The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets...And How We Could Have Stopped Him

by Douglas Frantz

  Copyright © 2007 by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Twelve

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

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  The Twelve name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: December 2007

  ISBN: 978-0-446-50689-2

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: THE SMILING MAN

  Chapter 2: AN ACCIDENTAL OPPORTUNITY

  Chapter 3: THE MUSLIM ALLIANCE

  Chapter 4: GOING HOME

  Chapter 5: THE PAKISTANI PIPELINE

  Chapter 6: DOUBLE STANDARDS

  Chapter 7: THE ROAD TO KAHUTA

  Chapter 8: OPERATION BUTTER FACTORY

  Chapter 9: ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE

  Chapter 10: A NUCLEAR COWSHED

  Chapter 11: SEE NO EVIL

  Chapter 12: CRIMES AND COVER-UPS

  Chapter 13: NUCLEAR AMBIGUITY

  Chapter 14: MAN OF THE YEAR

  Chapter 15: ONE-STOP SHOPPING

  Chapter 16: WISHFUL THINKING

  Chapter 17: SADDAM’S GAMBIT

  Chapter 18: MISSED SIGNALS

  Chapter 19: NUCLEAR NATIONALISM

  Chapter 20: MORE AND MORE PIECES

  Chapter 21: A MYSTERIOUS MURDER

  Chapter 22: INSIDE THE NETWORK

  Chapter 23: TIGHTENING THE NOOSE

  Chapter 24: “WITH US OR AGAINST US”

  Chapter 25: DIPLOMATIC CHESS

  Chapter 26: SPY GAMES

  Chapter 27: THE DROWNING MAN

  Chapter 28: CHECKBOOK PROLIFERATION

  Chapter 29: NUCLEAR WAL-MART

  Chapter 30: WHO’S NEXT?

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  ABOUT TWELVE

  Other Books by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins

  Teachers: Talking Out of School

  Celebration, USA: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town

  Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and

  World War II’s Holocaust at Sea

  Other Books by Douglas Frantz

  Levine & Co.: Wall Street’s Insider Trading Scandal

  From the Ground Up: The Business of Building in the Age of Money

  By Douglas Frantz and James Ring Adams

  A Full Service Bank: How BCCI Stole Billions Around the World

  By Douglas Frantz and David McKean

  Friends in High Places: The Rise and Fall of Clark Clifford

  “The splitting of the atom has changed everything, save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  “The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.”

  — JOHN HERSEY, Hiroshima

  PROLOGUE

  CROSSING THE RINGSTRASSE near Vienna’s ornate State Opera House, a rumpled man with a shock of reddish hair tumbling across his forehead walked briskly past the cafés, where people lingered over their espressos and newspapers on the unseasonably warm day. He glanced anxiously at his watch as he tugged open the door on the Starbucks at the corner of Kärntner Strasse and Walfischgasse, two of the city’s busiest streets. Olli Heinonen was a senior official with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations organization charged with stopping the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. Stout and in his early fifties, Heinonen had spent more than twenty years rising methodically through the agency’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, his ascension built as much on his stubborn intelligence as on his ample scientific skills. On this particular day in May 2004, as he picked up his coffee and mounted the stairs to the second floor of the Starbucks, Heinonen’s career was about to veer into the murky world of espionage and nuclear smuggling on an unprecedented and frightening scale. He would soon be playing a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek with an unseen man whose actions over the past thirty years had pushed the world closer to nuclear war than at any time in history.

  Four months earlier, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian diplomat who was head of the IAEA, had put Heinonen in charge of the most significant and pressing investigation in the agency’s fifty-year existence: the inquiry into the global black market in nuclear technology led by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist revered throughout the Muslim world as the father of the Islamic bomb. It was Khan who had exploded the myth that a developing country was too poor and too backward to join the nuclear powers. Heinonen soon found that Khan’s nuclear trail led far beyond the borders of Pakistan. The scientist and a network of associates and middlemen had sold nuclear technology to a rogue’s gallery of countries: Iran, North Korea, and Libya. If that were not bad enough, Khan had apparently provided nuclear secrets and possibly designs for an atomic weapon to customers still hidden behind the shroud of secrecy that had engulfed the scientist when, in late 2003, Pakistani authorities had arrested him but refused to turn him over to the IAEA for questioning. Pakistan was not alone in refusing to cooperate with the IAEA, as other foreign governments rebuffed queries, allowing members of Khan’s ring to disappear underground throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Heinonen and his team were frustrated and fearful that the trails would disappear before they could unravel Khan’s nuclear web.

  Then a surprise telephone call offered Heinonen hope. A woman had contacted him at the IAEA headquarters, which rise high above the banks of the Danube in Vienna, requesting a meeting outside the agency’s offices. She had refused to give her name, but she had promised that she could provide information that would be enormously helpful to his investigation of A.Q.Khan. Heinonen recognized the woman’s accent as American and suspected that she was from the Central Intelligence Agency, which maintained a huge operation in the Austrian capital and had occasionally and grudgingly shared information with the IAEA. He agreed to meet with her on the second floor at the Starbucks. When he asked how he would know her, the woman assured Heinonen that she would recognize him.

  Olli Heinonen and other senior officials at the IAEA were well aware of the dangers posed by nuclear proliferation, and they were deeply worried in the spring of 2004 that the genie was out of the bottle and that the weapons technology was spreading like a virus among some of the world’s most unstable regimes. North Korea was on the brink of exploding its first nuclear device, to demonstrate its defiance of the United States and its allies. Iran was pushing ahead with a program that many experts at the agency were convinced was intended to lead to the capability of producing nuclear weapons, a threat that could destabilize the Middle East and lead to an all-out war. Libya had given up a clandestine nucl
ear-weapons program only after its exposure by British and American intelligence agencies. All three were customers of Khan and his network, but what Heinonen feared most was the possibility of other buyers.

  WITHOUT any trumpets to herald the change, the world has entered a second nuclear age, and for the first time since the end of the Cold War the threat of nuclear annihilation is on the rise. Mohamed ElBaradei, whose Cassandra-like warnings won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, fears that more nations are hedging their bets by developing nuclear technologies that could be diverted quickly from civilian energy plants into weapons programs. He estimated that as of the fall of 2006 thirty or more countries have both the technical know-how and motivation to opt for nuclear weapons. “Unfortunately the political environment is not a very secure one,” ElBaradei cautioned. “So it’s becoming very fashionable, if you like, for countries to look into the possibilities of protecting themselves through nuclear weapons.”

  Nuclear weapons are no longer the sole province of a handful of the most powerful nations. Since the dawn of the nuclear age more than sixty years ago, the technology for the most destructive weapon in history has spread far and wide. The basic design for a crude atomic weapon was widely available and well understood even before the Internet made it accessible to anyone with a computer. But rather than the traditional nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia or even between India and Pakistan, the gravest threat of catastrophic attack today may well come from a terrorist organization like Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. There is no doubt that bin Laden or his successor is seeking to buy or build a nuclear weapon for use in his holy war. As early as 1998, the Al Qaeda leader proclaimed possession of a nuclear weapon to be a “religious duty,” later obtaining a dispensation from a Muslim cleric that justified its use against the West. A month before the September 11 attacks, bin Laden met with two Pakistani nuclear scientists to discuss acquiring nuclear-weapons technology. Later that year, following the American invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. troops found rudimentary designs for nuclear weapons inside an Al Qaeda safe house in Kabul. Intelligence agencies have tracked the group’s efforts to obtain nuclear material across three continents.

  The deaths of nearly three thousand people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, were a devastating demonstration of the willingness of a group like Al Qaeda to kill innocent civilians. Senior American officials were soon plunged into an even worse nightmare when the CIA was told that Al Qaeda terrorists had stolen a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb from the Russian arsenal and smuggled it into New York City. The information came from an informant code-named Dragonfire, and it seemed to gain credence when the National Security Agency picked up chatter in international communications that “an American Hiroshima” was imminent.

  When President George W. Bush was told of the suspected plot on October 11, 2001, he ordered Vice President Dick Cheney to leave Washington for an undisclosed location—in the event that the target was not New York but Washington. Casualty estimates from such an explosion ranged as high as half a million people, while the psychological impact of a nuclear attack on American soil would be incalculable. Top-secret Nuclear Emergency Support Teams (NEST) were dispatched to New York City, where, under a cloak of secrecy that excluded even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, searches were conducted. NEST was established in 1975 by the Department of Energy to respond to a terrorist incident involving a nuclear device or a bomb that contained radioactive material. Its members are drawn from more than three hundred scientists and technicians at the Energy Department and the national weapons laboratories; they are trained to detect the slightest evidence of radioactivity. Responding to Dragonfire’s warning, more than a dozen teams of six members each were dispatched throughout Manhattan, working from unmarked vans and concealing detection instruments in backpacks and briefcases as they searched on foot. In the end, it turned out to be a false alarm. But the specter of terrorists unleashing a nuclear bomb in New York or London or Madrid remains a real possibility in the minds of many experts. The rules for what is thinkable have changed.

  No science can calculate the precise chances of a rogue nation or terrorists detonating a nuclear device, but enough credible evidence exists to convince many experts that it is a matter of when, not if. Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and author of a book about nuclear terrorism, puts the odds of a nuclear attack by terrorists in the next ten years at better than 50 percent. One of his Harvard colleagues, proliferation expert Matthew Bunn, says he would not live in either New York or Washington because he fears a terrorist attack using atomic weapons is inevitable. Former defense secretary William Perry estimates the same odds of a nuclear attack, though he calculates it is likely to come before the end of the decade.

  Smuggling a nuclear device into the United States is not regarded by experts as particularly difficult. A crude device the size of a large desk could be hidden inside one of the two hundred million freight containers moving in and out of the world’s ports every year. A ten-kiloton nuclear weapon, which has the power of the Hiroshima bomb and weighs about one thousand pounds, could be hidden in the back of a delivery van. Detonating a device of that size at noon on a normal workday in Midtown Manhattan would destroy everything within a third of a mile: Half a million people would die instantly as a hurricane of fire vaporized buildings; hundreds of thousands more would perish in the raging infernos, collapsing structures, and radioactive fallout. Communications systems would be fried, hospitals and emergency teams overwhelmed.

  Should such a horrific assault occur, there is a strong likelihood that the trail of devastation will lead back to Abdul Qadeer Khan. For three decades, Khan was the mastermind of a vast clandestine enterprise designed to obtain the technology and equipment to make atomic bombs—first for Pakistan and then later for the highest bidder. Khan started down the nuclear path as a patriot, stealing secret European nuclear designs out of determination to protect his country from its archrival, India. After playing a central role in developing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, he shifted course and employed his global network to sell those same nuclear secrets to some of the most repressive regimes in the world, transforming himself into a nuclear jihadist devoted to payback for real and imagined grievances suffered by Muslims around the world. In the process, Khan grew arrogant, corrupt, and powerful, operating with impunity as he amassed a fortune from his black-market deals.

  By the time he was stopped, Khan had done more to destabilize the world’s delicate nuclear balance than anyone in history, emerging as the common thread woven through today’s most dangerous nuclear threats, from the potential showdown between India and Pakistan to the international standoffs with North Korea and Iran. The sheer scale of what Khan wrought is breathtaking, and so is the apparent ease with which he sold his wares. Khan’s organization was a nuclear Wal-Mart, selling weapons blueprints, parts for thousands of centrifuges to manufacture fissile material for bombs, and the expertise to assemble the works into a bomb kit. The Pakistani scientist and his accomplices shattered the old proliferation model of state-to-state transfers, in which one government quietly shared nuclear secrets with an ally. For the first time, an individual demonstrated convincingly that the existing international safeguards and mind-set were no longer operative, leading to the grim conclusion that any ruthless or unstable regime—or individual, for that matter—with the will and money could acquire the bomb.

  What is nearly as remarkable is that Khan spread this nuclear technology in partial view of successive administrations in Washington and in European capitals. What Pakistani government and military leaders knew about his activities is still in dispute. But it is certain that all of them, at various points in time, turned a blind eye when confronted with warnings from numerous intelligence agencies about what the Pakistani scientist was doing. There is no doubt that at key moments along the nuclear trail, Khan could have been stopped; but each time, more pressing strategic concerns trumped worries about proliferation to spare hi
m and keep his global nuclear bazaar operating.

  American intelligence first learned of Khan’s activities in 1975, when the Dutch government informed the CIA that the scientist had stolen top-secret plans for the latest uranium-enrichment technology and taken them home to Pakistan. The CIA watched in the years that followed as Khan established a network of European and North American suppliers to obtain the sophisticated technology required to enrich uranium for atomic weapons. And they watched as Pakistan built its own nuclear arsenal. Yet for all of its detailed reporting on Pakistan and Khan, the CIA missed what occurred in the shadows. The agency failed to notice when Khan reversed the flow of the black market and began selling nuclear technology and expertise outside Pakistan, to the highest bidder.

  This book explores the rise of A.Q.Khan and his role as one of the principal architects of the second nuclear age, examining how a scientist of mediocre skills and great ambition first helped Pakistan build the bomb and then had no qualms about spreading nuclear weapons to some of the most unstable regions of the world. It identifies the points at which American authorities and their allies could have halted his deadly operation, laying out what the Americans knew about Khan’s operation and when they knew it. And finally the book follows Olli Heinonen and his small team of determined men and women from the International Atomic Energy Agency as they search for clues about Khan’s activities from the clandestine nuclear plants in Iran to the hidden stockpiles of technology in Libya, from the dismantled atomic facilities in war-torn Iraq to a secret factory in South Africa. Evidence of the global reach of Khan’s lethal bazaar has been unearthed in the capitals of Pakistan and European countries, from current and former intelligence officials, and among the written records of those who enabled Khan to turn the world into a more dangerous place. With little experience as detectives and facing a myriad of obstacles, the team plunged into a dark continent that had yet to be mapped, to search for the clues among the jungle of evasions and half-truths of Khan’s accomplices, the false invoices, and the secret bank accounts. The goal was to reconstruct Khan’s actions over the last three decades in a desperate fight to put the nuclear genie he had unleashed back in the bottle so they, and the rest of us, could stop waking, hearts pounding, in the middle of the night.