Pakistan's nuclear hero throws open Pandora's box
Investigators have uncovered a sophisticated black market in components with Islamabad at its centre
Ian Traynor in Vienna
Saturday January 31, 2004
The Guardian
While on a tour of eight Asian countries in the summer of 2002, Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, arrived in Islamabad with a special request.
Mr Powell asked Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, to arrest Abdul Qadeer Khan, the mastermind of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme and a hero in the country. His demand was extraordinary but so were the allegations which went with it.
He said Mr Khan needed to be questioned over the alleged secret trading of Pakistan's nuclear technology to North Korea and he had evidence.
An American spy satellite had recorded images of a Pakistani transport plane being loaded with missile parts in North Korea. It was, the US believed, part of a barter deal trading Pakistani nuclear know-how for missiles.
According to sources in Washington, Mr Powell offered Gen Musharraf assistance for an inquiry into Mr Khan's activities. The Guardian has learned that money, equipment and lie detectors for interrogations would be made available. Gen Musharraf rejected the overture but the case against Mr Khan has been building up inexorably since.
Yesterday, Mr Khan was under effective house arrest in Islamabad waiting to hear if he will face charges of treason.
Global network
The evidence being considered is embarrassing for Pakistan, whose scientists are accused of being at the centre of the illegal and dangerous trade in nuclear secrets.
Astonishing details of their alleged involvement not only with North Korea but with Libya and Iran have emerged in the last two months after the UN's demand that Iran provide its investigators with a comprehensive record of its 20-year-old nuclear effort. The UN's nuclear detectives, acting on names and contacts supplied by Tehran plus information gleaned in Iran, found evidence which pointed to Pakistan as the source for Iran's uranium enrichment technology.
But in an interview with a Pakistani satellite channel last month Mr Khan denied any involvement with Iran. "I am being accused for nothing, I never visited Iran, I don't know any Iranian, nor do I know any Iranian scientist.I will be tar geted naturally because I made the nuclear bomb, I made the missile," he said.
When Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Gadafy, volunteered last month to scrap his covert nuclear bomb project, MI6, the CIA and UN inspectors from Vienna got a glimpse of Libya's equipment and concluded that Pakistan and Mr Khan were again the source, directly or indirectly, of the bomb-making equipment.
Gary Milhollin, head of the Wilson Project, a counter-proliferation group, said: "In all three places [North Korea, Iran and Libya], it's the same designs and technology. It was pilfered by A Q Khan. It's old but it works. The Pakistanis used it to make 30 bombs."
Gary Samore, a former Clinton Administration official and nuclear expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, says the link between Pakistan and Iran is clear, while the more recent disclosures from Libya also point to Pakistan.
"The operating assumption is that Pakistani scientists sold designs and perhaps centrifuges to Iran and Libya."
The result is that almost two years after Gen Musharraf rebuffed Mr Powell and almost 30 after Mr Khan absconded from the Netherlands with top secret blueprints on how to enrich uranium, the scientist feted in Pakistan may be about to face trial.
One of his key aides, Mohammed Farooq, a metallurgist, who was in charge of procuring foreign components for Pakistan's nuclear programme, has been in detention for six weeks. At least 20 other Pakistani scientists, businessmen, and military officers have been questioned.
The signals from Islamabad, this week, are that at least two men, apparently Mr Khan and Mr Farooq, will face trial for selling Pakistani nuclear secrets abroad.
Faisal Saleh Hayat, Pakistan's interior minister, said on Monday: "No patriotic Pakistani should even think of selling out Pakistan. There was a time when they used to call themselves heroes of Pakistan. But now the real face of some of these heroes is being exposed. We will take legal action against them." The network being revealed by investigations in Pakistan, Iran, and Libya has alarmed seasoned inspectors and intelligence services by its scale, its sophistication and the ease with which it has operated unimpeded for almost two decades.
According to this week's issue of Der Spiegel, a German weekly, a German intelligence report found in the mid-1990s that "there is said to be cooperation between Iran's atomic energy organisation and Pakistan's Khan laboratories".
Almost 10 years later, the threads in the dense web of the nuclear black market stretching from the far east to the Middle East and Europe are being unravelled.
Pakistan and its nuclear laboratories named after Dr Khan, at Kahuta, south of Islamabad, are the common factor in tracing equipment found in Libya and Iran, and believed to be in North Korea. But the networks which appear to have been set up in the mid-80s may now have grown so extensive as to have acquired a life of their own, independent of the original Pakistani sponsors.
According to diplomats tracking the investigations, Tehran named some six individuals and several firms as being involved in the black market trade.This led to the questioning of Mr Khan and his associates, but investigators suspect this is the tip of an iceberg.
"This is globalisation at work," said one well-informed source.
"So many fingers are pointing at Pakistan. There are only a handful of people who can pull together systems like this. But there are a large number of firms who can do gadgets and gizmos for centrifuges." Another diplomatic source agreed Pakistan was the main suspect. "But there's a whole bunch of other suspects and sources. There has been a very active market in this stuff and this thing is widening." Those suspected of involvement include an unnamed British businessman in Dubai and middlemen in Sri Lanka and the Middle East.
A planeload of nuclear equipment impounded by the Americans from Libya will provide details on the provenance of the machinery, as will a shipload of centrifuge components manufactured in Malaysia and seized aboard a German boat en route to Libya in October.
Mr Milhollin said Col Gadafy's programme, going back a decade, involved a deal with the Pakistani scientists "to outsource" the manufacturing and supplies of parts.
But the main focus of the investigation is the trade in parts for gas centrifuges, the key machines required to establish a home-based nuclear weapons effort.
The centrifuges found in Libya and Iran are all of the same fundamental design, by the German engineer Gernot Zippe. The design dates from the late 1960s for what was to become the Anglo/German/Dutch consortium, Urenco. At the same time as Zippe was working on his design, Mr Khan was studying in Germany and Belgium.
In 1975 he absconded with the Zippe centrifuge blueprints. Back home and given carte blanche to lead Pakistan's race to match India's nuclear bomb, he and his experts improved the Zippe design, known as G-2, to what has become known in expert circles as Pak-2. A Dutch court sentenced Mr Khan to four years jail for industrial espionage in 1983, but the verdict was overturned on the grounds that he had never been served with the arrest warrant.
Political imperative
The centrifuge is made up of hundreds of high-performance components, meaning that would-be bomb-builders can out source purchasing strategies to dozens of different manufacturers and suppliers making their ultimate aims harder to discern.
But IAEA sleuths have just concluded that the black marketeers have become bolder, offering ready to assemble centrifuge rigs with scientific and engineering advice. In the case of Libya, a backward country with insufficient home-grown engineering or scientific talent to operate a uranium enrichment programme, the sleuths concluded that the black marketeers have offered ready-to-assemble centrifuge rigs and the required scientific and engineering advice. This suggests that Col Gadafy needed to go to far fewer sources for his bomb programme than Saddam Hussein or Iran required.
It remains unclear how tainted Gen Musharraf's government is.
The political imperative for both Islamabad and Washington is to maintain that Pakistan's role was limited to that of a few rogue scientists acting without state authorisation and that in any case the nuclear deals preceded Gen Musharraf's takeover in 1999 and have been suppressed since then.
The latter claim is called into question by the alleged sighting of the Pakistani plane in North Korea in 2002 and by some of the supplies to Libya which have taken place since 1999. Because of the Pakistani leader's importance to the Americans in the war on terror, "there is," says one of the diplomats, "a high need to protect Musharraf. That's politics. Musharraf may not have wanted to know what was going on for reasons of plausible deniability". 
But even if the Pakistani channels are being closed down and Gen Musharraf escapes international censure and survives the domestic fallout, the damage may well already be done.
Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear analyst at the Carnegie Endowment said: "There's concern that this thing has spread beyond their [Pakistan's] control. Once you let the chickens loose, you can't get them back into the coop."
in this whole business was when the Americans went to all the trouble to grab the Pakistani "detergent" and discovered that the shells were filled with lead.