The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  KHAN finished the translation work at the end of October and returned to work in Amsterdam. Veerman remained concerned, and he kept a close eye on his friend, though he spoke to no one about his suspicions. As the weeks passed, he put the secret papers on the table out of his mind. By then, Khan’s copies of the plans were tucked away in a closet at his home. He tried to concentrate on his work, but he could think of little but the upcoming trip back to Pakistan and his meeting with the prime minister’s military adviser.

  In the middle of December, Khan flew home for his regular holiday. He settled Henny and the girls with his family in Karachi and took the two-hour flight to Islamabad for his meeting. Any pretense that the meeting was normal was contradicted by the fact that Khan had been instructed to use the code name “Karim” when he arrived at the prime minister’s office building. After passing through security, he was escorted into a large, formal office, where he expected to meet General Ali. When the military officer entered through a side door, Khan was surprised to see that he was followed by an even more imposing figure. Khan jumped to his feet, bowed slightly, and shook hands with Prime Minister Bhutto. Khan had brought his trove of plans and photographs with him, and he was fully prepared to say yes if Bhutto asked him to stay and join the nuclear program.

  Khan wasted no time in presenting his plan to Bhutto. He argued that Pakistan’s reliance on plutonium as a fissile material left the country open to interference from its antagonists in the West. Using a centrifuge plant to enrich uranium, on the other hand, Pakistan could achieve nuclear capability in a relatively short time, for less money, and in absolute secrecy. Material and equipment could be purchased quietly abroad, attracting less outside attention than the reprocessing plant Pakistan was trying to buy from France. Khan promised that Pakistan would be enriching uranium to the levels needed for a weapon in five years, a timetable that must have appealed to Bhutto, since the deadline he had imposed at Multan had been missed.

  Bhutto was skeptical. He had studied nuclear-weapons development enough to know that only a few countries had mastered the complicated processes of enriching uranium, and even those developed countries had taken years and spent millions of dollars. Still, facing delays with the plutonium project and the threat of American objections to the French deal, Bhutto was inclined to give Khan’s proposal serious consideration. Two paths to the bomb could prove better than one, and the prospect of working secretly to enrich uranium while the West watched the plutonium program was intriguing. Bhutto sent Khan on a Cook’s tour of Pakistan’s nuclear installations. After a few days, Khan returned to Islamabad and met again with the prime minister to report his observations. Khan said he had not been impressed by the progress, claiming that the plutonium route seemed impossible. To his surprise, Bhutto did not ask him to remain in Pakistan and start an enrichment program. Instead, the prime minister instructed him to go back to his job and supervise the beginnings of a secret procurement network to obtain the necessary equipment and technology. Once that was accomplished, the prime minister promised Khan that he would return and lead the enrichment program. No timetable was set, but Khan was elated with his new role.

  In meetings over the next few days, Khan learned the rudimentary tradecraft of espionage. He was given the name and telephone number of a contact at the embassy in Brussels named Siddique A. Butt and instructed to keep their conversations to a minimum. He was to come up with a shopping list and the names of suppliers from whom the material could be purchased, but the actual contacts with the outside companies would be handled by embassy personnel, who were protected by diplomatic immunity if something went wrong. In those days, Khan crossed the line from scientist to full-fledged spy and helped to lay the foundations for what was to become a global black market in nuclear technology.

  In early January, Khan returned to Amsterdam, bringing sweets for the secretaries and tiny carpets for the desktops of his colleagues, as was his habit. But he was a different man, with a different purpose. Veerman saw a subtle change in his office mate, noticing that he spent more time on the telephone, speaking what Veerman assumed was Urdu, and ducked out for meetings at odd hours of the day. Once he saw Khan stuff rolls of film into an envelope and seal it. Another time, Khan asked him to take photographs of some specific centrifuge components at FDO. On a visit to Khan’s house that spring, Veerman noticed some actual centrifuge components. Unlike when he saw the papers, this time the Dutchman spoke up, asking what Khan was doing with the parts. Khan explained that he had scavenged them as souvenirs from the discard bin at FDO and assured Veerman there was no cause for concern.

  Veerman could not rid himself of his suspicions this time, and they deepened a few weeks later when he was invited to a small afternoon party at Khan’s house. As he arrived, he noticed a car with diplomatic plates parked in front. Inside, he found his friend deep in conversation with two other men. Khan rose immediately and introduced Veerman to the pair, identifying them as Pakistani diplomats.

  Later that spring, as Khan was casually extolling the beauties of Pakistan, Veerman said he might like to go there on a holiday. Two weeks later, Khan told Veerman that he had arranged for the Pakistani government to pay for Veerman’s trip. He said they would provide airline tickets and a guesthouse in Lahore.

  “No, no,” Veerman insisted, somewhat surprised. “I will go there as a private person. I have no connection with your government.”

  Khan assured his friend there was no obligation, but the suggestion of a government-sponsored trip alarmed Veerman, and he anguished over whether this was yet another indication that his friend should be reported to the authorities. Again, he chose to wait, fearing that he was wrong. But if Veerman’s suspicions turned out to be well founded, he worried that the innocent help he had provided to Khan for so long might wind up implicating him. Faced with the possibility of being seen as an accomplice, he chose to stay silent, and the opportunity to stop Khan before he really got started was lost.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE PAKISTANI PIPELINE

  ONE OF THE DIPLOMATS who had been at Khan’s house during Veerman’s visit was Siddique Butt, who was listed as a science and technology officer at the Pakistani embassy in Brussels. When Bhutto had unveiled his plan at Multan in 1972, it was Butt who had stood up and enthusiastically embraced the audacious goal. His contribution had come not in the laboratory, however, but in the covert world of procurement. In 1974, Butt had been assigned to begin buying equipment in Europe for the plutonium project run by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. When Khan offered his services to Bhutto in September 1974, Butt’s assignment was expanded to encompass the new world of centrifuge enrichment.

  Khan had been given Butt’s name and contact details while he was in Pakistan in late 1974, and he wasted no time setting up a meeting with the young physicist when he returned to Amsterdam. With their shared background as scientists and belief in the need for a Pakistani bomb, the two men hit it off from the start. The relationship formed then was to extend for years, proving so effective that insiders gave it the nickname “the Pakistani pipeline.” Khan used a secure telephone number to set up meetings with Butt or convey simple information, and some of those conversations in Urdu were what Veerman had overheard at FDO. When it came to more complicated written information, like precision specifications for centrifuge components and reports on enrichment techniques, Khan copied the material and handed it over at his home or in crowded public places, where a casual encounter was unlikely to attract attention. In one case that had implications later, Khan worked on a Urenco team that developed specifications for a new type of ultrathin metal foil for the centrifuge process and copied the specs for Butt. Just six months after meeting with Bhutto, Khan had provided a nearly complete shopping list for the equipment and raw material for a centrifuge plant, as well as the names of suppliers in the Netherlands, Germany, and other countries working with Urenco.

  Butt’s job was to buy the equipment and get it shipped to Pakistan, employing a
network of other diplomats, covert agents, and front companies. As the flow of information from Khan increased, the procurement effort grew more elaborate, and Butt enlisted the help of Pakistanis whose diplomatic or scientific credentials allowed them to visit sensitive nuclear installations across Europe and in Canada and in the United States. Many of these people were part of the wave of bright young men sent overseas for training as nuclear scientists in the 1960s. Together, they managed to turn a handful of the country’s embassies into miniprocurement offices for the two secret nuclear programs and inaugurate a practice that came to be known as the gray market. The modus operandi was to develop a list of the required technology and equipment and assign to each item a potential civilian use, which would be used to describe the item to prospective sellers and government export officials. For example, frequency inverters required for centrifuges would be designated for use in textile factories, which also require spinning machines.

  As the procurement orders grew more specific, the risk that the scheme would be discovered increased, too. In the summer of 1975, Butt set up two separate front companies to mask his plans for obtaining restricted metal that would be used to form the cylindrical rotors central to centrifuge assemblies. Both companies placed orders for tubes manufactured from high-strength aluminum at a handful of manufacturing plants in the Netherlands that were already supplying the same material to Urenco. The coincidence was not lost on officials at the Dutch companies. When they recognized that the technical specifications exactly matched those for centrifuges under development by the consortium, the orders were politely rebuffed. Similarly, when Butt wrote to one of the Dutch firms on Khan’s list about buying a large number of high-frequency transformers to regulate the flow of electricity that keep centrifuges spinning at a consistent speed, the specifications raised another red flag, and the order was refused.

  Those incidents were reported to the Dutch authorities, who passed on the information to the CIA and European intelligence agencies. The Americans knew the Pakistanis were buying nuclear equipment, but they misinterpreted the purchase patterns and believed that the acquisitions were related only to the plutonium program. In response, diplomatic and export-control efforts were concentrated on blocking the French deal on the reprocessing plant. What the Americans and the rest of the world did not yet understand was that Bhutto had set his country on a second, more secret path, which relied on the cleverness of his new volunteer, A. Q. Khan. It simply did not occur to Western experts and intelligence agents that Pakistan could acquire the technological expertise to enrich uranium. The failure to recognize the significance of the threat was part of a pattern of underestimating the Pakistanis that contributed to their ultimate success.

  Stopping the trade in nuclear technology rested officially with the International Atomic Energy Agency, but few American officials thought the IAEA was up to the task. The agency was regarded primarily as a promoter of civilian nuclear energy and its applications, rather than a proliferation watch dog. The Americans also understood that the agency’s investigative capabilities had been restricted from the outset. As a result, Washington made diplomatic approaches to European governments to tighten controls over the exports of nuclear technology, an effort that ran into opposition in several countries. Washington wanted to stop the export of equipment that fell into the category of “dual-use technology,” which could be used in either a civilian nuclear program or a military one. The argument worked best with the Dutch and British, both of whom already cooperated closely with the United States on many issues. Germany and Switzerland were among the countries that were less receptive, suspicious of the American motives and willing to put their commercial interests ahead of proliferation concerns.

  The German economy had boomed after the Marshall Plan following World War II, with a civilian nuclear sector thriving under a massive government program to achieve energy independence. The Germans had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but their officials and industrial leaders had viewed the agreement primarily as a means to jump-start their own nuclear industry. When Germany tried to sell eight reactors, a uranium-enrichment plant, and plutonium-reprocessing facilities to Brazil, which had refused to sign the nonproliferation treaty, the Americans objected. The Germans eventually put the deal on hold, but killing the multibillion-dollar project left them with an unpleasant sense that the Americans were not as interested in counterproliferation as they were in aiding their own nuclear giants, such as Westinghouse and General Electric.

  Germany’s lax attitude toward proliferation and its general irritation with the United States provided fertile ground for Butt. He bought enough of a steel alloy known as maraging steel to produce 532 centrifuges. The steel was not on the restricted export list, and the German supplier, Rochling, filled the order and shipped it to Pakistan. In another case, a British technician working at the Almelo plant visited a company in Germany’s Rhine Valley to inspect specialized, free-flowing lathes being assembled for shipment to Urenco, where they would be used to manufacture centrifuge components. As he walked across the assembly floor, the technician noticed an extra lathe that appeared identical to the ones ordered by Urenco. When he asked where that lathe was headed, he was told it had been ordered by a company in Pakistan. The technician reported his discovery to British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the British partner in Urenco. When the British relayed their concerns to the German government, they were told that the sale did not violate any export controls. All the British could do was put on a watch list the Pakistani front company buying the lathe.

  For all its success in Germany, the Pakistani pipeline kept running into obstacles in the Netherlands, where authorities kept a closer eye on sales of nuclear-related technology and material. Despite several failures, however, Butt and his crew had to keep trying Dutch companies because they were the only sources for some of the components specified by Khan. These repeated attempts eventually became impossible to ignore.

  The discovery of Khan’s duplicity occurred because of the need for the special metal foil that Khan had helped to develop for Urenco. In September 1975, Butt placed an order for a large quantity of the foil with its Dutch manufacturers. As had happened with orders at other companies, officials at the firm recognized immediately that the order’s specifications were identical to those used by Urenco. The company alerted Urenco’s Dutch arm.

  Pakistan’s earlier attempts to acquire sensitive technology had been passed off as isolated incidents, but this attempt convinced FDO officials that the order could only be based on inside knowledge. In an attempt to discover if there was a mole, FDO security officials tracked the development path of the foil, tracing the specifications to a nonclassified research report prepared by a team of FDO scientists. Going down the list of scientists involved in the research, the security personnel stopped at a suspicious name: A. Q. Khan. The connection between the order placed by a Pakistani diplomat and a Pakistani scientist at FDO was circumstantial, but it raised the possibility that the laboratory had been infiltrated. FDO security investigators were worried enough that they went to the Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst (BVD), the Dutch national security service.

  Khan, granted a measure of immunity on account of his courtesy and friendliness, had been passing information to Butt for months without attracting suspicion. When the BVD launched its investigation, the agency discovered that Khan had worked on far more than the foil design—he had spent more than three years at the company, much of the time dealing with sensitive information, including the top-secret German designs. The potential for damage was enormous, and Khan was immediately placed under surveillance.

  In October, Khan was scheduled to travel to a nuclear-industry exhibition in Basel, Switzerland. The BVD and Urenco debated whether to permit him to leave the Netherlands and Dutch jurisdiction, fearing that he would bolt for Pakistan if he suspected anything was amiss. But canceling his trip, even on a pretext, risked alerting Khan that he was under suspicion before it could be determined h
ow much damage he might have done to the centrifuge program. In the end, the decision was made to let him go to the meeting, with a pair of BVD agents on his trail.

  Khan was in his element at the exhibition. He circulated from booth to booth, chatting with engineers and gathering promotional brochures. When the BVD agents approached the engineers with whom Khan had been speaking, they learned that he was asking about classified aspects of nuclear-weapons work, something far outside his responsibilities at FDO—a discovery that seemed to confirm suspicions that Khan was more than an innocent metallurgist.

  Something else caught the attention of the BVD agents. They spotted Khan deep in conversation several times with Henk Slebos, the former classmate who had suggested the job at FDO to Khan four years earlier. Since then, Slebos had gone to work for a company that supplied welding material to FDO, and the two men had quietly renewed their ties. The BVD knew nothing of the earlier connection between Khan and Slebos, but the Dutchman was already on the radar of the security service because Urenco authorities had voiced suspicions about his unusual curiosity regarding secret aspects of the centrifuge program. The possibility that Khan was connected to Slebos heightened the concerns of the BVD agents, though they lacked hard evidence the two men were engaged in wrongdoing.