For his part, the scientist faced an openly hostile head of government for the first time, and he, too, had to plot his moves with caution.
Khan had always tried to maintain a high level of security for his smuggling operations, but in the past he had feared exposure by the Americans or another Western government, not his own. He knew the CIA had tried repeatedly to penetrate his operations at KRL. He boasted to a friend that his people were too loyal to be swayed by promises or threats. In conversations with Tahir, he expressed the same convictions about the network and its members, though the near miss at home and the rapid expansion of the Libyan project caused him to institute new security rules. He compartmentalized the Libyan operation so that, for instance, the Swiss weren’t sure who was doing the work in South Africa, and the Libyans were never told much about the origins of the European equipment. The millions of dollars coming in from Libya and Iran were funneled through a series of banks in Dubai, Switzerland, and other secrecy havens before landing in the accounts of Khan and other network members. Other than Khan, only two men knew the full scope of the operation: Tahir and Urs Tinner.
Khan had long operated outside the law on the international scene, but he was not invincible. The CIA was about to get a big break.
In late 1999, a German intelligence agent working with the CIA informed the Americans that a handful of high-tech suppliers associated with Khan had a big new customer. The German wasn’t sure who that customer was, but he gave the CIA the name of the Swiss banker who had overseen a series of large payments to and from accounts of several people with histories in the nuclear black market. The German’s information was passed to the CIA station in Vienna, the agency’s largest outpost outside Washington and the one specializing in nuclear-related intelligence. The tip was recognized immediately as a potentially important break. The CIA was well aware of Khan, and they had picked up evidence over the years that he was peddling his goods to other countries, but this represented a major new incarnation of the ring—if true.
The station chief was a senior operations officer with extensive experience in espionage in Europe and other regions. He wanted to make sure that this information was handled with great care, so when one of his case officers suggested approaching the banker directly, the chief vetoed the idea. Swiss law prohibited its citizens from cooperating with foreign intelligence agencies, so even approaching the unfamiliar banker risked causing problems and chasing away a potential source. Instead, he requested help from headquarters in developing a list of names of people associated with nuclear trafficking involving Pakistan in hopes of spotting a weak link that might open the door to Khan’s operation. As analysts at Langley and agents in Vienna went over years of reports and intelligence, one name that kept coming up was that of the Tinners.
The Tinners had been flying close to the radar for many years. The CIA knew that in the 1970s Friedrich Tinner had been in charge of exports at a German firm identified by the Defense Department as shipping items with nuclear uses to Pakistan. After he set up his own company in Switzerland, Tinner was again linked to the sale of nuclear-related technology to Pakistan. In 1996, Swiss authorities had questioned Tinner about a shipment of specialized valves that ended up in Jordan, on its way to Iraq just before the Gulf War. IAEA inspectors reconstructing Iraq’s nuclear-procurement efforts had discovered the shipment in a warehouse in Jordan and asked the Swiss for help. Tinner had told the Swiss that he had no idea how the valves got to the Middle East, claiming they had been shipped legally to Singapore and that it was not his responsibility where they had gone after that. The Swiss statute of limitations on export violations had expired, so the authorities did not press the matter.
“We talked to Friedrich Tinner at the time, but we couldn’t prove that he knew,” Othmar Wyss, head of the Swiss export control agency, told us years later. “What can you learn? The Tinners lied all the time, saying they knew nothing.”
The station chief assigned a CIA agent nicknamed Mad Dog to find a way into Khan’s operation through the Tinners. Mad Dog was a single-minded, methodical case officer with a great track record in recruiting agents. In this case, he got a break when he learned that Urs Tinner had recently moved to Dubai, providing an opportunity to approach him outside Switzerland and away from his father’s influence. In assembling a dossier on the target, the CIA agent found out that Urs had run into some legal trouble in France, so he contacted a friend in French intelligence and asked a favor—could the French apply some pressure to rattle young Tinner? The French agent agreed, promising to get word to Urs that the French were looking for him.
When Mad Dog laid out the recruitment strategy for his station chief, the boss wrote a lengthy summary, signed and dated it, and routed it to the CIA’s operations directorate at Langley, with copies to the agency’s European and Near East division chiefs at headquarters. The distribution was limited to senior officers because of its sensitivity, and the idea of using someone involved actively in breaking the law sparked a debate at Langley. Some of the brass were concerned that, once recruited, Tinner might believe that his cooperation put him above the law. “You tell them they have to stop breaking the law because you might not be able to protect them,” the CIA station chief explained later. “No matter what you tell them, no matter how many times you tell them that you can’t defend them if they are doing something illegal, they don’t listen.”
Those worries were insignificant compared with the opportunity to penetrate the Khan network, however, so in early 2000 Mad Dog flew to Dubai, where he and other agents kept Tinner under surveillance for several days, watching for the places he frequented, where he could be approached alone. In the end, the best spot turned out to be a bar. One evening, the CIA agent spotted Tinner walking into a hotel bar. He was nondescript—about five foot seven, with a slight build, dark brown hair, and glasses. Mad Dog waited till Tinner sat down and then joined him, offering to buy a round of drinks. They talked casually until Tinner got up to leave. Mad Dog mentioned that he had heard Tinner was having some trouble with the French authorities, and he offered to help him out. Tinner abruptly sat back down. Over the next hour or so, the CIA agent said he could make the French case disappear if Tinner could help him learn about some goods moving in and out of Dubai. Tinner tried to extricate himself several times, but Mad Dog kept talking. Eventually, Tinner agreed to meet for dinner a few days later, and, after several conversations, he became a reluctant informant, opening an unprecedented window on the inner workings of the world’s largest nuclear smuggling operation.
What had been treated for more than two decades in intelligence circles as a subordinate matter, confined largely to a few counterproliferation experts relying on electronic eavesdropping and secondhand sources, took on a much more significant complexion. Detailed reports on what the network was buying and where it was shipping the goods began to flow in from Dubai. “Tinner gave us the final ability to know what the network was doing,” said a former senior CIA official who was involved in the recruitment effort and the processing of Tinner’s information. “He wasn’t an agent, but he agreed to cooperate with us. We did not have a huge amount of control over Urs, but he began providing the information we needed. Everything the Libyans got, we knew. We knew what was going into Iran, too.”
BY THE SPRING of 2000, the CIA had obtained proof that two of the most repressive and dangerous regimes in the world—the militant clerics in Tehran and the terrorist sponsor in Tripoli—were trying to develop nuclear weapons. Coupled with what the agency already knew about North Korea, the threat posed by Khan was undeniable. As word of the new source filtered up through the command at Langley, George Tenet, the CIA director, sent congratulations to the station chief in Vienna and Mad Dog. The intelligence bonanza was funneled through Vienna to the CIA’s small counterproliferation bureau at headquarters, where analysts processed the details of vacuum pumps and specialized lathes and evaluated the plans described by Tinner. Based on the shipments going through Dubai, th
ey were able to estimate the progress Iran and Libya were making toward building a functional nuclear weapon. While the early judgments required a certain amount of guesswork, both countries were believed to be within five or six years of going nuclear.
Only government officials with the highest level of security clearance were allowed access to the information, and even then any details that might disclose Tinner’s identity were scrubbed away. As the discovery that Khan was providing nuclear technology to Libya percolated through the government, concern increased at the State Department. “There was a very tight intelligence restriction on Khan and Libya,” recalled Bob Einhorn. “Late in the Clinton administration, probably in 2000, we were getting good information on the Libya-Khan connection. A handful of us at state were getting briefings from the director of operations at the CIA. We knew some of the tentacles of the ring. We knew about the Tinners. We clearly knew they had moved to Dubai. The U.S. knew that Dubai was the illicit trafficking capital of the world.”
Still, the government did not act against Khan and his accomplices. As the small circle of people who knew about the new source inside the Khan network grew, there was a debate over whether to take steps to shut down the operation or to continue watching. Tinner was providing enough information to close down key segments of the network, confront Musharraf, and demand action against Khan. But Tenet and others at the CIA, along with some officials in the White House and State Department, argued that more could be learned by delaying action. “The debate was, do you stop it now, or do you watch it and understand it,” Einhorn explained. “I don’t recall a specific decision, but the view prevailed that we’d watch and wait.”
The decision carried risks. The CIA and Mad Dog expected Tinner to keep them informed about the material flowing through Dubai and provide tips on other shipments, but they could not be certain that he knew everything or that he would share everything. There was an even bigger danger: Khan had acted on his own before, and he could unilaterally sell highly enriched uranium or some other critical bomb component to Iran, Libya, or a customer out of view of the CIA and its informant. It was also possible that either Iran or Libya was actually closer to a nuclear weapon than the Americans knew, which meant that the equipment and know-how they were getting from the network could put them over the top.
Tinner’s inventory of equipment destined for Libya and Iran offered a bonus—it gave the CIA the chance to engage in some of its fanciest cloak-and-dagger work by planting miniature electronic devices in some crates, so they could be tracked through every destination. On occasion, the CIA also sabotaged other equipment subtly to slow progress. In one case, specialized vacuum pumps manufactured at the national weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, that had been ordered with false invoices were identified and altered so they wouldn’t work, before being shipped to Iran.
The information was so good that the Vienna station chief was promoted to chief of the CIA’s European division and moved to headquarters in July 2001. Tenet later boasted about the extent of the CIA’s penetration of Khan’s operation. “We pieced together subsidiaries, his clients, his front companies, his finances, and manufacturing plants,” he said. “We were inside his residence, inside his facilities, inside his rooms. We were everywhere these people were.”
The obvious question, given the CIA’s extensive knowledge of Khan’s role, is, Why not shut him down? Despite the evidence, the administration of the new president, George W. Bush, did not press the Musharraf regime and did not provide it with the detailed information that might have forced the Pakistanis to act. “Their complaints about Khan were vague,” explained Brigadier General Feroz Khan, the senior Pakistani arms-control official at the time. “We were told that more detail could not be provided, purportedly because of their need to protect sources.” The CIA and the administration were employing the same passive response implemented in 1975—watch and wait. It would take a cataclysmic event to force them to act.
CHAPTER 23
TIGHTENING THE NOOSE
WHILE HE WAS ARMY CHIEF, Musharraf had tolerated Khan’s refusal to submit to any government controls, but as president, Musharraf was determined to rein in the scientist for the simple reason that he no longer needed Khan; Pakistan had ample fissile material for its nuclear arsenal. The mechanism that Musharraf chose was a newly formed government watchdog agency with extraordinary powers to investigate corruption throughout Pakistan. In November 1999, Musharraf created the National Accountability Bureau to go after the endemic corruption plaguing the public and private sectors, and he underscored his commitment to that goal by appointing as its director Lieutenant General Syed Mohammad Amjad, a highly respected career officer known for his integrity. The bureau was assigned space in a small, highly secure building in a symbolic location—next to the Supreme Court and near the National Assembly—and given the authority to arrest anyone suspected of corruption and detain them for up to ninety days merely on Amjad’s signature.
Amjad assembled a small and trusted staff with knowledge of banking, intelligence, the military, and law enforcement. Among them was a former Pakistani police investigator who had recently received a law degree in Britain and had a reputation as smart, ambitious, and incorruptible. When Musharraf told Amjad in early April that he wanted the bureau to investigate one of the country’s most powerful men, Amjad summoned the investigator to his office.
“I have something very sensitive and very important for you,” the director explained as the investigator sat across from him. Amjad swiveled in his chair and unlocked a filing cabinet, withdrew a foot-high stack of documents, and placed them on his desk. Read these, he said, and give me your impression of them tomorrow. Amjad said he would be out the rest of the day, so the investigator should remain in his office with the records until he finished. “You can have a cup of coffee, you can smoke, but you can’t leave this office,” Amjad said as he stood to depart. “When I return, I want your objective, honest opinion on whether there is a case in these documents.”
The name at the top of the first page was “Abdul Qadeer Khan.” The investigator had met the scientist casually a couple of times and, like every Pakistani, was aware that Khan was perhaps the most influential and respected man in the country. He also assumed, like every Pakistani, that Khan had used his government position to make himself rich. In this practice, he was far from alone. A culture of bribery and kickbacks that pervaded the public and private sectors in Pakistan was condemned regularly by the World Bank and other international organizations. The regimes of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif had both been mired in allegations of widespread corruption, and Musharraf had risen to power partly by promising to end graft at the highest levels of government. But what the investigator found was corruption on a scale unusual even by the extravagant standards of Pakistan.
The next eight hours were the most fascinating of the investigator’s life. Some of the information in the eight-hundred-page dossier involved rumors about Khan’s wealth that had been published in Pakistan’s English-language press, which was freer to question important people, but most of it was startling and new. One section dissected Khan’s personal finances, listing seven houses worth millions of dollars that he owned in Islamabad. Some of the properties were held in his name, others in the name of his wife or daughters. In London, he owned two in the affluent Kensington district in the name of his daughter, Dina, who lived in one of them. Another document listed four banks in Karachi, Lahore, Amsterdam, and Dubai where Khan maintained personal accounts, with a total balance of $8 million, an amount impossible to achieve on Khan’s government salary of $30,000 per year. Another entry on the property inventory caught the investigator’s eye—Khan owned the twenty-six-room Hotel Hendrina Khan in Timbuktu, and records showed that in late 1999 a Pakistani Air Force cargo plane had delivered a load of furniture for the hotel. Strangely, the documents showed that the plane had made an unexplained stop in Tripoli.
In addition to amassing a fortune in real estate
and hidden bank accounts, Khan had used his wealth to curry favor with the press and prominent charities. One list in the file identified twenty Pakistani journalists who received stipends of about $175 per month from Khan, more than the salaries paid by their employers, and indicated that Khan had bankrolled the Pakistani Observer. In a display that struck the investigator as hopelessly egocentric, Khan had financed many charities with the understanding that he would be the recipient of the awards they bestowed for good works. There were also lists of cash payments to various military officers, politicians, and even the occasional academic. “Khan loved to be flattered,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, Khan’s longtime bête noire. “Say a nice thing to him, and he’d dip into his deep, deep pocket.”
The dossier also pieced together evidence of how Khan had grown so wealthy. That section was highly detailed, with names, dates, and amounts for hundreds of specific transactions involving Khan and Khan Research Laboratories. Clearly, the information had been compiled by an insider with extensive access to laboratory invoices, shipping documents, and records of kickbacks to Khan. Sometimes the records reflected a 10 percent commission for Khan, and other times he ordered more equipment than necessary, with the surplus disappearing into what the insider described as Khan’s unregulated inventory. In a typical example, the lab needed fifteen to twenty feet of highly specialized, very expensive wire, but Khan had authorized buying one thousand feet. The insider suspected that Khan either got a kickback or took his cut by selling the unused portion to someone else.
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