Explosive Evidence: 'The Nuclear Jihadist'

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"THE NUCLEAR JIHADIST" is a triumph of investigative journalism.

Subtitled "The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets ... And How We Could Have Stopped Him," the book is both a biography of "the father of the Islamic bomb," Pakistan's A.Q. Khan, and a revealing portrait of decades of behind-closed-doors decision-making inside the American and Pakistani governments.

Husband-and-wife authors Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins told Express that their brisk, bracing, voluminously sourced narrative is the result of hundreds of interviews with sources from the CIA, State Department, International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), Pakistani government and elsewhere.

As "The Nuclear Jihadist" tells it, young A.Q. Khan was an ardent Pakistani nationalist studying abroad. He accumulated advanced degrees and, as a metallurgist, eventually went to work for a company designing centrifuges for the Dutch government.

Once gainfully employed, Khan went into espionage with abandon, snapping rolls of photographs of sensitive technology that could be used to help produce a Pakistani weapon and, as his career advanced, stealing and copying nuclear plans.

Collins and Frantz report that Khan came to the attention of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto — a strong advocate of a Pakistani nuclear arsenal — through a letter the scientist sent to the leader offering his services.

But Khan was not a great spy.

His Dutch colleagues had concerns about Khan and, thanks to the work of the Dutch national security service, the CIA was onto him by 1975. The CIA opted to wait and watch Khan.

Over the next three decades, he put on quite a show.

A teacher's son, Khan used espionage, knowledge gleaned from his time in Europe, managerial skill, the greed of European suppliers, a blank check from his government and — primarily — ambition to become a scientist beloved throughout his nation for bringing Pakistan the bomb by the late 1980s.

It was less well known, the authors write, that he also made a fortune selling Pakistan's nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, North Korea and, very probably, customers that remain unknown. ("Jihadist" notes that Pakistani nuclear scientists even met with Osama bin Laden and discussed how to build a dirty bomb).

"That is the most significant unanswered question," Frantz said. "Who else bought this kind of equipment? Who is the unknown customer?"

Frantz and Collins will discuss "The Nuclear Jihadist" on Wednesday at Politics & Prose.

» EXPRESS: One striking thing about your book is the way you show that during Khan's long career, there really was an "axis" of proliferators. But at the center of the axis was Pakistan, an American ally. How did that play out?
» FRANTZ: Well, 30 years of failed and cynical U.S. policy can be represented by the nuclear Wal-Mart established by A.Q. Khan. At various junctures, the U.S. could have stopped A.Q. Khan and slowed down Pakistan's nuclear program. At every juncture, they chose short-term goals over the long-term goal of stopping nuclear proliferation.

It goes back to Jimmy Carter in 1979, when he reversed the sanctions over Pakistan's nuclear program in exchange for their help with the Soviets [in Afghanistan]. ... When you put short-term goals in front of long-term principles, there's going to be blowback. There certainly was blowback from our role in the Afghan war against the Soviets.

But I think the worst form of blowback is possible because we turned a blind eye toward the development of a nuclear arsenal in a country that is unstable and populated by factions that are virulently anti-American. And that has the potential to unleash a blowback far more devastating than the events of September 11, 2001.

» EXPRESS: What did Pakistan's army feel it accomplished by allowing the sale of nuclear technology to Libya and Iran?
» FRANTZ: Two different things. The sale to Iran, when it started in 1987, [General/President Muhammad] Zia [-ul-Haq] and [General Mirza] Aslam Beg were interested in forming an alliance with Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. ... So, it was in the interest of the Pakistani rulers at that time to allow that Iranian deal to go through.

Fast-forward 10 years to 1997, when Khan started his project with Libya. By that time, Khan was such a powerful and influential figure in Pakistan that there was almost no stopping him.

I don't think the military necessarily knew about the Libyan transactions. That was simply Khan being Khan: this freewheeling, powerful, above-the-law figure.

If we look at the third country that we know got his assistance, North Korea, again, there was a military purpose served. North Korea is where we suspect the largest number of people within the Pakistani military knew what Khan was doing, because of those flights involving military transport planes. There, in exchange for uranium technology that Khan provided North Korea, the Pakistanis got very important missile technology, which allowed them to improve the missiles that they developed to deliver nuclear payloads.

So, in the cases of Iran and North Korea, there were military benefits to be had. In Libya, I think that was Khan off the reservation.

» EXPRESS: Your book gave me the impression that when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister she had little control over the military. Is that accurate? What was her role in Pakistan's pursuit of the bomb?
» FRANTZ: It's fair to say that Benazir Bhutto had little or no control over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. It was started by her father, which left her conflicted about its place in Pakistan's history. In the West, she maintained during her first term that she didn't know Pakistan had a nuclear program. In 1989, she told a joint session of Congress that Pakistan was not developing a nuclear weapon. We know, from our research, that by that point, Pakistan had all the makings of a nuclear weapon. All they had to do was "turn the final screw" in 1989.
» COLLINS:: The day after she addressed the joint session of Congress, she was shown a full-scale model [of Pakistan's] bomb by [U.S. officials]. So, if she didn't know by then, she knew the next day.
» FRANTZ: To your question of control, I think it's fair to say that she had very little control. The military was very distrustful of Benazir Bhutto.

» EXPRESS: Tell me about the details of Khan's house arrest and what his life is like now.
» COLLINS: Khan is living at his home in Islamabad, in a very posh neighborhood. The idea that he is kept in this place is alarming to me, because the U.S. has never tried to force the issue of having their own people or Western officials — I suspect IAEA would be the best people — to go in and talk to this man. He is the person with the most answers to what we need to know right now.
» FRANTZ: Khan remains a revered figure in many circles in Pakistan, particularly among the Islamists and the ardent nationalists. I think that precluded Musharraf from having him put in jail; therefore he's under house arrest. He's been treated, as far as we know, fairly mildly.
» COLLINS: Have you ever been to Pakistan?
» EXPRESS: No, I haven't.
» COLLINS: They have these little carts driven by two-stroke engines. They make an enormous amount of noise and pollution, but they're also decorated like elephants, with jewels, colorful streamers, that sort of thing. For a long time, many of them would be decorated with A.Q. Khan's face. You'd see his face on trucks driving down the highway. There are monuments all over the country in his honor. Some of them have been dismantled in recent years, but in the early '90s they were all over the place.

» EXPRESS:: What was Khan's motivation in doing this? Does he have an ideology beyond nationalism?
» FRANTZ: I think so. The book is more than a biography, but at its core, it traces the arc of his life, and I think his ideology was his ego. He was driven by ego, and he was a chameleon whose ego allowed him to adopt as camouflage the clothing of those around him. When it served his interests to be a nationalist and a patriot in the first Bhutto years, when they were developing the nuclear weapon, that's what he was.

When Zia took power and it became more popular to adopt the garb of an Islamist; we talked to lots of people who saw A.Q. Khan do that. And so, that became part of his ideology. I think it was a changing ideology, and he became very strongly anti-American and anti-Israeli as time went on.

He viewed the Americans as trying to impede him from developing the Islamic bomb, and he viewed the Israelis not only as an enemy of Islam, but as a country that had been allowed to develop its own nuclear weapon without facing the kinds of constraints that the West tried to put on Pakistan.

So there's not one simple ideology. At the heart, it was A.Q. Khan gratifying his own enormous ego and fulfilling the destiny that was given to him by a fortuneteller when he was just a child: He would do great things.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Wed., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness)

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Top photo by AFP/Getty Images; second photo by Colin Crawford