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 agents explained that Libya had agreed to give up virtually everything nuclear, down to the small amount of enriched uranium in a research reactor under IAEA safeguards. They said the Libyan government planned to invite ElBaradei to come see for himself what they had been up to. Finally, the agents said the British and American governments wanted the IAEA to play a role in overseeing the dismantling of the Libyan nuclear program and the crating and shipping of the equipment to the United States for safekeeping and inspection.

  News of the decision was a complete surprise to the IAEA officials. Dismayed as ElBaradei was by the Libyan disclosures and the IAEA’s failure to uncover the program on its own, he was relieved about the offer of a role for the agency in the next phase. His relations with the administration in Washington had remained testy since he had correctly challenged their claims about nuclear weapons in Iraq. The situation had deteriorated further because he continued to resist American efforts to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions because of its undisclosed nuclear activities. ElBaradei wouldn’t have been shocked to find the agency excluded, so he was happy to assure the British agents that the IAEA would devote the resources necessary to securing the Libyan program. He also promised a thorough investigation into how the technology had gotten there in the first place.

  While he had had no inkling of the talks with Gadhafi, Heinonen was not completely surprised that Libya had a secret nuclear program. During a routine inspection visit to Libya in May, he had heard a rumor that the Libyans had been buying nuclear technology on the black market, but there had not been enough information or time for him to follow up. The likelihood of Khan’s involvement was even less of a surprise. Since the discovery that Iran’s centrifuges matched Pakistan’s designs, the agency had been investigating whether the plans had been provided to the Iranians by Khan or someone close to him. The more the inspectors stripped away the layers of secrecy in Iran, the more the finger had pointed to Pakistan and Khan. Just a month earlier, the agency had sent an official letter to Islamabad asking if their scientist could have been involved. A delegation from the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission had arrived before the end of November to deliver the reply in person. Just as they had whenever suspicions about proliferation by their country arose, the Pakistani officials said it was impossible that Khan or anyone connected with the country’s nuclear program had helped Iran.

  Sitting in the director general’s office listening to the briefing on Libya that Saturday morning, the significance of what the intelligence agents were describing hit Heinonen hard. The disclosure confirmed his fear that the world confronted a more complicated and potentially dangerous version of proliferation than ever before, one that would require a new paradigm. The old model had been transfers of technology from one country to another. Khan represented a new model, which operated without state control or even knowledge. A single rogue scientist had apparently provided the world’s most advanced weapons technology to Iran and Libya. On top of that, the agreement with North Korea had fallen apart the previous year over allegations that the Koreans were using Khan-supplied technology. Who knew where else Khan had sown seeds of destruction?

  MINUTES after the British briefers departed, a delegation from Libya arrived at the IAEA. They had flown to Vienna that morning to extend the formal invitation to ElBaradei. A week later, on December 27, for the second time in less than a year, Mohamed ElBaradei found himself on a plane to a country with a freshly disclosed clandestine nuclear program. He could take some solace from the differences: Unlike the Iranians, who were continuing to work at Natanz and other sites, the Libyans were giving up their efforts. It was a small comfort as the Austrian Airlines jet touched down at Tripoli’s airport.

  Stepping off the plane, the IAEA team was escorted around customs to a line of black BMWs, which whisked them past billboards carrying photographs of the great leader to the Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel. The visit was a chance for the IAEA to see first hand what Libya had bought on the black market. It proved to be a sober revelation. Libya had not bothered to conceal its secret program in well-guarded bunkers or complexes buried beneath the sands of the Sahara. Instead, the delegation toured a series of nondescript warehouses and innocuous-looking school buildings scattered around the city. They saw components for five thousand centrifuges. Twenty of the machines had been set up and tested at one site. Other crates had not been unpacked. When they pried them open, the IAEA officials saw gleaming, well-oiled machine tools that would have enabled Libya to mass-produce tens of thousands of centrifuges. Standing in the corner of one warehouse were two cylinders containing a ton of uranium hexafluoride. It was obvious that Libya had been engaged in a complicated, long-term shopping spree, and invoices showed that equipment had arrived from around the world—advanced centrifuge parts from Khan’s stocks in Pakistan, some bearing KRL labels; other centrifuge components manufactured to order in Malaysia; vacuum pumps from South Africa; specialized steel and aluminum from Singapore; balancing machines from Switzerland; power regulators from Turkey.

  As Heinonen wandered among the stacks of machinery at the main warehouse, a Libyan named Karim pointed to dozens of four-foot-high metal cabinets containing regulators to govern the flow of electricity to the centrifuges. They were marked with the label of a Turkish company, Elektronik Kontrol Aletleri.

  “That firm is owned by Jews,” said Karim, who had attended the first meeting with Khan in Istanbul. “Nothing is holy in this world.”

  Once exposed, the Libyans appeared to hold back nothing. They told the IAEA officials, as they had the Americans and British, that Khan had promised to provide a complete, off-the-shelf bomb factory. The Libyans calculated that they had already paid around $80 million to the network. They said they had no idea what the final price tag would have been—$500 million? $1 billion? Iran had purchased prototypes and designs but used its own skilled workers and technical resources to develop its enrichment plant at Natanz. Libya, on the other hand, had few trained workers and little manufacturing ability, so it was forced to buy the entire infrastructure to build the bomb.

  ElBaradei had asked to meet with Gadhafi, but the Libyans had been unable to confirm a time for an appointment. On the third day, as the delegation was about to head out to another site, Gadhafi sent for the IAEA chief without warning. ElBaradei and one of his aides, Canadian diplomat Mark Gwozdecky, were bundled into a government car and driven to an old army barracks in the middle of Tripoli, which had been converted into one of Gadhafi’s many hideaways. The exchange was boilerplate. Gadhafi said Libya had opened a new chapter in its history and wanted to join the mainstream international community. He explained that he was committed to setting up a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, a proposal Egypt had been pushing for years. Part of the proposal, he stressed, was for Israel to give up its nuclear arsenal. ElBaradei welcomed Gadhafi’s commitment and pledged that the IAEA would work with the Libyans.

  That evening, Gwozdecky and Pierre Goldschmidt went for a walk outside the hotel to get a look at street life in Tripoli, a place few Western diplomats had visited in decades. Two men in dark glasses and plain clothes followed at a discreet distance. A few minutes into the walk, Gwozdecky turned and walked back to the pair, more amused than miffed about the intrusion. When the Canadian asked what they were doing, the men smiled and said they had been told to take care of the guests. The ice was broken, and the minders turned out to be friendly and hospitable tour guides who showed the visitors the intricacies of the local market. Later, back inside the hotel, another market was on Gwozdecky’s mind: the black market in nuclear technology. “It’s the most dangerous phenomenon we’ve seen in many years,” he told Goldschmidt. “It’s a sophisticated global network, spanning three continents and maybe a dozen countries.”

  As frightening as the black market was, there was some relief in what the IAEA team had seen. The Libyans had indulged in checkbook proliferation, paying large amounts of money for a vast amount of technology.
The Americans had warned that the program was well along toward developing a bomb, but to the expert eyes of the IAEA officials it did not appear that it was anywhere close. Some members of the team questioned whether the Libyans would ever have achieved the technical capabilities to build a bomb, even with Gadhafi’s open checkbook and Khan’s tutelage.

  Any sense of relief disappeared on the last day of the visit. Mohammad Matuq Mohammad, the head of Libya’s nuclear program and the point man for contacts with Khan since 1997, met with ElBaradei and the others in his office at the National Board for Scientific Research. As he had done previously with Kappes, he described his repeated meetings with Khan in Dubai, Istanbul, Casablanca, and other places. Rifling through stacks of invoices for equipment purchased through Khan and his associates, Mohammad provided the beginnings of a map of the world of nuclear trafficking that ElBaradei and the others could barely fathom. But the most startling revelation was yet to come.

  At one point, Mohammad rose from the conference table, walked to one corner of his office, and picked up two innocuous-looking beige shopping bags. Setting them on the table, he explained that he wanted to demonstrate that he and his country were now cooperating fully with the IAEA. The two bags bore the markings of a tailor shop in Islamabad. Though no one in the room knew it, they were the same ones that Khan’s two tails from the ISI had seen him carry to Dubai three years before and deliver to the unknown men. Mohammad reached into one of the bags and started to pull out a stack of papers, explaining that they were plans for a nuclear warhead that Khan had given to him years earlier, as a way of saying thank you for buying tens of millions of dollars’ worth of technology—and as an inducement to buy more. In Middle Eastern culture, a purchase is often followed by a small gift from the seller to the buyer. In this case, the gift was the key to the world’s most powerful weapon. Before Mohammad could withdraw anything, ElBaradei insisted that he stop. If the bags held what Mohammad said they did, the material was so sensitive that ElBaradei and Heinonen were forbidden to lay eyes on it. One of the cardinal rules at the IAEA was that only a handful of the 2,400 employees were permitted to look at anything that had to do with weapons designs. The few people allowed to see them were citizens from the five countries authorized by the nonproliferation treaty to possess nuclear weapons—Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States. And even they had to have the highest levels of security clearances from their governments. The restriction was deemed necessary to prevent secrets from being stolen by employees who come from dozens of countries. Only one member of the IAEA team in Tripoli that day, Jacques Baute, had the required clearance, but even he did not want to open the bags. Instead, Baute took the two bags from Mohammad and put them in a hard plastic case normally used to carry scientific equipment and affixed an IAEA seal to it. The Libyans were told to keep the case under lock and key until Baute and another colleague with proper clearances could return to examine the modern equivalent of Pandora’s box.

  The Libyan was surprised by the response, explaining that he had already showed the plans to the CIA and MI6 and allowed them to make copies.

  BRITISH AIRWAYS flight 898 from London arrived in Tripoli on January 18. Aboard was a fourteen-member team of American and British experts under the command of Donald Mahley, a deputy assistant secretary of state for arms control and retired U.S. Army nuclear-weapons officer. They were the first American diplomats to visit Libya officially since 1980; their passports carried special stamps from the State Department permitting them to enter a country still under sanctions. Just getting there had been difficult. There were no flights from the United States, and restrictions on travel to Libya were so tight that computers at the State Department did not list the British Airways flight. In the end, Mahley and his colleagues flew to London and paid cash for their tickets to Libya because British Airways was not even allowed to accept American credit cards for trade with Libya. Fearing Gadhafi might still change his mind, the joint team had been assembled and briefed for the trip quickly. Two weeks earlier, the last details of the protocol for dismantling and packing up the hundreds of tons of Libyan equipment had been negotiated in London. The resulting agreement specified, point by point, what was expected from the Libyans and how the removal mission would be conducted. Top priority was to remove the nuclear-warhead designs, the P-2 rotors, and other key components for the uranium-enrichment plant as soon as possible. The remaining material was to go on a later flight.

  While the IAEA delegation had stayed in Tripoli’s best hotel three weeks earlier, the Brits and Americans were to have a decidedly lower profile. Though Libya was a police state, Gadhafi didn’t want to risk stirring up his subjects by flaunting his new alliance with old enemies. Mahley and the team were taken to a compound of low, white buildings outside Tripoli that normally was home to young men studying the Koran. About thirty staffers from a Tripoli hotel were drafted to provide food and other services. The quarters were spartan, but the team members would be spending their days and most of their nights dismantling and repacking the equipment. Mahley wanted the first load flown out within a week.

  Two days later, an Austrian Airlines jetliner from Vienna touched down in Tripoli, carrying ElBaradei, Heinonen, Baute, and other experts. The Libyans saw no need to hide their presence and the delegation returned to the Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel. ElBaradei had come to review the agreement with the Libyans for removing the equipment and to reassure them that the decision to give up the illicit technology voluntarily meant the IAEA would not recommend any sanctions by the United Nations. The rest of the team was responsible for creating an inventory and attaching IAEA seals to the equipment that would be removed from Libya by the Americans. The experts also wanted to return to Vienna with samples of some of the equipment and with the uranium hexafluoride so the agency’s lab could try to confirm its origins. Heinonen was most worried about the centrifuge components and related enrichment equipment, the part of the bomb equation with which he was most familiar and the part generally regarded as the biggest proliferation concern. He thought Mohammad must have been wrong about the contents of the shopping bags. The idea that Khan had been reckless enough to hand over a cookbook for a nuclear weapon was so massively stupid that it was beyond imagination. Heinonen’s colleague, Baute, feared otherwise.

  Early the next morning, not long after the first call to prayer from the mosques of the nearby medina, Heinonen and the others from the IAEA gathered in the hotel restaurant to go over their strategy. Heinonen would lead inspections at nine separate, previously secret locations to compile a detailed inventory of the hundreds of tons of material. Because of the volume and the need to move fast, Heinonen decided to place seals on only selected components, a sample from every category of equipment. Baute and Bob Kelley, an American nuclear-weapons specialist who also had top-level security clearance and worked at the IAEA, were assigned the sensitive job of examining the contents of the shopping bags. Just receiving permission to look inside the bags had required a high-level debate with the Americans, who were extremely possessive of the entire Libyan trove. The day before the IAEA delegation left for Tripoli, John Bolton had flown over to argue forcefully that the weapons designs were too sensitive for anyone at the IAEA to view, even a fellow American such as Kelley. ElBaradei had responded that Baute and Kelley needed to inspect the bomb plans so the agency could get a sense of how much the Khan network had given to Libya. Certainly Bolton wanted to protect against the spread of such dangerous plans, but he had other reasons for wanting to keep a lid on the existence of the warhead designs in Libya. It was possible that once the behind-the-scenes story emerged in the press, someone would discover that Khan had delivered the designs to Gadhafi well after his network had been penetrated by the CIA, a fact that could tarnish the victory. Finally, Bolton had relented, specifying that, while Baute and Kelley could examine the documents, the Americans would take ultimate custody of them.

  During his years as the chief of the inspection team in Iraq, Bau
te had never seen anything as dangerous as actual designs for a nuclear warhead. He was alarmed simply by the presence of such material in Libya, outside any sort of control. Kelley, on the other hand, had spent the last eighteen months focusing on Iran and wondered whether the network had provided Iran with the same warhead plans he was about to inspect.

  Shortly after nine o’clock that morning, Baute and Kelley were driven to the National Board for Scientific Research, where Baute had met with Mohammad on the earlier trip. Accompanying them was a Libyan minder, a silent, unsmiling man who sat next to the driver. At the so-called research center, Baute and Kelley were escorted to a small office with three desks. A few minutes after they sat down, a guard entered, carrying the hard case with the IAEA seal Baute had attached the previous month, still intact. The minder remained, reading a newspaper in a corner and only occasionally glancing at his charges, as Baute broke the seal and removed the shopping bags. He lifted out the contents, making two piles, each about a foot high, and for the next eight hours he and Kelley read through the two stacks. No sound was heard except the shuffle of papers and the drone from a window air conditioner. Occasionally, one of them would point to a particular diagram or let out a low sigh at the extent of the designs. Baute’s worst fears were confirmed each time he flipped a page or opened a new document.