The Nuclear Jihadist
Page 14
Carter faced a historic decision, one that would shape American nuclear policy and determine the fate of Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions. The president was dogged by the ongoing Iranian hostage crisis, which was damaging his political standing at home and America’s image in the world. So Carter accepted Brzezinski’s argument that the prospect of defeating the Soviets outweighed the goal of stopping Pakistan’s nuclear program, agreeing to lift the sanctions imposed two years earlier. Then, he went so far as to offer four hundred million dollars in economic and military aid to Pakistan.
President Carter justified his decision by telling Congress in his State of the Union address on January 23, 1980, that the United States needed to support Pakistan’s territorial integrity by easing sanctions. The only mention of the nuclear arms race in the speech was in the context of controlling the threat from the Soviets; Carter said nothing about Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, though a statement sent out a few days later by the State Department pledged that the renewed assistance to Islamabad was not intended to diminish the American commitment to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons in Pakistan or elsewhere.
For a second time the American government had decided that short-term strategic considerations outweighed the future danger from Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, again opening the door to Khan and his associates. Four years earlier, the CIA had decided to let the Pakistani scientist escape Dutch arrest and continue gathering the know-how and equipment for the enrichment plant, so that the Americans could keep track of what the Pakistanis were doing on the nuclear front. Now, Carter and Brzezinski were giving the Pakistani government carte blanche to carry on its nuclear-weapons development in exchange for its help against the Soviets. The goal of stopping Pakistan’s nuclear effort was sacrificed, and American moral authority to advocate for the cause of nonproliferation was severely damaged.
Anyone who doubted the lasting damage of that decision on American proliferation policy needed only to listen to Ronald Reagan, the former California governor who was seeking the Republican presidential nomination to run against Carter. Reagan was determined to go much further: During a campaign stop in Jacksonville, Florida, on January 31, 1980, he was asked his concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons ambitions. “I just don’t think it’s any of our business,” he replied.
Reagan won the Republican nomination and defeated Carter, who had been damaged by both his inability to extricate the hostages from Tehran and a sagging domestic economy. The hostages were released in January 1981 as Reagan moved into the White House, but the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan was just beginning, and the new president wasted no time embracing the new leniency on Pakistan’s nuclear program. It was decided that Washington could live with Pakistan’s pursuit of an atomic bomb as long as it got the help it needed against the Soviets. Reagan’s first secretary of state, General Alexander Haig, told Pakistani officials that their nuclear program “need not become the centerpiece of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.” For the next eight years, the Reagan administration concentrated on keeping Pakistan on its side in the war against the Soviets, while Pakistan concentrated on perfecting its bomb.
BY COINCIDENCE, Reagan’s selection as ambassador to Pakistan was Ronald Spiers, a strong supporter of nuclear containment whose memo nearly three decades earlier had planted the seeds for the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency as part of the Atoms for Peace program. Before his appointment, Spiers had been in charge of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, where he had overseen the report warning that elements of Pakistan’s military leadership considered nuclear weapons part of the arsenal of terror. But Spiers was a career foreign-service officer who knew that his job was to execute the policies established by the president, and it was clear that proliferation was a much lower priority than prosecuting the Afghan war. “We would not have done anything to jeopardize Pakistani cooperation by taking too hard a position on the nuclear issue,” he said, years later. “The administration had made a very pragmatic, though probably unarticulated, decision to keep an eye on nuclear matters, but not to do anything to jeopardize the Afghan business. Washington put it to the Pakistanis in a way that signaled, ‘Don’t do anything to embarrass us.’ The Pakistanis probably understood this as a go-ahead.”
The message was reinforced in the spring of 1981 when Reagan submitted a request to Congress for $3.2 billion in aid to Pakistan over the next six years, a dramatic escalation. The assistance was to be divided equally between economic and military assistance, including the option to buy forty F-16s, which the Pakistani Air Force had been trying to buy since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Senator Alan Cranston, a liberal Democrat from California, was one of the few members of Congress who spoke out against the plan, warning that Congress was being kept in the dark about Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions.
Len Weiss agreed with Cranston, but he was unable to persuade his boss to oppose the package. Like most of his colleagues, Senator Glenn proved too much the Cold Warrior and voted to open the flow of military and economic aid to Pakistan. Weiss did succeed, however, in convincing Glenn to insist that the aid package include a provision that required it be cut off if Pakistan tested a nuclear weapon. In the end, however, Congress approved what became the largest American assistance package in the world, including the F-16s and other advanced weapons. The legislation also gave the president the authority to waive the Symington and Glenn amendments for six years if he deemed doing so to be in the national interest. The action effectively removed the remaining impediment to Pakistan’s nuclear efforts.
Weiss had invested enormous intellectual and emotional energy advocating a tough policy on proliferation, and he was convinced waiving the sanctions and ignoring hard evidence of Pakistan’s pursuit of nuclear weapons spelled the end of Washington’s attempt to be an honest broker concerning proliferation. “As a result of supporting the Afghan rebels and refusing to act against Pakistan, our credibility on nonproliferation policy was destroyed,” he said.
If Zia had any lingering doubts about American tolerance of his nuclear agenda, they were resolved in December 1982 when he visited Reagan at the White House. A briefing paper prepared for Reagan pointed out that concerns remained about Pakistan’s human-rights record, its opium production, and its nuclear program, but the emphasis was on maintaining close ties with Islamabad. “The fundamental aim of U.S. policy toward Pakistan today is to help this front-line nation provide for its own security and independence in the face of the threat from 100,000 Soviet troops across the border in Afghanistan and general instability in the region,” said the paper.
Reagan stayed on message, telling Zia that his administration would pretend Pakistan’s nuclear program did not exist, so long as the Pakistanis adhered to three main points. First, it would not actually manufacture a nuclear weapon. Second, it would not transfer nuclear technology to another country. Finally, it would not embarrass the United States by going public with its progress toward a weapon. The deal erected a convenient fiction that was to exist as long as Pakistan remained useful to the United States. In the years to come, maintaining the illusion would require hairsplitting by administration lawyers over what constituted possession of a nuclear weapon and, eventually, outright lying to Congress.
Along with the turning of a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, Reagan’s determination to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan led to other consequences that would one day boomerang on America. The Afghan war attracted a new breed of Islamic fighter, eager to embrace the holy war and oust the Soviets. Among them was Osama bin Laden, the son of a wealthy construction-company owner in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden later claimed that he went to Afghanistan within two weeks of the invasion, though others said that he did not arrive until 1982. In either case, bin Laden’s operations in the first years of the war were based in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, not far from the Afghan border. From there, he recruited fighters from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries, providin
g them with cash and equipment and dispatching them to expel the Soviets and install a fundamentalist regime in Kabul. Bin Laden did not conceal his disdain for the United States because of its alliances with Israel and moderate Muslim countries, and before the end of the Afghan war the Saudi firebrand started building a new global organization dedicated to carrying the fight beyond Afghanistan to the United States.
WITH AMERICAN attention diverted, Pakistan’s nuclear work went ahead at a remarkable pace. By 1981, construction was completed on the outer shell of the enrichment plant at Kahuta, and technicians were preparing the huge halls for thousands of centrifuges. In honor of the milestone, Zia attended a public dedication ceremony, and he renamed the plant the Dr. A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories. Khan basked in the glory. In the five years since his return, his achievements had gone beyond the realm of science. Since the execution of Bhutto, Khan had cultivated a close relationship with Zia that allowed him to maintain his freedom from government oversight. Like a chameleon, Khan had adopted a style of dress that amounted to protective coloration. He initially abandoned his Western suits and ties in favor of the traditional flowing pants and baggy shirts known as shalwar kameez worn by Bhutto and most Pakistani men. But with Zia’s ascension, Khan switched to well-tailored beige safari suits. Not quite military, not quite civilian, they provided a distinctive uniform for the man who straddled both worlds. Rarely was he seen in public wearing anything else. Khan’s religious coloration changed, too, under Zia. Although Khan had observed the religious prohibitions against alcohol and pork throughout his life, friends saw a new pious streak emerge as the scientist began referring to Allah in conversations and public remarks and denouncing the United States and Israel.
Though still operating in a cocoon of secrecy, Khan started courting a small group of high-level Pakistani journalists. Occasionally, he reached out to them to make a comment in the Urdu press about the progress of his work or to react to criticism of his country from the Western press. Always, he was careful to couch any reference to Pakistan’s nuclear program in civilian terms.
Khan’s long hours and frequent trips abroad meant he was often absent from home. His daughters were growing up without him, but the family’s circumstances had improved sharply. They had moved into the grand house on Margalla Road, where the neighbors were foreign ambassadors and wealthy Pakistani businessmen. Khan’s home was a gracious white building surrounded by a large yard enclosed behind a high wall, with a guard shack at the gated entrance manned twenty-four hours per day by military police. Behind the wall were fruit and flowering trees, inhabited by monkeys that Khan fed regularly, and a swimming pool where he exercised and the children played. Inside, dominating one wall of Khan’s study, was a constant reminder of his past: a large painting showing red flames spewing from the last train leaving strife-torn India for the new country of Pakistan.
Khan was growing imperious at work. While he could still turn on the charms of the friendly, humble man who had seduced his colleagues in the Netherlands, workers who crossed him quickly discovered his nasty temper. More than one technician was fired for angering the boss, but those who did well and remained in his favor could count on top salaries and regular cash bonuses.
By this time, Khan had surpassed his rival, Munir Khan. The plutonium effort was still stumbling, and enrichment looked more than ever like Pakistan’s quickest path to a nuclear weapon, with the huge halls of the main plant at Kahuta almost finished. A test cascade of fifty-four centrifuges set up at the pilot plant in Sihala had run smoothly, and engineers were resolving last-minute problems so Khan could give the green light to begin mass production of the machines for Kahuta. Work at related installations was progressing quickly, too. Using equipment purchased in Germany, a plant to convert uranium ore into uranium hexafluoride was being completed in Dera Ghazi Khan, adjacent to the country’s only uranium mine and a mill capable of producing thirty metric tons of uranium ore per year. When the conversion plant was up and running, it could supply enough uranium gas to operate thousands of centrifuges.
While Khan concentrated on enriching uranium, scientists at the PAEC used a front company to purchase two powerful computers to conduct research on a nuclear warhead. The progress on the design worried Khan, who wanted to maintain complete control over the entire nuclear program, so he assigned a team of his own engineers to begin a secret effort to design a competing warhead, which was based on plans that he had obtained from the Chinese.
Sometime in the early 1980s British intelligence had discovered that Khan had the Chinese plans. Though the Americans were no longer pushing strict controls on sales of nuclear technology to Pakistan, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 were continuing to monitor Kahuta and Khan’s travels. On several occasions, agents tried to strike up conversations with him at technical conferences outside Pakistan, but they had no luck, and Khan joked to colleagues about the ineptitude of Western intelligence agencies. During one trip, however, MI6 agents broke into his hotel room and photographed the documents in his suitcase. They shipped the film to London, where nuclear experts determined that they were designs for a nuclear device tested by the Chinese in 1966. The British shared their find with the CIA.
Vernon Walters, a former CIA deputy director serving as President Reagan’s roving envoy, was dispatched by Washington to confront Zia about the obvious violation of his agreement not to embarrass Reagan. Sitting opposite the Pakistani president and Munir Khan in the president’s office, Walters spread copies of the drawings across a table and watched their reaction. “What is this thing that looks like anyone could have drawn?” asked Zia. Munir Khan seemed surprised, too. Walters explained what he was certain Zia already knew—that the designs were for a nuclear warhead. He warned Zia not to build the warhead or do anything else that would provoke Reagan.
PAKISTAN was not the only country trying to cloak a nuclear-weapons program in civilian clothes. About the same time that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had launched his campaign for the bomb at Multan in 1972, Saddam Hussein had started a clandestine weapons program in Iraq. At the time, Saddam was the country’s vice president and second in command of the ruling Revolutionary Council. He recognized that building an atomic bomb would require orchestrating a grand deception to persuade the international community that his only goal was generating electricity. Iraq had been among the first signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which entitled the country to buy advanced nuclear technology as long as it was used for civilian purposes only.
The French nuclear industry had taken the lead in helping Iraq build its first nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha, a dusty outpost ten miles southeast of Baghdad. The French called the reactor Osirak, a combination of the name of the Egyptian god of the dead, Osiris, and Iraq. Like the Indians and the Pakistanis, the Iraqis planned to reprocess the spent reactor-fuel plutonium for weapons, but the reactor also contained highly enriched uranium at its core, which could be used to manufacture a crude nuclear device. While the French may have thought the Iraqi program was civilian, the Israelis recognized it as a military effort from the start and conveyed their concerns to the French on several occasions. In the late 1970s, the Israelis persuaded the French to propose fueling the Osirak reactor with a form of low-enriched uranium, which could not be used for a weapon, but the Iraqis refused to change to their agreement. When diplomacy failed, the Israelis turned to other means.
Israeli intelligence set up a fictitious group, the Committee to Safeguard the Islamic Revolution, to send threatening letters to scientists and technicians working at Tuwaitha, but they did not stop there. Early on the morning of April 6, 1979, several Israeli demolition experts broke into a hangar operated by a French nuclear company at La Seyne-sur-Mer, near the port of Toulon, and destroyed reactor cores scheduled to be shipped to Iraq. The sabotage was attributed to a previously unknown organization, the French Ecological Group, but French intelligence suspected the sophistication of the operation meant it was carried out by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence ser
vice.
Slightly more than a year later, French intelligence again suspected Mossad of taking matters into its own hands. Yahya el-Meshad, an Egyptian-born nuclear scientist trained in the Soviet Union, had been recruited by Iraq to work in its nuclear program. On June 14, 1980, Meshad was on a trip to France to inspect work being done for Osirak. That afternoon, a chambermaid at the Paris hotel where he was staying let herself into his room, despite the “Do Not Disturb” sign that had been hanging on the door since the previous night. Inside, she found the Egyptian scientist, lying across his bed, fully clothed and bludgeoned to death. When police arrived, they determined that the only item missing was the scientist’s personal diary. The sole lead appeared to be makeup smeared on a bathroom towel, and police quickly discovered that Meshad had been accompanied to his room the night before by a prostitute. The police eventually identified the prostitute as Marie Claude Magal, but when she was tracked down and questioned, she claimed that Meshad had turned her away and gone into his room alone. Magal acknowledged hearing noises inside the room as she walked away, but she insisted that they did not appear to indicate violence. A few days after her initial interrogation, the police sought Magal for additional questioning and found that she had been hit by a car and killed.