was about to run dry.
The Nuclear Jihadist Page 41
