The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  Sharif was hesitant to test, fearing the economic impact of international sanctions like those imposed on India, so Clinton’s offer must have been enticing. But he told the American president that he faced tremendous pressure from his generals, Islamist parties, and an overwhelming majority of the population. The Clinton administration was well aware of the pressure and where it was leading.

  Three days after the initial Indian test, CIA director George Tenet testified before a closed session of the Senate and House intelligence committees, telling them that satellites had picked up preparations for underground nuclear testing in the Chagai Hills of southwestern Pakistan. The images showed heavy traffic along roads leading to the test site. The consensus in the intelligence community, he said, was that a Pakistani nuclear test was imminent.

  On May 15, an emergency session of Pakistan’s national-defense committee was convened to debate the pros and cons of testing, with Sharif and his cabinet in attendance along with the senior members of the military. Two items were on the agenda: Should Pakistan carry out nuclear tests? And if so, should the test be performed by the PAEC or Khan Research Laboratories? As part of the deliberations, Sharif described Clinton’s incentives, but there was skepticism that the Americans would fulfill their promises. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries were urging Pakistan to test the Islamic bomb, and Sharif told the meeting that he had received a late-night call from a member of the Saudi royal family who promised to counter any Western sanctions with fifty thousand barrels of oil daily for an indefinite period on deferred payment terms. The debate lasted for several hours, with only Finance Minister Sartaj Aziz opposing the tests because he was certain it would lead to devastating economic sanctions.

  When it came to deciding which organization would conduct the tests, Samar Mubarakmand, PAEC’s technical director, presented the case for his agency while Khan argued on his lab’s behalf. Mubarakmand said the PAEC had conducted all of the preparations at the test site in the Chagai Hills and performed the simulated nuclear explosions called cold tests, which substitute conventional explosives for highly enriched uranium or plutonium. He said he could be ready within ten days. Khan argued that his legacy gave him the right to be in charge. KRL could also be ready within ten days, he said, reminding the civilian and military leaders that his lab had enriched uranium for the devices and carried out its own cold tests. “KRL is fully independent in the nuclear field and should be given the honor of carrying out Pakistan’s first nuclear tests,” he told the generals and cabinet ministers.

  The meeting adjourned without a formal decision on when or who would stage the tests, though the consensus was that India could not go unanswered. Sharif met with his military leaders over the next two days and decided the tests would be conducted as soon as possible by the PAEC. Khan was outraged, fearing that everything he had worked for over the past two decades would be stripped away. The public still adored him, but his relationship with Sharif was tenuous, and the army chief of staff, General Jehangir Karamat, distrusted Khan to the extent that he had tried to investigate the finances of his laboratory three years earlier. The biggest event in Pakistan’s nuclear history was about to take place without Khan.

  Forced to swallow his pride, Khan went to plead his case to Karamat at the Army House in Rawalpindi, asking the commander to give his lab a role even if it was not the lead agency. He argued that the nuclear devices would be using the highly enriched uranium produced by his lab. He also pointed out that he had recently tested a missile capable of carrying a nuclear payload to India. Karamat could not argue with Khan’s success. In April, KRL’s Ghauri missile had traveled about seven hundred miles, far enough to reach Delhi, Mumbai, or many other Indian cities. Karamat did not want to antagonize someone as popular with the public as Khan, so he promised that a team from KRL could travel to Chagai Hills to help with final preparations and that Khan would be among the honored guests invited to view the tests from a nearby bunker.

  The next day, a small group from KRL joined two teams of 140 PAEC scientists, engineers, and technicians on two Pakistan International Airlines flights bound for Chagai. The unassembled weapons and other equipment followed on two C-130 Hercules military transport planes, escorted by four F-16 fighters that had instructions to shoot down the C-130s if they strayed outside Pakistani airspace. At Chagai, the components of five nuclear devices were taken into five separate rooms at the end of a three-thousand-foot, fishhook-shaped tunnel, where they were assembled under military guard. Diagnostic cables were strung out of the tunnel and connected to the devices that were to monitor the blasts. On the afternoon of May 26, the tunnel was sealed with six thousand bags of cement, and the next day the engineers certified that the cement was dry enough to contain the blast.

  On May 28, Pakistani and foreign dignitaries gathered in a bunker about six miles from the blast site. Muhammad Arshad, a young science officer from the PAEC who had designed the triggering mechanism, was selected to push the button to ignite the devices. At 3:16 in the afternoon, calling out, “All praise be to Allah,” he initiated the firing sequence. Five simultaneous explosions deep underground shook the mountain. Clouds of dust obscured the sun. The black granite instantly turned white from deoxidation. India had been matched. Two days later, a sixth device was to be detonated, topping India’s total.

  When photographers lined up to take the pictures of the assembled officials on that historic day, Khan pushed his way to the front and smiled broadly, determined to maintain his grasp on the public mantle of “father of the Islamic bomb.” On the flight back to Islamabad, however, there was no official party to greet Khan at the airport except a handful of Kahuta employees gathered in the VIP lounge. The big welcome, the cheering crowd, and the prime minister came a short time later, with the arrival of Samar Mubarakmand.

  President Clinton was furious and determined to punish Pakistan along with India. The United States was providing only limited assistance to Pakistan, and after the tests Clinton forged an ad-hoc multinational coalition to expand sanctions and block all nonhumanitarian assistance and loans to both countries. Japan, Pakistan’s major trade partner, joined the sanctions regime. For an economy that depended on outside assistance, the fallout from broader sanctions was crippling. Loans from the American government and international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were blocked, except for humanitarian purposes; American banks were prohibited from making loans to Pakistan; and sales of dual-use technology were prohibited. Sharif responded by freezing twelve billion dollars in foreign-currency deposits to avoid a run on Pakistani banks. The economic collapse that followed led to the first serious debate in Pakistan about the costs and benefits of nuclear weapons.

  Even as the economy sputtered, the tests elevated Khan in the eyes of the Pakistani public and the larger Muslim world. He was embraced even more fervently by the masses. His face was painted on the back of the wildly decorated and bejeweled trucks that ply the roads and highways of Pakistan. A replica of Chagai Hills, complete with a plastic atomic bomb, was constructed on the outskirts of Islamabad in Khan’s honor. Though others had played important roles, they remained in the background. Khan was the adored public face of the nuclear program, the person who made the bomb part of Pakistan’s green-and-white flag. In a country where more than half the population of 132 million was illiterate, the Islamic bomb stood as the supreme status symbol. Even the elite, both secular and Islamic, saw the bomb as what Pervez Hoodbhoy described derisively as “a sign that Pakistan could succeed at something.” And Khan was the ultimate nuclear hero. “You couldn’t criticize him without being called a traitor,” said a Pakistani journalist.

  AMERICAN spy satellites monitoring the Pakistani tests sent back photographs showing several North Korean military officers among the foreign dignitaries at the detonations. Their presence renewed concerns about the type of cooperation between the two countries. The North Korean plutonium program remained frozen und
er the agreement reached in 1994, but the CIA was desperate to learn how much help Khan had given to them on uranium enrichment. The lengths to which the Pakistanis and North Koreans were willing to go to hide the answer to that question became apparent just days after the detonations.

  On the night of June 7, a North Korean woman named Kim Sa Nae was shot to death a few yards from Khan’s heavily guarded compound in his quiet Islamabad neighborhood. The Pakistani government moved quickly to head off the inevitable suspicions aroused by the murder of a foreigner. The official version of her death blamed a neighbor’s cook who accidentally discharged a shotgun borrowed from a security guard. Kim was identified as the wife of a midlevel diplomat at North Korea’s embassy. The coroner was not allowed to carry out an autopsy, and the police report was sealed. Strangely, the death of a diplomat’s wife did not arouse a protest from the North Korean embassy.

  Not everyone accepted the official version, and the potential for exposing a link between Pakistan and North Korea was tantalizing to Indian intelligence. When Indian agents began to probe the death, they uncovered a far more disturbing story. Kim was a North Korean scientist, and her husband, Kang Thae Yun, was a major arms dealer who was instrumental in the ongoing exchange of Korea’s missile technology for Pakistan’s uranium-enrichment technology. At the time of Kim’s death, a delegation of North Korean scientists and technicians was staying in a guesthouse at Khan’s compound while working at Kahuta. A few days earlier, Kim had been seen talking with an American diplomat in a local supermarket. The meeting, whether a chance encounter or something more calculated, raised fears that Kim was providing evidence to the CIA and planned to defect, a constant concern about North Koreans who were let outside of their poor, tyrannical country. One of the North Koreans was suspected of shooting Kim to keep her quiet. Kim could have given the Americans the first window into Khan’s relationship with North Korea and perhaps evidence of North Korea’s uranium-enrichment efforts. Three days after Kim’s death, her body was flown out of Pakistan aboard a chartered Shaheen Air International jet, a private carrier controlled by the Pakistani Air Force. A Western intelligence official said the plane also carried P-1 and P-2 centrifuges as well as drawings, sketches, technical data, and uranium-hexafluoride gas for the Korean enrichment program.

  But the Clinton administration was about to be distracted by another more urgent crisis.

  SHORTLY BEFORE 10:30 a.m. on August 7, 1998, two teams of suicide bombers had entered two sprawling capitals in Africa. In Nairobi, Kenya, a truck packed with homemade explosives turned into the lane behind the American embassy and was detonated, blowing away the rear façade of the embassy and sending shards of glass and jagged concrete through the interior offices. Two hundred and thirteen people died, twelve of them Americans, and about four thousand people were injured. Less than ten minutes later, a second truck turned into the parking lot of the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and exploded. A water tank standing between the truck and the building absorbed most of the blast, keeping the death toll to eleven Africans; another eighty-five people were injured.

  A week before the embassy bombings, the CIA’s counterterrorism center had issued an alert, warning of possible attacks using chemical, biological, or radiological weapons. But the CIA warning had not identified any particular threat in Africa, and the lack of specifics rendered the alert nearly useless. By then, the terrorist teams were already in place. Al Qaeda operatives had flown unnoticed to Nairobi and Dar es Salaam from Pakistan several months earlier to begin assembling the truck bombs in the backyards of rental houses.

  Within hours of the embassy bombings, dozens of FBI agents were en route to Tanzania and Kenya to begin investigating, and eventually more than five hundred American agents participated in the inquiry. Although several suspect groups emerged, including Hamas and Hezbollah, the FBI and CIA soon focused on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who had issued numerous public statements from Afghanistan calling for his followers to kill Americans.

  At the time, Afghanistan was controlled by the Taliban, religious zealots who had seized power after the departure of the Soviets and the crumbling of corrupt interim governments in Kabul. The Taliban was providing a haven for bin Laden and his organization, which operated terrorist training camps across the country. The CIA had received a report a few days after the bombings that bin Laden would be at the Zawhar Kili camp near Khost in eastern Afghanistan. On the evening of August 20, General Joseph Ralston, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sat down to dinner in Islamabad with General Karamat. He was there to alert the Pakistani commander that the missiles that were about to pop up on their radar were not aimed at them. A few minutes after the men finished dinner at 10:00 p.m., seventy-five Tomahawk cruise missiles roared across Pakistani airspace and crashed into the camp complex in Afghanistan. At least twenty-one jihadis were killed, and another fifty or so were wounded. The main quarry escaped—bin Laden had left the camp a few hours before the strike. The attack escalated the war between the United States and bin Laden’s army of terrorists. In time, that war would make Washington and Islamabad uncomfortable allies once again.

  CHAPTER 22

  INSIDE THE NETWORK

  WHEN B.S.A. TAHIR ARRIVED at Khan’s apartment in Dubai in late 1998, the partners knew that they had arrived at a troublesome obstacle to building Libya’s bomb factory. The size and logistics of the project threatened to stretch Khan’s network beyond capacity and demanded nothing less than a complete rethinking of the way Khan and his accomplices did business. A few shipments of centrifuge parts and minor equipment had already made their way from Pakistan to Tripoli, but it had become obvious to Khan that he could not spirit away enough equipment from his stockpile at Kahuta to get the Libyans up and running without attracting unwanted attention. In the same way, the extent of the technology required for the project necessitated broadening the reach of his suppliers and recruiting new people for the network.

  The first task facing Khan and Tahir that day was deciding where to locate the initial plant. Pakistan was out of the question for obvious reasons, and Libya was unacceptable because Gadhafi lived under a blanket of sanctions because of his links to international terrorism. The logical choice, they decided, was right under their noses: Dubai. Khan was comfortable in the rapidly growing Persian Gulf city, where he owned his luxury apartment and had ensconced a mistress in a second apartment a few blocks away. Tahir’s computer business, already serving as a front for shipments to Iran, offered access to large, anonymous warehouses in the free-trade zone, where the manufacturing operation could be set up. They thought that bringing huge lathes, vacuum pumps, centrifuge prototypes, and other advanced equipment into the busy port city and shipping it out again would amount to nothing more than business as usual in a place where the government’s own website bragged that Dubai “enables traders to transit their shipments . . . without any hassles.” American counter-proliferation expert Gary Milhollin described Dubai as “a perfect black hole into which to send a sensitive technology because you can always say, ‘Well, we thought it was staying in Dubai.’”

  Khan and Tahir could find and buy the necessary equipment, but someone would have to be in Dubai on a full-time basis to oversee the day-to-day manufacturing operation. Khan could not spend that much time there without attracting the attention of the Americans and the ISI, and Tahir did not have the technical background required for the job. As he pondered the dilemma, Khan hit upon the solution: Urs Tinner. Khan had known Friedrich Tinner since his days at Urenco, and he and his sons had transformed proliferation into a lucrative family business, selling their specialized vacuum technology to Pakistan’s nuclear program for more than a decade. If their Swiss neighbors knew anything about the Tinner business, they did not hold it against them. Friedrich was a model citizen in their village of Haag, where he was president of the school board and active in the local branch of the Free-thinking Democratic Party of Switzerland, which advocated a liberal business age
nda.

  During the years in which he did business with Tinner, Khan had traveled often to Haag and gotten to know the younger of Friedrich’s two sons very well. He knew that Urs was an accomplished technician with the attention to quality and detail often found in Swiss craftsmen. As a young man, Urs Tinner had worked with his father and brother on many projects, including some work for Urenco’s advanced centrifuge installation outside Amsterdam. “If you show him a picture of a fork, he will manufacture the perfect fork, no flaws, Swiss quality,” said someone who knew him. “He was perfect for Dubai.”

  Just as important, Khan felt Urs could be trusted because he was a second-generation member of the network family, a loyal cog in a tightly knit and secretive enterprise that had rebuffed repeated attempts at penetration by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. At thirty-two, Urs Tinner had recently gone through a divorce from his Russian wife, and Khan suspected he would welcome a move to Dubai, which was growing popular with European tourists. First, Khan needed the father’s permission. The elder Tinner agreed happily. Urs, too, liked the idea of starting over. He told friends in Haag that he was moving to Dubai to sell “power drinks,” but by early 1998 he and Tahir were scouting for a warehouse to serve as the new home of Khan’s operation.