Iran-Pakistan Nuclear Links

Rafsanjani wanted Benazir to clear $6bn nuclear dealBy Rauf Klasra: The News, May 4, 2007

LONDON: Former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani had sought the consent of ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto to execute a $6 billion deal for the purchase of nuclear weapons technology that Gen Aslam Beg had negotiated with Tehran in 1989, revealed the dossier on the Dr AQ Khan network released here on Wednesday.

It also revealed that after departure of Gen Beg, a new deal was also concluded between the then Army chief Gen Asif Nawaz, Rafsanjani and Gen Mohsen Rezai, Head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, in exchange for Iranian oil.

According to the dossier on “Nuclear black markets: the AQ Khan network” prepared by International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) and issued here the other day, after the death of Gen Zia in 1988 and Khomeini in 1989, new leaderships emerged in each country that were much more inclined towards mutual cooperation on a wide range of issues.

In Pakistan, it said Gen Beg, the new Army chief, openly supported the Iran cause and suggested that Pakistan cooperate with Iran, Afghanistan and any new Islamic republic that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in an alliance of sorts organised around “strategic defiance” of the US and its western allies.

It said Beg also has been an ardent supporter of Iran’s bid to acquire nuclear weapons. Although, the dossier said, Gen Beg’s direct involvement is unconfirmed and he denies this, he is widely suspected of having been an accomplice, if not encouragement or even outright direction.

The dossier quoted former US ambassador to Pakistan, Robert Oakley and Assistant Secretary of Defence Henry Rown, who revealed that Beg had threatened to transfer nuclear technology to Iran if Washington cut off arms sales to Pakistan. The dossier also said that two unnamed former high-level Pakistani officials were reported as saying that in 1989, President Rafsanjani sought Benazir Bhutto’s consent regarding a deal for nuclear weapons technology that Beg had initiated. The two officials said she told both Rafsajani and Beg that she did not approve of it.

Beg was quoted as saying that by Bhutto’s own account it was she who had been approached by the Iranians with a similar proposition for a $4 billion transfer. Beg also said Iran was ready to pay $6 billion or more. This price, according to the dossier, however, seems exaggerated, as it is very much higher than Khan’s 1987 and 1993 enrichment deals with Iran.

Although, the dossier said, Beg denies having authorised any onward proliferation from Pakistan to Iran, he has confirmed that serious nuclear discussions took place between the two nations at the time. According to an unnamed former cabinet minister, these talks continued after Benazir’s departure from office in 1990.

Several sources have reported that an agreement was reached in 1991 between Gen Asif Nawaz, Rajsanjani and Gen Mohsen Rezai, which involved the Pakistani nuclear weapons-related technology in return for Iran oil.

Oakley claimed that Beg agreed to abandon the deal at his urging and that prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Ghulam Ishaq Khan told Rafsanjani that the deal had not been approved by the president or parliament and that Pakistan would not implement it.

The Western intelligent officers were worried at that time that a deal might have involved a nuclear weapon design that Pakistan had originally obtained from China. But later it turned out to be the case of Khan’s deal with Libya.

The dossier revealed that GIK provided continuity in the direction of the nuclear programme and protected AQ Khan from government oversight. Several of Benazir Bhutto advisers, including Major-General Imtiaz and her Military Secretary Zulfikar Ali, reportedly encouraged meetings between Khan and Iran. Benazir was aware of the nuclear discussions during both of the terms of office. These individual leaders may all have been inclined to help Iran especially after the autumn of 1990.

The US reaction to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the first ever refusal by White House to certify to Congress that Pakistan did not have a military nuclear programme because of the inconvertible evidence to the contrary gave ammunition to those such as General Beg who urged defiance of the West.

However, the dossier said no evidence has emerged that a clear directive was ever given to Khan to provide nuclear technology to Iran. In any case, the onward proliferation not only continued after the departure of GIK, Benazir Bhutto and Beg from power, but also expanded since 1994.

The diffusion of domestic political power among the troika of the president, prime minister and the army chief obscured the command and control authority over the covert nuclear weapons programme. Further, as these power centres jockeyed for supremacy, each undermined the standing of the others. This situation provided Khan a relatively free rein as long as he did not alienate the collective leadership and continued to produce the desired results for the nation’s nuclear weapons programme.

Also see
EDITORIAL: AQ Khan’s fatal deal with Iran
Daily times, May 4, 2007

London’s International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) has issued a “dossier” on Pakistan’s disgraced nuclear hero Dr AQ Khan which says the scientist sold nuclear secrets to Iran probably on some vague orders from his superiors in the Pakistan army. It wonders if the signal was implicit rather than explicit, but “no evidence has yet emerged that a clear directive was ever given to Khan to provide nuclear technology to Iran”.

The IISS report is a cautious assessment of Dr Khan’s clandestine proliferation activities involving Iran, North Korea and Libya. It tells us that “although the seeds of Pakistan’s weapons programme can be traced back to the early 1960s, the major boost came in the 1970s” until Pakistan was able to shift to a more advanced centrifuge design during the 1980s. Dr Khan was left with an excessive inventory of older centrifuges and components that gave him and his foreign-based partners the opportunity for a more profitable business model by exploring export markets.

Anyone who knows of the strain in Iran-Pakistan relations in the 1980s will wonder how Dr Khan even got a distant signal to go ahead and sell the bomb to Iran. The Arabs across the Gulf were greatly scared of the Iranian Revolution and were leaning on General Zia-ul Haq in Pakistan to tighten up Islam and impose disabilities on the Shia community before it got too inspired by Imam Khomeini. The Saudis were also funding Saddam Hussein and General Zia on both sides of Iran, and Iran was furious with General Zia for playing ball with the Arabs.

Who could have given implicit or explicit orders to Dr Khan under these circumstances? The IISS report says Pakistan suddenly got a boost in its inventory in the 1980s, which means it could easily sell the nuclear stuff for extra income. There is now some evidence, considered inadequate by the IISS but recorded in a recent book Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Security and the Rise and Fall of the AQ Khan Network by journalist Gordon Korera, who actually traces the first sale of nuclear secrets to Iran from Dubai for which Iran paid $3 million in Swiss francs to a Dubai agent of Dr Khan.

This was done in 1987. Korera notes that the deputy army chief, General Aslam Beg, was close to Dr Khan and was deeply interested in cooperation with Iran on the nuclear issue. But he also wonders whether General Zia knew what was happening inside his nuclear programme. He was fighting the big sectarian war on behalf of Saudi Arabia, allowing massacres in Parachinar in 1986 and in Gilgit in 1988. Did he approve the deal with Iran from Dubai? Or was the army following two policies made easy by the license given to Dr Khan to travel the world freely and create openings wherever he pleased because only he knew how to put together the bomb in a country where scientific knowledge was retreating fast before religion. Had Dr Khan linked up with someone else within the GHQ who wanted Iran to have the nuclear bomb on payment and then show strategic defiance to the United States and its Arab allies?

Korera writes: “During the mid to late 1980s, when Pakistan and Iran were moving closer together and nuclear dealings began, General Mirza Aslam Beg was first vice chief from 1987 and then from 1988 to 1991, chief of the army staff...As soon as he became vice chief he was ‘made privy’ to the nuclear programme for the first time. He supported a more overt nuclear policy and greater distancing from the United States and the West. According to his own writings, Beg thought in terms of ‘democratising’ the global nuclear non-proliferation order and moving to a multipolar world, which he believed would be safer than either a bipolar Cold War world or a unipolar world of American power...Beg and AQ Khan were close friends and political allies and shared many of the same views”.

The nuclear secrets were sold in 1987 and General Zia died an unnatural death in 1988. Did he get to know what Dr Khan had done behind his back? If he didn’t, did the people who sold the bomb to Iran fear that he might be informed by the Arabs in whose backyard the deal was concluded? Iran was never happy with General Zia. In fact, Imam Khomeini had insulted him a number of times. It must have welcomed a through-the-backdoor deal with someone in Kahuta.

Vali Nasr in his book The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future says that it was Pakistan’s Sunni bomb that first pushed Iran to think of its bomb in the 1990s: a Shia bomb. Author Ray Takeyh in his book Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic also says that Iran thought of its bomb only after it began fearing that a nuclear Pakistan might be grabbed by the Deobandi clergy. Clearly, Iran saw Pakistan’s bomb as a Sunni bomb.

There are a lot of ironies in Pakistan’s relationship with its abandoned hero Dr AQ Khan. The man was a completely commercial creature, although he often came on TV on 14th August and confessed how he tended to lose control over his emotions when thinking of his country. He accumulated massive private wealth and later on became so bold that he used to take a posse of worshipful on-the-take journalists on his trips to Africa — especially Timbuktu — where he used to shock them by throwing his money around. All this was recorded in the pages of the national press, but no one cared.

Dr Khan proliferated like a mad man and thought little of his country when he was amassing his personal wealth. His sale to Iran was soon discovered together with his other deals with other countries, but in the completion of his ambitions, Pakistan may have lost a ruler because it was feared that he would come to know about what Dr Khan was up to. *