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

  ON AUGUST 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait and began massing his million-man army for what looked like a possible assault on Saudi Arabia, which would threaten the world’s oil supplies. When Saddam rebuffed a demand from the United Nations to withdraw from Kuwait, the United States and other countries began readying troops for deployment to defend Saudi Arabia.

  Four days later, with the world’s attention focused on the Middle East, Pakistani president Ishaq Khan invoked his constitutional authority and removed Bhutto from office, accusing her of incompetence and corruption. Some of those charges seemed accurate, particularly suspicions about her husband’s business dealings, but the real reason behind his action was her refusal to back Beg’s decision to step up uranium enrichment to weapons-grade levels. Bhutto’s ouster evoked little outcry from a distracted Washington, where her backers were disillusioned by her inability to stand up to the generals or slow the nuclear program.

  Pakistan’s strategic importance to the United States had reached a new low. In the fall of 1990, the CIA and other intelligence agencies declared finally that the country possessed a nuclear weapon. The decision caused some consternation within the administration because the official acknowledgment would force an end to assistance and would further deepen the divide with a country that the Pentagon and State Department still deemed important to U.S. regional interests. Before the new CIA finding could be announced publicly, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney tried to intervene, telephoning one of his senior counterproliferation experts at the Pentagon. Since his days as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, Cheney had been convinced that the Watergate scandal had weakened the presidency and that Congress had usurped authority over foreign policy that belonged to the executive branch. As defense secretary, he had come to regard Congress as “a bunch of annoying gnats,” according to one friend at the time.

  “Do we have to abide by this congressional amendment and decertify Pakistan?” asked Cheney, who opposed taking action that would damage ties with the Pakistani military and curtail defense sales.

  “Yes, sir, it’s the law, and we have to follow it,” the expert replied, wondering how the defense secretary, himself a former congressman, could contemplate bypassing Congress.

  In the end, there was nothing Cheney could do, and Bush notified Congress that he would no longer certify that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear weapon. The resulting sanctions ended arms transfers to Pakistan, including the sale of twenty-eight F-16s, which had been approved a year earlier and had already been paid for by Pakistan. The long charade was finally over, though it was easier for the American hard-liners to swallow because they no longer needed Pakistan to help fight the Soviets.

  Senator John Glenn, who had long fought for transparency about Pakistan’s nuclear industry, used tough language in assessing the performance of the last two administrations. “The Reagan and Bush administrations have practiced a nuclear nonproliferation policy bordering on lawlessness,” he said. “In so doing, they have undermined the respect of other countries for U.S. law and have done great damage to the nuclear nonproliferation effort. Keep this in mind the next time someone in the administration extols the need for military action to deal with some power hungry dictator who is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons in the Middle East or elsewhere.”

  FOR KHAN and his network, the conflict in the Persian Gulf looked like a business opportunity, so in early October, two months after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Pakistani sent an intermediary to meet with Iraqi intelligence agents in Baghdad. The meeting took place in the offices of Technical Consultation Corporation, a front organization that was already acquiring nuclear technology throughout Europe and North America. The intermediary, who gave his name only as Malik, said Khan and some associates were prepared to sell Iraq a package of nuclear-weapons technology. The offer was strikingly similar to the equipment and plans offered to Iran three years earlier, but the Iranians had gone their own way after the initial ten-million-dollar purchase of plans and components. Malik said Khan was prepared to help the Iraqis develop the capacity to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels and provide the design for an atomic device. The goods would be shipped through a company Khan owned in Dubai. Malik wanted five million dollars as an upfront fee plus a 10 percent commission on equipment bought through the network. Khan would not be available to come to Baghdad because he was worried about the coalition troops massing in Saudi Arabia, but Malik suggested a meeting in Greece.

  A top-secret memo written on October 6, 1990, by the lead Iraqi intelligence officer outlined the proposal and speculated about why Khan wanted to help Iraq. “The motive behind this proposal is gaining profits for him and the intermediary,” he concluded. The Iraqis took the offer seriously enough to assign it a code name, “A-B,” but they were skeptical and suspected that the proposal could be an elaborate sting designed by the Americans or their European allies and intended to cripple Iraq’s clandestine nuclear efforts or even create an excuse for a massive bombing campaign. Still, the intelligence agents were intrigued enough to proceed cautiously. After all, Khan was well-known for his role in Pakistan’s nuclear program, and Iraqi intelligence knew Saddam desperately wanted a nuclear weapon as soon as possible. They tried to obtain sample documents from Malik, but before the negotiations went farther, the realities of looming war intervened. Coalition troops and armored divisions massing in Saudi Arabia required the attention of all the resources of the intelligence service, and the Khan offer was filed away.

  On January 16, 1991, allied forces began a withering bombing campaign against Iraq and its forces in Kuwait. The ground attack followed on February 23, and armored forces rolled through Kuwait and into Iraq. On March 3, Saddam Hussein accepted a cease-fire, and the fighting ended. As part of the bargain to end the war, Iraq agreed to accept an unprecedented degree of UN oversight. A key element of the oversight called for sending teams of inspectors from the IAEA into Iraq to search for evidence of a rumored nuclear-weapons program as well as chemical and biological weapons, but no one really expected to find much.

  In the years leading up to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the occasional press report had claimed Iraq was buying nuclear technology on the black market, but IAEA inspectors had never seen any evidence of a hidden program during routine inspections of Iraq’s declared nuclear installations. Immediately after the invasion of Kuwait, Len Weiss had been talking with John Jennekens, the IAEA deputy director-general in charge of compliance with proliferation restrictions. American military commanders were worried that Iraq might use the highly enriched uranium at its declared sites to manufacture a crude nuclear device, but Jennekens was reassuring. “In a word, I can describe Iraq’s cooperation as exemplary,” he told Weiss. “Iraq’s nuclear experts have made every effort to maintain compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.”

  Jennekens was dead wrong. For nearly a decade, Saddam had concealed an ambitious clandestine program that had moved Iraq closer to an atomic bomb than anyone outside the country could have imagined. At Tuwaitha, site of the Osirak reactor, he had built an entire parallel weapons program in the shadows of the civilian installations inspected regularly by the IAEA. Just as the CIA had warned in 1981, the destruction of the reactor had driven the Iraqi program underground. Taking a page out of Pakistan’s playbook, Saddam had been buying technology from a web of front companies that stretched from Europe to North America. Some of the goods were not covered by export regulations because they had civilian applications, but others were provided by companies and middlemen who evaded the controls by masking the ultimate uses of the equipment.

  The public and secret programs were centered at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, which was Iraq’s only approved nuclear facility. Four buildings, which contained two small research reactors, a laboratory, and a storage site, were the only facilities open to IAEA inspectors. Even within those buildings, inspectors were barred from some rooms because the Iraqis said they were not part of the nuclear pro
gram. The secret project was housed in a dozen small buildings scattered around Tuwaitha, which were visible but off-limits. To reinforce the message, the structures were set off behind berms, and Iraqi employees were under strict instructions not to let the outsiders near them.

  Khidhir Hamza, a senior official in the Iraqi nuclear-weapons program, described how IAEA inspectors were carefully escorted along designated paths that kept them from seeing the buildings where the secret work was carried out. Before each inspection, Iraqi nuclear scientists and officials spent hours rehearsing answers to possible questions. Hamza said he and others in the nuclear establishment had thought at first that it was folly to construct the weapons facilities within the Tuwaitha complex, but the top administrators knew better. “They had come to understand how poorly the IAEA system worked,” he explained years later, after escaping Iraq.

  The cease-fire had given the IAEA its first unfettered access to Tuwaitha, but it still took months of wrangling with Iraqi bureaucrats before the first team of inspectors moved in. At its head was Jacques Baute, who had spent more than a decade with the French nuclear-weapons agency before joining the IAEA for this task. He and his colleagues soon discovered that Iraq had created what Baute called “a full-blown indigenous program” aimed at producing atomic weapons. As inspectors went through dozens of previously off-limits installations and sorted through millions of pages of records, they discovered the astonishing extent of Iraq’s secret procurement operation. “The big shock was that during the 1980s Iraq was able to develop a totally independent, clandestine network,” said Baute. “They had four locations under safeguards at Tuwaitha, but at the same site Iraq used all the other buildings for clandestine activities.”

  In hindsight, Baute and other experts realized there had been clues. Articles in American, German, and British publications had described elements of Iraq’s operations, and intelligence agencies had gathered isolated pieces of what was happening without assembling the full puzzle. But American and British governments had failed to respond aggressively to those early reports because in those years Iraq was seen as a Western ally because it was fighting Iran. The IAEA had fared no better largely because it was bound by bureaucratic inertia and the long-standing precedent of taking countries at their word. “In the 1980s, Iraq had become so hungry that they were being incautious,” Baute said. “Out of the press, the IAEA could have been alerted without the Gulf War, but we weren’t looking.”

  Views of how close Saddam was to a bomb were all over the map, with some experts predicting he was within a year and others speculating that it would have taken three to five. There was a consensus, however, that one of the world’s most ruthless leaders eventually would have joined the nuclear elite. The Israelis’ attack on the Osirak reactor in 1981 now took on greater significance. Had they not taken out the reactor and set back Saddam’s efforts, it might have been a nuclear-armed Iraq that invaded Kuwait. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had acknowledged as much when he visited Israel in June 1991, three months after the end of the war and ten years after the Osirak attack. In a ceremony in Tel Aviv, Cheney gave Major General David Ivry, the commander of the Israeli Air Force at the time, a satellite photograph of the wrecked Iraqi reactor, inscribed by Cheney, “For General David Ivry, with thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi Nuclear Program in 1981, which made our job much easier in Desert Storm.”

  Saddam had demonstrated a willingness to use chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, and there was strong evidence that he had considered using a rudimentary nuclear device against the coalition troops. In January 1991, facing more than five hundred thousand coalition troops and airpower unseen since World War II, Saddam ordered highly enriched uranium removed from one of the reactors at Tuwaitha and taken to a secret location within the complex for building a crude bomb. The work had not gotten far, however, when the air assault by the coalition started, and the effort was halted.

  The CIA’s failure to uncover Saddam’s nuclear ambitions or the full extent of his biological and chemical weapons before the war had a profound impact in Washington and was to frame American policy on Iraq in the years to come. Senior Pentagon officials, led by Cheney and Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, believed the CIA had stumbled repeatedly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, missing the collapse of the Soviet Union and nearly exposing American troops to Iraq’s hidden arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. A deep and lasting distrust of the CIA developed among Cheney, Wolfowitz, and their aides—which was to resurface at a critical juncture a decade later, when they formed the war cabinet for the next President Bush.

  CHAPTER 18

  MISSED SIGNALS

  BY THE MIDDLE OF 1991, Hans Blix was beginning to recognize how masterfully he had been conned. A meticulous international lawyer by training and a measured diplomat by experience, Blix had been the director general of the IAEA for the past decade. As teams of inspectors were assessing the real nature of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, Blix realized that Saddam Hussein had succeeded in that time at concealing a threat of monumental proportions, highlighting the ineffectiveness of the international inspections regime. The sixty-three-year-old Blix was determined not to let it happen again. “The discoveries in Iraq were the ones that surprised and shocked us the most at the IAEA and they led us to the conclusion that the safeguard system had to be strengthened,” Blix recalled later.

  Born in Uppsala, Sweden, Blix had studied at Columbia University in New York and received a doctorate from Cambridge University. Later, he received his law degree in Stockholm and embarked on a political career, serving as Sweden’s foreign minister in the late 1970s. In November 1981, he succeeded his fellow Swede, Sigvard Eklund, as head of the IAEA. That same month, a report circulating in Washington was sharply critical of the IAEA’s performance as the world’s frontline defense against nuclear proliferation, suggesting a tougher version of inspections was necessary.

  In the decade that followed, the polite and mild-mannered Blix received mixed reviews at the agency. He increased the number of inspectors, raised the number of inspections annually by fourfold, and pushed for better techniques for monitoring nuclear sites, but the agency remained hobbled by the restrictions inherent in the safeguard system. Under the rules, inspectors could only visit facilities that were officially declared to be part of a country’s nuclear program. In theory, the IAEA could conduct “special inspections” at undeclared plants, but only if another country supplied credible evidence of suspicious activity. From its inception in 1957, the agency had never invoked its authority for a special inspection and never discovered a single instance in which nuclear material had been diverted to a clandestine program.

  Iraq blew a hole in the underlying assumptions of the inspection program. Saddam had demonstrated that the way to build a bomb was simply to do it at highly secret sites that were separate from the publicly declared locations where nuclear research and other activities were taking place. Not until the IAEA inspectors were granted extraordinary rights to inspect any facility of their choosing did they discover Saddam’s hidden weapons facilities and begin to understand how close he had come to possessing an atomic weapon.

  When critics blamed the IAEA for failing to discover Iraq’s secret weapons program, Blix was sometimes defensive and sometimes contrite. “We did what we were entitled to do,” he said repeatedly. “Nobody had come to us with concrete information.” On other occasions, he said he had learned something from the experience. “It’s correct to say that the IAEA was fooled by the Iraqis,” he explained. Even that did not erase the affable Swedish grandfather’s sense of protocol. David Kay, an American who was on the IAEA team sent into Iraq after the war, recalled challenging a senior Iraqi weapons official in front of Blix. Later, Blix scolded Kay for confronting “a representative of the state.”

  Blix recognized that there had to be something more than the threat of a special inspection if the agency was going to follow leads concerning suspicious locations and
avoid another Iraq. In May 1991, he instructed his staff to begin work on a more intrusive inspections regime. The goal was to make it easier to visit a suspicious location on short notice, even when a country denied that it was involved in nuclear activities. At the same time, Blix told his lawyers to find the legal authority for inspectors to use a new technique developed in the IAEA laboratories known as environmental sampling. Using cotton swipes, the method could detect radioactive particles and discover whether undeclared nuclear activity had taken place.

  The steps marked the beginning of a new era at the IAEA in which inspectors would be expected to be something closer to detectives than accountants. Laura Rockwood, an American lawyer at the agency, described the change this way: “In the past, we concentrated on correct inspections. If you tell me you have one stapler, and I see that you have one on your desk, I don’t ask whether you have other staplers. Our job was seen as verifying what we could see. We realized that we should ask, Are there any other staplers in your office?”

  Many countries were reluctant to relinquish sovereignty, and others did not want outsiders poking around in their nuclear closets. Still, as the startling discoveries in Iraq were beginning to emerge, a growing number of countries were worried about what their own neighbors might be doing. “The timing for reform was right,” said Blix. “Before Iraq, reform would not have been accepted by governments. At a review conference for the nonproliferation treaty a few years earlier, I said the agency wanted to strengthen safeguards, but the majority of governments would not accept more intrusive international inspections. It took a catastrophe to bring readiness for action.”