New allegations made by
the New York Times say that Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan sold
$100 million worth of nuclear gear to Libya and as a “sweetener”
included blueprints for a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb.
The report says intelligence officials
had watched Dr Khan, “for years”, though it
fails to say why they waited, “for years”,
before exposing his alleged network. US experts were unsure
who else had those designs besides Libya. They were not
certain if the designs had also been passed on to Iran,
Syria or the Al Qaeda organisation. Experts from the US
and the IAEA are said to have quarrelled over who should
have control over the blueprints and after, “hours
of tense negotiation, agreement was reached to keep it
in a vault at the Energy Department in Washington, but
under IAEA seal.”
According to the newspaper, nearly a year
after Dr Khan’s arrest, “secrets of his nuclear
black market continue to uncoil, revealing a vast global
enterprise.”
“The breadth of the operation was
particularly surprising to some American intelligence
officials because they had had Dr Khan under surveillance
for nearly three decades, since he began assembling components
for Pakistan’s bomb, but apparently missed crucial
transactions with countries like Iran and North Korea,”
added the report.
The report says that for three decades
Dr Khan has been well known to British and American intelligence
officials.
The report alleges that the Dutch company
where Dr Khan worked, as well as Dutch intelligence, were
suspicious of Dr Khan and saw him as “a potential
danger.” It repeats the discredited allegation that
when he left Holland for Pakistan, he took away centrifuge
blueprints with him. Dr Khan returned several times to
Holland. “The Dutch wanted to arrest him,”
a diplomat said. “But they were told by the American
CIA, ‘Leave him so we can follow his trail.’
The New York Times reports that in the
early 1980s, Dr Khan “pulled off a coup” by
obtaining the blueprints for a weapon that China had detonated
in its fourth nuclear test, in 1966. The design was notable
because it was compact and the first one China had developed
that could easily fit atop a missile. American intelligence
agencies only learned the full details of the transactions
earlier this year, when the Libyans handed over two large
plastic bags with the names of an Islamabad tailor on
one side, and a dry cleaner on other, - one of several
clues that it had come from the Khan Laboratories. The
design inside included drawings of more than 100 parts,
all fitting in a sphere about 34 inches in diameter, just
the right size for a rocket.
Intelligence experts believe that Dr Khan
traded his centrifuge technology to the Chinese for their
bomb design.
The report says Dr Khan knew he was under
surveillance. He once told British journalist Simon Henderson,
“The British try to recruit members of my team as
spies.”
When George Bush came to office, the CIA
began to tutor him on the danger posed by Dr Khan and
disclosing how deeply the agency believed it had penetrated
his life and network. “We were inside his residence,
inside his facilities, inside his rooms,” the former
CIA chief George Tenet said in a recent speech.
The Pakistanis insisted they had no evidence
of any proliferation at all, a claim American officials
said they found laughable.
So far, said European intelligence officials
familiar with the agency’s inner workings, no hard
evidence of clandestine nuclear arms programs has surfaced.”
