Western intelligence remains in the dark
about the identity of the “fourth customer”
benefiting from the nuclear supply network allegedly operated
by Dr AQ Khan.
According to a long report in the Washington
Post on Tuesday, “Iran was Khan’s first customer,
North Korea his second and Libya his undoing. What troubles
US and British officials today is the evidence of a fourth
customer yet unknown.”
The report, based on interviews with mostly
unidentified US and Pakistani officials, and one identified
former Brigadier of the Pakistan Army, Feroz Hassan Khan,
now associated with a Pentagon-related think tank in California,
goes over known territory but contains a number of facts
that had not come to light so far in the press.
The report states that soon after Bush
took office, three dozen analysts from around the government
gathered for a full-day conference in Chantilly, Virginia,
to sift top-secret ntelligence. If al Qaeda obtained a
nuclear weapon, they asked, where would it come from?
They thought the best place to buy an assembled weapon
would be Russia, compared to Pakistan that had few weapons.
They came to the conclusion that black market sales posed
the greatest risk. In Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf,
after he was made privy by Washington and London to the
AQ Khan network, retired the scientist in March 2001,
offering him an advisory position instead. By the time
Bush came to office, the CIA and British intelligence
had come to the conclusion that Dr Khan was at the center
of an international proliferation network supplying uranium
equipment to at least one customer in the Middle East,
thought to be Libya. Dr Khan not only dealt in designs
but also had begun mass production of components. “The
US government had a dilemma. The picture was alarming,
incomplete and dependent on sensitive intelligence sources.
And the man at the center of suspicion had a stature in
Pakistan that easily exceeded Musharraf’s,”
said the Post report.
Envoys were sent to Islamabad with the
news that nuclear secrets were being marketed abroad.
Assistant Secretary of State Robert Einhorn told the three-star
general overseeing Pakistan’s strategic nuclear
force. “Either you are not on top of this or you
are complicit. Either one is disturbing.” US officials
did not mention Khan by name. They feared a confrontation
that could break Gen. Musharraf’s grip on power
and, in the worst-case scenario, bring about a “fundamentalist
government in Pakistan that had nuclear weapons.”
The Bush administration, one US policymaker said, welcomed
Musharraf’s decision to close the spigot on his
nuclear technology. “At least,” the policymaker
said, “that’s what we hoped it was.”
It did not turn out that way. Khan changed titles but
kept access to his labs. His global sales flourished.
The CIA and British intelligence saw that Khan had more
than one customer, but they could identify only Libya.
After 9/11, Bush demanded a change in
Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban and al
Qaeda. Brig. Feroz Hassan Khan, who was then a director
in the army’s strategic plans division, told the
Post in an interview that “there would have been
a positive response” if Armitage had used that moment
to demand action against the nuclear black market. But
Bush’s national security team believed the United
States could push Musharraf no harder. When Bush was told
that two Pakistani nuclear scientists had met Osama bin
Laden, he went “through the roof” The CIA
chief rushed to Islamabad and demanded access to the two
scientists’s questioning. This was denied.
In March 2002, British intelligence learnt
that Dr Khan had moved his base outside Pakistan, that
he controlled the business through associates in Dubai
and had “established his own production facilities,
in Malaysia.” The Blair government was of the view
that Pakistan should be confronted with what had been
learnt about Dr Khan’s network. The Americans disagreed
because they felt that would close off intelligence gathering
opportunities. Dr Khan continued moving freely abroad,
evading nominal restrictions. On a trip to Beijing, one
senior Pakistani diplomat told the Post, Chinese authorities
“took me aside, said they knew it would be embarrassing,
but AQ Khan was in China and bribing people, and they
wanted him out.” The diplomat said Pakistan confiscated
a false passport, but Dr Khan kept travelling. “They
made no attempt to get a handle on his activities abroad,”
said John Wolf, who was Bush’s assistant secretary
of state for nonproliferation until June. Bush’s
advisers “were continually engaged in a trade-off”
between stopping the sales of nuclear technology and learning
enough about them “so that when we did move we brought
down what we could.” “It was a 51-49 call
every day we were going through this,” a key official
said.
As London and Washington tried to keep
watch in 2001 and 2002, important parts of the black-market
network escaped their view. During that period, authoritative
sources in both capitals said, Dr Khan’s operation
delivered tens of thousands of gas centrifuge parts that
brought North Korea to the threshold of unlimited bomb
production.
