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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When several Italian Coast-Guard cutters set out from the industrial port city of Taranto on that country's southeastern coast on Oct. 4, 2003, they had specific orders: to detain and board a German-flagged cargo ship called the BBC China, then heading for Libya. The seizure had, in fact, been arranged jointly by the CIA and MI6, the overseas arm of British intelligence. When the agents boarded the BBC China, what they found was anything but routine: five large containers, each carefully packed with precision machine tools, tubes and other bombmaking equipment. The containers amounted to part of a uranium-enrichment facility manufactured in Malaysia by Tahir's Scomi operation.

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The CIA had been tracking Khan since the late 1990s. "We were inside his residence, inside his facilities, inside his rooms," former CIA Director George Tenet told an audience last year. A Libyan source told TIME that the Libyan government believes that the mole may have been Tahir, Khan's trusted aide. "[The U.S.] made a compromise with him," the source says. "He will be safe. They won't touch him, but he had to cooperate." The source has told TIME that when the CIA finally confronted Tripoli in late 2003 about its nuclear ambitions, the officers played a tape of a 1997 Casablanca meeting that was attended by only Khan, Tahir and two representatives of the Libyan government.

The source believes that Tahir was wearing a concealed microphone during that meeting.

Tahir was arrested in Kuala Lumpur in May 2004 and held under a Malaysian law allowing for the indefinite detention of individuals posing a security threat. He has provided a wealth of information to local investigators about the specifics of Khan's dealings, particularly with Iran and Libya. The IAEA said last week that the Malaysian government agreed for the first time to make Tahir available to IAEA investigators—the next best thing to being able to talk to Khan himself.

Two days after the boarding of the BBC China off the waters of Taranto, then U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage arrived in Islamabad and confronted Musharraf, demanding that the Pakistanis shut down Khan's network. "If I ever perspired," Musharraf said later, "it was then." But Pakistani sources close to Khan say Musharraf backed away from arresting the scientist out of fear that Khan would finger senior members of the Pakistani military and security services as having been complicit in nuclear trafficking.

"Everyone got a cut," says a Khan acquaintance, referring to high-ranking military officers connected with the nuclear program.

Khan's last public appearance came on Feb. 4, 2004, when he appeared on national television and confessed to running the smuggling ring.

The next day, to the outrage of many in Washington, Musharraf pardoned him.

The quest to get more information out of Khan has been slow. At the White House meeting in December, Musharraf told Bush that it was impossible to know whether Khan has divulged all he knows, since he tends to talk only when confronted with evidence. If the U.S. has specific questions for Khan, Musharraf said, his men would follow it up. "I will investigate," Musharraf assured Bush. The Administration gave Pakistan a new dossier of queries for Khan, and a knowledgeable official says Pakistan has since questioned Khan and reported back to Washington.

But many questions remain unresolved, including whether Khan sold blueprints for building a nuclear warhead to Iran, as he did with Libya. If true, such a finding would allow the U.S. to ratchet up its charges that Tehran's nuclear research has a military purpose. What's more, sources close to Khan Research Laboratories in Islamabad tell TIME that even though its head has been removed, Khan's illicit network of suppliers and middlemen is still out there. "Nothing has changed," one of Khan's former aides says. "The hardware is still available, and the network hasn't stopped." A recent probe of Khan's lab found that 16 cylinders of uranium hexafluoride gas, a critical ingredient for uranium enrichment, are missing, sources close to the lab say. And a Pakistani official says some in Islamabad are vexed that the Swiss and German governments, among others, have failed to arrest individuals implicated by Khan's testimony.

The man with the answers passes his days in Islamabad, his once peripatetic lifestyle now confined to the interior of his villa. A close friend says Khan's health is poor, and he is given to bouts of depression. Although the man may fade into obscurity, the world is only beginning to reckon with his legacy. It's still a seller's market in the nuclear bazaar. And now there's room at the top.

With reporting by Ghulam Hasnain/ Karachi, Sayed Talat Hussain/ Islamabad, Timothy J. Burger and Elaine Shannon/ Washington, Scott MacLeod/ Tripoli, Andrew Purvis/ Vienna, Simon Robinson/Johannesburg and Nahid Siamdoust/ Tehran