The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  Libya was one of the few countries whose leader had the degree of authority to decide to give up such weapons and make it stick. Gadhafi appeared to have made a sensible calculation that he had little to gain and much to lose from his nuclear program. Still, Libya had spent tens of millions of dollars, and Gadhafi was reluctant to abandon his long-sought goal just as Khan had put it within his grasp. He needed a push to take the final step.

  When the negotiations bogged down in the summer of 2003, Kappes and his British counterpart, a senior intelligence agent and expert on Libya named Mark Allen, boarded an unmarked CIA Gulfstream jet outside London and flew to Tunisia for a secret meeting with Gadhafi, who was in the neighboring country on a state visit. They found the leader charming and confident and not ready to relinquish his plan for weapons. Despite long hours of conversation, they left without an agreement. In September, Kappes and Allen flew to Tripoli for their first meeting with the Libyan on his home turf. The second meeting seemed to build trust between the men, but still there was no admission by the Libyan leader that he possessed nuclear weapons, let alone an agreement to give them up. Something more was necessary to persuade the Libyan strongman to take the final, irrevocable step, and that something was bobbing across the Indian Ocean on its way to Dubai.

  AT THE CIA, there was a strong sense that the endgame was coming for Khan. Seizing the cargo from Scomi would provide irrefutable proof that the Pakistani scientist was selling nuclear technology on the black market. While the CIA tracked the shipment from Malaysia to Dubai with the help of satellites, the White House arranged for a face-to-face meeting between Bush and Musharraf on the sidelines of the United Nations annual meeting. The Pakistani leader was regarded as such a vital U.S. ally against Al Qaeda and its offshoots that he needed to be warned of what was coming. Late on the morning of September 24, Bush and Musharraf met in Bush’s suite on the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York for a session that was described to the press as an opportunity to discuss cooperation on the war on terror. Near the end of the one-hour meeting, the American president informed Musharraf that he would be getting a visit the next morning from George Tenet. “It is extremely serious and very important from your point of view,” Bush explained.

  Tenet arrived at Musharraf’s suite early the next morning, and after routine pleasantries the CIA director said he had some bad news. “A. Q. Khan is betraying your country,” Tenet said. “He has stolen some of your nation’s most sensitive secrets and sold them to the highest bidders. Khan has stolen your nuclear-weapons secrets. We know this, because we stole them from him.”

  With a flourish, Tenet reached into his briefcase and placed a stack of papers and diagrams on the table in front of Musharraf—copies of the papers stolen years earlier from Khan’s hotel room by British intelligence. Leafing through the material, the Pakistani leader recognized detailed drawings of the P-1 centrifuges used at Kahuta. As he looked more closely, Musharraf saw that the papers carried part numbers, dates, and signatures that linked them to his own government’s nuclear program. Khan’s name did not appear in the documents, but the records left no doubt that the scientist had been selling Pakistan’s nuclear technology. Tenet drove home the point, extracting a blueprint for a P-1 centrifuge and saying, “He sold this to Iran.” Picking up a design for the P-2, he said, “He has sold this to several countries.” Finally, Tenet picked up another sheaf of papers and said, “These are the drawings of a uranium-processing plant that he sold to Libya.”

  The CIA chief went on: “Mr. President, if a country like Libya or Iran or, God forbid, an organization like Al Qaeda, gets a working nuclear device and the world learns that it came from your country, I’m afraid the consequences would be devastating.” Tenet suggested that the United States and Pakistan join together to shut down Khan’s operation.

  Musharraf betrayed no emotion, though he later acknowledged that it was one of the most embarrassing moments of his life. After asking a few questions and being permitted to take the documents, he said: “Thank you, George. I will take care of this.”

  After Tenet’s departure, Musharraf was left with the revelation that it had all taken place beneath his nose: The foreign trips, the chartered airplane flights, the enormous wealth, and the secret meetings with suspicious characters uncovered months earlier in the investigations that Musharraf had ordered, all fit into a pattern. The Pakistani leader hoped that he could deal with Khan firmly but quietly, without embarrassing the country and without devastating consequences.

  A few days later, the Malaysian ship arrived in Dubai. The five crates from Scomi were offloaded and taken to a warehouse that belonged to Aryash Trading. Two days later, the crates were loaded onto the BBC China, a German-owned freighter bound for Libya. The ship left Dubai, sailing out the southern end of the Persian Gulf, through the Red Sea, and into the Suez Canal. Midway through the canal, the captain was hailed on the radio by the ship’s owners in Hamburg, who ordered him to change course when he emerged into the Mediterranean Sea. He was told that the new destination was the southern Italian port of Taranto. The order was highly unusual, and the Hamburg office offered no explanation, but the captain immediately changed course, a switch monitored by two small U.S. Navy frigates shadowing the ship in the Mediterranean.

  The next step was tricky. The Americans and their British counterparts wanted to get the ship into a safe port and offload the cargo in secret. They designed a cover story that was rooted in a partial truth—the German shipowners and the Italian authorities were informed that the ship was the unwitting carrier of a load of nuclear technology that involved A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist. The ship arrived at the port on October 4, where it was met by Italian and American authorities. They handed the captain the numbers of the crates they wanted. Crew members opened the hatches and began the cumbersome process of locating and removing the forty-foot crates from the ship’s hold. They were loaded onto U.S. military trucks and hauled away to an unmarked guarded warehouse. The ship’s captain never saw what was in the containers and resumed his journey to Tripoli. The next morning, the crates were opened, and CIA experts confirmed that they contained thousands of components for centrifuges. Word was sent immediately to headquarters at Langley and to MI6 in London.

  Finally, the CIA had the ammunition to force Gadhafi’s hand. The cargo on the BBC China would allow the Americans and British to confront Gadhafi with hard evidence without exposing the inner workings of the intelligence operation that had led to the ship’s seizure. The very day the crates were opened, Mark Allen telephoned Musa Kousa in Libya and asked for an urgent meeting. Two days later, Allen and Kappes flew to Tripoli with Kousa’s permission. There, they boarded one of Gadhafi’s personal jets and flew to an airport two hours away, in the vast Libyan desert. Not far from the airstrip, they found Gadhafi waiting for them inside a well-appointed tent. As they sat in the cooling night air, a servant lit a brazier near the entrance and fanned the hot air inside. As far as Kappes was concerned, the time for negotiating was over. The Americans had proof that Libya was trying to develop a nuclear weapon; if he refused to give up the program, the months of negotiations would end, and there would be consequences for Gadhafi and his country.

  “You are the drowning man, and I am the lifeguard,” Kappes told the Libyan leader.

  Gadhafi agreed to be saved.

  With a deal at hand, secrecy was more vital than ever. If word leaked that Gadhafi had agreed to give up his weapons of mass destruction, the Arab press and his own people might embarrass the Libyan into backing out. President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair were informed, but only a handful of senior officials in either government knew of the deal in the desert. Technical details now needed to be resolved. First, arrangements had to be made to take an inventory of Libya’s stocks of chemical weapons and nuclear equipment. Second, an agreement had to be reached to remove the most sensitive nuclear equipment from Libya and dispose of its chemical weapons. All of this was contingent upo
n the mercurial strongman not changing his mind and walking away from the deal.

  Two weeks after the agreement, a joint team of CIA and MI6 experts in chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons boarded a CIA plane operated by a British front company and headed for Libya to get their first look at the sites where work was under way. Somehow, word of the secret flight reached a member of the European Council, the advisory body of the European Union, which threatened to expose and possibly torpedo the grand bargain. Fortunately, the legislator made the wrong assumption, leaking to the press that the aircraft had been involved in one of the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions” to return a terrorism suspect to Libya. The trip lasted only a couple of days, so in early December the team returned to take a more exhaustive inventory of the nuclear sites and the warehouse where the Libyans stored barrels of chemical weapons. This time, they spent ten days compiling a catalog of advanced nuclear technology so extensive that it stunned them. The Libyans had received far more equipment than Urs Tinner had reported to the CIA, though there was no way to determine whether the Swiss technician had withheld information or simply not known about the extent of the shipments. There was still a chance that Gadhafi might change his mind, but after the second inspection the Americans and British had enough information to bomb the programs out of existence if need be.

  Meanwhile, efforts were under way to resolve the political side of the equation. The diplomatic wrangling centered on how much Libya would acknowledge in public, the precise language of its admission, whether all the nuclear equipment would be removed, and whether Gadhafi would suffer the humiliation of making the announcement himself.

  Late on the morning of December 16, an unlikely group arrived at the Traveller’s Club, a Victorian-era gentlemen’s club, which had already witnessed its share of history from its perch among the grand buildings of Pall Mall, just off Piccadilly in the center of London. They were ushered to one of the private rooms off the pillared main lobby, where they took seats around a massive mahogany table, which was set for a formal luncheon. In the middle on one side sat Musa Kousa, flanked by Libya’s ambassadors to London and Rome. Across from him were William Ehr-man and David Landsman, senior officials from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Mark Allen, and another MI6 agent. Representing the United States were Robert Joseph, the head of counterproliferation at the National Security Council, and Steve Kappes.

  The meal was over soon, but the negotiations dragged on for ten hours as the Americans and British pushed relentlessly toward a single goal: forcing Gadhafi to make an unambiguous public statement relinquishing his chemical weapons and abandoning his nuclear-weapons program. They insisted that Libya give up all of the nuclear material and equipment it had bought on the black market and destroy its stockpiles of chemical weapons. In addition, Libya would have to turn over its long-range Scud missiles, which were capable of reaching Europe, sign the Additional Protocol, and permit full inspections by the IAEA.

  “It was a really tough meeting,” said one participant. “They were giving up things that cost a lot of money, and a lot of people had their careers tied up in these programs. It was not an easy thing to do to shut them down and have them removed, too. There was also the political issue, how was this going to look to their Arab neighbors. And there were other impediments. There was no obligation for them to give up the Scuds. They also could have tried to keep the centrifuges and other nuclear equipment. They could simply have said this was intended for peaceful purposes, and I think the IAEA would have agreed with them and let them keep the equipment.” But for the Americans and British, it was an all-or-nothing deal.

  The Libyans won on a critical face-saving point. Gadhafi would not have to be embarrassed by making the actual announcement, a task given to the foreign minister. Still, Gadhafi would have to issue a brief public statement endorsing the decision as a way of signaling to the world that he had signed off on it. Eventually, the negotiations came down to the language of Libya’s announcement and the responses by the British and American leaders. Each sentence was parsed over and over until the two sides found language that was acceptable to everyone. “Nothing was agreed until everything was agreed,” said another participant.

  As the ultimate goal loomed larger, the fears of a leak grew, causing the British and Americans to push the Libyans to announce the agreement as soon as possible. After much back and forth, the historic announcement was finally set for December 19, the earliest date by which the Libyans thought they could make the necessary preparations. In Washington, only a handful of senior people knew of the pending news. John Bolton, America’s top counterproliferation official, was among those who were kept in the dark, out of fears that he would expose the negotiations. In London, one of the few British officials who knew what was coming was pacing his office and glancing at the television throughout the day on the nineteenth, waiting for word from Libya. As evening turned to night, and Tripoli was still silent, he called Anthony Layden, the British ambassador there.

  “Have they broadcast it yet?” he asked Layden.

  “There’s a football match on television,” replied Layden.

  As it got later and later, the British official began to worry that Gadhafi had suffered a last-minute change of heart and would call off the whole thing.

  Finally, when the soccer game ended, Libyan foreign minister Mohammed Abderrahmane Chalgam appeared on national television to announce that the country would disclose and dismantle its nuclear- and chemical-weapons programs. Gadhafi then appeared briefly to deliver his public blessing, calling it a “wise decision and a courageous step.”

  Shortly after 5:00 p.m. in Washington and 10:00 p.m. in London, Bush and Blair went before the TV cameras on separate sides of the Atlantic to praise Libya’s decision. Nearly nine months into the Iraq war, the American teams there had failed to find any evidence that Saddam had resumed efforts to develop WMDs, stripping Bush of his principal justification for the war. As America’s primary ally, Blair faced rising criticism at home. So both leaders found themselves grasping at a life preserver, this one offered by Moammar Gadhafi. Bush in particular argued that the Libyan action restored the luster of American intelligence agencies, tarnished by their failures in Iraq. Gadhafi’s decision, the president said, was a direct benefit of getting tough with Saddam Hussein and other rogue regimes. American pressure on North Korea and Iran and the war in Iraq, he said in a televised address, “have sent an unmistakable message to regimes that seek or possess weapons of mass destruction: Those weapons do not bring influence or prestige. They bring isolation and otherwise unwelcome consequences.”

  The next day, Gadhafi sent a messenger to London with a box of dates and oranges for the prime minister, along with a note of thanks. The Khan network was about to get a different message.

  CHAPTER 28

  CHECKBOOK PROLIFERATION

  OLLI HEINONEN WAS SHOPPING with his family at Vienna’s famous Christmas Market outside City Hall on the morning of December 20, a Saturday, when his cellphone rang. ElBaradei’s secretary was calling with an urgent message: Heinonen was needed at an emergency meeting in the director general’s office. He left his family on the sidewalk and drove to the IAEA, promising to return home in a couple of hours. He was to be gone far longer.

  Heinonen’s boss, Pierre Goldschmidt, had left town the previous afternoon to spend the holidays in his native Belgium. He was pleased about the prospect of two weeks off because he had spent the previous Christmas in North Korea, negotiating in vain to prevent the expulsion of IAEA inspectors after the collapse of the agreement that had frozen the Korean plutonium program. When he opened his cellphone on the morning of the twentieth, he found a message from Vienna: “You have to come back immediately. There is a crisis with Libya.” He raced to the airport in Brussels.

  ElBaradei had received word of the Libyan decision the night before, within minutes of Gadhafi’s announcement, when an American official telephoned his home, but he had waited until morning to
contact the others. The IAEA officials were not the only ones in the dark. The American ambassador to the IAEA, Kenneth Brill, was out of Vienna on a ski trip and knew nothing of the pending announcement, so he missed the detailed, classified communication, which arrived at the offices of his delegation at midnight. Only the duty officer was there to read the memo, which provided an extensive rundown of what had been discovered about the Libyan nuclear program and talking points for what could be shared with the IAEA the following morning.

  Though Washington had continued to feed information about Iran to the IAEA, there had been a squabble over whether to involve the agency in dismantling the Libyan program. John Bolton, who himself had not learned of the negotiations with Libya until moments before Gadhafi’s public announcement, argued that the United States and Britain deserved all the glory for forcing Libya out of the nuclear business, and he pressed to keep the IAEA completely out of the loop. He contended that the Libyan episode showed once again that the IAEA was incapable of uncovering a hidden nuclear program. Colin Powell overrode Bolton, persuading the White House that the IAEA had a legal role to play in dismantling the Libyan installations and that it would be good politics to involve the respected agency.

  Late on that Saturday morning, two British intelligence agents arrived in Vienna and were escorted directly to ElBaradei’s office. Gathered to meet them with the director were Heinonen, Jacques Baute, and a handful of other senior agency officials. Goldschmidt was still in the air. Two diplomats had come over from the American mission, but Brill had not made it back for the briefing. There were a couple of British diplomats. The intelligence agents presented an hourlong description of the types and amounts of nuclear technology discovered in Libya and the number of installations that had been inspected by the joint British-American team earlier in the month. Though the inquiry was still preliminary, the agents said that much, if not all, of the technology appeared to have come through suppliers associated with A. Q. Khan. Though the agents did not say so, the Libyans had admitted to Stephen Kappes that Khan had been their chief supplier, which was confirmed by the fact that some crates discovered at various places around Tripoli bore markings from Khan Research Laboratories.