The Man Who Sold the Bomb

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The ultimate fear: that one of Khan's clients may pass along nuclear technology and expertise to terrorist groups. Although the U.S. does not have concrete evidence that Khan did business with al-Qaeda, there is reason to suspect such a link exists. A few members of Pakistan's military and intelligence establishment, which worked closely with Khan in his role as the government's top nuclear scientist, are known to sympathize with Osama bin Laden. The more investigators have learned about the reach of Khan's network, the more alarmed they have become. Says a U.S. official involved with analyzing Iran's nuclear program: "You're dealing with a supplier who didn't appear to have any qualms."

Despite the U.S.'s obvious interest in uncovering the scope of the nuclear bazaar, neither the Administration nor the IAEA has been allowed to interrogate Khan directly. Knowledgeable sources tell TIME that at a meeting at the White House in December, Bush told Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that he believed Khan had not fessed up to all his nefarious transactions. Musharraf agreed but refused to allow non-Pakistanis to quiz Khan.

So who is Abdul Qadeer Khan, and what kind of threat does his illicit enterprise still pose? When you piece together the details of Khan's career, his business dealings and the covert operation that brought him down, what emerges is a portrait of a brainy engineer who devoted his life to the pursuit and proliferation of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Born to humble beginnings, he became a globe-trotting magnate who relished the luxury that fame and savvy brought him. But colleagues say he was also driven by a devout faith and a burning belief that Muslim possession of nuclear weapons would help return Islam to greatness. Just how far Khan was able to spread that vision is a question, says a former U.S. intelligence official, "that still keeps a lot of us up nights."

Khan was born in 1936, in Bhopal, India, 11 years before the founding of Pakistan. His youth was shaped by the communal violence that plagued India after the end of colonization. He has told his biographer of witnessing the massacre of Muslims by Hindus that followed the partition of the old British colony in 1947. By the time he immigrated to Pakistan in 1952, Khan had developed an interest in science and a loathing for India.

In 1953, Khan enrolled in Karachi's D.J. Science College. But he soon uprooted again, moving to Europe and earning degrees in electrical engineering and metallurgy. After finishing his studies, he threw himself into the burgeoning field of nuclear science in the Netherlands. With oil prices soaring, interest in harnessing nuclear power for civilian energy was high. In 1975, Khan took a job at the Dutch branch of a European nuclear-research consortium, Urenco, which specialized in uranium enrichment. Khan soon recognized that the centrifuges Urenco had developed to enrich uranium for civilian use were powerful enough to produce the fissile material needed for a nuclear weapon.

When he returned home in 1976, he displayed his talent for enterprise. He brought with him the Dutch woman who would become his wife—and extremely sensitive centrifuge designs, which the Dutch say he had stolen from his nuclear employer. In the context of Pakistan's rivalry with India, Khan's perfidy was considered an extreme form of patriotism. Since India had a nuclear program, Pakistan needed one too. Soon Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto appointed Khan to run Pakistan's nuclear-research program, with the goal of developing a weapon as soon as possible. "Pakistan's choice was either to reinvent the wheel or buy it," says Samina Ahmed, South Asia project director for the International Crisis Group in Islamabad. Khan decided to buy it.

There are two basic paths to producing bomb-grade material. One involves reprocessing the plutonium contained in spent nuclear fuel, a path taken by North Korea in the 1980s. But that method requires first building a nuclear reactor, a costly and cumbersome endeavor.

Khan's experience in Europe steered him toward the cheaper option.

Working the contacts he had made in Europe, he set out to acquire the rotational machines, known as centrifuges, that enrich uranium into bomb-grade material. Pakistan's bomb program took years to mature, but in 1998, on the back of Khan's labors, the country detonated five underground nuclear bombs. At a time of high tensions with India over the disputed region of Kashmir, the event turned Khan into a national hero. His glowering, wavy-haired portrait was hand-painted on the backs of trucks and buses all over the country. He was twice awarded Pakistan's highest civilian honor, the Hilal-e-Imtiaz medal.

Celebrated in textbooks, he was probably Pakistan's most famous man.

But Khan had a secret life. In hindsight, there were some obvious tip-offs. Although still a civil servant in a poor country, he owned dozens of properties in Pakistan and Dubai and invested in a Timbuktu hotel, which he named after his wife. He donated $30 million to various Pakistani charities and had enough money left over to buy his staff members cars and pay for the university education of their children. He had an ego to match his newfound fortune: after paying to restore the tomb of Sultan Shahabuddin Ghauri, an Afghan who conquered Delhi, Khan put up a portrait of himself next to the sultan's.

Friends noticed another transformation in Khan. He became more religious after the successful nuclear tests in 1998. A Libyan source familiar with Khan's transactions with the Libyan government says Khan claimed he was selling nuclear technology to bolster the standing of Muslims. "We Muslims have to be strong and equal to any other country, and therefore I want to help some countries be strong," the source recalls Khan saying. Ex-colleagues told TIME that following the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, he railed against the West and its operations against the Muslim community. After the U.S. imposed sanctions on Pakistan for its nuclear test, Khan became convinced that the U.S. was bent on destroying Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, its main weapon against India's far mightier army.

Whether motivated by greed or ideology or both, Khan decided to go into business for himself, even as he oversaw Pakistan's nuclear development. Khan offered a one-stop shop for regimes interested in producing nuclear weapons. He offered centrifuges—known as P-1, for Pakistan, and later P-2, a more sophisticated version—as well as machines that make centrifuges (critical to Khan's customers because hundreds or thousands of them are needed to make highly enriched uranium in quantities sufficient for a weapon). Utilizing a variety of contacts in Europe, Asia and Africa, Khan built a network of factories and salesmen that covered the globe. There was even a slick advertising brochure promoting the group's wares.

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