Osama's Nuclear Quest

Nobody is certain what Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood has been up to in Afghanistan in the past three years--but nobody in the West much likes it either. Mahmood is one of Pakistan's leading nuclear engineers, a key part of the team that developed the country's small arsenal of atom bombs. According to a lot of people, he also may be a little flaky. The fact that since 1998, so loose a nuclear cannon has been traveling in and out of the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, where he has helped the Afghans construct a complex of buildings he describes as flour mills, has a lot of people worried.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

It was for this and other reasons that Pakistan detained Mahmood and two of his colleagues to determine if the three scientists may have been passing nuclear expertise, raw materials or--worse--functioning weaponry on to the Taliban. So far, nothing Islamabad has learned has proved that the men have indeed been trafficking in secrets, and they have been released. But nothing has put all doubts to rest either.

The detention of the three scientists was just the latest in the so-far offstage effort to battle the most dreadful of the terror weapons Osama bin Laden would like to have in his arsenal: nuclear arms. Airborne anthrax and hijacked planes are little more than a murderous tease compared with the prospect of rogue nukes. Just what bin Laden has in his stockpiles, what he plans to do with it and what can be done to stop him are rapidly becoming the most pressing questions in the anti-terror wars. "The goal of terrorism is to spread panic," says Dr. Jerrold Post, a physician and professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, who believes that al-Qaeda would try a nuclear or radiological attack if it had the capacity. "Psychologically, there are no constraints."

It's been an open secret in the intelligence community that bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization have long lusted after nukes. The consensus in Washington is that the group does not have a true nuclear-fission device, though it may well have what is known as a radiological weapon or "dirty bomb"--a conventional explosive packed with radioactive debris. Whatever bin Laden's got, he has made any number of attempts to get more. As early as the mid-1990s, intelligence sources tell TIME, bin Laden's agents began cruising the black markets of Europe and Asia looking for pirated Russian warheads. Al-Qaeda also made it known that loose components such as enriched uranium would do too. Relatively new to the free-for-all thieving of the post-Soviet republics, bin Laden was fleeced at least twice, getting fooled by black marketeers who tried to sell him low-grade, radioactive rubbish--in one instance claiming it was "red mercury," a fictional Russian weapon.

But bin Laden has been a patient shopper, and if he hasn't made a good buy yet, he has come awfully close. Earlier this year, at the trial of the four men now convicted of planning the U.S. embassy bombings, al-Qaeda turncoat Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl described his role in helping to broker a 1993 deal in which bin Laden attempted to pay $1.5 million for a cylinder of South African uranium. Al-Fadl saw the cylinder, but he wasn't present to see when--or if--money and material changed hands. Last April a Bulgarian working as a middleman in a Dubai company providing Asian laborers to Middle East construction firms was briefly introduced to bin Laden in a safe house at an unknown location during a trip to Pakistan. The next day he was approached by a scientist who seemed to be part of bin Laden's organization, offering him a different kind of business proposition: a scheme to bring nuclear waste from Bulgaria through Moldova and Ukraine. The names al-Qaeda and bin Laden never came up during that meeting, but the wary Bulgarian backed out of the deal. "They pressured me," he told TIME. "They said, 'We're ready to give you this business.'"

That kind of al-Qaeda tenacity is part of what sparked the recent arrests in Pakistan. Mahmood, the best known of the detained engineers, has been a vocal supporter of the Taliban, calling its members "upholders of a...movement of renaissance of Islam." He has compared the journey of the soul from life through death and after to an electrical current passing through a wire, and has said the energy of the spirits known as jinns could be harnessed to solve the energy crisis. Such seemingly loose-screw ideas coming from a man with so much knowledge of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal always troubled Islamabad and Washington. In 1999, when Mahmood retired from the government and began traveling in and out of Afghanistan to establish what he said was a relief organization, antennae went up.

Once American military actions began, the commanders of the air campaign decided to direct a few bombs at Mahmood's flour mills. At about the same time, Pakistani officials brought Mahmood and the others in for questioning. President Pervez Musharraf's spokesman Major General Rashid Quereshi stresses that the U.S. did not request the arrests--something Washington confirms--dismissing as "absolutely baseless" rumors that the men were simply handed over to the FBI or the CIA. Secretary of State Colin Powell, however, has readily admitted that the Pakistani scientists are high on Washington's worry list. "I discussed this issue with President Musharraf," he said, "and I'm confident that he understands the importance of ensuring that elements of his nuclear program are safe."