The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  IN MID-AUGUST, two Pakistani nuclear scientists sat down beside a campfire in a compound on the outskirts of Kandahar, the city in southeastern Afghanistan that was headquarters for the ruling Taliban party and the unofficial home of Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden. Seated with the scientists were bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon who had emerged as bin Laden’s equal and senior tactician. The Al Qaeda leader had been scouring the Middle East and former Soviet republics for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons for years and had even obtained a fatwa, or legal ruling, from a Muslim religious leader that authorized the use of weapons of mass destruction in a holy war against the United States and Israel. Al Qaeda was conducting tests with crude chemical and biological weapons at several locations in Afghanistan, but mastering the technology was difficult. The search for nuclear material was even harder. An attempt to buy fissile material in Istanbul had fizzled when an Al Qaeda operative wound up paying a large sum for what turned out to be radioactive medical waste, which could have no use in a bomb. An earlier attempt in the Sudan had failed, too. But bin Laden remained committed to acquiring a nuclear weapon, and the two Pakistanis, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudiri Abdul Majeed, offered the best chance yet. Mahmood was the more important figure, an expert in uranium enrichment who had held a series of senior posts in Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program. In 1974, when the Pakistani government was anticipating A. Q. Khan’s triumphal return from Amsterdam, Mahmood had been chosen to set up the pilot plant for the new uranium-enrichment program. As part of Musharraf’s crackdown, however, Mahmood had been forced into early retirement because he had expressed sympathies for the Taliban and other Islamic extremists. In writings and speeches, he had advocated sharing Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons technology with other Islamic nations to hasten the “end of days,” which he believed would give rise to Muslim world dominance. Majeed was less well known, but he had important skills acquired during a career at a Pakistani installation where enriched uranium was shaped into the cores for nuclear devices.

  A year before the campfire meeting, the two scientists had set up a nonprofit organization, Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, to conduct relief work in Afghanistan, including guiding the Taliban on scientific matters. Its board boasted several Pakistani generals and business leaders sympathetic to the Taliban cause, and it was one of the few nongovernmental groups that the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, permitted to operate in Afghanistan. Not long after opening their office in a house in Kabul, the scientists met with Mullah Omar and bin Laden, and the conversation had shifted from relief work to weapons development. At one point during his visits to Afghanistan, Mahmood provided one of bin Laden’s associates in Kabul with information about the construction of a nuclear weapon.

  That August, the scientists spent two or three days at bin Laden’s compound, listening as the Al Qaeda leader explained that he had obtained, or at least had access to, some type of radiological material from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a radical group affiliated with Al Qaeda. They discussed how the material could be used in a so-called dirty bomb, which could spread radioactive contamination over a wide area. The sessions ended inconclusively when bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and their closest associates abruptly left for the mountains of northwestern Afghanistan. Before leaving, bin Laden told his followers that something great was going to happen, and Muslims around the world were going to join them in the holy war.

  The events of September 11, 2001, redefined the American concept of national security. Suddenly aware of their vulnerability, America’s leaders were determined to secure the borders and root out their enemies by whatever means were necessary. If terrorists were willing to hijack passenger planes and kill thousands of civilians by crashing them into buildings, what would stop them from exploding a nuclear device in an American city? The nuclear fears that gripped the United States at the height of the Cold War were revived, though this time the enemy was more elusive.

  CHAPTER 24

  “WITH US OR AGAINST US”

  ON THE MORNING of September 12, General Musharraf was meeting with regional leaders in Karachi when one of his assistants entered and whispered that Secretary of State Colin Powell was on the telephone. Musharraf said he would call Powell after the meeting, but Powell insisted on talking to Musharraf immediately. The Pakistani leader excused himself to take the call in a private office. Without preamble, Powell told Musharraf that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon put the United States at war and left Pakistan with a stark choice: “You are either with us or against us.” Like the rest of the world’s leaders, Musharraf had been shocked by the terrorist attacks and expressed his sympathy. In the next breath, he assured Powell that he and Pakistan were with the United States in the fight against Al Qaeda.

  Aligning himself with the Americans in what the former army commando suspected would be a hellish fight on his own border entailed high risks for Musharraf, whose Sunni-dominated government had long provided financial and political help to the Taliban in order to maintain a friendly regime as a buffer against its on-again, off-again relations with Iran’s Shiites. He would face objections from the Pakistani population and from within his own officer corps, where many senior officers had deep ties to the Taliban leadership and junior officers shared their fundamentalist view of Islam. But what choice did the Pakistani leader have? Refusing to sign on with the Americans at this desperate hour, he realized, would expose him to the same kind of wrath they were about to rain down on Afghanistan.

  Similar conversations were taking place with other nations’ leaders as Washington laid out in the starkest terms that it expected complete and unstinting cooperation from all of its allies against the perpetrators of September 11. None of those countries, however, was as crucial as Pakistan to the American strategy. Just as it had served as a route for arms and assistance to the Afghan guerrillas fighting the Soviets, the intermittent ally would play a central role in the coming war. In case Powell’s telephone call left any doubt, the point was reinforced later that same day by Bush administration officials who summoned Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, the head of the ISI who was in Washington as a guest of the CIA, to a meeting at the State Department. Before going, he telephoned Musharraf for instructions. Musharraf told him to reinforce Pakistan’s determination to cooperate and to report back immediately. According to Ahmed, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age unless it cooperated in going after Al Qaeda and its allies. Though Armitage later denied making an overt threat to the Pakistani general, the message that Ahmed relayed to Musharraf reinforced that the American position was nonnegotiable. The next day at CIA headquarters, Ahmed was given a list of demands that included stopping Pakistani military assistance to the Taliban, closing its borders with Afghanistan, and allowing American reconnaissance planes to fly out of remote bases in Pakistan. Ahmed assured the Americans that Pakistan would accept the demands, but he also told them that Taliban leader Mullah Omar was a man of peace who would turn over bin Laden if the Americans convinced him that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. Mahmood did not believe Al Qaeda was to blame for September 11, but he kept his thoughts to himself until he returned to Pakistan. There, he suggested to Musharraf that September 11 had been staged by the Americans as an excuse for making war on Islam, a theory that gained credence throughout the Muslim world in the weeks that followed.

  As the United States prepared for war in Afghanistan, Pakistan followed through on its commitment, opening bases to U.S. aircraft and withholding assistance to the Taliban regime. In an attempt to avert a war, Mahmood led a delegation to Kandahar to persuade Mullah Omar to turn over bin Laden to the Americans. The terrorist attacks and the prospect of massive retaliation against Afghanistan had split the Taliban. Some argued that the United States had been Afghanistan’s ally and that bin Laden lacked the religious authority to initiate a jihad against it. They argued for turning him over. Omar was angry that bin Laden had put the Taliban
and Afghanistan in such a precarious position, but he reasoned that he could not remain in power himself if he gave in to American demands, so he decided that bin Laden could stay.

  The prospect of an all-out American attack on fellow Muslims sent tens of thousands of Pakistanis pouring into the streets of the cities. Religious militants, who already saw Musharraf as too secular, threatened to topple his government if he helped the Americans, a position that had support among elements of the military and the ISI. Musharraf faced the dangerous task of satisfying the American demands without further inflaming passions on the streets and in the barracks.

  Bush administration officials recognized the delicate balance that Musharraf was trying to maintain and worried that his ouster could destabilize the country at a critical time, probably leaving extremist elements of the military in charge of the government and its nuclear arsenal. But Washington would tolerate no wavering. In October, Powell visited Islamabad, and the security of Pakistan’s nukes was part of his agenda. He told Musharraf that the United States was willing to supply technical assistance to improve the security of the nuclear weapons, including transferring technology called “permissive action links” that would prevent warheads from being armed unless a number of people entered codes. The Pakistanis worried that the Americans’ real intention was to identify the location of their nuclear bombs so that they could be seized in the event of political instability. “There are some in the Pakistani hierarchy who fear a Trojan horse, that we are learning about their nuclear program because, in their minds, we may one day need to deal with it,” a senior American official said at the time. The offer was rejected.

  To underscore the danger of the nuclear weapons falling into unfriendly hands, Powell’s delegation said the CIA had learned of Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudiri Abdul Majeed’s meeting with Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan shortly before the September 11 attacks. The Pakistanis agreed to detain the scientists, who later that month were secretly taken into custody by the ISI; not even their families were told why, or where, they were held. After four weeks of interrogation, the ISI decided neither man had been involved in the weapons portion of Pakistan’s nuclear program and could have been of little value to Al Qaeda, so they were released. The CIA wasn’t convinced the scientists were harmless, and information obtained from Al Qaeda records found in an abandoned training camp in Afghanistan renewed their concerns. The records indicated that Mahmood and Majeed had met with bin Laden himself and that they had promised to help Al Qaeda build an atomic bomb. Adding to the fear, CIA agents operating alongside American troops had uncovered evidence at Al Qaeda training camps of experiments with chemical and biological weapons. The unfolding evidence about Al Qaeda’s intentions was alarming enough that CIA chief George Tenet was convinced his people needed a crack at questioning the Pakistani scientists.

  In the middle of the night on December 1, 2001, a Boeing 707 operated by the U.S. Air Force taxied to a stop in Islamabad. Three men emerged and got into an unmarked van. Accompanying Tenet were a CIA analyst named Kevin, who specialized in weapons of mass destruction, and Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, the head of CIA counterterrorism center’s weapons of mass destruction branch. Mowatt-Larssen was white haired and formal, a graduate of West Point, who had served as an army officer before spending two decades as an intelligence officer for the CIA in Europe and the former Soviet Union. They had come with orders from President Bush to insist that Musharraf rearrest the scientists and permit the CIA and FBI to participate in a second round of interrogations. By this time, the American troops were routing the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, stoking the anti-American furor in Pakistan and making Musharraf’s alliance with Washington more dangerous by the day—hence the secrecy of Tenet’s visit.

  “We have trouble, big trouble—trouble for you, trouble for us,” the CIA boss told Musharraf, describing the August meeting and the new evidence. “Al Qaeda has said for years that they want a nuclear device. Now it is within reach. That is an unacceptable situation for the United States. Intolerable.”

  “That is not possible, Mr. Tenet,” Musharraf responded. “It took Pakistan many years and a great deal of money to produce the devices we have. What you are talking about—Al Qaeda producing a bomb—is implausible.”

  “If it was implausible, the president wouldn’t have sent me here,” Tenet replied.

  Mowatt-Larssen laid out the possible ways in which a terrorist organization could obtain a nuclear weapon, from the theft or black-market purchase of enriched uranium to the availability of small, portable nuclear devices. He and other American experts were concerned that Al Qaeda could fashion a crude device, even without all the components, if they acquired fissile material—and the mostly like source of that was Pakistan. Simply slamming together two subcritical masses of enriched uranium could detonate an explosion large enough to kills thousands. In addition, he told Musharraf that American intelligence had discovered that Al Qaeda cells were searching for radioactive material that could be wrapped around explosives to make a dirty bomb.

  Musharraf agreed reluctantly to rearrest the scientists, saying that he hoped word of this would not become public. But news of Tenet’s trip leaked three days later, causing American and Pakistani officials to claim the CIA chief had come to urge Musharraf to crack down on religious extremists leading anti-American demonstrations. By the end of the week, however, it was known that the two scientists and several of their prominent backers had been detained at the direction of the American government. To avoid a major furor, Pakistani and American officials downplayed the episode, telling reporters that the scientists were retired and did not have direct responsibilities for weapons production. Mahmood’s son acknowledged that bin Laden had asked his father for help in building a nuclear bomb, but he said his father told the Al Qaeda leader that it would be very difficult. The son also said his father declined to help bin Laden. Behind the scenes, the scientists were more forthcoming when confronted with the CIA evidence, acknowledging that bin Laden had indicated that he had access to fissile material through Uzbek allies and that he had questioned them about how to fashion it into a weapon. They claimed to have told him that it would be impossible to create a weapon simply from the radioactive material, but they also admitted that their conversations with him had covered a wide range of weapons of mass destruction. Mahmood in particular appeared to the interrogators to represent the most dangerous and extremist elements of Pakistan’s elite, a segment of society that advocated not only developing its own nuclear weapons but spreading them to other Islamic countries. In the end, however, the Pakistani authorities determined that the two scientists had not violated any laws, and they were quietly released again.

  THE NAME that never came up in the conversation between the CIA chief and the Pakistani president was that of A. Q. Khan. From Musharraf’s perspective, he had sidelined Khan the previous March. For Tenet, the issue was preventing Al Qaeda from getting access to nuclear weapons by keeping Musharraf in power, at least long enough to capture bin Laden and uproot the Taliban. As early as 1998, CIA intelligence had discovered that bin Laden had sent emissaries to contact Khan about help in building a nuclear weapon, but the scientist had apparently rejected the overtures. Khan might have felt he and his network were overextended: He was supplying enrichment technology to North Korea and in the midst of the massive project to build a nuclear weapon for Libya. Further, Khan might have felt that working with bin Laden in Afghanistan was too close to home for comfort. Nevertheless, Tenet was willing to turn a blind eye to Khan’s activities to avoid jeopardizing Musharraf. “I didn’t want the discussion to veer off toward Khan at this point,” Tenet wrote in his memoirs. “There would be another day for that topic.”

  The Pakistani leader was mistaken in thinking that he had sidelined Khan. Being barred from his own laboratories may have complicated the task of supplying Libya and Iran, but the obstacles were not insurmountable. After Musharraf told Khan that he was being removed from the
lab in late January, he had taken advantage of his last weeks at the facility by cleaning out not just his desk but the technology cupboard, too. He made electronic copies of a host of critical designs, including those for the P-1 and P-2 centrifuges, and ordered eight complete P-2 centrifuges shipped to Dubai.

  In the fall of 2001, Tahir had begun to pursue Malaysia as the site for the centrifuge factory. It had emerged as a developing country with a growing manufacturing capacity, a skilled workforce, a good industrial infrastructure, and, most important, relatively loose controls on imports and exports. Equally important, it was far from the watchful eyes of the CIA and European intelligence agencies. Tahir had the connections to pull off the deal. His wife, Nazimah Syed Majid, was an investor in a Malaysian company called Scomi Group, which was involved primarily in the oil and gas industry. Among her partners was Kamaluddin Abdullah, the only son of Malaysia’s prime minister, Abdullah Badawi.

  When Tahir talked with Khan about this possibility, the Pakistani scientist immediately liked the idea of an opportunity to work in a technically advanced Muslim country, and he authorized Tahir to proceed. In December 2001, Tahir struck a deal with a Scomi subsidiary, Scomi Precision Engineering, to use one of its factories to produce what he described as metal tubing for the petroleum and water-treatment industries. He explained that Scomi’s small factory would be reconfigured with new machinery and its workforce of thirty or so would be retrained for the project.

  Urs Tinner agreed to move to Kuala Lumpur to take charge of the factory, and by the spring of 2002 he was on the scene and ordering the specialized lathes and other machinery. Some difficulties remained, however, particularly in obtaining some of the more sophisticated materials. Carbon fiber for the P-2 rotors was one example; its export was tightly controlled, so Tinner decided to substitute high-strength aluminum, which was more readily available. He placed an order for 330 tons of the aluminum with the Singapore offices of a German company. As the machinery and material arrived in Malaysia, Tinner used blueprints from Khan to set up a miniature version of the centrifuge production plant at Kahuta. The goal was to produce parts for at least ten thousand centrifuges.