Author: Maggie Farley and Bob Drogin
Publication: Los Angeles Times
Date: January 5, 2003
[The Evil Behind the Axis? A scientist
who built Pakistan's nuclear bomb may have helped North Korea, Iraq and
Iran. The national hero denies he's 'a madman.']
If one man sits at the nuclear fulcrum
of the three countries President Bush calls the "axis of evil," it may
well be Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The 66-year-old metallurgist is
considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. He is a national hero
at home, where hospitals bear his name and children sing his praises. U.S.
and other Western officials do not. They say Khan is the only scientist
known to be linked to the alleged efforts of North Korea, Iraq and Iran
to develop nuclear weapons.
"If the international community
had a proliferation most- wanted list, A. Q. Khan would be most wanted
on the list," said Robert J. Einhorn, who was assistant secretary of State
for nonproliferation in the Clinton administration.
U.S. intelligence long has known
of Khan's activities. But the extent of his ties to all three "axis" nations
became public only recently as North Korea admitted resuming its nuclear
weapons effort, satellite photos showed that Iran may be conducting clandestine
nuclear work and Khan's name appeared in a letter offering to "manufacture
a nuclear weapon" for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Pakistan denies giving nuclear assistance
to other countries and insists that Khan has done no wrong. But under intense
U.S. pressure, President Pervez Musharraf abruptly removed Khan as head
of nuclear weapons development two years ago. Bush administration officials,
wary of undermining a partner in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism, publicly
downplay concerns about Islamabad's possible role in spreading nuclear
knowledge.
Privately, U.S. officials have confronted
Pakistani leaders in recent years with the suggestion that Islamabad might
not have complete control over its nuclear scientists. However, some analysts
and experts doubt that a maverick scientist working alone -- even one as
senior as Khan -- could have engineered such sensitive deals with so many
governments.
"We know he's been [to North Korea]
at least 13 times, perhaps more," Gaurav Kampani, a nuclear expert at the
Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International
Studies in California, said of Khan. "It's obviously been sanctioned by
institutions within the Pakistani government."
Khan, with graying wavy hair and
a salt-and-pepper mustache, has shrugged off charges that he is a nuclear
Johnny Appleseed. Instead, he portrays himself as a scientist, a patriot
-- and a pacifist.
"Some people have the impression
that because I built a nuclear bomb, I'm some sort of cruel person," he
told a Pakistani journalist in 2001. "That's not the case. I built a weapon
of peace, which seems hard to understand until you realize Pakistan's nuclear
capability is a deterrent to aggressors. There has not been a war in the
last 30 years, and I don't expect one in the future. The stakes are too
high."
Unlike two other senior Pakistani
nuclear scientists who were questioned by U.S. and Pakistani authorities
in 2001 after meetings with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, Khan is not
an Islamic radical.
"He is not a fundamentalist, though
he is nationalist -- and sometimes nationalism and religion get mixed up
in Pakistan," said Pervez Hoodbhoy, an anti-nuclear activist and MIT-trained
physicist who teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan's
capital. "He has been in it for the power, the money and the glory."
Khan has received all three. When
he ran Pakistan's bomb- building program, he reported directly to the nation's
leader and had free-flowing funds at his disposal. U.S. officials say Khan
owns several palatial residences. And he is revered not only at home, where
he is hailed for putting Pakistan on an equal nuclear footing with rival
India, but also in much of the Muslim world, where he is lionized as the
man who built the "Islamic bomb."
One-Upmanship Begins
It began when India tested a nuclear
device in 1974 and Pakistan immediately sought to catch up. Khan kick-
started the country's nuclear program the following year, allegedly providing
copied plans for gas centrifuges from the Urenco uranium enrichment facility
in the Netherlands, where he had worked. He also obtained a list of suppliers
that would prove invaluable. Khan ultimately was tried for treason in absentia
in the Netherlands, but the case was dropped when prosecutors failed to
properly deliver a summons.
"He stole the blueprints," said
David Kay, who headed nuclear weapons evaluation programs at the International
Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna from 1982 to 1992. "But he's not a cat burglar
who snatched some plans. He's a very good scientist."
Khan took charge of Pakistan's uranium
enrichment program in 1976. Using the Urenco designs, his team secretly
built gas centrifuges at the A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta,
a heavily guarded complex near Islamabad. A separate agency, Pakistan's
Atomic Energy Organization, built the weapons using what U.S. officials
believe were plans obtained from China.
Pakistan detonated its first nuclear
devices underground in May 1998, shortly after India launched a second
series of nuclear tests. But U.S. officials say Pakistan had produced its
first nuclear weapon a decade earlier, thanks to Khan's success at the
hardest part of bomb- building: producing fissile material. Islamabad today
is believed to have 30 to 60 nuclear weapons.
Khan has proudly recounted how his
team procured key components openly from Western companies that were willing
to help -- and by subterfuge when they weren't. Khan said in an interview
with Pakistan's Defense Journal that Western governments tried to prevent
his nation from developing nuclear weapons but were foiled by the greed
of their own companies.
"Many suppliers approached us with
the details of the machinery and with figures and numbers of instruments
and materials," he said. "They begged us to purchase their goods."
For other items, the team used offshore
front companies in nations such as Japan and Singapore, sometimes routing
the goods through Jordan.
"I am not a madman or a nut," Khan
told an interviewer in 2001. "If making nuclear weapons for the sole purpose
of safeguarding the existence, independence and sovereignty of your country
could be termed madness or fanaticism, there are many thousands in other
countries who should be awarded even bigger titles. I am proud of my work
for my country. It has given Pakistanis a sense of pride, security, and
has been a great scientific achievement."
But international officials worry
that Pakistan, through Khan, has spread that nuclear knowledge to other
countries. The strongest evidence appears in North Korea.
U.S. officials say Khan initiated
talks with the North Koreans in 1992 to obtain 10 to 12 medium-range Nodong
ballistic missiles to help Pakistan boost its military profile against
India. The Americans say the deal was finalized during a secret 1993 visit
to North Korea by Benazir Bhutto, then Pakistan's prime minister.
In April 1998, Pakistan test-fired
a knockoff Nodong missile renamed the Ghauri I, which can carry a nuclear
payload deep into India. A month later, North Koreans attended Pakistan's
first nuclear tests, according to European diplomats.
In exchange for the missiles, U.S.
and other officials say, Pakistan gave North Korea designs for Khan's gas
centrifuges and other assistance needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
After a tense diplomatic standoff with the Clinton administration, North
Korea promised to freeze its nuclear program in 1994. It recently admitted
that it has a uranium enrichment program, however, and it has reopened
nuclear facilities that were closed under the 1994 agreement. Khan has
also played a notable role in Iran's nuclear development.
In 1986, Pakistan and Iran signed
a nuclear cooperation agreement after Khan visited Bushehr, a nuclear power
plant that Tehran is building with Russian help. After subsequent visits
by Khan, Western intelligence reported that Iranian scientists received
training in Pakistan in 1988 and that Pakistan was helping Iran build a
nuclear reactor in 1990. The exchanges seemed to cease by 1993 when Pakistan
and Iran became rivals over Afghanistan, said Ibrahim Marashi, a proliferation
expert at the Monterey Institute.
Because Iran has abundant oil and
other energy sources, U.S. officials long have suspected that Bushehr is
a cover for a nuclear weapons program. Concerns increased last month when
satellite photos showed construction at two other Iranian facilities, Arak
and Natanz, that Iranian dissidents contend are being used for nuclear
weapons development. Iran insists that its nuclear programs are for peaceful
purposes only.
Khan's role with Iraq is less clear.
In October 1990, two months after Iraq invaded Kuwait, an intermediary
claiming to represent Khan met agents from Baghdad's secret service. A
memo dated Oct. 6, 1990, from Section B-15 of Iraqi intelligence to Section
S-15 of the Nuclear Weapons Directorate describes "a proposal from Pakistani
scientist Abd-el Qadeer Khan" to help Iraq "establish a project to enrich
uranium and manufacture a nuclear weapon."
The middleman said Khan "was prepared
to give us project designs for nuclear bombs," according to the memo. The
middleman said he was based in Greece and would oversee shipments from
Western Europe, using a company he claimed to own in the Persian Gulf emirate
of Dubai, according to sources who have studied the memo.
U.N. weapons inspectors found the
memo in 1995 in a cache of documents hidden at a chicken farm near Baghdad.
They determined that Iraq had rejected the middleman's offer, but Iraq
refused to identify him.
A letter from the International
Atomic Energy Agency to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1997 details
interviews with agents from Mukhabarat, Baghdad's secret service, who described
Iraq's clandestine nuclear program, code-named the Petrochemical-3 project.
The agents said that "PC-3 had adopted a policy of avoiding foreign assistance,
believing that the risk of exposure (e.g. through 'sting' operations) far
outweighed the likely technical benefits."
In 1998, Pakistan's government investigated
the middleman's letter at the IAEA's request and declared the offer a fraud.
The nuclear agency concluded that charges of Pakistani proliferation were
"inconsistent with the information available," but it listed the memo as
a key unresolved issue in a 1999 U.N. report on Iraq's arms programs. Iraq's
recent 12,000-page arms declaration referred twice to the "unsolicited
offer."
"The memo was taken quite seriously,"
said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International
Security in Washington and a former nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq.
"There's this pattern of leakage out of Pakistan. These people broke almost
every country's law to get their own nuclear components."
Nuclear Chief's Ouster
In March 2001, Musharraf removed
Khan as head of Pakistan's nuclear programs and named him a presidential
advisor -- a move that nation's nuclear hero heard about on television
and at first refused to accept.
However, U.S. officials suspected
that the exchanges with other nations continued, especially after U.S.
spy satellites spotted Pakistani military cargo planes picking up missile
parts in North Korea last July. The North told U.S. officials that the
parts were for surface-to-air missiles, not for a missile that could deliver
a nuclear weapon.
In June 2001, Deputy Secretary of
State Richard L. Armitage all but named Khan when he expressed concern
that "people who were employed by the nuclear agency and have retired"
might be spreading nuclear technology to North Korea.
After North Korea confessed last
fall that it had resumed its nuclear weapons program, Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell again confronted Pakistan's president about illegal assistance.
"Musharraf assured me, as he has
previously, that Pakistan is not doing anything of that nature," Powell
said, though he noted that they did not speak of Pakistan's past contacts
with North Korea. "The past is the past. I am more concerned about what
is going on now. We have a new relationship with Pakistan."
However, a senior U.S. official
says the Bush administration keeps a wary eye on the retired scientist
as he oversees philanthropic groups, runs seminars and feeds stray animals
in his neighborhood.
"How can you stop the transfer of
intellectual property?" the official said. "The potential for sharing is
always there."
