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

  The intelligence was accurate in part. At the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, the Iranians were struggling to engineer centrifuges from the components and drawings that Khan and his group had sold them in 1987. Inside hidden workshops within the research facility, teams of scientists were using uranium gas provided secretly by China to test centrifuges built from Khan’s substandard components, but the machines kept breaking down. The CIA had learned of the problems firsthand from Masud Naraghi, the director of the Iranian program who had negotiated the initial deal with Lerch in Zurich five years earlier. The delay in getting the centrifuges running had cost Naraghi his job, and he had walked into the United States embassy in Bern, Switzerland, to ask for asylum in late 1992. He and his family were flown to the United States. In exchange for protection, Naraghi underwent a thorough debriefing by nuclear weapons analysts with the CIA, providing them with a complete rundown on the Iranian effort to develop nuclear weapons, including its dealings with A. Q. Khan and his network. He also said Iran was scouring Europe for new sources of centrifuges or parts, with little success in the face of the increasing international scrutiny.

  The information was incorporated in a secret report issued on February 1, 1993, by the U.S. Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, titled “Iran’s Nuclear Program: Building a Weapons Capability.” While the report represented clear evidence about Iran’s nuclear intentions and Khan’s role, the information was not shared with the IAEA. If the American government had provided the intelligence to the IAEA, its inspectors could have demanded access to the hidden workshops. Cut off from the intelligence, however, the centrifuge work was off-limits to the inspectors because the Iranians used the common ruse that no unauthorized nuclear work was underway there.

  While the United States withheld the most critical intelligence, it and other countries warned the IAEA that Iran was buying nuclear equipment, and the agency officially asked Iran to respond to the accusations. The Iranians said they had nothing to hide and invited senior IAEA officials to tour its nuclear facilities. A contingent of IAEA officials spent several days on what amounted to nothing more than a wild-goose chase. The intelligence information from the Americans and others had been too general and did not identify any specific locations, so the agency’s officials had had to rely on their Iranian guides. One of the few specific allegations was that weapons work was being conducted at a defense facility on a mountaintop northwest of Tehran; so on the final day of the visit, the IAEA party boarded an Iranian Air Force helicopter to visit the site. The pilot had trouble finding the remote location, eventually landing near some crude bunkhouses and other small buildings. The IAEA officials saw no signs of any nuclear work and returned to Vienna without knowing for sure that they had even been taken to the right place. The IAEA had no choice but to give Iran a clean bill of health.

  Still, the international community continued to try to restrict sales to Iran, threatening to bring its nuclear effort to a standstill. The complexity of starting to build an atomic bomb from scratch meant that thousands of sophisticated machines, from centrifuges to the smallest specialty valve, had to be procured under increasingly difficult conditions. The Iranians realized that progress depended on asking A. Q. Khan and his network to obtain the technology and the material required. The Iranians had learned some lessons since 1987, and this time they demanded top-quality equipment, designs, and components for the more advanced and efficient version of the centrifuge, the P-2. In the summer of 1994, Iran’s defense minister traveled to Islamabad to persuade Khan to sell his country’s most advanced nuclear technology to Tehran. For a second time, Khan was going to become the unintended beneficiary of international efforts to thwart the spread of nuclear weapons.

  IN PAKISTAN, Khan appeared to be untouchable, his freedom to operate unfettered, and his word unquestioned. At Kahuta, the enrichment work was going smoothly, and as he and his scientists continued to improve the centrifuge designs, the laboratory had expanded into the manufacture of conventional weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, antitank weapons, and rocket launchers. In addition, Khan Research Laboratories was peddling its nuclear wares through seminars dealing with the complexities of enriching uranium and perfecting centrifuge operations. The cover of one of the lab’s brochures showed a photograph of Khan with a mushroom cloud in the background. Another brochure offered “consultancy and advisory services to government and private organizations” and, under the heading “NUCLEAR-RELATED PRODUCTS,” a list of items for sale that constituted virtually a complete enrichment plant, ranging from ultracentrifuges and high-frequency inverters to a system for handling uranium hexafluoride. The lab’s scientists published papers in scientific journals about how to make and test centrifuges. Khan boasted in print of getting around Western restrictions on the spread of nuclear technology, saying in one paper that he wanted to sweep away the “clouds of the so-called secrecy.”

  His long feud with Munir Khan had ended in 1991 when his rival had resigned as head of the PAEC and moved back to Vienna, where he had worked for the IAEA before joining Pakistan’s nuclear program two decades earlier. Throughout his career, Munir Khan had maintained a low profile, even in the face of public attacks by A. Q. Khan. In his view, scientists should remain in the background. Years later, he said that he regretted allowing A. Q. to take the limelight because the fame allowed him greater license for his skullduggery. A. Q. Khan had reveled in his competitor’s departure, but he was unable to persuade the government to grant him sole authority over the country’s nuclear program—a new PAEC head was appointed, leaving Khan to sulk at his laboratory.

  Strangely, Pakistan’s nuclear status still remained officially ambiguous, and Khan was part of the charade. When British journalist Simon Henderson interviewed the scientist, he found him at once talkative and evasive. Asked whether Kahuta was enriching uranium for nuclear weapons, Khan offered a flat denial, saying the plant was “not meant for weapons production and we do not see the need of having nuclear weapons in this part of the world.” Pushed about whether Kahuta could produce highly enriched uranium, Khan dismissed the idea as hypothetical, saying: “Everything has a double side: a knife can cut vegetables and a knife can kill human beings. So if you want to see it that way, so all nuclear plants and nuclear facilities and chemical plants and chemical facilities all over the world can be used for all purposes, either for saving the human race or hurting it.” The scientist accused the West of discriminating against Pakistan by demanding that it open its nuclear facilities to inspection while permitting India to avoid the same. When asked whether his use of the black market indicated that Kahuta was flouting international regulations, Khan turned the question around and blamed the West for having double standards that necessitated a certain amount of subterfuge: “I can give you an example of them stopping O-rings that you can get from a shoemaker’s shop. They were stopping O-rings, they were stopping materials, ordinary papers. It was not a question of circumventing. When you see that somebody is trying to stop everything which is destined for you, you ask the supplier to send to some other address. Now it is the responsibility of the supplier and the country that they observe the national laws and that they don’t violate them.”

  Khan’s remarks came at a time when the dynamics of Pakistan’s foreign relations had changed. Relations with the Americans, whom he saw as his chief adversaries, had soured since President Bush cut off military assistance in the fall of 1990, and they had not improved following Clinton’s election. Clinton had tried to repair the relationship by offering to sell Pakistan the F-16s, for which it had already paid five hundred million dollars, but when the deal was tied to inspections of Kahuta and other nuclear installations, the Pakistanis balked. Still, the absence of the jets left a gap in Pakistan’s military strategy for attacking India with nuclear bombs, and Khan wanted desperately to fill that gap by developing a missile capable of reaching the most distant Indian cities. To that end in late 1993, he hatched a plan that took him back to the office
of Benazir Bhutto.

  In October 1993, more than three years after she had been ousted by the military, Bhutto had engineered her political comeback as prime minister under a new coalition government. This time around she was determined to avoid confrontation with the military and intelligence establishments, so when Khan visited her that December, Bhutto decided to cultivate a potential ally. But Khan was not the same man she had rejected as head of the nuclear program in 1990. Bhutto had run into him at a couple of official functions since returning to office and noticed changes in his demeanor. “Since my dismissal, he had clearly become more important,” she explained. “But he also had changed in other ways. My first impression of him in the late 1980s was that he was a nationalist. By the time I returned to office in 1993, I felt that he was an Islamist.”

  Others had noticed the transformation, too. Perhaps he had become more devout. Perhaps, angered by accusations and criticism from the West, he had become a nuclear jihadist devoted to payback for grievances real and imagined. Khan frequently portrayed himself as a pious man, once telling his biographer: “I belong to the group of people who believe that nothing happens without Allah’s will. What we have done for Pakistan is no less than a miracle. It is true that Allah honored me with the task of defending our beloved country.”

  Lieutenant General Talat Masood dealt with Pakistan’s conventional-weapons programs, but he knew Khan well and had also noticed the changes in his outlook by the early 1990s. Masood believed the scientist’s attitude had been shaped by the criticism and actions of the Western countries, particularly the accusation that he had stolen the keys to the bomb. “He believed that Muslim countries had been thwarted over the years while others, like Israel and India, were allowed freer rein,” Masood explained. “From a Western perspective, he cheated in stealing designs, but from his point of view, he did what was necessary to achieve his goal for the country.”

  Pervez Hoodbhoy’s job as a physicist at Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University and his ardent antinuclear stance meant that he often attended conferences and other meetings with Khan, occasionally debating the scientist about the need for nuclear weapons. Hoodbhoy had spent enough time with Khan to regard him as something of a chameleon, changing his colors depending on the powerful men around him, adopting his quasi-military fatigues when necessary and exhibiting a more pious side when it served his interests. Hoodbhoy did not regard Khan as a Muslim fundamentalist but rather as an ordinary believer whose outlook dovetailed with others in Pakistan’s ruling circles—a pan-Islamic vision that saw the bomb as a strategic defiance of the West and a Muslim success story that brought admiration from hundreds of millions of coreligionists. Khan was deeply resentful of the United States and Israel, attributing apparent Muslim backwardness to a conspiracy by Christians and Jews, and he regarded the bomb as a victory for all of Islam. Khan was part jihadist, part nuclear nationalist.

  When Khan showed up at Bhutto’s office in December, he explained that he knew the prime minister was scheduled to make a state visit to China later that month. He asked if she would make a slight detour on his behalf. “If you are going to North Korea, it would be very nice if you could talk to Kim Il Sung about helping us with this nuclear thing,” said Khan.

  Instantly suspicious, Bhutto asked, “What do you mean, ‘this nuclear thing’?”

  Khan replied that he had been talking to the North Koreans, and they were willing to sell Pakistan the designs for a version of the No-Dong missile, which could carry a nuclear payload. Bhutto was puzzled and pointed out that Pakistan already had missiles capable of reaching India, but Khan said he and the generals wanted longer-range ones, with bigger warhead capacity. The prime minister was reluctant to exacerbate the arms race.

  “We have a policy of doing what India does,” she told him.

  “We should get the technology while we can, even if we don’t use it,” he countered.

  Bhutto recognized an opportunity to win favor with Khan as well as the hard-line generals and intelligence chiefs. She said she would make her decision in a matter of days. She then summoned General Abdul Waheed Kakar, who had by this time replaced Beg as chief of the armed forces, and Farooq Leghari, the longtime civil servant who had been elected president. Leghari told her that A. Q. Khan had already been to see him about the missiles, and he thought getting the designs was a good idea. Waheed concurred. Bhutto said that she would do as asked and instructed aides to arrange the detour to Pyongyang and a meeting with Kim, the autocratic and mercurial communist leader. Bhutto later described her motivation to an aide, explaining, “I thought the military would be very happy with me and would stop trying to destabilize my government.”

  A few days later, a Pakistani Air Force plane carrying Bhutto and her party landed in Pyongyang, where Bhutto was given a lavish welcome. Tens of thousands of people braved the bitter cold to line the streets for her motorcade from the airport, and that night the North Korean dictator was on hand to welcome Bhutto at a state dinner in the Kumsusan Assembly Hall. Like Pakistan, North Korea was suffering under economic hardships imposed by the international community after the discovery of its nuclear work a year earlier, and in her remarks Bhutto complained that her country and North Korea shared the problem of American-imposed sanctions. Pakistan was committed to nuclear nonproliferation, she said, but added that countries still had “their right to acquire and develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, geared to their economic and social developments.”

  North Korea was extremely poor; arms sales and currency counterfeiting were among its few sources of outside revenue. One of its most sought-after products was the No-Dong missile, so Bhutto found that Kim was willing to sell the missile plans. Bhutto’s plane left the country carrying several computer disks containing the blueprints for the latest version of the missile, which she later delivered to Khan, with a reminder that the missile should not be developed unless India started work on its own long-range missile.

  Khan ignored the prohibition and instructed his engineers to get to work immediately. His rivals at the PAEC had already produced short-range missiles that put most Indian cities within reach of Pakistani nuclear warheads, and Khan was determined to beat them with a missile that could go farther and carry a bigger payload. In honor of a twelfth-century Muslim warrior who fought the Hindus and with whom Khan claimed kinship, he named the missile the Ghauri. Based on a Soviet-era Scud design, the missile had an estimated range of about eight hundred miles and could carry a nuclear warhead that weighed up to 1,700 pounds. The Korean version was already popular with other countries, including Iran.

  The plans were not enough to build a functioning missile, so in the months that followed Kahuta’s technicians established close working relationships with their North Korean counterparts, who served as advisers. The North Koreans, including top officials from the military missile program, became familiar figures inside Kahuta, a phenomenon that did not go unnoticed by the CIA. At the same time, Khan began making so many trips to Pyongyang that he caught the eye of American intelligence agents there. The question was obvious—not what were the North Koreans doing in Pakistan, but why was Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist traveling to North Korea?

  The CIA suspected that Pakistan was trading Khan’s knowledge of uranium enrichment for North Korean help in developing missiles, not paying for it. Pakistan’s economy was suffering, and the Americans believed the country was too poor to pay for the missile help. Instead, CIA agents inside Pakistan uncovered evidence that Bhutto had set up a deadly barter, agreeing to trade Pakistan’s uranium-enrichment technology for the missile secrets. When asked about the accusation after she left office, Bhutto acknowledged obtaining missile designs from North Korea but insisted that she had authorized the government to pay for the designs. If Pakistan later exchanged uranium-enrichment equipment and know-how for the technology, she said, she had no knowledge of it at the time.

  A barter arrangement made sense, though, because after North Korea’s plan to
divert plutonium to its nuclear-weapons program was frozen by the dispute with the IAEA in 1992, its scientists had tried to start a centrifuge program as an alternative means of developing a nuclear arsenal. Centrifuge enrichment could be concealed more easily, particularly in a mountainous country where hundreds of military installations and critical factories were already buried in thousands of miles of tunnels, inspired by the national paranoia that the Americans or South Koreans would bomb the North, possibly with nuclear weapons. Hiding a few thousand centrifuges posed no problem. The problem was that the North Koreans were having a hard time mastering the enrichment technology.

  Throughout 1994, the suspicion that Khan was helping the North Koreans gained further credence. Intelligence tracked shipments from Pakistan to North Korea, often on board regularly scheduled Pakistan International Airlines flights and sometimes aboard military transports. Proving what was taking place within the closed confines of Korea was virtually impossible, however, and Pakistani cooperation with American intelligence was at a low point.

  There are conflicting viewpoints on whether the Pakistani military knew the full extent of what Khan was doing with the North Koreans. The scientist was traveling often in those days, using his red diplomatic passport to visit the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. The fact that some of the crates were sent to North Korea aboard military transport planes makes it hard to imagine that Khan was operating without military approval at some level. One retired Pakistani general said there were suspicions that Khan had traded enrichment technology for missiles and pocketed the government’s payment to the Koreans. Some senior military officers worried that the years of unchecked freedom and his extensive dealings with the nuclear black market to build Pakistan’s arsenal had corrupted Khan, but the consensus remained that his importance to the atomic-weapons program was too high to ask too many questions. “For the military, the whole job was to protect and allow A. Q. Khan to build the bomb freely,” said Feroz Khan, a retired Pakistani general who was involved in the nuclear program throughout the 1990s. “It was very clear to the military that we did not question what he was doing or how he was doing it. I used to say to the Americans and others, ‘Look, we are not selling nuclear technology to the Middle East where we could get a lot of money.’ We realized that if we were proliferating, our program would be in jeopardy. We got what we wanted, the bomb, we knew we were working on the black market, we knew Khan was using these dubious characters, but this was in our military interest, so some dirty tricks were allowed to go on.”