A Q Khan Network: How much the US knew all along?

Daily Times, January 17, 2006
‘US knew all along about AQ Khan network’
By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Washington was keeping a close watch on Dr AQ Khan all through the years but finds it “politically inconvenient” do admit that now, according to a lengthy report in a reputable American magazine on Pakistan’s nuclear establishment and the Khan affair.

The first part of the investigative report, written by William Langewiesche, appeared in Atlantic Monthly in November 2005, while the second part has been published in the magazine’s first issue of the new year.

Langewiesche quotes a US source as saying somewhere in the 1980s, “We have a very strong interest in Dr Khan and the Khan Research Laboratories. We pay very close attention to his work. In fact, our interest in this man is so intense that you can assume if he takes a toilet break and goes to the john, we know about it. We know where he is.”

Langewiesche, who visited Pakistan for interviews and information-gathering more than once, writes, “Though it would be politically inconvenient to admit this now, the United States was aware not only of Khan’s peddling of nuclear wares to Iran but also of the likely involvement of the army and the government of Pakistan. (Mark) Hibbs (an American reporter for Nucleonics Week magazine) has reported that the US ambassador to Islamabad from 1988 to 1991, Robert B Oakley, went around the embassy fuming, ‘They sold that stuff to those bastards!’ (a reference to Iran) and believes that Oakley expressed the same emotion more politely at the National Security Council. Oakley, who now works at the National Defence University, in Washington, DC, does not recall knowing of the sales to Iran when he was ambassador, and says he was not asked to raise the matter with the Pakistani government. For political reasons more than for reasons of national security, these are some of the most closely held secrets in the United States. For the same reasons, the apparent lack of good information is pointed to as yet another US intelligence failure … when in reality the CIA knew fairly well what was happening, and an awareness of Pakistani actions should count as a US intelligence success.”

Langewiesche, who interviewed Dr Mubashar Hasan, finance minister under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, quotes him as saying that the late Munir Ahmed Khan, “AQ Khan’s despised rival” and head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, repeatedly complained to him in the late 1980s that “AQ Khan was corrupt and, more important, that he was involved in selling Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons technology abroad”.

According to Hasan, Munir Ahmed Khan had taken the same complaints to reporter Mark Hibbs that the Pakistani procurement network during the making of the bomb remained large and robust, providing not only for AQ Khan’s uranium-enrichment plant but also for a parallel programme to acquire plutonium - the alternative material for a fission bomb - which was led by Munir Ahmed Khan, at the head of the PAEC. AQ Khan exploited the connections he had developed in acquiring nuclear weapons and, by neatly diverting the inbound procurement flows, eventually set up a virtual nuclear-weapons market in which countries could buy the entire package, from the necessary machine shops and centrifuges to the blueprints for a bomb, he states. One of the Pakistani procurement people, he recalls, was Mazhar Malik who lived in south London and ran a small trading company by the name of Development & Technology Enterprises, Ltd.

Langewiesche says of the offer allegedly made on behalf of Dr Khan to Iraq that it was not taken up because “the Iraqis suspected that the offer might be a scam or a trap; they asked for a sample of the goods - possibly a component or blueprints. They never received the sample, because the Gulf War then erupted.”

Meanwhile, the reporter Hibbs, who lives in Germany, writes Langewiesche, “was beginning to piece together the signs that Pakistan’s nuclear-procurement network had expanded into the business of spreading these weapons around … Pakistan’s sale of nuclear-weapons technology abroad did not require a deliberative process, a chain of command, or a formal commitment to proceed. More likely it took the shape of opportunities that occasionally arose and were acted on by a small circle of friends - the country’s military rulers, its co-opted politicians, and, of course, AQ Khan and his men. They knew that such activities would provoke the United States, Europe, and other great powers - but they did not think of themselves as bad people, or believe that they were breaking international law. Whatever profits they hoped to gain from these deals would have been as much for the treasury as for their personal accounts - albeit in a country where such distinctions have little meaning. As to questions about the morality of promoting such lethal technology, they had some questions of their own - about the fairness of discriminatory non-proliferation treaties and a world order in which the established nuclear powers seemed determined to ‘disarm the disarmed’. This was the emotional spillover from Pakistan’s experience of building a bomb, and it fed a genuine sense of solidarity with all other nuclear aspirants, including even a potential antagonist like Iran.”

Langewiesche refers to the then army chief of staff, Gen Mirza Aslam Beg, who in 1991 returned from a trip to Tehran openly advocating the export of nuclear-weapons technology to Iran and pointing to the several billion dollars’ worth of state revenue that might be in the offing. “Beg,” he writes, “is an anti-American with sympathies for Iran, and he says that he is the target of a Jewish conspiracy of lies. Be that as it may, he was told to keep quiet in the early 1990s, presumably because the transfer of blueprints and centrifuges was already under way.”

The CIA, he states, had in the meanwhile concluded that the Pakistan-Iran connection had cooled, in part because the centrifuges that Pakistan had sold were castoffs, prone to vibration and inefficient compared with more modern designs. “As a result US interest in Khan diminished, and to some extent the trail was allowed to go cold. Hindsight shows that this was a mistake: Khan remained as ambitious as ever, and like a good vendor, he offered improvements to his client. His relations with Iran were solid and all the better because they were out of sight. Throughout that decade, however, as Hibbs occasionally reported, US suspicions remained strong that Iran was continuing to pursue a nuclear-weapons programme, with the perhaps unwitting aid of Russia and China, both of which were eager to sell civil nuclear technology to Iran - as they are today.”

Hibbs, writes Langewiesche, asked a confidential US source in Washington in late 2002 as to where Iran had got its centrifuges and the answer was Pakistan. Earlier, the United States had leaked word that North Korea had received centrifuge designs and possibly prototypes from Pakistan in return for missile technology, in a state-to-state swap. The leak was directed not against Pakistan but against North Korea, which soon restarted its plutonium-reprocessing facilities and expelled IAEA inspectors. The IAEA knew about the Pakistan-Iran link but was not willing to say so publicly, as it was “all being discreetly negotiated between the IAEA, the United States, and other countries”. Hibbs, who was chasing the story, said the problem for the United States was that Pakistan was again now a trusted ally, this time in the effort to destroy Al Qaeda.

He was also asked to “pipe down”. But he did not. Hibbs recalled to Langewiesche, “Anyway, we kept working on Pakistan, and more and more bits of the story got confirmed. I kept fingering Pakistan, fingering Pakistan, and pissing off the IAEA and the US government, because at that time they were saying, ‘We want to make a deal with these people. We want to make sure it doesn’t get out of control.’” The US did not want to control the activity but the “story” of the activity.

According to Langewiesche, “Behind closed doors in 2000 US officials confronted the Musharraf regime with what they thought was irrefutable evidence (much of it photographic) of the centrifuge trade. The Pakistanis categorically denied that any such activity had taken place. They looked the Americans in the eye and lied, and they did not care that the Americans knew it. The transfers continued. The Americans persisted, some believing that bombs in the hands of Pyongyang would be more dangerous even than bombs in the hands of Baghdad or Tehran. Eventually Musharraf came up with a convenient answer: while admitting to no wrongdoing by Pakistan or himself, or to any consummated transfers of nuclear technology, he quietly pointed at Khan, essentially for being out of control.”
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For the Atlantic Monthly article, see:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200601/aq-khan