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

  One of the bags contained hundreds of pages of engineering schematics, detailed drawings, and handwritten reports—at least one hundred production drawings and reports that comprised precise instructions for building an implosion-type nuclear bomb. The device would weigh around one thousand pounds, possibly small enough to fit atop the ballistic missiles in Libya’s arsenal and more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though the reports and plans were in English, Baute’s experience told him that he was looking at the designs for a device tested on a missile by the Chinese in 1966. Despite its age, the warhead design was relatively sophisticated and lighter than the first-generation nuclear warheads designed by the United States and Soviet Union.

  The other bag yielded a more haphazard collection. Some documents were unclassified reports from the U.S. Department of Energy and the national weapons laboratories, which could have been downloaded from the Internet. Others were notes from seminars and visits to China that covered a variety of techniques for fabricating a nuclear warhead. These notes were numbered sequentially and appeared to cover more than a year of intensive how-to sessions. From the handwriting, it appeared that at least four scientists had attended the seminars. The notes were written in English, the international language of science, but Baute saw various clues scribbled in the margins that indicated to him that the note takers were Pakistani. “Munir’s bomb would be bigger,” read one note.

  The plans offered an almost complete road map to a nuclear warhead, but Baute and Kelley believed that Khan had not given the Libyans everything they needed. Like a cook who leaves out an important ingredient when sharing a favorite recipe, Khan seemed to have omitted designs for at least one crucial part. Perhaps, they thought, he had planned to sell the final piece for more money. Despite the gap, the material provided an invaluable starting point for constructing a working nuclear device. Baute and Kelley decided that the information was so sensitive that they would take only limited notes in case their own papers fell into the wrong hands.

  Nuclear-weapons technology was sixty years old: Inevitably, significant amounts of information had been distributed widely, and certainly the Internet had increased its availability. But the existence of actual plans for a proven nuclear warhead constituted a new level of threat in Baute’s mind. His worries were deepened by his fears that the plans in front of him probably had been copied by the Libyans and that there was no way to discover who else might have received the same information from Khan’s network, which no doubt had maintained its own copies.

  After eight hours of wading through columns of figures and scientific ratios and diagrams on page after page, their eyes blurred and minds numbed, Baute and Kelley returned the documents to the plastic case and attached a new seal. Despite Bolton’s objections two days earlier, Baute wanted to get the plans back to Vienna for further study. IAEA headquarters did not have the security required to guard nuclear-weapons plans, so Baute hoped to persuade the Americans to store them at their embassy in Vienna, where he and Kelley could have regular access to them. After repacking the material, the Frenchman carried the case down the hall to Mohammad’s office, where he found Mahley waiting. “We need to take these plans back to Vienna,” Baute told the American.

  Mahley was in his early sixties, with the same lean, fit physique and close-cropped, iron-gray hair that he had had when he mustered out of the army as a colonel a decade earlier. He had spent twenty-eight years specializing in nuclear and biological weapons before joining the State Department as a counterproliferation expert, with the rank of ambassador. Like Bolton, Mahley thought the IAEA and ElBaradei were too soft, but he had been ordered to cooperate with the agency, so he listened to Baute’s request.

  “Sure,” Mahley said with a wry smile. “You can have ’em, but only if you bring in a battalion big enough to take ’em.”

  Baute could only shrug. The plans would go back to the United States with the rest of the nuclear material.

  Later that evening, with IAEA officials gathered at the hotel, Baute and Kelley offered a sanitized description of the plans they had seen and a full description of the encounter with Mahley. “These designs were made in a laboratory, and they are real,” Baute explained gravely. “They are not well organized perhaps, but this is the real thing. It would provide a great starting point for any scientist trying to build a nuclear weapon. There is no question about that.”

  Baute told them that when he questioned Mohammad after looking at the plans, the Libyan had sworn that no one had done anything with the weapons designs and that the bags had sat untouched in a corner of his office for more than two years. There was no evidence Mohammad was lying, but he had allowed the Americans and British to make copies, raising the question of whether he made his own copy at some point. It would have been understandable insurance in case Gadhafi changed his mind. Even if they had not done so officially, what would have stopped someone from making his own copy for resale? A tested nuclear weapons design could fetch a huge sum on the black market. Listening to Baute and Kelley, Heinonen assumed securing the plans now would be too little, too late.

  A COUPLE of days later, near the end of the trip, the Libyan nuclear team hosted a dinner for the IAEA delegation at a fish restaurant a short walk from the hotel. Melissa Fleming, the American who was the agency’s media chief, sat next to one of the Libyans who had played a central role in buying equipment from the Khan network. He declined to give her his name, but he spoke at length about his distaste for the nuclear-weapons program and the methods used by his country to acquire the technology.

  “I have a wife and children, and I want very much for them to respect me,” the Libyan explained. “What we were doing was against my religious beliefs, and it was illegal. I was always uncomfortable with the way we had to conduct this business, and I am certain these black-market people cheated us.”

  The Libyan said he had never met Khan, but he participated in many negotiating and planning sessions with others in Dubai. He said Tahir and others in the network were always trying to get more money from the Libyans. For instance, he said, they offered to set up a training course in Dubai for Libyan technicians if Libya bought certain advanced equipment. Fleming went away from the dinner believing that the Libyan was sincere in his regrets.

  After the IAEA team inspected and sealed most of the nuclear-related equipment, the Americans and British loaded it onto pallets for shipment to the States. The Defense Department planned to send a Hercules C-130 cargo plane to transport the freight to the United States, but Mahley objected. A C-130 could not be refueled in midair, which meant it would have to land somewhere along the route for refueling. Though any risk to the cargo was remote, the idea of stopping was unacceptable to a career military officer. After arguing with the Pentagon, Mahley telephoned Bob Joseph at the National Security Council and explained the problem. Joseph promised to clear it up, and within hours Air Force personnel at McChord Air Base in Washington State were preparing a special C-17 Globemaster certified to carry nuclear material and capable of midair refueling. Part of the preparations involved repainting the huge aircraft. The Libyans refused to have an aircraft with American military markings land on its soil, so the C-17 was repainted gray to cover its insignia. Even then, Musa Kousa told Mahley that the plane would have to land after dark at a former military air base outside Tripoli and depart before dawn to avoid attracting attention.

  About 9:30 on the night of January 28, the C-17 lumbered to a halt on the runway outside Tripoli. The nuclear equipment was waiting inside the hangars, and the loading began at a furious pace. First aboard were the cylinders of uranium hexafluoride from Pakistan and North Korea. Next up were the P-2 rotors, the complete P-1 centrifuges, and the two Spanish lathes. The guidance sets for the long-range Scud missiles were also wheeled up the loading ramp; the missiles themselves would be part of one thousand tons of heavy stuff that would leave two months later on an American-registered ship, the Industrial Challenger. Mahley personally han
ded the case containing the nuclear-warhead plans to the pilot. At 2:17 a.m. on January 29, the plane took off for Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the material would be taken to the Department of Energy’s top-secret Y-12 National Security Complex for a detailed postmortem.

  After the departure, the American and British experts had time to assess the full extent of Libya’s nuclear equipment, which was still being inventoried and consolidated in a few warehouses. The Americans were finding that Libya had amassed far more nuclear technology than they had imagined previously, illustrating that even under the best of circumstances espionage rarely provides a complete picture. Activities inevitably occur outside the net cast by surveillance and informants. In Khan’s case, the information from Tinner and other sources, both human and electronic, had vastly understated the extent of the technology shipped to Libya by the network, missing tons of sensitive equipment and, worst of all, the warhead plans. “We thought we knew it all about the A. Q. Khan network, and our intelligence was the best we ever had,” said a senior State Department adviser. “I can tell you we were shocked by what we learned in Libya. It was amazing. They had ten times more stuff or five times more stuff than anyone had ever thought.”

  Mahley and the others left the country for a few weeks after the first load was sent on its way. By the time they returned in March, the Industrial Challenger was moored at the farthest end of Tripoli harbor, waiting to haul away the additional thousand tons of equipment. The Libyan authorities insisted that the goods be moved to the port and loaded at night, but the plan ran into trouble. “The first night we only got three truckloads,” said Mahley. “The second night, four truckloads arrived. It was too slow coming through city traffic. I told the Libyan in charge that we had to do better, but the third night it was just three truckloads. I complained again.”

  Both sides were nervous. The Americans and Brits worried that the Libyans would stop the operation before they got everything onto the ship, and the Libyans were concerned that moving the heavy loads through Tripoli might cause a backlash if the public learned what was going on. The solution was something that could occur only in an authoritarian country: The fourth night, the authorities shut down Tripoli at 9:00 p.m., closing every street, road, and alleyway; by the next morning, everything was in the warehouse at the port. Even then, with the material one hundred yards from the ship, the last step was to prove difficult. A storm blew across Tripoli, with winds up to fifty knots sweeping across the port and making it impossible to use the ship’s huge cranes to load cargo into the bay. “We had to use fifty-five-ton deck plates for stacking between the crates of equipment, and they were flying around like Frisbees,” said Mahley. The storm blew itself out after thirty-six hours, and the loading was completed, allowing the Industrial Challenger to sail away with the remainder of the would-be bomb factory.

  Estimates varied about how close Libya was to possessing a nuclear weapon. Some experts, after examining the equipment and plans, believed that an enrichment facility could have been up and running within four or five years. A warhead built according to the Chinese plans might have fit atop Libya’s Scud missiles, though other means of delivery could have been developed—and there was always the opportunity to conceal a device inside a freight container. The enormity of the Libyan program, and the potential for actually building a bomb, was a dramatic demonstration of the dangers of permitting Khan to operate, even under CIA surveillance. During the months and years that his activities had been monitored, Khan had still managed to provide the plans for an atomic bomb to a rogue dictator, and it was possible that he and his accomplices had sold the same information to Iran, North Korea, or others. No one at the IAEA thought defusing Libya’s nuclear ambitions had ended the greater threat.

  CHAPTER 29

  NUCLEAR WAL-MART

  AFTER RETURNING FROM TRIPOLI near the end of January, Olli Heinonen and a handful of IAEA experts began reviewing the invoices, designs, and other papers turned over by the Libyans. They went through the lists of centrifuges, components, tool-and-die machinery, specialized electronics, and other equipment. They also went over notes from the interviews with the senior Libyan officials who had been involved in the nuclear program. For the most part, the Libyans had seemed eager to talk about what they viewed as a scientific project, though some expressed reservations about their country’s quest for the bomb. The Libyans forthrightly described the initial contacts with Khan and the meetings that had followed in Dubai, Casablanca, and other capitals—information corroborated by invoices from Pakistan and equipment that still bore the labels of Khan’s laboratory at Kahuta. The magnitude of the network began to emerge, with Khan as the ringmaster negotiating the deals, providing the technical advice, reassuring the scientists that the journey would end with a nuclear arsenal. Still, there were hurdles; Khan and his associates had managed to cover many of their footprints with false documents and by simply withholding information from the Libyans, leaving Heinonen the difficult task of completing the portrait of what was clearly the most dangerous proliferation operation in history.

  IAEA inspectors were already suspicious that Khan and Pakistan had helped Tehran, but as Heinonen and others compared what they learned in Libya with what they had seen in Iran, it became clear that the links were much stronger than imagined. Much of the technology at Natanz and other nuclear facilities in Iran matched what was found in Libya. Most tellingly, the Urenco-based P-1 centrifuges found in Tripoli were identical to the machines being manufactured for the pilot plant at Natanz, which was nearly finished. There were still questions about the intent of the Iranians, and crucial to answering them, was finding out whether Khan had provided Iran with the same bomb plans that he had sold to Libya. Answering that would require an investigation into uncharted territory. The first step was comparing the equipment and know-how provided to Libya with what inspectors were finding in Iran. In addition to matches, omissions could be telling, too.

  Before the end of January, Heinonen dispatched Trevor Edwards to Tehran to confront the Iranians over one apparent omission. Libya had turned over two P-2 centrifuges, but the Iranians had made no mention of the P-2 in earlier disclosures to the IAEA. Faced with the Libyan evidence, the Iranians admitted that they had purchased P-2 centrifuge drawings in 1994 from what they called foreign sources. Unfortunately, they said, the records of the transaction could not be found, and the government official who had arranged the deal was dead.

  The reason for the lies had less to do with the actual centrifuge technology than with Iran’s determination to avoid any direct connection with A. Q. Khan, fearing that admitting dealings with the father of the Islamic bomb would raise more doubts about the claim that their program was strictly civilian. Even after the Libyans pointed the finger directly at Khan, officials with the Iranian nuclear agency denied doing business with him. But that story, too, began to unravel.

  About the same time Edwards was in Tehran, the laboratory results from the environmental sampling done nearly a year earlier at the secret workshop at Kalaye had come back positive—traces of highly enriched uranium had been picked up at the site. The results appeared to contradict Iran’s claims that it had not enriched uranium and showed why IAEA inspectors had been barred from Kalaye while workers tried to obliterate the evidence. Confronted with the results, the Iranians adopted a new strategy, asserting that the HEU traces were only contamination from used components and centrifuges that they had purchased from Pakistan. They continued to deny that Khan had been involved.

  On February 24, 2004, the IAEA staff produced a thirteen-page analysis of Iran’s nuclear program in preparation for a board of governors’ meeting the next month. The language of the report was scrubbed for several days, with various versions passed among senior officials for review. At one point, some of the language was shared with the Iranian delegation in Vienna, and they argued that some passages should be toned down and that they should get credit for cooperating with the inspections. The result was a compromise report th
at praised the Iranians for limited cooperation while still accusing them of withholding critical information and pointing out the common elements between Libya’s clearly military nuclear program and Iran’s, which the Iranians continued to assert was only civilian. “The basic technology is very similar and was largely obtained from the same foreign sources,” the report said.

  John Bolton was angered by the draft and pushed for tougher language. Kenneth Brill, the American ambassador to the IAEA, carried the complaints to ElBaradei and others, arguing that the agency had an obligation to declare that Iran’s lies about its nuclear program warranted a referral to the UN Security Council for possible economic sanctions. The consummate diplomat, ElBaradei was reluctant to pursue the path of confrontation laid out by the Americans, fearing that it would lead to a war like the one under way in Iraq, without hard evidence that Iran was engaged in a weapons program.

  The IAEA director general found support among the nonaligned countries represented on the agency’s board of governors, such as South Africa, Venezuela, Egypt, and Malaysia. These countries accepted ElBaradei’s conclusion. They were motivated partly by solidarity with Iran, which was also a member of the nonaligned movement, but more significantly by fears that their own civilian nuclear programs might be jeopardized in the future if they ran afoul of the United States. Their anger was increased because the Bush administration had recently disclosed that it was conducting research on a new generation of precision atomic weapons even as it was arguing that Iran should be denied a nuclear program because of suspicions about its intentions.