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

  Henny had visited Pakistan several times, and she had long recognized her husband’s determination to live there, but the brief holidays had not prepared her for the gigantic pushing and shoving throng that was her new home. The crowded streets of Karachi had been an urban jungle of beggars, street vendors, staring passersby, careening rickshaws, and traffickers in unidentifiable goods. Islamabad had offered a relative respite, with calmer and less crowded streets, many of them lined with neat white houses, mature trees, and flowering bushes. She knew her husband’s work was vital and secret, and she understood that security considerations dictated that she not develop the sorts of casual friendships that might have eased her isolation. Her only solace was her family and the late-night conversations in which her husband confided in her about the challenges he encountered in trying to make Pakistan safe from India and other enemies. In the years that followed, she developed her own code of silence, even to the point of denying to outsiders that she was married to the famous scientist, saying, “Khan is a common name in Pakistan.”

  While Kahuta was being built, Khan ran Project 706 from a temporary office near Army House, the military headquarters in Rawalpindi. The trappings of power were already present. Late each night, he would leave the office and get into a chauffeur-driven car for the short ride home, accompanied by an armed guard and an escort car carrying soldiers assigned to his security. As the enrichment project grew, no detail was too small for Khan. He established a pattern that he was to follow until the end of his career: Every piece of paper had to cross his desk; every purchase was approved by him; every new hire understood he was Khan’s man.

  “Khan centralized everything, and nothing went out without his review,” said a Pakistani engineer who worked alongside Khan for two decades and both admired and detested him. “At least subliminally, he wanted to rule everyone. Khan was no Einstein. He wasn’t very creative, but he knew how to get things done.”

  CHAPTER 8

  OPERATION BUTTER FACTORY

  BEFORE LEAVING AMSTERDAM, Khan had realized that he might need more information from the experts at FDO and Urenco, so he had taken steps to leave a back door open by arranging for two Pakistani agents to obtain low-level jobs in the purchasing department. Perhaps because they were outside the sensitive areas of the lab or because of the same sloppy security that had allowed Khan to start work at FDO, the two men had avoided losing their jobs or even coming under scrutiny after Khan’s departure. From their positions, they were able to pass on some of the information that Khan needed. But their access was limited, so to fill bigger gaps he turned to his old friends at FDO, Urenco’s outside suppliers, and at least one unusual source.

  In the spring of 1976, Khan found that he needed some things he had left behind in his desk at FDO. Henny was planning a trip back to Amsterdam to pack up the belongings in their house, and he asked her to collect a cache of documents and other material from his office. He wrote a letter for her to give to Frits Veerman, asking the Dutchman to escort her to the office. But Veerman’s earlier anxiety over Khan’s activities had deepened in his friend’s absence, and he was unwilling to take any step that might expose him to charges later. When Henny telephoned him shortly after her arrival in Amsterdam, he said that he was too busy to help. He rebuffed her second attempt and later said that, as far as he knew, she did not get into the office.

  When Henny returned empty-handed, Khan had to try a different tack, so he mailed a more brazen letter to Veerman. “Very confidentially I request you to help us,” he wrote to his old friend. “I urgently need the following information for our research programme.” What followed was a list of sensitive components for ultracentrifuges and design information. “Frits, these are very urgently required, without which the research would come to a standstill,” he said. “I am sure you can provide me with these. These things are very small, and I hope you will not disappoint me.” In addition, Khan asked Veerman to get in touch with another former colleague at FDO and arrange for both men to come to Pakistan. “I have a little technical work for him and much photographic work for you,” Khan wrote. “Both of you could take a holiday and at the same time earn something as well.” Because of the candid nature of his request, Khan tried to cover his tracks by asking his friend to address his reply to Henny or one of the children and not use his own name or address on the envelope.

  By this time, Veerman had concluded that his former colleague was engaged in industrial espionage, and he worried that he could be dragged into the mess if he remained silent. So he took Khan’s letter to one of his superiors at FDO, who recognized the dangers immediately and alerted the BVD. A few days later, Veerman was sitting in front of the television at home when two agents from the security police knocked on his door. Veerman spent the rest of the night describing how he had taken photographs for his friend, recounting the visits from Pakistani diplomats to Khan’s home, and mentioning the secret drawings that he had seen there. The intelligence agents showed Veerman an array of photographs of diplomats attached to the Pakistani embassy, and he was able to pick out two of them as men he had met at Khan’s home. Veerman was warned to keep quiet about the investigation or he would put himself in danger.

  After the men left, Veerman was frightened because he could not figure out exactly what the security policeman meant. There was an implied threat from Khan’s associates, but it also seemed that his worst fear might be coming true: The BVD could suspect that he had knowingly helped Khan.

  The BVD agents prepared a lengthy written report on the interview with Veerman, including the accusation that Khan had stolen classified centrifuge designs. As the report moved through the chain of command and into other parts of the Dutch government, no one rang the alarm bell. Instead of fully investigating Khan’s activities, the government decided again not to follow up on the suspicions or take precautions against Khan’s continuing efforts to obtain technology and assistance. Exposing Khan’s deception risked embarrassing the Dutch government at a critical time in the partnership with the British and Germans on Urenco. As a result, senior ministers decided to turn a blind eye once again to evidence that Khan had plundered their nuclear trove.

  The government’s inaction allowed others associated with Urenco to respond positively to Khan’s entreaties. A handful of Urenco contractors agreed to sell equipment to the Pakistani pipeline, and some of them traveled to Pakistan to inspect the plant under construction there. Khan’s former mentor at the university in Leuven, Martin Brabers, was among those who accepted an invitation. He came away impressed, saying later: “He had a good setup, a good organization. He could choose the people he really wanted. He knew who the good people were. He gave them good salaries so they would not want to leave the job. Also, in buying equipment, he knew all the companies. He knew so many people abroad in many countries. Why, he knew so many languages, and he was so charming [that] he managed to buy many things that other Pakistanis could not manage to buy.”

  SIDDIQUE BUTT also was proving to be a gifted man in the field, emerging as Khan’s top purchasing agent in Europe as the buying campaign moved into high gear. Butt and his ring of fellow diplomats exploited a combination of weak export regulations and greedy businessmen to buy sensitive equipment for the centrifuge program. In some cases, the ring hid the true destination for the parts behind front companies and fake invoices; other times, they were able to make their purchases openly by claiming the equipment was for nonnuclear civilian use. Butt also developed a technique aimed at overwhelming officials who oversaw exports: Critical equipment was concealed in large shipments of material that had no nuclear application, compelling customs and law enforcement to send whole lots along without proper inspection.

  But some items on Khan’s shopping list were clearly designed solely for a nuclear plant. Among them was a huge and complex system of pipes and vacuum valves to feed uranium-hexafluoride gas into the centrifuges, which would be a main component of the Kahuta plant. This elaborate, specially designed system ha
d no civilian application, and its central role in an enrichment plant could not be disguised. Butt and two associates approached a Swiss company, CORA Engineering, and outlined what they wanted. The Swiss engineers were willing to design and build the system, but the procurement team didn’t understand the technical details well enough to explain exactly what was required. As a result, Khan and another Pakistani scientist flew to Switzerland to meet with the company. After the visit, CORA consulted the Swiss government and was reassured that the system did not require an export license because its individual components were not on the government’s list of restricted technology. Several months later, it took three huge C-130 cargo planes to transport hundreds of tons of the sophisticated machinery to Pakistan. Rudolph Walti, an executive at CORA, defended the sale, saying that it did not violate any regulations. “We are not producing revolvers or cannons, and we are not producing bombs,” Walti told the BBC years later. “We are not involved in nuclear weapons in any respect because we wouldn’t even know how to make a nuclear weapon.”

  It was not unusual for Khan to travel to Europe to explain the technical aspects of an order or offer a final nudge to reluctant suppliers. He arrived again in November 1976 to conclude negotiations with a German engineering firm run by Heinz Mebus. The company, CES Kalthof, agreed to build a fluorine plant in Pakistan, an important step in the production of uranium hexafluoride. The transaction was the ring’s first contact with Mebus, an important figure in the years to come. Other contacts were old friends of Khan’s. From its earliest days, the pipeline got a major assist from Henk Slebos. After graduating, Slebos had gone to work for the Dutch Navy as a troubleshooter assigned to find parts for the submarine fleet, which enabled him to develop an encyclopedic knowledge of high-tech companies in the Netherlands. In 1974, two years after Khan started at FDO, Slebos had become commercial director of a specialized welding firm that had a contract with Urenco, and the two men reestablished their friendship.

  By the time Khan returned to Pakistan, Slebos had formed his own business, and he flew to Pakistan just as the clandestine purchasing operation was gathering steam. Khan had requested his help obtaining 6,500 tubes manufactured of hardened steel for centrifuge rotors, and Slebos agreed to find them. Returning home, Slebos placed a small order with a Dutch firm, Van Doorne Transmissie (VDT), but the request caught the attention of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, and an export officer visited the company. VDT officials acknowledged that the tubes were for a Pakistani centrifuge project, and the Dutch government refused to provide an export license. The order proved too big for the company to ignore, however, so it challenged the government’s prohibition. When the ministry was unable to find a specific export regulation that prohibited the sale of the tubes, the first batch of three hundred was sent to Pakistan on November 2, 1976. Khan was so pleased with the quality that he risked returning to the Netherlands to persuade the company to send the remainder of the 6,500. When Khan showed up there in early 1977, VDT readily agreed to sell him all the tubes he needed, though it would take three years to fill the order.

  The transaction marked the beginning of a long and lucrative relationship between Slebos and Khan, which brought wealth to the Dutchman and delivered critical equipment to the Pakistani. A short, slender man with a stern military bearing, Slebos later boasted about his relationship with Khan. “I delivered him . . . the whole lot, the whole range from electronics to the construction materials, all kinds of things that were not forbidden to deal in,” he said, later explaining that he was well aware that the products he sold were destined for Pakistan’s nuclear program. Slebos even exhibited a degree of pride, justifying his actions by contending that Pakistan was within its rights to build a nuclear weapon to maintain the balance of power against India. Still, when he was shipping equipment to Pakistan, Slebos sought to evade detection and gave the deals a code name: Operation Butter Factory.

  HAAG is one of those chocolate-box Swiss villages, with tidy houses and neat gardens, dwarfed by the towering peaks of the Alvier range, near the border with Liechtenstein. The valley had been part of the marshlands that spread out from the Rhine until the 1960s, when a vast reclamation project created a series of small hamlets along the great river’s tributaries. Swiss authorities persuaded a number of high-tech companies to relocate to the area; many of them specialized in vacuum technology, giving the region its new nickname, “Vacuum Valley.”

  After World War II, the Swiss had flirted with the idea of developing their own nuclear arsenal. In the late 1960s they abandoned the plan for financial and political reasons, choosing instead to sign the nonproliferation treaty in 1969. Instead of becoming a nuclear power, Switzerland decided to focus its ample technical capabilities on becoming a major exporter of nuclear technology. Many of the industry’s hot new companies had set up shop in Vacuum Valley. That was where Butt had found CORA Engineering and where Khan later came across one of CORA’s competitors, Vakuum Apparat Technik. VAT manufactured a particular type of vacuum valve critical in controlling the gas that flowed into centrifuges. The inventor was a Swiss engineer named Friedrich Tinner, who was also in charge of export sales for VAT.

  When Khan needed tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of valves for Kahuta, the natural choice was Tinner, an old acquaintance from his Urenco days. Tinner had supplied valves for FDO, and he was more than pleased to renew his ties with Khan when the Pakistani arrived at his office. Khan was frank, explaining to Tinner that he was building a centrifuge plant for his own country and needed VAT’s assistance. Regardless of the purpose or destination, Tinner and VAT were eager for the sale, but the firm checked with the authorities in Berne, the Swiss capital. The bureaucrats there replied by sending a list of export regulations, which included the trigger list published by the IAEA and the ad-hoc group of nuclear-export nations known as the Zangger Committee, named for its first chairman, a Swiss professor. Complete centrifuge units were on the list, but individual components like vacuum valves were not, despite their specific use in centrifuges. As in the CORA sale, the Swiss reasoning was that since the valves were not involved directly in the separation of isotopes at the heart of enrichment, they were not “nuclear sensitive,” an obscure rationalization concocted by countries and companies that wanted to keep commercial avenues open.

  The negotiations ran over several months, and Khan and some of his colleagues visited Haag so often that Tinner grew tired of making sure local restaurants did not cook meals that violated Muslim prohibitions on serving pork or alcohol. Eventually, he found it simpler to invite Khan to his home, where his wife would cook. “This was a business friendship, not a personal one,” Tinner’s daughter, Sonja Haas, said years later.

  Other reasons might have been in play. Tinner was an important man in the village. He was active in civic organizations, including the board of the local school attended by his three young children. The valley was fairly isolated in those days, and strangers attracted attention. Like most of his countrymen, Tinner wanted to avoid anything that called attention to him or his business. This would have been particularly true when it came to selling nuclear-related items to foreigners.

  AS KHAN and the network progressed, his patron’s fortunes declined. In the spring and early summer of 1977, protests swept Pakistan. The March elections that had returned Bhutto to office appeared to have been rigged. The religious parties, never happy with Bhutto’s leadership, sent their disciplined cadres into the streets in protest, leading to the most violent clashes between civilians and the police in Pakistan’s history. On July 4, a weakened Bhutto met with his senior advisers to tell them that he would resume negotiations with the Pakistan National Alliance, a right-wing coalition dominated by the ultrareligious Jamaat-i-Islami party, in an attempt to defuse the situation. Yet there was to be no chance for an accord because the next day the country’s military commander, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, ordered Bhutto and his ministers arrested, imposed martial law, and suspended the constitution. Zia said the mili
tary was forced to intervene because the country was on the verge of a complete breakdown. Zia said he had no political ambitions and promised new elections in October.

  Bhutto saw the coup as Kissinger’s revenge. In memoirs written eighteen months later from his jail cell, where he faced a death sentence, Bhutto inferred that his fall was orchestrated by the Americans because of his refusal to back down from his pursuit of nuclear weapons after Kissinger visited him in August 1976. To be sure, the Americans were unhappy with Bhutto’s stubbornness on a number of issues, but there was no evidence that they were involved in his overthrow. Still, the speculation refused to die, particularly among some Bhutto supporters and factions within Pakistan’s primary intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. Known universally by the initials ISI, the agency was regarded as a state within the state that operated as something like an invisible government.

  If the Americans were counting on a new policy from Zia’s military government, they misjudged him. Two weeks after the coup, U.S. envoy Joseph Nye met with Zia and was told that the change of government had not changed Pakistan’s stance on the development of nuclear capabilities.

  Zia had dealt extensively with American military officers and intelligence agents in his years as a rising star in the military and later as commander of the armed forces. He was a hardened nationalist and an Islamist. The son of a devout Muslim civil servant in British India, Zia had been a young captain in the colonial army at the time of partition in 1947. He later recalled the nightmarish assignment to escort the final trainload of Muslim refugees from northern India to Pakistan. The weeklong journey took them past a landscape littered with mutilated corpses. “We were under constant fire,” he said later. “The country was burning until we reached Lahore. Life had become so cheap between Hindu and Muslim.” In his new country, Zia resumed his military career and eventually rose to the rank of general, growing more pious along the way. For him, Islam was not just a religion but the political framework that should govern the country. He liked to compare Pakistan to Israel, saying that he believed Pakistan would fail without Islam just as Israel would collapse without Judaism. And he was not going to back away from the country’s nuclear ambitions. Zia had developed a close relationship with Khan as they worked to build the plant at Kahuta. Not long after taking control, the general took the scientist aside and assured him that his pursuit of atomic weapons should go forward at full speed.