A High-Risk Nuclear Stakeout
The U.S. took too long to act, some experts say, letting a
Pakistani scientist sell illicit technology well after it knew of his
operation.
Douglas Frantz. Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2005
WASHINGTON - Nuclear warhead plans that Pakistani
scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan sold to Libya were more complete and
detailed than previously disclosed, raising new concerns about the cost
of Washington's watch-and-wait policy before Khan and his global black
market were shut down last year.
Two Western nuclear weapons specialists who have examined the
top-secret designs say the hundreds of pages of engineering drawings
and handwritten notes provide an excellent starting point for anyone
trying to develop an effective atomic warhead.
"This involved the spread of very sensitive nuclear knowledge, and it
is the most serious form of proliferation," one of the specialists
said. Both described the designs on condition that their names be
withheld because the plans are classified.
The sale of the plans is particularly troubling to some investigators
because the transaction occurred at least 18 months after U.S. and
British intelligence agencies concluded that Khan was running an
international nuclear smuggling ring and identified Libya as a
suspected customer, according to U.S. officials and a British
government assessment.
Interviews with current and former government officials and
intelligence agents and outside experts in Washington, Europe and the
Middle East reveal a lengthy pattern of watching and waiting when it
came to Khan and his illicit network.
The trail dated back more than 20 years as Khan went from a secretive
procurer of technology for Pakistan's atomic weapons program, which he
headed, to history's biggest independent seller of nuclear weapons
equipment and expertise.
For most of those years, Khan's primary customers were Iran and North
Korea. In 2002, President Bush said the countries were part of an "axis
of evil," in part because of nuclear programs nourished by Khan and his
network.
Despite knowing at least the broad outlines of Khan's activities,
American intelligence agencies regularly objected to shutting down his
operations. And policymakers in Washington repeatedly prioritized other
strategic goals over stopping him, according to current and former
officials.
Some officials said that even as the picture of the threat posed by
Khan's operation got clearer and bigger in 2000 and 2001, the
intelligence was too limited to act on.
Other officials said the CIA and the National Security Agency, which
eavesdropped on Khan's communications, were so addicted to gathering
information and so worried about compromising their electronic sources
that they rebuffed efforts to roll up the operation for years.
"We could have stopped the Khan network, as we knew it, at any time,"
said Robert J. Einhorn, a top counter-proliferation official at the
State Department from 1991 to August 2001. "The debate was, do you stop
it now or do you watch it and understand it better so that you are in a
stronger position to pull it up by the roots later - The case for
waiting prevailed."
Current and former Bush administration officials say the patience paid
off. They say that in late 2003, combined U.S. and British intelligence
on Khan finally yielded enough information to persuade Libyan leader
Moammar Kadafi to relinquish his nuclear technology and turn over
conclusive evidence used to shut down the Pakistani scientist, who by
then had been removed as head of his nation's primary nuclear
laboratory.
"A.Q. Khan is a textbook case of government doing things right," John
S. Wolf, then assistant secretary of State for nonproliferation, said
when Kadafi gave up his nuclear equipment.
Others say that the price of patience was too high, emphasizing that
for years Khan fed the nuclear ambitions of countries that the U.S.
says have ties to terrorism and pose major foreign policy problems.
"I don't see what was gained by waiting," said George Perkovich, a
nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in Washington. "Iran got centrifuge equipment and knowledge at
the very least, and possibly a weapons design. We don't even know what
North Korea got."
An American diplomat in Europe was more blunt, saying, "It's absolutely
shocking that Khan spread nuclear knowledge while he was being
watched."
As a global inquiry into Khan's network enters its second year,
investigators from several countries and the United Nations'
International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna are trying to answer two
vital questions: how much damage did Khan do and how did he stay in
business for so long?
The challenge has been made tougher by Pakistan's refusal to allow
outside investigators to question Khan, who is under house arrest in
Islamabad, and because his network began systematically shredding
papers and deleting e-mails in the summer of 2002, after realizing it
was under surveillance.
Investigators said the previously undisclosed destruction of records is
making it harder to discover whether the network sold its deadly wares,
including the warhead plans, to as yet unidentified countries or even
extremist organizations. It also increases the chances that remnants of
the ring will re-emerge. "Regrettably, they had a long time to destroy
evidence," said a senior investigator who had interviewed members of
the network. "They knew they were being watched."
A detailed chronology of the long history of Khan and the spies who
watched him, based on extensive interviews and hundreds of pages of
public and confidential records, provides an unusual look at the
inherent tension between gathering intelligence and taking action,
which allowed the scientist and his network of engineers and middlemen
to operate unchecked.
Path to Deception
Abdul Qadeer Khan, believed to have been born in India in 1935, moved
with his family to Pakistan in 1952 in the aftermath of ethnic violence
in India. He was a bright student whose studies took him to Europe,
where he eventually received a doctorate in metallurgy.
In May 1972, Khan started work for an engineering firm in Amsterdam
that was a major subcontractor for Urenco, a British-Dutch-German
consortium founded two years earlier to develop advanced centrifuges to
enrich
uranium for civilian power plants.
Though he was supposed to work only with material labeled confidential,
over the next 3 1/2 years Khan got access to top-secret dossiers on
every aspect of the enrichment process, according to a lengthy report
prepared last year by Dutch anti-nuclear activists.
When he returned to Pakistan in December 1975 with his Dutch wife,
Hendrina, and their two daughters, ostensibly for a holiday, he carried
with him designs he had copied while working in the Netherlands,
intelligence and law enforcement authorities said.
His timing was excellent. Pakistan had fought wars in 1965 and 1971
with neighboring India and the two countries were locked in a race to
develop nuclear weapons.
Khan mailed his resignation letter to Amsterdam and quickly assumed a
primary role in the Pakistani government's nuclear program, which would
succeed in testing its first bombs in 1998 partly because of Khan's
skills.
Initially, he served under the nation's atomic energy commission, but
he bristled at the constraints and won the right to work without
official oversight.
"He asked for and received autonomy and an unlimited budget," said
Feroz Khan, a retired Pakistani brigadier general and nuclear expert
who is not related to A.Q. Khan. "There was no accountability."
Enriching natural uranium to weapons grade is a complicated process
requiring huge arrays of slim cylinders called centrifuges and
sophisticated machinery to regulate them as they spin at twice the
speed of sound.
Pakistan did not have the material to manufacture the delicately
balanced centrifuges or much of the other equipment required, so Khan
used his outsize budget to establish a clandestine procurement network.
The first purchases were from companies associated with Urenco and were
orchestrated through Pakistani embassies in Europe in 1976, creating
what became known as the Pakistani pipeline.
Alarm bells rang in 1978 after a British company sold Pakistan
high-frequency electronic devices used in the enrichment process. The
ensuing investigations pointed at Khan, according to media reports at
the time.
President Jimmy Carter cut off U.S. assistance to Pakistan in April
1979 when it was discovered that Khan had stolen plans from Urenco and
was using them in Pakistan's nuclear effort.
But the U.S. sanctions were short-lived. The Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan later that year pushed counter-proliferation concerns to
the back burner and lowered the heat on Khan and Pakistan for the next
decade. During that period, Islamabad was the principal conduit for
huge amounts of U.S. aid to anti-Soviet fighters in neighboring
Afghanistan.
The Dutch were unable to prove that Khan stole the designs, but in 1983
he was convicted in absentia of writing two letters seeking classified
nuclear information. The conviction was overturned because he never
received a proper summons.
A former CIA agent who worked in the region said the Reagan
administration had "incontrovertible" knowledge of Pakistan's progress
toward the bomb and Khan's central role in procuring material, but
chose not to act.
The pattern and priorities had been established. Throughout the 1980s,
the Reagan and Bush administrations sent $600 million a year in
military and economic assistance to Pakistan for its help on
Afghanistan, according to a report last month by the Congressional
Research Service.
Not until the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan did the first President
Bush reimpose sanctions on Pakistan, in 1990, for developing atomic
weapons.
But U.S. intelligence had not lost complete sight of Khan. The CIA was
told in 1989 that the Pakistani scientist was providing centrifuge
designs and parts to Iran, said two former U.S. officials who read the
reports.
Not for the first time, however, U.S. intelligence officials and
policymakers underestimated Khan's talent for spreading nuclear
know-how.
"We knew he traveled a lot, but we thought it was probably related to
imports rather than exports," said Einhorn, who read about the Iran
link when he joined the State Department nonproliferation bureau in
1991. "We thought the Iran connection had fallen off during the 1990s
and that Iran was mainly looking to Russia rather than Pakistan for its
nuclear supplies."
In fact, Khan started providing material to Iran in 1987 and continued
as its primary nuclear supplier for at least a decade, recent reports
by the International Atomic Energy Agency state. As demand for his
wares grew, he turned for help to many of the companies and engineers
supplying Pakistan.
Tapping Old Contacts
The network was a sort of old boys club from Urenco. It included Dutch,
German and Swiss members, former Urenco subcontractors who had gotten
rich helping Khan turn Pakistan into a nuclear power.
But rivalries developed within the group as orders from Iran slowed in
the mid-1990s, and Khan, even as he ran Pakistan's enrichment
facilities, tried to expand his illicit sales to other countries,
investigators said.
"Some guys got along and some guys didn't," said an investigator who
spoke on condition of anonymity. "A.Q. dealt with them individually.
There were some group meetings, but there was never a meeting of all
the major players at once."
Khan developed a particularly close friendship with B.S.A. Tahir, a Sri
Lankan businessman who eventually turned his computer business in Dubai
into the network's operational base. The two men traveled together
frequently and twice made the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
Khan visited at least a dozen countries in the Middle East and Africa
in search of new customers for the network, but nuclear weapons proved
a harder sell than he had imagined, investigators said.
In 1997, he got a cold reception when he told an audience of scientists
and military officers in Damascus that Syria should acquire its own
nuclear weapons to counter Israel's arsenal, said a former Syrian
official who attended the talk.
But that same year he appeared to strike it rich. At a series of
meetings in Istanbul, Turkey, and Casablanca, Morocco, he made a deal
to sell Libya a complete bomb-making factory for approximately $100
million.
This appears to have been the network's biggest transaction, and it led
Khan to take a risk and expand beyond the original participants and his
own safe base in Pakistan.
The Libya deal was taking shape just as Khan reaped enormous benefits
at home. On May 28, 1998, the desert of southwestern Pakistan rumbled
deeply as five nuclear weapons were detonated. It was Pakistan's first
nuclear test and it answered India's detonation of three bombs two
weeks earlier.
Already a powerful figure, Khan basked in nationwide adulation as he
was dubbed the father of the Islamic bomb, a title that many experts
say exaggerated his role. Still, he boasted in an interview with a
Pakistani
magazine about evading efforts to stop him and exploiting Western
greed.
"Many suppliers approached us with the details of the machinery and
with the figures and numbers of instruments and materials," he said.
"They begged us to purchase their goods."
Even with his role in making nuclear weapons now in the open, Khan
continued to quietly make deals with other nations. In late 1998, U.S.
intelligence picked up evidence that he was trading enrichment
technology to North Korea in return for missiles capable of carrying
nuclear warheads into India, a former senior U.S. official who read the
reports said.
The suspicions were added to a growing, highly classified chronology of
Khan's actions kept at the State Department, said another former senior
official.
In January 1999, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott raised the
North Korean deal at a lunch in Islamabad with then-Pakistani Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif. He asked Sharif to stop the illicit trade in
nuclear technology and end the deals with Pyongyang, Talbott wrote in
his 2004 book "Engaging India." A second U.S. official who attended the
meeting corroborated the account.
Though Talbott did not mention Khan by name, the second official said
it was clear that Talbott was talking about Khan when he asked for a
halt to the nuclear proliferation and the deals with North Korea, which
intelligence data showed were being handled directly by Khan through
his research laboratory in Pakistan.
"It is true that Pakistan has important defense cooperation with North
Korea, but it is for conventional military equipment," Sharif replied,
according to the second official. "Nothing nuclear is taking place."
Former Pakistani officials said the Americans never provided hard
information that could have led to action against Khan, though critics
argue that the scientist could not have conducted his business without
at least a wink and a nod from Pakistan's military establishment.
"They were very vague warnings and there was no real evidence or we
would have acted," Feroz Khan, the former Pakistani brigadier general
who is a visiting professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey, Calif., said in a telephone interview.
The situation for Abdul Qadeer Khan began to deteriorate after Sharif
was ousted in a coup in October 1999 by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the head
of the armed forces.
Aides to Musharraf said he tried almost immediately to assert control
over the country's nuclear establishment, including imposing the first
audit requirements on Khan Research Laboratory, the government complex
renamed
after him that was his base of operations.
Khan resisted and Musharraf ultimately forced him out as head of the
lab, though he lavished praise on Khan at his retirement banquet,
saying his team had "sweated, day and night, against all odds and
obstacles, against international sanctions and sting operations, to
create, literally out of nothing, with their bare hands, the pride of
Pakistan's nuclear capability."
The unprecedented restrictions at home coincided with increasing demand
for centrifuges and other goods for Libya's bomb-making factory. Khan
responded by finding new sources of equipment in South Africa and
Malaysia.
Pakistan was known in U.S. intelligence circles as a "hard target,"
which meant penetrating Khan's inner circle and his facilities there
was extremely difficult. Pakistani authorities were aware of U.S.
interest in their nuclear facilities and took steps to protect them and
their scientists.
The shift to other locations for production created a new vulnerability
that was quickly exploited by the U.S., most likely by eavesdropping on
phone calls and monitoring e-mail.
"We were inside his residence, inside his facilities, inside his
rooms," said George J. Tenet, the former director of the CIA,
describing that period to an audience last year.
A former U.S. intelligence officer said the CIA and National Security
Agency were focused on the Khan network and collecting important pieces
of the puzzle, but both agencies argued for caution out of a strong
desire to protect sources and methods.
"In the NSA's case, we could be talking about the potential compromise
of a collection system costing millions of dollars or a specific,
crucial source that would be evident if the information were acted on,"
the former officer said.
The best public source of information for what intelligence agencies
were learning at the time is a report issued in July by a British
government commission. Two U.S. officials described the report as an
accurate reflection of information shared between the CIA and its
British equivalent, MI6.
By April 2000, intelligence showed that Khan was supplying uranium
enrichment equipment to at least one customer in the Middle East,
thought to be Libya, the report says. Five months later, intelligence
operatives learned that the network was mass producing centrifuge
components for a major project.
When the new Bush administration came into office in January 2001, the
CIA briefed officials at the National Security Council on the dangers
posed by Khan. The NSC officials recognized the threat as well as the
need to get as much information as possible before acting, said two
people involved in the talks.
"The suspicion was that the intelligence guys were all about reporting
and watching and they had to overcome that," said Richard Falkenrath,
an NSC staff member at the time. "The other question was, 'What would
we do about Khan, what would Pakistan tolerate?' "
Throughout 2001, the CIA and MI6 tracked Khan's activities. A
comprehensive assessment in March 2002 concluded that Khan's network
had moved its base to Dubai and established production facilities in
Malaysia.
A few months later, new information led the agencies to conclude that
Khan's network was central to a Libyan nuclear weapons program.
By January 2003, the British were concerned that "Khan's activities had
now reached the point where it would be dangerous to allow them to go
on," the report says.
Libyan officials later would tell the Americans and British that Khan
had delivered the warhead plans to them in late 2001 or early 2002.
Wolf, the former assistant secretary of State, said he was unsure
whether the Americans or British knew about the plans until after the
Libyans decided to give up their nuclear ambitions.
Even as the danger mounted, there was a new constraint on action. The
terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001,
had restored Pakistan as a vital ally, and U.S. officials were
reluctant to take any step that might jeopardize the fight against Al
Qaeda and the Taliban.
Unraveling the Network
The endgame for Khan began in March 2003. Seif Islam, Kadafi's elder
son, approached an MI6 agent in London with an offer to talk about
rumors that Libya possessed weapons of mass destruction, several
officials briefed on the episode said.
Intelligence agents from the CIA and MI6 held sporadic talks with the
head of Libyan intelligence, Mousa Kusa, through the spring and summer.
The U.S. and Britain wanted Libya to give up its chemical weaponry and
nuclear technology, and Kadafi wanted assurances that in return
economic sanctions hobbling its economy would be removed.
In August, with the issue still unresolved, British intelligence got a
tip about a shipment that would be leaving Khan's factory in Malaysia
for Libya. U.S. spy satellites tracked the shipment, and the vessel was
eventually diverted by U.S. and Italian authorities to an Italian port,
where five crates of delicate centrifuge components were unloaded.
U.S. officials involved in the episode said the interception finally
persuaded the Libyan leader to give up his weapons programs, a decision
Kadafi announced on Dec. 19, 2003.
As part of the deal, teams from the U.S., Britain and the International
Atomic Energy Agency arrived in Libya in January 2004 to dismantle the
500 tons of nuclear equipment that Khan's network had shipped there.
The most sensitive material was loaded onto a U.S. military cargo plane
that had been stripped of its identifying marks and flown nonstop to
the national weapons laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Among the items on the plane was a sealed pouch containing the warhead
designs, said people involved in the shipment.
The two nuclear weapons specialists who examined the top-secret plans
said the Libyans had handed them over in two plastic shopping bags.
They said identifying marks had been removed but the designs were
clearly for a warhead tested by China in 1966 and later provided to
Pakistan.
One bag contained about 100 production drawings for fabricating the
warhead; the other held hundreds of pages of handwritten notes and
unclassified documents from sources such as the U.S. Department of
Energy.
The notes, written in English by at least four people, were numbered
sequentially and appeared to be the detailed records of a year-long
seminar given long ago by Chinese experts to Pakistanis on how to build
the warhead, the experts said.
Even before Kadafi made his announcement, U.S. officials had confronted
Musharraf with the Libyan evidence against Khan, leaving the Pakistani
leader with little choice but to act.
But Khan remained too popular � and Musharraf's grip on power too
tenuous � for a public arrest. Instead, Khan was placed under house
arrest and made a brief televised confession on Feb. 4, 2004, and he
was pardoned immediately.
Since then, Pakistan has kept Khan outside the reach of investigators,
leaving many questions about the proliferation network unanswered.
In one troubling discovery, investigators and customs officials in
Europe say they recently found signs that elements of the network had
resumed work. This time, the client again is Pakistan, which
investigators suspect is trying to get material for a new generation of
centrifuges.
"With Pakistan today, it's hard to know how much they need, but already
a couple of items have been stopped very recently, including a shipment
of high-strength aluminum for centrifuges," an investigator said.
In the meantime, Congress has approved and funded a request for a
three-year, $3-billion package of economic and military assistance to
Pakistan, which remains a key ally in the Bush administration's war on
terrorism.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
