The Nuclear Jihadist Read online

  Khan returned to Amsterdam unaware of the drama that was unfolding around him, threatening to expose him and fatally derail Pakistan’s enrichment plans. The BVD delivered a full report on Khan’s role in the foil research and his activities at the exhibition to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which oversaw the Dutch part of the Urenco consortium. The findings fell short of proof of espionage, but they sparked a fateful debate. One faction within the security service and the ministry felt that the minimum action required was to fire Khan and ban him from the industry, while hard-liners wanted him arrested and charged with espionage. Led by a contingent from Urenco, another group counseled against taking any harsh action, arguing that the evidence was inconclusive and amounted to nothing more than a string of coincidences. They wanted to move Khan into a job where he would no longer be in contact with sensitive information and sweep the episode under the rug to avoid a scandal. This line of thinking was particularly appealing to some because the Dutch government was struggling to develop a high-tech industry, and exposure of a spy inside a top-secret area could jeopardize the effort and its economic rewards.

  The contingent that argued against a splashy espionage arrest was led by Ruud Lubbers, the economics minister, who would later become prime minister. “It was about economic interests,” Lubbers said later in recounting the debate. “My title was economics minister, and economics was my job. The Foreign Ministry insisted on arresting him for proliferation, but we did not.”

  The BVD was determined to arrest Khan, and it went so far as to plan an operation to nab him. Two teams of agents would be used for simultaneous actions, with one group waiting at FDO to arrest Khan as he arrived at work in the morning and another team poised to launch a raid on his home in Zwanenburg to search for stolen documents. Before executing the operation, a senior BVD agent contacted the CIA station chief in the Netherlands and briefed him on the discovery of an apparent Pakistani agent with access to top-secret nuclear designs. The Dutch and American intelligence agencies cooperated extensively in those days, and sharing the information was not unusual. After all, the Americans were making the most noise about proliferation, and they might want to interrogate Khan after the arrest. The BVD expected American support for arresting Khan, but they got a surprise. The station chief said he needed to run the matter past his superiors in Langley, Virginia, and he asked the BVD to wait.

  In November 1975, the CIA was an agency in turmoil. Its director, William Colby, had been fired by President Gerald Ford following both a string of revelations about assassination attempts on foreign leaders, some of which were successful, and the failures to anticipate the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the Arab-Israeli war in 1973. Colby’s replacement was to be George H. W. Bush, the future president, and he would immediately find himself fending off attacks in Congress from the Church Committee. The request for advice on whether to back the arrest of a Pakistani scientist reached the upper levels of the agency, where the decision was made to watch Khan in hopes of learning more about Pakistan’s procurement pipeline in Europe. Better to watch and wait, said the CIA man to the BVD a few days later, particularly given the criticism the agency was under for its recent intelligence failures.

  When the Dutch authorities reconvened for a final decision, Lubbers said, the American position tipped the balance. If the CIA had agreed, the BVD would have gone ahead and arrested Khan. Instead, the Pakistani would remain at FDO. Still, the suspicions could not be ignored, and the Dutch devised another plan for dealing with what most people agreed was a rogue scientist, deciding to remove him quietly from sensitive work while the investigation continued into the extent of his espionage. In November, Khan was given a small promotion and told that he would be transferred to another part of FDO. He also was informed that his new job meant he would no longer need to visit Almelo.

  Lubbers and a former CIA division chief who monitored the Pakistani nuclear program at the time said the solution met the Dutch goal of maintaining the economic status quo and satisfied the Americans. In fact, the CIA was exultant because the Khan episode opened a new window onto Pakistan’s procurement operation at a critical moment. A few weeks earlier, a Pakistani nuclear scientist who had been providing the CIA with intelligence from inside the PAEC had been exposed and arrested. The CIA feared that its spotlight on Pakistani nuclear work would go dark at a critical moment. Said the former CIA official, “We were nervous about rebuilding our espionage network, so it makes sense that the agency would not have asked the Dutch to arrest Khan. We were rebuilding, and we would have wanted to see a lot more.”

  The decision to recommend against arresting Khan marked the first time that American intelligence agencies could have stopped Khan. The decision was understandable in light of the agency’s culture and worldview—the CIA is not a law-enforcement agency, and its responsibility is to gather intelligence and pass it on to American policymakers. Looking back, however, current and former government proliferation experts and intelligence officers questioned the decision. What if Khan had been stopped before he really got started? He had kept the centrifuge designs to himself to ensure a triumphal return, and his arrest would almost certainly have stopped the transfer of key information to Pakistan and delayed its nuclear program for years, perhaps decades.

  “That was the first monumental error,” said Robert Einhorn, who was assistant secretary of state in charge of counterproliferation and arms control under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

  There is no conclusive evidence that Khan knew how narrowly he escaped, but his later actions suggest he realized that the abrupt change in his responsibilities hinted that he was in some jeopardy. Though there were still gaps in his purloined library of plans, he had stolen most of what he needed to build the most advanced centrifuges in the world and, almost as important, he had collected a list of Urenco subcontractors to supply the equipment.

  Khan might not have sought out the role of a spy, but he had jumped enthusiastically into espionage when the opportunity arose. He was a scholar and a scientist, but he was also an ambitious man placed by fate in the right place at the right time. Motivated by his animosity toward India, driven by a growing nationalism and his own outsized ego, he took advantage of his situation to lay the groundwork for building the nuclear bomb that Bhutto had called for at Multan. The time had come to return home for the starring role he had long envisioned for himself.

  On December 15, 1975, he and his family left for their annual pilgrimage to Pakistan, telling friends they would be visiting relatives for a couple of weeks. While he was unaware of how close he came to being arrested, Khan suspected he would not return to his job at FDO.

  CHAPTER 6

  DOUBLE STANDARDS

  LEONARD WEISS stood in Senator John Glenn’s outer office in Washington, D.C., chatting with a staff member while he waited to meet the man whose heroics in space had helped him win political office. Weiss, forty-one years old, was a tenured professor of applied mathematics and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland. Yet here he was applying for a year-long job on Glenn’s staff as part of a fellowship sponsored by an engineering association. His goal was to find a staff job in which his background in science and engineering could translate into useful insights and a role in crafting policy. It was about noon on a cold day in December 1975, about the same time A. Q. Khan was flying home to Pakistan, and Weiss was about to embark on a new career. And unlike Khan, Weiss would devote himself to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.

  Weiss was tall and slender, a distance runner in a time before the sport had become popular. He had grown up in a liberal Jewish household in Brooklyn. His father, a self-educated Russian immigrant with socialist tendencies, had worked a series of factory jobs to make ends meet for his wife and three children. Len was the youngest, and as a child he absorbed the lessons of his parents’ struggle for economic survival, as well as the lessons of World War II. Dinner conversations at the Weiss table often turned to the need
to combat fascism and to the plight of Europe’s Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Max Weiss had left several relatives behind in Russia, and concerns about their fate rose as word of the Holocaust filtered out. But his son’s outlook also was shaped by events on the other side of the world.

  For many Americans, the horror of the Holocaust was compounded by the impact of the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the waning days of the war. For Weiss, the destructive reality of the atomic bomb made the victory bleak. CBS Radio commentator Edward R. Murrow seemed to be speaking directly to young Weiss on August 12, 1945, when he said, “Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.” Within two weeks of Hiroshima, The New Yorker magazine published a cartoon that envisioned a nuclear-arms race that would make the first atomic bombs obsolete and lead to an even larger disaster. Nuclear proliferation entered the lexicon of the intellectual and popular press. John W. Campbell illustrated his 1947 book, The Atomic Story, with a drawing of two mad scientists assembling a crude weapon. The caption read, “In a cave or forgotten cellar, an atomic bomb can soon be set up.” For a generation of Americans growing up in the new atomic age, fear became a constant companion. Two thirds of Americans, pollsters found, felt a real danger that atomic bombs would be used against the United States someday. Bomb shelters became household features; duck-and-cover drills were staples of school classrooms. Some sought humor in the blackness—Bob Hope joked about the fear, saying on Valentine’s Day 1946: “Have you noticed the modern trend in verses? No more roses are red, violets are blue. I picked up one that read, ‘Will you be my little geranium until we are both blown up by uranium?’”

  A darker image was burned into the mind of young Len Weiss, who as a freshman in high school read John Hersey’s iconic Hiroshima and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, two seminal works about the horrors of war. The books had such a powerful effect on Weiss that he never thought of war without empathy and sorrow for its military and civilian victims and visceral anger at its perpetrators. Weiss devoted hours to reading political tracts, which increased his fear that America’s blustery postwar policies could lead to a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets. As a fourteen-year-old, he worked as a volunteer in the 1948 presidential campaign of dovish Henry Wallace.

  When it came time for college, Weiss could not afford a private school, so he enrolled in New York’s free university system. He graduated from City College with an engineering degree and went on to get a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. He taught at Brown University and then moved to the University of Maryland when his wife, Sandy, got a job in Washington, D.C. While he concentrated on research and teaching, he remained active politically, joining protests against the Vietnam War and arguing for a reduction in nuclear arms in the United States and the Soviet Union.

  In late 1975, Weiss was awarded a fellowship that offered scientists the opportunity to bring the rigors of their discipline to the political process on Capitol Hill. Weiss had the choice of working for any senator or congressman who would have him; his first candidates were liberal Democrats, whose policies meshed with his own views. Weiss was not some young intern, looking for a foot in any door. He wanted to work for someone who would take serious advantage of his scientific skills, so he interviewed with old-time and novice politicians alike, insisting on a personal meeting with the congressman or senator as a condition for taking a job. He initially tried legendary liberals like Senator Walter Mondale and Senator Hubert Humphrey, but they were too busy to see him personally. He met with Representative Bella Abzug, the fiery liberal from New York, but was put off by her high-handed treatment of her staff. “Though I liked her politics, I decided to strike a blow for the workingman,” he said with a laugh. Eventually someone suggested that Weiss go see John Glenn, the freshman senator from Ohio and a true American hero.

  Like most Americans of a certain age, Weiss had strong memories of Glenn’s role as a pioneer in the country’s space program. He remembered watching televised reports in February 1962 as Glenn waited through weather delays for his chance to pilot the first American-manned orbital spaceflight. He recalled being slightly put off when Glenn brushed aside questions about the stress of the delays by saying that his religion had sustained him. In 1974, Glenn had traded on his hero’s reputation for a run for the Senate as a Democrat from Ohio, his home state. It was the height of Watergate, and the images from that summer were fresh in the minds of Americans: the helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House, the final salute from Richard M. Nixon, the only president in American history to resign from office. Glenn had ridden the wave of public indignation to the Senate, along with other Democrats who became known as the Watergate babies.

  “John Glenn didn’t quite fit my political profile,” Weiss said later. “I knew him as a conservative Democrat. I am a liberal Democrat. So I didn’t come to that first meeting prepared for the idea that this was a guy I would particularly like or want to work for. But he was famous, and I was curious.”

  When Weiss was ushered into Glenn’s office, he found the man across the desk from him funny and charming and smart. Most important, Glenn was interested in Weiss’s scientific research and said he believed science had a role in the political process. When Glenn asked what he wanted to do in Washington, Weiss listed a range of interests, from energy and arms control to environment and health.

  “If you come here, you can work in all these areas,” Glenn promised.

  Weiss had arrived in Washington without personal ambition, driven only by the belief that he had a duty to make a difference. He found Glenn’s open-ended offer irresistible. As a freshman senator, Glenn had a small staff, which translated into plenty of opportunities for the newcomer. Before agreeing to take the job, however, Weiss went home and discussed the prospect with Sandy and some close friends. One of the friends was well to the left on the political spectrum and active in a variety of causes. She urged Weiss to sign up with Glenn, explaining: “If you go with a liberal, they will vote the way they vote regardless of what you do. But with Glenn, you might have some influence in swinging him to some position he might not have chosen otherwise.”

  Accepting the logic of her argument, Weiss signed on to Glenn’s staff, starting his yearlong fellowship in January 1976. It turned out to be a banner year for arms control and a turning point for the senator and the intern.

  Within weeks, Weiss was deeply involved in nuclear issues. The Indian explosion two years earlier had raised the profile of proliferation concerns in Congress, and some members believed the new administration of Gerald Ford was not exercising enough influence to avert a nuclear-arms race in South Asia. Glenn in particular worried that the United States needed to get tougher on proliferation, and he assigned Weiss to examine the issue and draft legislation if it seemed necessary.

  The first thing Weiss did was upgrade his security clearances. As a university professor, he had consulted occasionally for the navy and other parts of the government, so he had clearances that granted him access to some classified information. But if he was to take a lead role in developing counterproliferation legislation, he needed to understand the issue in all its manifestations, and that meant digging deeper into the secrets being gathered by the CIA, the electronic sleuths at the National Security Agency, and other government intelligence operations. His existing clearance allowed him to upgrade quickly to level Q, which granted him access to the mostly highly classified information on nuclear issues. Later, he added another level, called “compartmentalized,” which permitted him to see information related to specific countries and regions. The clearances also authorized Weiss to receive the highest-level briefings from U.S. intelligence agencies.

  Within weeks, Weiss found himself walking from Glenn’s office to the Capitol, where he took a special elevator to the fourth floor. There, the Senate Intelligence Committee maintained a sec
ure hearing room and a library open only to staff members with top security clearances. Emerging from the elevator, Weiss walked down a short corridor to the receptionist’s desk, leaving his briefcase there as he was ushered into a windowless anteroom, where he was seated at a small table. The clerk brought some classified material to the table, where Weiss signed a sheet acknowledging its receipt. The rules were so strict that when he left the room, the notes he had written were automatically classified and had to be left in the folder with the documents.

  In his growing knowledge of America’s nuclear secrets, Weiss began to discover that the information often appeared contradictory and confusing, and the briefings provided by CIA officers seemed designed to obfuscate rather than enlighten. “They would give you a briefing in which they would speak very quickly,” he said. “They would give you the facts, but they would throw them at you at a speed at which you found it hard to take notes. I would try to slow them down. It was a game they would play. It was annoying, but it didn’t stop me from asking pointed questions. The main problem was that I would ask these questions, and I wouldn’t get answers, or I would get answers that were inconsistent with information I already had from other sources. I was treated with condescension until they discovered my background as a scientist. They assumed that meeting with someone representing Congress meant they would be briefing an ignoramus, so they exhibited a smart-alecky attitude until they realized I had done my homework.”

  After attending a dozen or more briefings and reading countless classified intelligence reports, Weiss concluded that the threat of nuclear proliferation was far more serious than Congress, let alone the average American, knew. U.S. export controls were not strong enough to block the transfers of critical technology, and neither were the laws of its allies. If the threat was to be contained, new legislation would be required, and the United States would have to enforce the resulting restrictions.