The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

  “Can you imagine? Al Qaeda as the tenth nuclear power? Can you see Al Qaeda in the same category as the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea?”

  “I can maybe see them on a par with North Korea,” Kate ventured. “In fact, North Korean leaders are pretty much as nasty as Al Qaeda’s.”

  “Hard to pin down something like that. NBC in Pakistan—nuclear, biological, chemical...”

  Wheatley droned. He put his hands behind his head and his feet on his desk. “The worst downside I can imagine in Pakistan is that nuclear weapons come under the control of terrorists like Al-Zawahiri.”

  “With respect, sir, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  “Well, hear me out,” Wheatley said. “Pakistan has a massively compromised security problem with their nukes and 190 million people, most of them impoverished and angry. It’s impossible to estimate how many Paks are actively jihadist. It’s not a small number. There is absence of civilian governance and decision-making at all levels. Grim economic and energy situations. Corruption everywhere. The only thing that seems to work in Pakistan is the Army.”

  “And it’s the Army that has exclusive control of the nukes,” Kate said.

  “But the Army is made up of individuals, people with beliefs and agendas. And some of those individuals surely have strong sympathies with Al Qaeda even at the level of brigadier and above.”

  “That’s true, but would anyone with that level of authority let loose a nuclear bomb within Pakistan? We know for sure that it would take several co-conspirators to make that happen. No single individual could do it alone, not even the Chief of Army Staff.”

  “OK, I agree with that. I could quibble with pieces of it. Permissive action links, the absence of a civilian chain of command. But I won’t. We’ve spent $100 million helping the Paks improve nuclear security since 9/11 and the Army always seems to have a lid on the nuclear sites.”

  “It’s unimaginable to me that Al Qaeda would penetrate Pakistan’s nuclear sites.”

  “Here’s a ‘what if’ for you: Let’s say the Pakistani Taliban engaged the Army in an area not far from a base where nuclear weapons are stored. The Army decides they need to move them, and the convoy is then incredibly vulnerable to capture.”

  “Mort Feldman wrote a cable about that scenario a year ago,” Kate said. “He discussed it with Mahmood Mahmood, who served a stint in the Strategic Forces Command before he got his first star and moved to ISI.”

  “That’s the outfit responsible for deployment of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons?”

  “Exactly, based in Rawalpindi. Mahmood was a colonel back then. Served with the SFC for seven years. He showed us that their procedures for moving nuclear arms was well-thought-out, modeled on training we provided.”

  “There’s always a weak point,” Wheatley said. “Moving your nuclear assets is always risky. What scares the hell out of me is that the Army says personnel assigned to nuclear facilities are all vetted by the ISI. And we know for sure that the ISI was instrumental in creating the Pakistani Taliban in the first place. There are moles within the ISI sympathetic to the militants. The bastards with the beards.”

  “I don’t think anyone would guarantee that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are totally secure,” Kate agreed.

  “So you have a situation, potentially, where despite the vetting procedures in place, Taliban or Al Qaeda manages to get work in a nuclear facility, somewhere like the A. Q. Khan lab, and steals enriched uranium or fissile material.”

  “It’s a risk,” Kate agreed. “Vetting personnel isn’t foolproof. But access to fissile materials is not the same as access to a completed bomb.”

  “They could make a dirty bomb,” Wheatley said. “Wrap the radioactive stuff around C4, dynamite...”

  “Sure, but that’s not in the same ballpark as a functioning nuclear device. Hundreds dead instead of thousands. Or millions.”

  Wheatley got up from his desk. He picked up a thick folder from the small circular conference table in a corner of the office.

  “I want you to go through this traffic,” he said. “I’ve already read these myself, you’ll see my markings and comments, but I want your take on it. I’m half-tempted to send you back out there right now, but I have a feeling that some of this nuclear bomb stuff is just a red herring. You can imagine how much attention this gets at the White House and on the Hill, distracting us from everything else. Meanwhile, no one has heard anything about Al-Zawahiri for weeks. My fear is that we haven’t put the two of them together. That’s the real threat. Al-Zawahiri with the bomb at his disposal. What can we do to chase this down? Think about it.”

  Kate took the folder with her back to her cubicle. She had always thought there was a non-zero risk that Al Qaeda would succeed in getting access to loose nukes, or materials to make nukes, but she didn’t think it would happen in Pakistan. Her experience was that the Paks were almost as security conscious as Americans, obsessive about it, notwithstanding all the bad hype about A. Q. Khan selling secret plans and even the weapons themselves. The nuclear devices within the control of the Pakistan Army were probably not breachable, in Kate’s view.

  No, if Ayman al-Zawahiri and his crew succeeded in getting a bomb, Kate mused, it would be somewhere else. Probably in Russia.

  Chapter 7 — Paris, France

  The rue Saint-Phillipe du Roule runs off the Faubourg Saint-Honoré about a block east of the Avenue Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 8th arrondissement. It is a tranquil street of shops, restaurants, and an exquisite small hotel, the Bradford, which caters mainly to English tourists.

  At No. 3 Saint-Phillipe du Roule is a dark and quiet restaurant that provides an excellent luncheon—pâté de foie gras with Madagascar vanilla, sea bass or a rumsteak. There is an expansive wine list. The tables are spaced with sufficient privacy that conversations cannot be overheard.

  The restaurant is not inexpensive, but that rarely dissuaded Jacques LeClerc from dining there. After returning from Moscow, LeClerc invited Simon Wantree to lunch to discuss a technical evaluation of the special item Colonel Marchenko had offered for sale. LeClerc arrived early, a few minutes before noon, dressed in a blue pinstripe suit, a flowered maroon tie from Hermès with a matching pocket silk, and onyx cufflinks set in gold. He looked like a prosperous Chamber of Commerce official.

  When Simon Wantree entered the restaurant, he waved him over to his table and laid out his proposition over an apéritif.

  “You’ve been bloody had, Jack, and by a KGB colonel no less!” Simon Wantree kept his voice down with difficulty. A corpulent man with thinning red hair and the delicate hands of a musician, which he was, he was also a bon vivant who loved his food and drink. His mood was animated at the prospect of a well-paying job from his arms merchant patron. He had flown in from his cottage in the south of England just for this meeting.

  In an earlier life, Wantree had worked for the British military’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston, until he was dismissed for failing a drug test. Before being cashiered, Wantree had been responsible, as a junior tech, for the manufacture and support of UK nuclear warheads.

  “I don’t think I’ve been ‘had,’ as you so indelicately put it, mon ami,” LeClerc said. “I have a nose for these things. This is the genuine article.”

  “I hope you haven’t parted with the contents of your pocketbook.”

  “I have paid a reasonable price for an option on the device, which secures the time necessary for—well, for you to do a bit of research on my behalf.”

  “This wouldn’t be the first time a bloody Bolshy had tried to peddle a phony atomic bomb,” Wantree said. He almost added “to an unwary arms merchant unsophisticated in nuclear matters” but he held his tongue. No use biting the hand that fed you.

  “That will not happen my friend. I am in no hurry. I have worked with Marchenko’s patron for years. We have done business, as you are well aware. He knows that I do my homework.”


  “What precisely is it that you expect of me?”

  LeClerc took a folded sheet of paper from inside his jacket and handed it to Wantree.

  “First, I want you to check all the electrical circuits. You’re familiar with the Soviet RA-211 tactical weapon?”

  “No, not really,” Wantree said. “The Russkies were not keen to share the secrets of their arsenal with us. But I’ve got a detailed knowledge of the American Mk-54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition, the SADM. The physics package was about a cubic foot and a half in size, perhaps a bit bigger. With the surrounding housing and electronic gear, it fit in a portable container about the size of a footlocker. The principles are the same for these miniature atomic bombs. They are all implosion-type plutonium bombs with energy release in the double-digit kiloton range.”

  “This is quite similar,” LeClerc said, “but larger than Mk-54, both in terms of the weight and the yield. I think a day or two with the RA-211 and you’ll be able to draw the appropriate parallels. The plutonium/beryllium core is kept in a separate location in Moscow. I saw it, but I had no way of telling whether it was functional. It was heavily shielded.”

  “With the physics package, it’s mainly a question of making sure the symmetrical explosive charges are in order—the explosive lenses, as they are called.”

  “I’m leaving all that to you. All I want to know is that when all the parts are mated back together it will explode when the right button is pressed. I do not plan to become a nuclear physicist myself.”

  Wantree did not raise the question of his fee until after lunch and dessert, when the waiter had served two espressos and retreated to the kitchen. LeClerc’s reply surprised him.

  “I’ll pay you whatever you think is reasonable,” LeClerc said. “No quibbling. But there are two conditions. First, you must undertake to me in writing that I am buying an operable nuclear weapon, with the understanding that I will pass this guarantee on to the buyer with your name on it. Second, you must agree to serve as the technical consultant to the buyer, at my expense, so that the buyer will have all the technical help right there, with him, necessary to detonate the weapon.”

  Wantree took this in carefully, sipping his coffee. LeClerc did not need to state the consequences of failure. Wantree did not so much fear LeClerc, but he knew that LeClerc’s buyer would be someone whose tolerance for mistakes was low, possibly the sort of person who beheaded enemies with a scimitar while videotaping it.

  Also, one had to ask oneself, if terrorists set off a nuclear bomb, to what lengths would the world’s intelligence services go to round up whoever had played a role in its deployment? Should his name ever become public, he would become one of the most reviled and hunted human beings on the planet.

  With no haggling at all, LeClerc agreed to a fee of two million euros, payable to a numbered account in Zurich, ten per cent upon his return from Moscow, forty per cent upon completion of the sale of the weapon, and the remainder when Wantree had returned from his consultation with the buyer. So there was likely to be one million euros in the bank before he had to make a final decision to go join the crazies and help them detonate their bomb.

  Wantree privately concluded, as he left in a taxi for Le Bourget and his flight back to England, that he would likely collect only 200,000 euros of his fee. He expected that he would be obliged to report to LeClerc that the weapon Marchenko had offered for sale was a dud, and that the remainder of the deal was not a ‘go.’ That did not trouble him, as becoming the target of MI-6 and CIA and the Mossad did not greatly appeal to him.

  ***

  Djabel Rabia was an Algerian banker who had spent much of his early career, in the late 1980s, with the now-defunct Bank of Credit and Commerce, International (BCCI), based mainly in Paris and Toronto. Back in those days he had assisted the Pakistani brigadier Inam ul-Haq and a Pakistani-born Canadian who was in the import-export business ship quantities of beryllium and high-strength maraging steel, known as 350-steel, from suppliers in Philadelphia to Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) in Pakistan.

  The hard-to-find 350-steel was used by Khan to produce rotors and other components of high-speed uranium enrichment centrifuges. The beryllium was used as a casing and reflector for the fissile core of Khan’s atomic bombs. Rabia had arranged $330,000 of financing for the metal export deals through BCCI.

  When the bank imploded in the wake of scandals in the early 1990s, Rabia settled in Paris, where he used his worldwide contacts to operate an anonymous business providing discreet financial services to the PLO and other groups who put a premium on opacity and untraceability in the management of their financial affairs. He had frequently worked with Jacques LeClerc in arms transactions, providing foreign currency translation, letters of credit from European banks, and bridge loans to make it possible for LeClerc to finance deals without putting up too much of his own capital before he could collect cash from sales.

  Rabia maintained an office, really just a desk and an unlisted telephone, in a room above the shop of his nephew, a baker, in the rue Poteau in Montmartre. He did not advertise. The people who needed to reach him knew how. Jacques LeClerc made an appointment and paid him a visit in Montmartre a few days after his lunch with Simon Wantree.

  “I am working on a major project,” he told Rabia in the privacy of his shabby office. “One that is orders of magnitude bigger than anything I have ever done before. I need your help in financing it, and in washing the proceeds.”

  “How much?” Rabia was a thin man with sere, leathery skin. As he grew older, he began to take on the texture and color of a ripe avocado.

  “Twenty million dollars, in round numbers,” LeClerc said evenly. This was, Rabia knew, about five times LeClerc’s annual cashflow.

  Djabel Rabia raised his eyebrows, but said nothing. He looked out the window at the pedestrian traffic in the street outside.

  “How much will you need to borrow?”

  “I have two million dollars of my own capital which I will put at risk,” LeClerc said, “but my seller will want to be paid about ten million, in high quality diamonds, between one and three carats in size.”

  “So you will need eight million from me. For how long?”

  “A matter of six weeks, perhaps, from my acquisition of the merchandise until I am paid.”

  “And what is the merchandise?”

  “I’d prefer not to say. Arms-related, of course, as is usual with me.”

  “And the seller and buyer? Who are they?”

  “The seller is the deputy of an old comrade of mine based in Moscow, a man of former ministerial rank. You would recognize his name if I mentioned it. The buyer will likely be a syndicate in the Middle East or Central Asia.”

  “And you will be paid how?”

  “By wire transfer in American dollars. There may be some cash involved. In hundred-dollar bills. That is not yet clear. I hope to avoid cash, if it is possible.”

  Rabia made some cryptic notes on a scrap of paper and totaled a column of figures. He seemed like a man more comfortable with an abacus than a computer, but this was an illusion.

  “I can lend you eight million for eight weeks at a cost to you of $750,000, with collateral that I approve.”

  “That is acceptable to me,” LeClerc said. The interest rate, or vig, LeClerc quickly calculated, was just under 10 per cent for two months, or about 55 per cent on an annualized basis. By any normal measure of banking and finance, this was an outrage. But the cost of money in the arms trade was never cheap. Once Rabia figured out what was really changing hands, he might even jack up the cost of funds.

  “And your revenue,” Rabia said, “will be twenty million?”

  “Yes,” LeClerc said flatly. “In dollars. And it will be essential that when the money arrives, it cannot possibly be traced back to me. This is likely my last transaction, one that will set me up for my retirement. I do not want any loose ends.”

  “That can be done,” Rabia said, tapping his pencil. “It will cost you
, say, five per cent on top.”

  “That is acceptable also,” LeClerc said. “But may I ask how you will do it? I want to be comfortable with this aspect of the transaction. It must be clean money when it comes back to me.”

  “Certainly,” Rabia said. “I will explain it to you, and you can judge whether it is satisfactory and meets your needs. Here is how it will work. The proceeds of your sale, in cash or by wire, will be sent to a front company I own in New York, in the jewelry district.

  “In New York, the money will be sent to my South American Jewelry Exchange, a firm I own in Los Angeles in the heart of the diamond district downtown. The twenty million will be used to buy gold, mainly scrap and bars. On the premises of my South American Jewelry Exchange, it will be melted down and mixed with silver, to give it the look, feel, and weight of South American raw, mined gold, which is of poorer quality than gold from the U.S. or South Africa.

  “In Montevideo, I own a company called Aura Metallica, S.A. From Montevideo I will ship lead bars covered in gold leaf to California, invoicing the consignment as South American mined gold. When it arrives at my Broadway premises, the real gold will be substituted for the lead and shipped on to New York with the authentic documentation from Uruguay.