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2 BOOK REVIEW Salesman of
doom Shopping for
Bombs by Gordon Corera
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
Until
an Anglo-American joint intelligence team busted
the racket in 2003, Pakistani scientist, spy and
national hero Abdul Qadeer Khan had been peddling
the most dangerous nuclear technology across the
world for three decades.
Described by
former US director of central intelligence George
Tenet
as "at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden",
Khan wreaked havoc on the attempts to restrain the
spread of weapons of mass destruction by riding
piggyback on Pakistani state protection and
unscrupulous entrepreneurship. By offering a
one-stop shopping experience to any country
willing to pay, Khan nearly brought the
non-proliferation regime to its knees.
British Broadcasting Corp journalist
Gordon Corera's investigative book on the Khan
network and its long-term damage to world
security assembles fragments from news reports and
personal interviews into a worrisome tale of greed
and failure of international political will to
rein in Pakistan and its evil genius.
Khan
was a PhD student in metallurgy in Belgium when
Pakistan was dismembered in the Bangladesh war of
1971. Out of depression and humiliation, he swore
that he would prevent such a catastrophe from
recurring. Pakistani patriotism, Muslim
internationalism and resentment of Western
hegemony motivated Khan behind his quiet and suave
facade. "His desire was to see the Islamic world
rise above other nations and for Pakistan to
occupy the top position in the Islamic world" (p
123).
Khan landed his first job in the
Netherlands for Urenco, the European consortium
for enriching uranium, where he effortlessly
accessed sensitive information marked "top
secret". In 1974, armed with enough stolen data,
he volunteered to spy for Pakistan and boldly
filched invaluable bomb designs and channeled them
through Pakistani embassies in Europe. By December
1975, he returned to Pakistan and elbowed aside
other domestic nuclear scientists to become the
head of the country's atomic project with the
blessings of the then prime minister Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto.
At the Kahuta research center,
Khan developed a power base and autonomy that gave
him a free hand. Instead of procuring entire
enrichment plants that would invite Western
suspicion, he devised a strategy of buying nuclear
components in the open European market through
middlemen. His uncanny skill of oiling key
contacts and luring them to serve Pakistan's bid
to go nuclear advantaged him to the very end. With
satisfaction, he recalled years later that his
intermediaries "would sell their mother for money"
(p 27).
By the mid-1980s, the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) had detailed leads on
Khan's activities, but the US government's
emphasis on communism over counter-proliferation
left him unharmed. For instance, in 1989, the
Pentagon falsely testified before Congress that
Pakistan could not adapt aircraft to carry nuclear
weapons. Safely embedded within the US policy
myopia of cushioning Pakistan, Khan's tentacles
spread far and wide, and Kahuta attained the
reputation of "a state within a state". Khan
tightly integrated himself into Pakistan's
military-industrial complex by also reverse
engineering and sale of conventional armaments.
In the early 1980s, US intelligence rifled
through Khan's luggage and found a document
showing that China handed over a full, proven
weapons design to Pakistan. Khan made several
visits to China, and Chinese scientists were also
present at Kahuta. Despite assessments from 1986
that Pakistan was "only two screwdriver turns away
from assembling an unconventional weapon", US
policymakers retained a massive public charade
that kept Khan off the radar.
In 1990,
shortly after Benazir Bhutto was deposed as prime
minister, Khan bragged that he had asked
Pakistan's then army chief, General Aslam Beg, to
remove her "because she was causing trouble for
the nuclear program" (p 54). As Pakistani politics
entered a messy period of frequent turnover of
governments, Khan flourished and embarked on a
daring career of exporting the expertise he built.
Khan was the source of Iran's great leap
forward in assembling a cascade of centrifuges at
Natanz. The deal was struck in Dubai in 1987
wherein drawings and designs, including technical
instructions on building the core of an atomic
bomb, worth US$3 million were passed over to Iran.
Western diplomats perceived Russia and China as
the main facilitators of Iran's nuclear program
and overlooked Pakistan, which was far more
important. Thanks to Khan, Iran could leapfrog
painstaking and time-consuming processes that
would have taken decades to mature. In 1994, Iran
signed up for a bigger package, including designs
for the advanced P-2 centrifuge. Khan went to Iran
a number of times and had a guesthouse on the
Caspian Sea.
Three further shipments to
Iran were made in 1997, all with the full
knowledge of senior Pakistani government
officials. General Beg and the chief of the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Asad Durrani,
wanted to sell Iran nuclear know-how worth $12
billion to finance their terrorist operations in
Afghanistan and Indian Kashmir. Moreover, many key
Pakistani authorities "felt that the bomb should
be shared with Islamic nations" (p 78). After
Pakistan tested nuclear devices in 1998, the
Iranian foreign minister congratulated it, saying
"now Muslims can feel confident" (p 84). Khan was
quite happy to supply Iraq as well, offering
Saddam Hussein enrichment and bomb designs
unsolicited in 1990.
Benazir Bhutto's
"nukes for missiles" deal with North Korea in 1993
paved the way for Khan, who was desperate for the
Nodong delivery system that could aim at more
targets in India. In return for the Nodong
(renamed "Ghauri"), Khan shipped enrichment
technology to Pyongyang in the late 1990s. He
visited North Korea 13 times from 1997 to 2002 on
Pakistani military planes, transferring
blueprints, uranium hexafluoride and centrifuges.
"Covert activity had become an integral part of
the Pakistani state and meant Khan could go about
this business with minimal oversight" (p 95).
It was not coincidental that top Pakistani
diplomats in Pyongyang "are almost always former
senior members of the ISI or army" (p 93). In
1998, the wife of a North Korean diplomat in
Islamabad was shot dead for being a suspected spy
who could be passing on information about nuclear
contacts between her country and Pakistan. The
killing was swiftly covered up by Islamabad.
Corera finds that the North Korean deals of Khan
were "least likely without wider complicity of the
Pakistani military, since they involved key
strategic concerns like missile purchases" (p 96).
From 1995, Khan clandestinely met with
Libyan officials and
damage to world
security assembles fragments from news reports and
personal interviews into a worrisome tale of greed
and failure of international political will to
rein in Pakistan and its evil genius. 
