The Man Who Sold the Bomb

Sunday, Feb. 06, 2005 By BILL POWELL AND TIM MCGIRK/ISLAMABAD
Supporters hold pictures of A. Q. Khan, the father of the "Islamic Bomb"
SHAKIL ADIL / AP
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In the early 1990s, Khan began meeting with representatives from an assortment of outlaw regimes. A former Energy Minister in Islamabad says Iranian officials approached Pakistan's army chief in 1991, offering "around $8 billion" for access to Khan's technology. The offer was rebuffed but, IAEA officials say, three years later Khan did establish contact with the Iranians. A key member of the network has told investigators that Iran bought centrifuges from Khan. The IAEA reports that the Khan network also provided Iran with blueprints to manufacture more P-1 and P-2 centrifuges. The Iranians say they wanted the centrifuges for civilian purposes, a claim the U.S. doubts. Either way, says a U.S. official, "Khan was vital" to the progress of Iran's nuclear program.

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By 1995, with Khan's Iran connection established, another global pariah, Libya, sought him out. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had tried in the late 1980s to build his own nuclear program by importing German technology and engineers, but the effort failed. To make its bombs, Libya wanted to enrich uranium rather than produce plutonium in a reactor because, says the official, "with a reactor, you cannot hide anything." Khan's system was a perfect fit, and as the commercial relationship was launched, Khan's underlings whetted Gaddafi's appetite with an unexpected gift. Khan gave the Libyans a stack of technical instructions for how to build a nuclear warhead. The material was wrapped in the kind of plastic sheeting used by dry cleaners. Khan never told the Libyans that it was a plan for a bomb, saying only "Here is some information that will be useful for you in the future."

Gaddafi soon upped the ante. In 1997, Khan's Libyan contacts told him they wanted P-1 and P-2 centrifuges and the equipment to build hundreds more. The deal was worth $100 million. To fill the order, Khan turned to old contacts in Western Europe and South Africa, in some instances using the same people he had done business with in the 1980s. Among the shadowy middlemen involved over the years were South African Johan Meyer and German- South African Gerhard Wisser, who allegedly helped set up a processing facility that could be shipped whole to Libya. Khan's crew tapped furnacemakers in Italy, lathemakers in Spain, and Swiss middlemen who helped design parts for construction in Southeast Asia.

The network began sending Libya crateloads of equipment, routing the ships through Europe and the Persian Gulf city of Dubai before they reached their destination in Tripoli. It was an audacious enterprise, given that Western spies were on the hunt for illicit trading in weapons of mass destruction. But as far as Khan knew, his pursuers were still in the dark.

Khan's base of operations became Dubai, with its easy transit connections by air and its balmy beachfront climate. Dealmaking was suitably informal. A key member of Khan's network told investigators that Iranian contacts once dropped off in Khan's apartment two suitcases containing $3 million in cash as a payment. From 1999 on, Khan traveled to Dubai 41 times, the Pakistani government says. Khan also kept a penthouse on posh al-Maktoum Road. When arranging a shipment, he would set up in Dubai dozens of shell companies consisting of nothing more than "a fax machine and an empty office," says a former colleague. As soon as the deal was done, he shut the companies down.

For meetings with his underlings and potential customers, Khan favored other exotic locales: Istanbul and Casablanca. Pakistani sources say Khan used Dubai gold dealers to launder smuggling profits. At the height of his power, Khan was worth as much as $400 million.

Khan's right-hand man, what an intelligence official calls the managing director of his operation, was Buhary Sayed Abu Tahir, 44, a Sri Lankan whom Khan first met in Dubai in the mid-'90s. Tahir idolized Khan, mimicking him in sometimes expensive ways. In homage to the boss's vintage fleet, Tahir tooled around Dubai in a luxury car. To Khan, Tahir became indispensable. He divided his time between Kuala Lumpur (his wife is Malaysian) and Dubai. Through his connections in Malaysia, Tahir arranged for centrifuge components to be manufactured at a publicly traded company called Scomi Precision Engineering. Back in Dubai, he set up a cutout company called SMB Computers, which was a front for Khan's proliferation business.

Ultimately, components manufactured at Scomi were sold via SMB to Libya as "used machinery"—part of the $100 million contract with Gaddafi's government.

Meanwhile, Khan expanded. He made contact with the North Korean government as early as 1993, according to Pakistani investigators. In the late 1990s he began shipping centrifuges and the means to make them—"the whole package," as a U.S. intelligence official put it—in bulk to Pyongyang, sometimes aboard Pakistani military cargo planes.

Pakistani officials say Khan has testified that the North Koreans were so appreciative that in 1999 they took him on a private tour of their nuclear facilities during his visit to Pyongyang. U.S. and IAEA investigators believe that Khan also traveled to Saudi Arabia and Egypt and to such African countries as Sudan, Ivory Coast and Niger.

The purpose of those trips remains unclear, but intelligence officials have hunches: Saudi Arabia and Egypt are believed to be in the market for nuclear technology, and many African countries are rich in raw uranium ore.

As he hopscotched across the globe, Khan had little reason to believe that Western intelligence agencies were catching on to his activities. But unbeknownst to him, they apparently had found a mole in the operation who could lead straight to the boss.