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 spread of nuclear know-how and related technology has gone far beyond the traditional weapons states and outstripped their capacity to control it. In 2005, Britain’s MI5 revealed that more than 360 businesses and individuals worldwide were suspected of playing a role in the development of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. MI5 said these entities and people were concentrated in the developing countries of the Middle East and South Asia.

  Recent history offers little reason for optimism that this proliferation can be contained. President Kennedy’s dire prediction in 1963 that there would be twenty countries with nuclear weapons by 1975 did not come true. But the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, which helped hold down the number, is in danger of falling apart because of defiance by North Korea and Iran and the threat of new entrants in the atomic sweepstakes. The biggest danger lies in the domino effect: North Korea and Iran are likely to be followed by Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Unlike some of those countries, Japan is a highly industrialized country with the nuclear and military infrastructure in place to flip the switch and go from zero to nuclear in almost an instant, which could trigger a wider arms race. What will Washington do if an ally like Japan or oil-rich Saudi Arabia decides to go nuclear? Probably nothing.

  The challenge of proliferation control lies not in the lack of proven techniques but in the absence of moral suasion and sustained diplomacy by the world’s leaders. The American government subsidized the spread of nuclear knowledge through the Atoms for Peace program to counter Soviet influence, and at virtually every critical juncture since then successive administrations have set aside long-term proliferation goals in favor of short-term strategic priorities. Jimmy Carter did it in 1979 when he abandoned sanctions on Pakistan in exchange for help fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan; Ronald Reagan continued the policy throughout the eighties; George W. Bush sacrificed the opportunity to uproot Khan’s network to maintain the support of the Musharraf regime in the fight against Al Qaeda. As a result, independent nodes of Khan’s network went to ground and have since reinvented themselves to proliferate another day. In each case, the more immediate U.S. goals seem worthy—until the day comes that a nuclear weapon is detonated in a major city and incinerates tens of thousands of people.

  The logical question is, What steps are required to restrain the ambitions of the nuclear aspirants? Several are readily identifiable, though not so easily adopted:

  The first order of business is restricting the supply of highly enriched uranium. A moratorium should be imposed on new enrichment plants, coupled with additional layers of international inspection on existing plants to lessen the chances of diversion. Countries that agree to forgo enriching uranium for their civilian reactors should be guaranteed access to internationally regulated supplies of the fuel. Mohamed ElBaradei has proposed this approach, but developing countries object to curtailing rights to enrichment created under the nonproliferation treaty. To further restrict access to bomb material, the dozens of research reactors worldwide that use highly enriched uranium should be replaced with versions relying on the less dangerous low-enriched uranium.

  The nonproliferation treaty, which remains the world’s primary arms-control regime, is battered and in desperate need of reform. A critical change is closing a gaping loophole that allows a country to acquire nuclear-weapons capabilities and then withdraw from the treaty without penalty, as North Korea did and as many expect Iran to do. A group of twenty-three nuclear experts at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation proposed that the UN Security Council establish sanctions to impose on any country that withdraws from the treaty and tries to build weapons using fissile material and facilities obtained for supposedly peaceful purposes.

  Reforms must go beyond taking from the have-nots. When the treaty was drawn up, the vast majority of the countries agreed to forgo nuclear weapons on condition that the five existing nuclear powers eventually reduce their arsenals. While the Russians and Americans made substantial progress in the years after the end of the Cold War, they have not gone far enough—and they still possess twenty-six thousand nuclear weapons between them. More troubling, the Americans are threatening to reverse the trend. The Bush administration initiated research into a new type of tactical nuclear weapons, called “bunker busters,” and began designing the nation’s first new nuclear weapon in two decades. In 2002, the administration released its “Nuclear Posture Review,” which recommended a continued reliance on nuclear weapons to “achieve strategic and political objectives” and advocated using them to “dissuade adversaries from undertaking military programs or operations that could threaten U.S. interests or those of allies and friends.”

  The Bush nuclear doctrine undermines its arguments that others should give up or not acquire nuclear weapons. The next American president needs to make a commitment to further reductions in the arsenal and abandon the development of new weapons and the strategy of using them for tactical warfare. Other nuclear powers must restrain themselves, too, pulling back from what author Jonathan Schell calls a “nuclear renaissance” in which China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Britain are increasing their arsenals or improving their delivery systems—or both.

  If the United States is to reduce the threat of a nuclear attack in the coming years, the next president must do a far better job of balancing long-range proliferation concerns with short-term strategic goals. This will require enforcing restrictions on sales of nuclear technology to allies as well as adversaries, and recognizing that the dangers of nuclear annihilation far outweigh the benefits of coddling nuclear aspirants even if they appear to be friends. Containment is more challenging today than it was during the Cold War or before September 11; it is also more important to the security of Americans and the rest of the world. Along with taking challenging unilateral steps, the United States must recognize the gravity of the nuclear threat by assuming a leadership role in strengthening existing international treaties and developing new methods and eschewing the inflammatory rhetoric of unilateralism.

  The IAEA is the best hope for enforcing new treaties, but the agency requires more cooperation from its member states and the ratification of new power in order to carry out its mission of safeguarding nuclear facilities and uncovering hidden sites. An important step in expanding its reach is embodied in the Additional Protocol, but since its passage in 1995 only 112 countries have signed the agreement, and eighty-one of them have ratified it. Among the countries that have not yet signed are several with substantial nuclear activities, including Argentina, Brazil, and Egypt.

  As the Khan network proved, nuclear proliferation is the result of dedicated clandestine programs that are not always related to existing civilian nuclear programs and diversion from power plants. Enforcing a tougher nonproliferation treaty will not go far enough. Stopping the spread of atomic weapons in the new nuclear age also depends on close monitoring of the nuclear industry and strengthened international cooperation through full transparency with regard to sales of nuclear-related technology and improved intelligence sharing.

  These are steps that offer the promise of slowing global proliferation, though few believe that it can be stopped without more radical action, such as the abolition of all nuclear weapons. The idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds: The vast majority of countries in the UN General Assembly have voted regularly to get rid of all nuclear weapons, and two thirds of Americans responding to a public-opinion poll in 2006 agreed with the statement “no country should be allowed to have nuclear weapons”; the favorable response was even higher in other countries.

  LEONARD WEISS, who has spent thirty years working on counterproliferation, advocates going a dramatic step farther, arguing that abolishing nuclear power is the only certain way to avoid Armageddon. As long as nuclear power plants exist, he reasons, so will the opportunity to divert fissile material to weapons. Since retiring from Senator Glenn’s staff in 1999, Weiss has worked as a consultant to Lawrence Livermore Nation
al Laboratory and written extensively about nonproliferation policy. After Khan was exposed, Weiss wrote passionately about the United States turning a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear development and bemoaned the absence of a consistent proliferation policy, just as he had during his days as a Senate staffer.

  “Instead of following a single standard for everyone, we made distinctions between countries, between our friends and our enemies,” he said one day in the spring of 2007 as he sat in a small apartment at the edge of the Stanford University campus, where he is a fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. “When you get down to fundamentals—things like nuclear weapons—you must treat your friends and enemies the same. Only then can you have a nonproliferation policy.”

  Richard Barlow has had little time to relish Khan’s downfall and finds no satisfaction in being proved right. Instead, he remains obsessed with winning the pension he was denied after his dismissal from the Pentagon. His efforts have been hampered because there are few protections against retaliation for intelligence officers and other national security staffers who reveal wrongdoing. He lives with two dogs in a motor home and works sporadically as a fishing and hunting guide in New Mexico and Montana. “The government viciously tried to destroy my life, personally and professionally,” he said forcefully one night over dinner in Los Angeles. “Not just my career, but they went after my marriage, my livelihood, and smeared my name in truly extraordinary ways that no one has ever seen before or since, at least until Joe and Valerie Wilson were victims of the same people.” Valerie Wilson was a covert CIA agent whose cover was exposed after her husband criticized claims by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Niger, one of the justifications for the war in Iraq. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, was sentenced to thirty months in prison for lying to federal investigators looking into the leak of Wilson’s identity as a CIA agent.

  In Islamabad, Abdul Qadeer Khan remains a figure of adulation in some circles, despite his confession to peddling his country’s dearest secrets. Officially, he remains under tight house arrest, with visitors restricted and his compound under constant military guard. But when he was hospitalized in the summer of 2006 with heart problems and high blood pressure, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz sent flowers, and prayers for his recovery were recited across the country. About the same time, the Pakistani Senate passed a resolution opposing American requests to interrogate Khan as interference in the country’s internal affairs. By the middle of 2007, Pakistani authorities were easing the restrictions on Khan, allowing the scientist to have visitors at home and make brief excursions outside. Despite the American aid flowing into Pakistan at the rate of $1 billion a year, Khan remained outside the reach of interrogators from the United States or the IAEA.

  Others sought to rewrite Pakistan’s nuclear history, downplaying the disgraced scientist’s role. In May 2006, Defence Journal, a publication controlled by the Pakistani military, devoted thirty-six pages to relegating Khan to the dustbins of the country’s golden nuclear era, replacing him on the pedestal with his old rival, Munir Khan. That fall, Musharraf published his memoir, In the Line of Fire, in which he described the discovery of Khan’s proliferation network as one of “the most serious and sad crises” he had ever faced. As for the scientist, Musharraf wrote: “The truth is that he was just a metallurgist, responsible for only one link in the complex chain of nuclear development. But he had managed to build himself up into Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer rolled into one.”

  For a simple metallurgist, Khan wreaked enormous damage and played a critical role in ushering in the second age of proliferation. His ego and his nationalism, his skill at subterfuge, and his religious fervor all combined to push the Doomsday Clock a little closer to midnight.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE CREDIT for this book belongs to our sources, the scores of people who provided us with insights into the complexities and nuances of nuclear proliferation, espionage, and geopolitics. Many of them sat for multiple interviews over the course of many months, sharing their knowledge and trusting us to convey it as accurately and fairly as possible. Some of them are named in the endnotes, but others must necessarily remain anonymous. We are sincerely grateful to all of them for their help, and we accept all responsibility for any errors or omissions in compiling this book.

  More than any others, the staff at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna was instrumental in bringing this book to life. They guided us through their arcane world with unflagging commitment to the truth and with patience and good humor. We cannot name all of those who assisted us, but special thanks go to members of the communications staff—Mark Gwozdecky, Melissa Fleming, Peter Rickwood, and Elizabeth Dobie-Sarsam—and members of the safeguards division—Olli Heinonen, Pierre Goldschmidt, and Miharu Yonemura—as well as Jacques Baute, Terry Dunn, and Tariq Rauf.

  Many excellent journalists came to this subject before us, and many competed with us over the last five years. We could not have written this without relying on their contributions to the body of knowledge about nuclear proliferation and A. Q. Khan. Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker broke major stories about this topic, from the early 1990s until the present. David Sanger and William Broad of The New York Times and Dafna Linzer of The Washington Post were dogged in their coverage of the Khan network and the IAEA. Louis Charbonneau from Reuters was the best beat reporter at the IAEA, perhaps ever, and a good friend, too. Steve Coll wrote extensively and thoughtfully about this topic at The Washington Post and most recently at The New Yorker; his marvelous book Ghost Wars provided innumerable insights into the CIA and its relationship with Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. At the Los Angeles Times, we were assisted by Josh Meyer, a persistent and knowledgeable reporter, Bill Rempel, a trusted colleague, and former Johannesburg researcher Salma Patel. In 2003, then managing editor Dean Baquet and Marjorie Miller, the foreign editor, helped launch the reporting that led to this book. In Switzerland, Bruno Vanoni of Tages Anzeiger proved an able guide to the complexities of the export bureaucracy.

  Len Weiss devoted hours to explaining the history of U.S. proliferation policy and correcting our misunderstandings about all things nuclear. We are grateful for the friendship of Len and his wife, Sandy. Richard Barlow was always available to answer any question, and he illuminated the mistakes of the Pentagon and CIA for us.

  Among the many denizens of the world’s think tanks and policy institutes, a handful was particularly instructive and always helpful. George Perkovich at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., offered excellent insights on American policy in South Asia. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, has written extensively and provocatively about this subject for many years. Jeffrey T. Richelson, author and senior fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington, shared his knowledge and some key documents. Avner Cohen of the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Maryland knows more about Israel’s nuclear-weapons program than any person willing to talk about it, and we benefited from his generosity. Frank Slijper and his colleagues at the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade prepared an extensive history of Khan’s activities in the Netherlands for Greenpeace International.

  Our understanding of Pakistan, however flawed it may be, was enhanced enormously by the help of our friend Stuart Hughes and his diplomatic colleague, Aized Ali. Husain Haqqani, a journalist and professor at Boston University, graciously shared his extensive knowledge of his homeland. Hassan Abbas of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs proved a formidable guide to the intricacies of Pakistani bureaucracy and law enforcement. Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University, is simply one of the most honest and brave people we know, and we are honored to have spent time with him. Numerous Pakistani journalists and former government officials, who for their o
wn safety cannot be named, spent hours schooling us.

  The concept of Twelve Books is brilliant, and so was our editor there, Jonathan Karp. Sometimes we thought he understood the subject better than we did, which was always comforting. We are also indebted to Nate Gray, the editorial assistant at Twelve, and Cary Goldstein, publicist extraordinaire. Our agent, Kathy Robbins, fought for our book at every step, and we cannot thank her enough. Thanks, too, to her tireless assistant, Coralie Hunter.

  And finally, a special thanks to friends and family who listened over and over again to the refrain, “This week we are going to finish the book.” With their help and understanding, we finally did.

  NOTES

  The following is a guide to the main sources of information in the book. For complete end notes, with detailed references to source material and links to original documents, please refer to our Web site, www.thenuclearjihadist.com.

  The primary source of factual material was hundreds of hours of interviews with people who had firsthand knowledge of the subject matter. In many cases, more than one participant in an event was interviewed; some people were interviewed multiple times over the course of many months. The interviews were augmented with thousands of pages of public and confidential documents from government agencies and courts around the world, personal notes taken by participants, and reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

  Many people spoke to us only after being promised confidentiality. The reasons for requesting anonymity varied: Some were not authorized to provide the depth of detail that they shared with us; others feared reprisals by their governments or employers. We have respected these requests and endeavored to corroborate as much information as possible from other sources to provide the fullest and most complete picture possible.

  The book was written in a narrative style that places readers as close as possible to major events. As a result, occasionally it was necessary to reconstruct conversations in order not to interrupt the narrative flow for attribution. Many of these reconstructions are from official transcripts and post-conversation summaries prepared by participants; in other instances, the information was provided later by one or more participants. In some cases, the authors’ notes examine discrepancies between versions of events.