Others believed that Khan could not have been engaged so openly with the North Koreans without the explicit approval of Pakistan’s military leaders. The CIA and State Department saw the cooperation as part of a larger strategic partnership engineered by senior Pakistani military and civilian leaders. “We had information that this was a two-way street and nuclear technology was involved,” said Bob Einhorn, the State Department’s senior nonproliferation official at the time. “The strategic cooperation between Pakistan and North Korea was almost assuredly known and approved of by Pakistani military officials.”
While the CIA had picked up Khan’s work with the North Koreans, they were not as fortunate when it came to his cooperation with another troublesome regime.
IN THE SUMMER of 1994, Iran’s ambassador in Islamabad hosted a reception for a visiting military delegation from Tehran. Among the many diplomats and government officials attending was A. Q. Khan, who huddled in a corner with Iran’s defense minister. The Iranian had come with a bold proposal: He wanted Khan to resume supplying Tehran with nuclear equipment on a far larger scale than before. The minister told Khan that he wanted to buy the P-2 centrifuge. Describing Iran’s difficulties in obtaining other equipment on the black market, he asked Khan to reach out to some of his long-standing contacts in that world. The offer entailed some risk for Khan, but the scientist assumed that the generals would not object in the unlikely event he was discovered. Khan frequently told friends and associates that the notion of assisting another Islamic country, particularly one so opposed to the United States and Israel, appealed to him. So did the chance to earn millions of dollars. He agreed to help Iran, assuring the official that he could deliver the first shipment through his contacts in Dubai before the end of the year.
By promising to secretly siphon off some of Pakistan’s most advanced centrifuge technology for Iran and enlisting his gang of black marketers, Khan was embarking on a course that would turn him into the most dangerous seller of atomic-weapons systems in history. The 1987 shipment to Iran was a small, one-time transaction, probably approved in advance by his own country, and the barter deal with North Korea provided direct benefit to Pakistan in the form of missile technology. This, however, was a private arrangement, which promised nothing to Pakistan and great wealth for Khan.
The scientist knew precisely where to turn for help in organizing the smuggling operation for Iran. Khan had kept in touch with B.S.A. Tahir, the young Sri Lankan in Dubai who had played a minor role the first time around. The two men frequently dined together on Khan’s visits to the gulf port, and Tahir had helped him find an apartment in a luxury building on Al Makhtum Street, near the center of Dubai. The soft-spoken Tahir had evolved into a tough businessman, forcing his uncle, Mohammed Farooq, out of the family computer-sales business through an acrimonious lawsuit and expanding his clientele across the Middle East. On occasion, he had organized shipments of equipment from Europe to Khan’s labs.
Khan telephoned Tahir and told him to expect some visitors. He’d made a deal, he explained, to move goods from Pakistan to another country, and he promised that he would get to Dubai as soon as possible to oversee the transaction. By the way, Khan said, the deal was a big one, worth six million to seven million dollars just as a down payment.
A few days later, two officers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards arrived at Tahir’s SMB Computers in the city’s Jebel Ali Free Zone, saying that they had come to see A. Q. Khan. Tahir told them that he expected Khan to arrive soon but that some of the items they sought were likely to be delayed. The two men spent a couple of days shopping in Dubai’s glittering malls, waiting for their new partner. When Khan arrived, he brought with him detailed plans for building the P-2 centrifuge; by then, about half the parts had arrived separately at Tahir’s warehouse. Unfortunately for the Iranians, Kahuta did not have enough P-2 components for Khan to take them without attracting attention, so he had substituted P-1 parts. He telephoned Tahir, who met him at his apartment, took the drawings, and then picked up the Iranians at their hotel and took them to his warehouse. The men examined the drawings without seeming to understand them and poked around in one of the crates containing the components. Tahir explained that the rest of the centrifuge components were expected in a matter of days; when they arrived, he would ship both sets to Tehran disguised as computer parts. Among the equipment to follow were about four hundred specialized bellows for centrifuges from Friedrich Tinner, and thousands of magnets and high-voltage inverters, both critical components for a centrifuge system, manufactured and supplied by two Turkish businessmen, Gunes Cire and Selim Alguadis, who had sold similar goods to Pakistan in previous years. In a rare moment of honesty, Tahir explained that though the drawings were for the P-2, the components were from P-1s. The Iranians had little choice but to accept what was offered, and they handed Tahir two heavy suitcases. After dropping the Iranians at the airport, Tahir drove to Al Makhtum Street and lugged the suitcases into Khan’s apartment, where he opened them in front of Khan. The scientist’s face lit up when he saw the stacks of bills, a total of three million dollars. The cash was about half what Tahir expected, but Khan explained that the remainder of the money would be paid to other participants in the network.
The arrival of the first batch of P-1 components and the additional equipment from the network provided an immediate boost to the Iranian nuclear effort, though the officials were angry that they had been shortchanged on the P-2s. Up until that point, scientists at the Tehran Nuclear Research Center had succeeded in operating only a single centrifuge at nearly full speed. The new components meant that the testing could be expanded dramatically, but hiding a larger number of machines from IAEA inspectors increased the risk that someone would discover the program. So the research and production operations were moved to a nondescript complex in an industrial area on the outskirts of Tehran. The walled compound, which contained two large buildings and several smaller ones, had been home to a small clock manufacturer, Kalaye Electric Company. It was about to become the heart of Iran’s nuclear project, and renovation work started even as technicians began to assemble the components into the first fifty centrifuges. Progress was to be surprisingly swift.
American intelligence completely missed the transfer of the centrifuge technology and other equipment to Iran. The notion that Khan, a Pakistani scientist whom the CIA had always underestimated, had gone from black-market buyer to seller did not occur to the intelligence agencies around the world that had been watching Pakistan for nearly two decades. The warnings about the potential for Pakistan sharing its nuclear prowess with Iran seemed to have been forgotten.
CHAPTER 20
MORE AND MORE PIECES
IN EARLY MAY 1995, Bill Clinton boarded Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and headed to Moscow to attend ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. Because Russian president Boris Yeltsin had recently dispatched troops to quell rebels in the breakaway province of Chechnya, some White House officials opposed the trip, fearing Clinton would be seen as paying tribute to an army tarnished by atrocities. But the president had high hopes and a pressing agenda and could not be dissuaded.
High on Clinton’s list was persuading Yeltsin to crack down on the sale of Russian nuclear technology to Iran. Russia’s Ministry of Atomic Energy was on the verge of becoming a major supplier to Iran’s nuclear program, under the guise of civilian development. The primary vehicle for transferring technology was an eight-hundred-million-dollar contract announced in January 1995 that called for Russia to complete the reactor at Bushehr. Administration counterproliferation experts wanted the president to persuade Yeltsin to cancel the Bushehr deal and other technology transfers. In preparation, the National Security Council had prepared a five-page, single-spaced report describing Iran’s atomic-weapons ambitions and the roles that Russia, China, and Pakistan were playing in helping them achieve those goals. To buttress its claims, the report contained excerpts from e
lectronic conversations intercepted by the National Security Agency as well as some raw intelligence.
Providing such sensitive intelligence to the Russian leader was highly unusual, and there was opposition to doing so from many administration officials. But Clinton’s nonproliferation advisers carried the day, arguing that the information was vital to convince Yeltsin that Iran’s program was military. “We know that Iran has an organized structure whose purpose is the production of nuclear material for nuclear weapons,” said the report, which explained that Iran had tried to buy enriched uranium from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan and was importing nuclear components from European manufacturers through the same smuggling routes used by Iraq and Pakistan. Reading the report in Clinton’s presence, Yeltsin was in a tough position. The Iranian deals, particularly the work on Bushehr, meant thousands of potential jobs for the unemployed and underemployed Russian nuclear scientists and technicians and a chance to increase Russian influence with Tehran. Yeltsin told Clinton he would consider the American objections, leaving the Americans hopeful.
The Clinton administration was still trying to persuade China not to sell nuclear reactors to Iran. During a conference at the United Nations to discuss extending the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Secretary of State Warren Christopher had lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Qian Qichen. Christopher argued to Qian that Iran was building a nuclear arsenal and that any cooperation with Tehran was dangerous because the technology and training could be diverted to the weapons program. Though the Americans did not know it, just such a diversion had already taken place. In 1991, the Chinese had sold Iran 1.8 tons of uranium ore and chemical forms of uranium, which the Iranians had used in testing the faulty centrifuges provided by Khan and recently transferred to the hidden facility at Kalaye Electric. Qian was unimpressed with Christopher’s argument, agreeing only that Chinese experts would meet with American scientists to discuss the issue further. He refused to promise that China would end its nuclear cooperation with Iran, which was providing Beijing with badly needed hard currency and the potential access to Iran’s reserves of natural gas and oil.
China officially opposed nuclear proliferation, but the reality was shaped by its self-perception as a nuclear outsider, never quite a member of the club led by the United States and the former Soviet Union. China developed its nuclear arsenal partly in response to the American threat to use nuclear devices on its troops in the Korean war and didn’t test its first nuclear device until 1964. The Chinese refused to sign the nonproliferation treaty until 1992 because they regarded it as a mechanism for allowing the superpowers to maintain their arsenals while denying such weapons to other countries, some of which might have legitimate self-defense needs. The same argument is still made today by many nonnuclear countries facing what they see as outside threats.
The efforts to block Russia and China from supplying nuclear technology to Iran were commendable, but the Clinton administration and its intelligence apparatus were fighting the last war and missing the new front: the creation of a private black market comprising rogue scientists and suppliers operating outside of states and offering nuclear know-how to the highest bidder. Even when the CIA had picked up signs of a shipment of centrifuge parts from Pakistan to Iran in 1994, just as they had in the late 1980s, the incident was regarded as random and minor. No one connected the episode to Khan because the concept of private proliferation was not in the vernacular and because, once again, the Americans underestimated the Pakistani scientist. Two months after Clinton’s trip to Moscow, American intelligence had another chance to connect the dots, and again it missed a golden opportunity.
ON THE NIGHT of August 7, 1995, a convoy of black Mercedes sedans sped west across the darkened border separating Iraq and Jordan. When the vehicles reached Amman, General Hussein Kamel emerged from the lead car. Kamel was Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law and had been responsible for Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons-procurement efforts. In a potentially major blow to Saddam, Kamel had decided to defect and share his extensive knowledge with the United Nations, which was still trying to guarantee that Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction four years after the end of the Gulf War.
UN inspectors had grown weary of the hide-and-seek game being played by the Iraqis, and the IAEA team was packing up to return to Vienna for a hiatus when news broke on CNN of Kamel’s defection. Hoping for new information, they unpacked. They didn’t have long to wait. Saddam feared the unveiling of Kamel’s secrets would undermine his government’s strained credibility and jeopardize any hope of ending the UN sanctions. In a preemptive strike, he instructed Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, to publicly denounce Kamel as a traitor and accuse him of concealing information about Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program. A few days later, the IAEA team was headed for a chicken farm west of Baghdad. After about ten miles, they turned down a dusty road to the village of Haidar and pulled into a farming compound. The August heat was blistering as the inspectors were led by Iraqi military officers to a locked chicken coop, where they found more than one hundred wooden and metal boxes, stacked one on top of another. As the inspectors opened the containers, they found microfiches, computer disks, videotapes, photographs, and pieces of hardware.
Among the inspectors sweating inside the chicken coop that day was Jacques Baute, head of the team. Baute was collegial, articulate, and quick with a smile, but his patience had been tested by the obfuscations and obstacles thrown up for months by the Iraqis. Now, as he looked at the material being pulled out of the containers, it seemed like the IAEA’s persistence was finally paying off. Though some documents and designs were for chemical and biological weapons, most of the contents dealt with the various stages of building an atomic bomb and showed that the Iraqis were much farther along than anyone knew. There were diagrams for centrifuges, schematics for cascades, and lists of equipment and suppliers across Europe. Inside one crate, Baute discovered five-foot rods of what appeared to be maraging steel. Any doubts about the sophistication of the Iraqi effort evaporated.
The Iraqis claimed the material had been hidden by Kamel without the knowledge of Saddam and other senior officials, a tale no one on the IAEA team believed. Their suspicions were proved right when satellite imagery soon revealed trucks delivering containers to the chicken farm the day after Kamel defected. Baute ordered the 150 containers sealed and transferred to Baghdad where, away from the heat and the Iraqis, he and the others would begin a careful analysis of what they had discovered.
Baute had left the French nuclear industry to join the IAEA out of a conviction that his skills could help stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and his analytical mind and expertise in weapon design made him an effective team leader. Carefully examining what he estimated to be about seven hundred thousand pages and the assorted hardware and components, Baute was convinced that Saddam would soon have produced a nuclear weapon. Among the disturbing discoveries was a thin sheaf of documents tucked deep in one of the boxes chronicling an offer to help Iraq build an atomic bomb, from a man who said he represented Abdul Qadeer Khan. Baute knew Khan as the father of Pakistan’s bomb, but this was the first time he had encountered a hint that Khan might have played a role in Iraq. The first page in the file was an Iraqi government memo summarizing the meeting in October 1990 between the Iraqi intelligence service and the man identified as Malik. The senior Iraqi intelligence officer involved, code-named PC-3, suspected a sting but accepted Malik’s offer to provide samples of Khan’s wares; it appeared from the documents that the Gulf War had interfered.
Baute copied the Khan file and took it to a meeting with senior officials from the Iraqi nuclear agency. Before showing them the papers, he asked whether they knew anything about Khan helping the nuclear program. They said they had no idea what he was talking about. Pulling the copies out of his briefcase and handing them over, Baute repeated his question. The Iraqi officials acknowledged the approach but explained that
the proposal had gone nowhere.
The offer fit too neatly into how the Iraqis operated for Baute to accept the denial at face value. For days, he traipsed from ministry to ministry, trying to solve the mystery. Eventually, he was given the names of the intelligence and nuclear officials who had received and evaluated the proposal. Some were still in Iraq, but when Baute and his team tracked them down, the officials repeated the government line that they had been dubious about the legitimacy of the offer and that it never went forward. Baute finally located PC-3, who had fled after the Gulf War, receiving asylum and eventually citizenship in a European country. Determined to get to the bottom of the story, Baute received permission from Vienna to go see the former intelligence officer, hoping that he might learn the truth because PC-3 was outside Saddam’s lethal reach. Baute’s luck did not change: PC-3 refused to discuss any aspect of the Khan overture.
The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets...And How We Could Have Stopped Him Page 26