The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  The scale of Khan’s thievery was so large and so obvious that the investigator could not imagine the scientist had operated so corruptly without the knowledge and tacit approval of a succession of generals and intelligence chiefs. As he thought about the evidence in the files, the investigator realized that unraveling the full extent of Khan’s illegal activities would require a long investigation, the threads of which could expose corruption throughout the military and government hierarchy. The scale of the potential scandal was enormous, and, drained from the reading and the revelations, the investigator returned the documents to the locked file drawer and went home around midnight. The only record he carried with him were notes scratched in a small black diary. The next morning, he told Amjad that he had been stunned by the material and needed at least another day to reexamine and digest it. The general agreed, and the investigator spent another long day, reading and marking in his black book late into the night.

  On the third day, he sat across from his boss again, saying that he needed yet more time, this time to verify some of the allegations before delivering his assessment. Amjad granted him the extra time and suggested that things might go faster if the investigator got in touch with the former Kahuta insider who had prepared much of the file. Amjad arranged the appointment, and later that day the investigator found himself facing a former top-ranking official with military intelligence and the ISI who had spent three years in charge of security at Kahuta.

  “Sir, I need your guidance on an important issue,” he told the retired general. “It is about a file I have been reading regarding the activities of A. Q. Khan.”

  The retired general nervously acknowledged that he had compiled most of the Khan dossier, and he said he had done so at the request of Musharraf. In fact, the former general said that he had delivered the only copy to the Pakistani president. “I spent three years at Kahuta, and I can tell you that Khan is a dishonest man,” the general said to the investigator. “He made a lot of money from kickbacks. He had his own favorites. He turned the lab into a corrupt business empire.”

  Once he was over his initial nervousness, the general filled many of the gaps in the investigator’s understanding of Khan’s activities. Over the next two days, the investigator conducted confidential interviews with a number of other people inside and outside government, delving ever deeper inside Khan’s world. He tried to phrase his questions as innocently as possible to avoid alerting his sources to what exactly he was doing, which made it difficult to verify every allegation. But he confirmed enough to compile a devastating portrait of greed and corruption that could shake the country to its foundations and land A. Q. Khan in jail.

  The question was what he should do now. The investigator was torn. Going after Khan would immerse the bureau in an investigation that would take years, draining resources from other inquiries. The National Accountability Bureau and Amjad already had powerful enemies in the military and intelligence establishments. Exposing the scientist and his links to other powerful people could lead to a backlash that could extinguish the group and end any chance of uncovering the backroom deals and corruption that hobbled the Pakistani economy and its flickering democracy. And in the end, he thought, Khan might be too powerful to bring down, at least for now.

  After a sleepless night wrestling with his conscience, the investigator met with Amjad and laid out the most compelling evidence against Khan. There was proof the scientist was living far beyond his government salary, he said, and his real-estate holdings alone would be enough to convict him of corruption. Everything pointed to his fortune coming from kickbacks and black-market deals.

  “What do you think we should do next?” asked Amjad.

  “My humble suggestion is not to open a case at this stage,” the investigator replied. “We are a small team. We cannot take on this thing.”

  Amjad nodded thoughtfully and paused before replying. He agreed that the timing might not be right, saying that perhaps in a year the bureau would have the political strength to undertake an investigation of someone of Khan’s stature. The investigator understood, but he felt guilty after leaving the office. Had he pressed, Amjad might have allowed him to assemble a team to conduct a full-scale investigation. History might have unfolded differently; the investigation might have discovered the full range of activities of Khan and his accomplices. But history took a different turn.

  AMJAD gave Musharraf a full report on the investigation and the decision not to proceed, and the president must have agreed, but he stepped up the pressure on Khan, ordering audits of KRL’s books and cutting funding for its missile program. Musharraf reasoned that Pakistan already had enough missiles to reach Delhi, Mumbai, and every other city of consequence in India. In a backdoor attempt to curtail Khan’s activities with the North Koreans, Musharraf imposed new regulations that required all senior nuclear scientists and officials to report any trips that they planned to make overseas. Such security requirements were normal in the United States and other countries, and Bhutto had tried to impose them on Khan, too. Khan fumed about the interference, telling Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir that Musharraf was only trying to appease the Americans, with the end result that he would damage the country’s nuclear arsenal.

  The scientist refused to cooperate with the audits and ignored the travel-reporting requirement, but he could not escape the increased scrutiny, as he discovered when he tried to use a charter plane to get centrifuge equipment to Iran. Officially, the flight was scheduled to go from Islamabad to another country and back, but Khan had asked for approval to have the aircraft stop for refueling in Iran on both legs of its journey. Normally, approval would have been routine for Khan, but the stops raised flags in the president’s office. Rather than explain the reason for the stops, Khan canceled the flight.

  In the fall of 2000, Musharraf decided again to take a closer look at Khan and summoned the director of the ISI, ordering him to put a team of agents on Khan’s trail. They were told they were to follow the scientist any time he left the country and report back directly to Musharraf. The intelligence agency, which had befriended and promoted Khan for two decades, was switching roles—its agents were to watch for evidence that might bring down the scientist.

  While under surveillance, Khan arrived at the VIP terminal at the west end of Islamabad’s chaotic airport in his usual two-car convoy in late October. A bulletproof Toyota Crown sedan carrying the scientist pulled to a halt in front of the terminal, blocking the aging taxis and dented minivans swirling around the entrance as two armed guards jumped from the second car to take positions alongside the Toyota. A military officer stepped out of the sedan and opened its rear door. Khan emerged in his familiar tailored safari suit and nodded regally as a wave of recognition swept over the onlookers. Somewhat incongruously for a man whose staff normally carried his briefcase, the scientist this time clutched two rumpled beige shopping bags from Good Looks Fabrics and Tailors, a dry cleaner and tailor that catered to Islamabad’s wealthy. Khan was whisked through security and passport control to the first-class lounge to await his flight. As diplomats, businessmen, and generals stopped to pay their respects, the two bags never left Khan’s side.

  Two men in the far corner of the lounge glanced at Khan from time to time as they sipped the tea delivered to them by a waiter. Khan was accustomed to curious looks from strangers, but these men were careful not to stare. When Pakistan International Airlines flight 211 for Dubai was called, the pair hung back until Khan boarded and then hurried to their seats. The men were ISI agents on Khan’s trail. When the jet landed at Dubai International Airport three hours later, they watched carefully as Khan disembarked, then they trailed him through the crowds of tourists and masses of workers arriving from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines to sweep the streets and clean the houses of the rich Arabs. Khan went directly to the customs booth for diplomats, flashed his red diplomatic passport, and was waved through. On the other side, he was met by Tahir, who ushered him to a waiting sedan. His only
luggage was the two shopping bags. The sedan rolled past the clotted queues of Mercedes and BMWs, down the long, smooth highway leading out of the airport, and past towering palm trees and endless new construction. The destination was Khan’s apartment on Al Maktoum Street, twenty minutes from the airport. The two ISI men did not bother to follow Khan closely because they knew about his apartment and, when they arrived there later, they saw that the lights were on. What they did not know as they settled in for a long night’s wait was why Khan had come here.

  The next morning, Khan, still carrying the shopping bags, emerged from the apartment building and got into the waiting sedan. The ISI agents trailed at a discreet distance as the car drove a few blocks to the Metropolitan Palace Hotel, where Khan strolled into the lobby and shook hands with two men in Western suits who could have been wealthy Arab bankers or traders. The three chatted amiably in the hotel coffee shop. About thirty minutes later, Khan stood and shook hands to leave. As he walked out, the ISI agents noticed that he no longer carried the bags. He must have left them with the men, whom the agents later described as “dubious characters.”

  For the next two days, Khan rarely left the apartment, except to visit Tahir’s computer-sales office in the free-trade zone and a couple of small warehouses. The two men from the hotel were nowhere to be seen. On the third day, Khan caught the evening flight to Islamabad. The agents were on the same plane, still wondering who those dubious characters had been and what was in the bags.

  The following day, Musharraf received the ISI report on Khan’s unauthorized trip to Dubai and immediately summoned the scientist. Musharraf was a small man, but he had a military bearing and a way of puffing up his chest that made him seem more imposing. In tough language, he berated Khan for keeping secrets, ignoring the travel restrictions, and refusing to cooperate with the auditors at KRL. Khan was unapologetic, arguing that there was no reason he should follow rules meant for lesser men. Musharraf stopped short of firing Khan, but he ordered the scientist to comply. Instead, Khan returned to Dubai in December, again without seeking government approval. And again, the ISI followed him and reported back that Khan had met with the same two men.

  This was an act of outright defiance, and Musharraf would not tolerate it. While he could not treat Khan like a common criminal, he would not put up with the continued flouting of the rules. Musharraf called his top advisers together to discuss how to discipline the recalcitrant scientist. They debated for hours before reaching a decision. In mid-January, Khan was summoned to army headquarters for a meeting with Musharraf and told that he was being sacked. Once his departure became official, Musharraf said, he would never again be allowed to set foot within the gates of KRL, the vast complex he had created. Musharraf knew he dare not humiliate Khan in public, so he told him that, since he was sixty-five years old, he would be allowed to retire gracefully in March and retain a ceremonial position as an adviser to the president.

  Just as President George H. W. Bush had been willing to expose Pakistan’s nuclear bomb after the United States no longer needed its help in ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1990, Musharraf no longer needed his preeminent nuclear scientist, who had become more trouble than he was worth. “Musharraf didn’t want a domestic backlash, and he didn’t want to belittle Khan,” said a former general who was a close adviser to the Pakistani leader. “But Musharraf was determined to get Pakistan back into the international community, and he could not tolerate Khan’s behavior. Nuclear deterrence was in place, the delivery system was in place. Now it was time to stop this dirty business.”

  After all the years of kowtowing by the generals and politicians, and despite all the money he had spread around to fund the legend of himself as the father of Pakistan’s bomb, there was little Khan could do to resist. If he fought Musharraf, he risked coming under a more serious investigation that could expose his role in selling the country’s nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Khan could wind up not just out of a job but in prison. Still, he was a proud man, and his first reaction was to reject Musharraf’s olive branch of a title, telling the president he was done with the government. Before the official announcement of his retirement, however, Khan had a change of heart. Unable to bear the prospect of losing even an empty job, he asked Musharraf for the title and an office in the president’s building. Musharraf agreed.

  On March 10, 2001, A. Q. Khan’s career in Pakistan’s nuclear industry came to an official end. He was saluted at a retirement dinner by Musharraf, who praised his service to the nation and said Khan would become his special adviser on strategic affairs, a position that carried the same rank as a cabinet minister. To reinforce the charade that Khan was stepping down voluntarily, Musharraf ordered the chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission to retire at the same time, portraying the two moves as a changing of the guard in the country’s nuclear industry.

  In the days that followed, Khan fumed at the unfairness of his fall from grace, complaining bitterly to friends that the Americans had finally engineered his removal and warning that a U.S. takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was the next step. Blaming Musharraf, Khan decided that he would challenge the little general by running for president against him. Part of his campaign involved staying in the public eye, so that summer he agreed to a rare interview with a foreign film crew in his Islamabad home. The crew was working on a documentary about the spread of nuclear weapons called Stealing the Fire, and as he had so many times before Khan swore that he had never provided nuclear technology to anyone outside Pakistan. “We have not indulged in any proliferation,” he said, looking straight into the camera. “You cannot buy nuclear weapons. You cannot get a nuclear weapon on a platter.”

  That, however, was precisely what Khan was endeavoring to accomplish for Libya. Banned from Kahuta and cut off from the equipment he had been stealing from the lab, Khan now had to depend more heavily on the network. But that effort was running into trouble. Tinner and Tahir were still unable to find skilled workers in Dubai. Khan and Tahir turned to South Africa, hoping that Johan Meyer could also manufacture the critical rotors for the P-2 centrifuges. They planned to buy the less-sensitive components as dual-use items in Europe. In late 2000, Tahir purchased two specialized, flow-forming lathes from a Spanish company and had them shipped first to Gulf Technical Industries, the Dubai company run by Peter and Paul Griffin. One of the two-ton lathes was then shipped to Tradefin, so that Meyer could begin to produce the rotors. But South Africa’s previous nuclear efforts meant that companies there and abroad maintained strict control over the maraging steel required for the rotors, so the lathe sat unused in its crate for months while Meyer worked on the piping. Eventually, he sent the machine back to Dubai.

  Failure to provide the thousands of centrifuges threatened to derail the project until Tahir came up with an alternative. His wife was from a prominent Malaysian family with political and business connections. They lived with their two young children in a four-bedroom condominium in the chic Majestic Palace in Dubai, with expensive boutiques on the ground floor. Tahir also owned an expensive building in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur and operated several businesses there, including a chocolate franchise and a gourmet date shop. In the middle of 2001 Tahir told Khan that he could find a company in Malaysia capable of producing the rotors and other components. Khan was intrigued because Malaysia offered a good technical base, lax export controls, and a location far from the spies and customs authorities of Europe and the United States. He told Tahir to look into it.

  BOB EINHORN remained the assistant secretary of state for proliferation and arms control when George W. Bush replaced Bill Clinton in the White House, and he soon found a key ally. Richard Armitage, the new deputy secretary of state, was a barrel-chested Vietnam veteran who had worked at the Pentagon during the Reagan years and had harbored concerns about Pakistan and Khan from those days. In one of their first conversations, Einhorn told Armitage that the situation with Khan was so serious that he should upgrade his security
clearances so that he could be briefed by the CIA. “Rich, you need to get into this compartment and get briefed,” Einhorn told him.

  Armitage got the clearances and called Stephen Hadley, the deputy national-security adviser, and asked him to convene a series of briefings on Khan and Pakistan. Within days, Armitage was at the White House for a detailed CIA briefing on Khan’s ring. Hadley and Bob Joseph, the senior nonproliferation official at the National Security Council, also attended the top-secret session. There, Armitage learned that Urs Tinner had turned out to be a gold mine, providing enough detailed information for the agency to set up an elaborate monitoring operation that tracked the network’s shipments. Alongside the CIA operation, the National Security Agency was running a massive eavesdropping operation targeting the network, while British intelligence was contributing information from its own sources. The Bush administration had a clear picture that showed Khan providing nuclear technology to three of America’s most dangerous enemies, Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Einhorn described Armitage as “really spun up about Khan,” but Bob Joseph and CIA officials wanted to see what else could be learned about Khan’s global network. So again, the policy remained the same: watch and wait.

  Einhorn left the administration to join a think tank in Washington, and he was replaced by John Wolf, a career foreign-service officer who had served a tour in Pakistan. “By the time I came on board in 2001, we had a very broad fix on what Khan was doing,” Wolf explained later. “I don’t think we knew all the details, but we were inside the whole network. In Libya, we didn’t know where the nuclear work was going on. We just knew they were doing it.”

  There was wide recognition that waiting entailed risks. The CIA suspected that Libya was making rapid progress, and its analysts knew that Iran was several years into a major bomb-building program. Equally dangerous, there was always the chance that the network was selling its technology and expertise to someone off the CIA radar, and it was possible that Khan, angered at his ouster, would retaliate by somehow arranging a shipment of weapons-grade uranium to one of his current customers or, worse, a new one.