EDITS | Saturday, October 3, 2009 | Email | Print |
Dr Strangelove’s letter bomb
Ashok Malik
In April 2003, a film called Hero: The Love Story of a Spy was released across India. Starring Sunny Deol, its script was suitably over the top.
At its heart was the quest of Pakistani radicals — terrorists, rogue Generals of the Inter-Services Intelligence, sinister-looking mullahs — to get their hands on a nuclear bomb.
The project was a global one. It included sourcing components through a front company run by a Canadian businessman of Pakistani origin. A half-Indonesian scientist was thought to have Islamist sympathies and was recruited. Unfortunately, he turned out to be Sunny Deol in disguise.
Six months after Hero, on September 25, 2003, Mr George Tenet, the then CIA chief, visited Gen Pervez Musharraf in his suite in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Here, he provided evidence of AQ Khan’s proliferation business — the ‘nuclear Wal-Mart’, as it came to be called. It made Sunny Deol’s script-writer seem not just prophetic but almost limited in his imagination. 
In the past six years, intricate details of Khan’s network have come to light. They have revealed a network of component suppliers in Europe and the United States, front companies in Dubai and Malaysia —
Khan’s representatives worked with a firm partly-owned by the son of Abdullah Badawi, Prime Minister in Kuala Lumpur from 2003 to 2009. Persons of Pakistani, Indian and Sri Lankan origin have also been named.
The Khan network had two components. The first was the matrix set up to source dual-use equipment for the Pakistani bomb. The second was the use of elements of this matrix, and of Khan’s private businesses, to supply nuclear know-how to client countries.
To be fair, this is well known.
What has remained a mystery is how much the Pakistani state knew. As long as Khan was into nuclear procurement, he was acting on behalf of his Government. What about his years in nuclear sales and marketing?
It has long been obvious Khan could not have been acting alone. Yet, few have pressed for a proper investigation. The Generals in Pakistan have found it convenient to blame Khan as an aberrant individual.
Given this backdrop, the question of who in Islamabad knew what Khan was up to is largely a subject of conjecture. From time to time, disparate pieces of evidence come up. Occasionally, they complement each other and give tantalising glimpses of a fuller picture.
It is necessary to place Simon Henderson’s article in London’s Sunday Times of September 20, 2009, in this context. A former foreign correspondent In Islamabad, Henderson has had a longstanding professional acquaintance with Khan. His article quotes extensively from a mea culpa letter written by Khan in 2004.
Khan gave the letter to his London-based daughter, Dina, asking her to use it if any harm came to him. A second copy was sent to Khan’s niece, Kausar, in Amsterdam. Henderson says he has the third copy of the four-page letter.
What happened to the other two?
Henderson writes the copy in Amsterdam was confiscated by Dutch intelligence agents. It was presumably shared with the Americans. Dina tore up her copy after ISI interrogators found out about it and threatened Khan. “Under pressure,” Henderson writes, “he (Khan) agreed to telephone Dina in London and ordered her to destroy the documents. He used three languages: Urdu, English and Dutch. It was a code for her to obey his instructions.”
This story is not new.
In their 2007 book The Man from Pakistan (originally published as The Nuclear Jihadist) American writers Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins described the episode in detail. “In December (2004), as rumours of his possible arrest had circulated, Khan
had given a thick stack of handwritten documents to his daughter Dina, who was visiting from London. He instructed her to take them back with her and keep them as an insurance policy. If the Government went after her father, she was to turn them over to Simon Henderson, a British journalist who had interviewed Khan years earlier.”
However, Frantz and Collins also pointed to something more ominous:
“A close friend of Khan’s maintained that the scientist had given his daughter a far more extensive document, nearly 100 pages that constituted an autobiographical account of Khan’s proliferation activities over the years. Its fate remains unknown.”
According to Henderson, the Khan letter makes three big-ticket revelations. First, Khan writes that Pakistan “put up a centrifuge plant at Hanzhong (250 km south-west of Xian)” in return for Chinese weapon designs and uranium.
Second: “Probably with the blessings of BB (Benazir Bhutto) … Gen Imtiaz (Benazir’s defence adviser, now dead) asked me to give a set of drawings and some components to the Iranians. The names and addresses of suppliers were also given.”
Third: “(A now-retired General) took $ 3 million through me from the N Koreans and asked me to give some drawings and machines.”
The letter was written in 2004 and Henderson says he got his copy in 2007. Why did he wait to publish his scoop? It can be guessed his sources asked him to hold on. Has Henderson been used by Khan and his friends to send a message to the Pakistani establishment?
Is some bargaining happening in Islamabad?
Henderson’s sympathies are with his protagonist: “Khan is adamant that he never sold nuclear secrets for personal gain. So what about the millions of dollars he reportedly made? Nothing was confiscated from him and no reported investigation turned up hidden accounts. Having planted rumours about Khan’s greed, Pakistani officials were curiously indifferent to following them through.”
Henderson claims Khan is not personally wealthy. He has two properties in Islamabad and is one of many investors in a ‘modest’ hotel in Timbuktu (Mali, west Africa). Henderson also writes he has documentary evidence Khan was asking for his small pension (12,200 Pakistani rupees at the time) to be enhanced and that this was done in 2007.
Accounts of Khan’s penury may be exaggerated but
they do imply substantial profits from the ‘nuclear Wal-Mart’ were pocketed by the Generals who were Khan’s principles. Today, the US is seeking to stop North Korea and Iran — both customers of Khan — becoming full-blown nuclear powers.
At some point, it will need to turn attention to the supplier state. It can no longer do to pretend Khan was a one-man band. His accompanists need to face the music.
-
[email protected]
-- Date was 1998 --> Not 2001
: