The Nuclear Jihadist

by Douglas Frantz

  A fourth meeting in September on the Austrian-Liechtenstein border, not far from the Tinners’ home, was testy, with Friedrich Tinner growing angry and trying to justify his decades-long business dealings with A. Q. Khan and with Libya. In a telling rationalization that demonstrated the psychological distance Tinner had erected between his conscience and his business, he shouted at Heinonen and Yonemura: “Just because someone makes a pistol, it doesn’t mean he is a murderer. Just because we help build centrifuges, it doesn’t mean we are making a bomb.” Yonemura, who had left Japan’s civilian nuclear industry to join the IAEA out of a conviction that nuclear weapons should never again be used, was horrified by the comment.

  The Tinners were frustrated. Neither the Americans nor the IAEA had provided assurances that they could be protected from law enforcement. The Germans were investigating Urs as an accomplice in the network, and the Swiss were looking into the transfers to Libya, too. A few weeks later, in early October, Urs Tinner crossed into Germany, for unknown reasons and in violation of Mad Dog’s warnings. His passport was flagged at the border, and he was arrested on charges of sending nuclear technology to Libya. Friedrich telephoned Heinonen, angrily accusing him of providing confidential information to the German authorities. Heinonen protested that he had kept everything within the confines of the IAEA, but Friedrich was unappeased. It proved to be their last conversation.

  The setback meant that the most likely sources for identifying a missing customer and filling in the blanks were Khan and Tahir. Efforts to question the Pakistani scientist had remained at a standstill, the mastermind incommunicado in Islamabad. Near the end of 2004, the Pakistanis hinted at a compromise, telling Heinonen that he might be allowed to send written questions to the scientist. Heinonen and his team began preparing their questions, coming up with fifty-two detailed queries—and a prayer.

  The Bush administration refused to pressure Pakistan to give the CIA or IAEA access to Khan, as it was more concerned about maintaining its alliance with Musharraf than getting to the bottom of the network. The lack of insistence was surprising because Bush seemed to believe that the threat of nuclear terrorism was real. In a presidential-campaign debate on September 30, 2004, the two candidates, Senator John Kerry and President Bush, were asked what they regarded as the top national-security danger facing the United States. The answers produced a rare moment of agreement: Kerry responded “nuclear proliferation” and repeated the words for emphasis; Bush said, “I agree with my opponent that the biggest threat facing this country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network.”

  Bush’s reelection did not bring access to Khan. But in February 2005 the Malaysian government notified the IAEA that a delegation from the agency would be allowed to interview Tahir. The following day, the team flew to Kuala Lumpur. The plan was to use this first meeting to get to know Tahir and convince him that it was in his interest to cooperate, so when the Malaysian secret police insisted that the interview take place at police headquarters, Heinonen was concerned. His worries deepened when the police who brought Tahir to the station from the remote prison where he was being held insisted on sitting in.

  “Does it disturb you that the police are here?” Heinonen asked Tahir.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  Heinonen assumed the room was bugged anyway, so he didn’t make an issue of it. He and others questioned Tahir gently about his background and how he came to be involved with Khan. Tahir did not appear to be evasive, though he was not particularly forthcoming either. He said he had tried unsuccessfully to get out of the ring on several occasions but that Khan had always brought him back in. Over several hours, Tahir began to open up, providing intriguing glimpses inside the ring, describing his friendship with Khan and the jealousies and rivalries within the network. Tahir said that Khan had grown increasingly religious during the years they had worked together; twice, he said, he had accompanied Khan to Mecca, the religious journey required by the Koran as the ultimate act of worship for Muslims. The tidbits were tantalizing, many corroborating information from the Tinners and others. Yet it was clear that there was far more to learn from Tahir. At the end of the session, Yonemura handed her digital camera to one of the policemen and asked him to take a picture of the group, promising to deliver a print to Tahir when they returned. But there was to be no next time. Twice, the IAEA officials made arrangements to see Tahir again, and each time the Malaysians canceled at the last minute, saying only that the timing wasn’t right.

  Come the summer of 2005, the investigation continued, but the headlines were gone and so was the pressure from the international community to get to the bottom of the Khan network. The war in Iraq was dragging on, all hope of an early American victory dashed by the growing insurgency. The way was cleared for ElBaradei to receive a third term as director general. Khan remained in protective custody in his home, suffering from high blood pressure, a hernia, and heart problems. The clamor for his release and rehabilitation had long ago subsided, though outside agencies were still prohibited from interviewing him. Urs Tinner had been extradited to Switzerland in the spring, and not long after Swiss authorities arrested his father and brother, too. In response to requests from the IAEA and published reports, the Swiss had determined that it was time to get tougher. Months later, Swiss investigators examining the role of the Tinners in the smuggling network complained that they were being hampered by a lack of cooperation from the United States. Wisser continued to await trial in South Africa.

  In June, Pierre Goldschmidt retired as deputy director general in charge of the safeguards department, the agency’s second-ranking position, and he was replaced by Olli Heinonen. The investigation of the network was incomplete, and Heinonen vowed to see it to the end despite the heavy new workload. His biggest headache was no longer the network, however, but the looming standoff with Iran. The United States argued that Iran continued to stonewall the IAEA and hide key elements of its nuclear program. Joined by Britain, France, and Germany in varying degrees, Washington was pushing the IAEA to send the Iranian file to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. ElBaradei remained reluctant, fearing it could put the world on the road to war with Iran as it had with Iraq. So he argued for more time to complete inspections. To impartial observers, ElBaradei had more credibility on the subject than the Bush administration, which had finally given up on finding any evidence of a nuclear program in Iraq. “You need to be patient,” ElBaradei told one interviewer.

  On October 7, the IAEA director general’s strategy got an enormous vote of confidence. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize was being shared by the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director general “for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.” The champagne corks popped in the offices of the IAEA in Vienna. An emotional ElBaradei told journalists gathered outside his office that he regarded the honor as a mandate for himself and the agency. “The award sends a very strong message: ‘Keep doing what you are doing,’” he said. “We continue to believe that in all of our activities, we have to be impartial, objective, and work with integrity. Overall, my colleagues and I will go to sleep tonight with a good feeling of satisfaction that finally our effort has been fully recognized.”

  Heinonen celebrated with the others, but he wasn’t so sure that he would sleep any better. Even with its enhanced investigative capacity and the authority that came with the world’s most prestigious prize, he was far from certain that the IAEA could find the next hidden weapons program. The investigation of Khan’s network had slowed, leaving Heinonen and the others doubtful that they would ever identify its other customer, if there was one. He estimated that the investigation had uncovered 75 to 80 percent of Khan’s network, but frightening gaps remained. No trace had been found of the electronic warhead plans or the missing equipment.

/>   One day in the spring of 2006, Heinonen gazed out the window at the Danube and the cityscape of Vienna. He refused to admit the obvious—that his investigation of the network was finished, overtaken by new chapters in the story of the new age of proliferation. He recognized that the IAEA still didn’t have all the powers necessary to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, particularly at a time when the technology was so widely available. He was proud of the agency’s performance in unraveling much of Khan’s operation and focusing attention on the dangers of proliferation, but he recognized that dangers still existed.

  “Even though A. Q. Khan doesn’t operate, the information is still out there,” he explained with a shrug. “Until we find out who got this information and technology, we cannot rest. In the past, these sorts of people have responded to difficult times by shifting the way they operate. They go where it’s easy. As long as there are clients, they will have work. But we don’t want to go down in history as the guys who didn’t ring the bell.”

  IN LATE 2006, word came from Pakistan that Khan had undergone surgery for prostate cancer at the Aga Khan Hospital in Karachi. His wife and two daughters were at his side, and the room was filled with flowers and cards from well-wishers across Pakistan, who still considered him a national hero although the legacy Khan had left the rest of world was far from heroic. He had changed the global nuclear landscape in ways that would live on long after his death, ushering in a new age of proliferation by demonstrating how the old restraints had frayed.

  In late October, Mohamed ElBaradei disclosed that Iran had started testing new uranium-enrichment equipment that could double the capacity of its pilot plant at Natanz, putting the country a step farther down the road toward developing fissile material. Tehran had ignored an August 31 deadline imposed by the UN Security Council to stop enriching uranium, but the group’s fractious members still could not agree on whether economic sanctions were warranted as punishment.

  The Iranian defiance led to new threats from the Bush administration. The Americans had determined for themselves that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon, though they estimated Tehran was four to ten years away. Nonetheless, articles in the American press described renewed contingency planning by the American military for attacks to knock out Iran’s nuclear installations and warned that some within the administration considered war inevitable. “We’ll turn Iran into a glass-covered parking lot,” warned a retired army colonel. The war drums worried ElBaradei, who said there was no hard evidence that Iran was pursuing a bomb. “People confuse knowledge, industrial capacity, and intention,” he said. “A lot of what you see about Iran right now is assessment of intentions.”

  Iran was not the only problem. At 10:36 on the morning of October 9, the North Koreans announced that they had successfully tested a nuclear device. American intelligence agencies quickly determined that the small device was based on plutonium extracted from its reactor at Yongbyon, but they cautioned that the North Koreans appeared to be preparing for a second test based on a uranium-fueled bomb developed from enrichment equipment and expertise from Khan. Reaction from Washington was swift and furious, with Bush calling the test provocative and threatening to hold North Korea “fully accountable” if its leader, Kim Jong Il, tried to sell bombs as freely as he had sold missiles. The United Nations responded by slapping sanctions on North Korea, though China and Russia watered down their scope. The Bush administration interpreted the sanctions as a warning to Iranians that they should stop their enrichment activities, but Iran’s hard-liners had a far different reaction to what was essentially a weak response by the international community to a momentous event. “They must be laughing,” Susan Rice, a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, said of the Iranians. “You can explode a nuclear weapon and only get slapped on the wrist.”

  North Korea’s nuclear test and Iran’s continuing defiance reverberated beyond their own borders and increased the likelihood that other countries might seek parity through their own nuclear weapons. Among the likely suspects were at least three countries in Asia—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—and four in the greater Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. A week after the North Korean test, ElBaradei took up the threat in an address to a conference on proliferation controls at IAEA headquarters. The mood was somber, and many experts from the IAEA and other countries feared a new worldwide arms race. ElBaradei offered little comfort, warning that as many as thirty additional countries could soon have the technology to produce nuclear weapons in a very short time. Some countries, he said, were already far enough along that they should be regarded as “virtual nuclear weapons states.” The IAEA boss did not single out any countries, preferring to issue a general warning. “The knowledge is out,” he told the audience, “both for peaceful purpose and unfortunately for not peaceful purposes.”

  Epilogue

  ON JANUARY 17, 2007, in an elegant nineteenth-century ballroom overlooking St. James’s Park in London and in a hushed auditorium a few blocks from the White House in Washington, the world inched closer to Armageddon. In simultaneous events at the Royal Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock, created sixty years earlier by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was pushed two minutes closer to midnight, the symbolic end of civilization.

  At the Royal Society’s headquarters on the Mall, cosmologist and mathematician Stephen Hawking spoke of the danger through a computer attached to his wheelchair. “Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear weapons have been used in war, though the world has come uncomfortably close to disaster on more than one occasion,” he said. “But for good luck, we would all be dead.”

  The clock was created in 1947 as a means of reflecting the continuous danger of living in a nuclear age; at the start of the Cold War, the minute hand was set at seven minutes to midnight, and over the years it has moved backward and forward as world threats ebbed and flowed. The decision to move the clock to five minutes to midnight on January 17 was made by the board of directors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists after consulting eighteen Nobel Laureates and a host of other luminaries. The board said the judgment reflected growing dangers from the spread of nuclear weapons and the potential for catastrophic harm from global warming. The danger of apocalypse is closer now than at any time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  A. Q. Khan was not on the list of reasons for the rising threat level, but two of his customers were. The North Korean test had occurred just a few weeks earlier. Experts decided that the underground explosion was relatively small, and might have been a dud, but for all intents and purposes a ninth country had joined the new generation of nuclear states. North Korea’s entry into the nuclear elite mattered most as what writer Steve Coll calls “a symbol of accumulating trouble.” The test was all the more ominous because the communist dictatorship has never developed a weapon that it did not offer up for sale.

  The Americans and their allies appeared equally impotent when trying to deal with the likely next member of the nuclear club, Iran. Despite the threat of economic sanctions and saber rattling by President Bush and his right hand, Dick Cheney, the Iranians defiantly pushed ahead with the completion of the huge underground centrifuge plant at Natanz, preparing to install tens of thousands of the machines based on drawings and equipment from Khan and his network. Given the savage devastation occurring next door in Iraq, which had no nuclear weapon, it was hard to fault Iran’s revolutionary leaders for wanting some deterrence against an attack by the United States. Indeed, short of sustained military strikes on dozens of nuclear facilities inside Iran, there appears to be no way to stop Iran from developing its own bomb, particularly given the Bush administration’s contempt for diplomacy.

  Another of Khan’s clients, Libya, had relinquished its nuclear ambitions in an attempt to rehabilitate its outlaw reputation and rejoin the international community. But its leader, Moammar Gadhafi, was growing restive at the slow pace of his country’
s reintegration into the world economic order. Some experts worried that he might rekindle his plans, possibly with equipment and designs hidden from the American and British intelligence agents.

  Then, there was the threat of the mysterious fourth customer of the Khan network, rumored to be Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, or Al Qaeda. Three years after the network was shut down, the fact that critical equipment from its inventory had still not surfaced offered no solace to the officials at the IAEA. Among the missing items were electronic copies of the Chinese nuclear warhead. Iran had already demonstrated how easy it was to conceal a nuclear program, having hidden its dealings with Khan for fifteen years.

  Khan played a central role in ushering in the second nuclear age, an era in which the monopoly on atomic weapons maintained by five major powers was threatened by a new type of proliferation. In this new age, history’s most lethal weapon became available to less developed countries and possibly to well-funded terrorist organizations. One of the most disturbing aspects of Khan’s successful operation was how clearly it demonstrated the failure of the nuclear-proliferation regime. From his days working in Amsterdam until his downfall, Khan exploited weak export controls and lax enforcement. His network relied not on state-to-state transfers of technology but on the easy availability of nuclear-related equipment and material on the gray market, as governments and industries promoted high-tech exports. Globalization and the Internet offered even easier and faster methods of distributing sensitive information and technology.

  The spread of nuclear know-how and related technology has gone far beyond the traditional weapons states and outstripped their capacity to control it. In 2005, Britain’s MI5 revealed that more than 360 businesses and individuals worldwide were suspected of playing a role in the development of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. MI5 said these entities and people were concentrated in the developing countries of the Middle East and South Asia.