I was later told by a senior member of the Bush administration that the president’s speech had been written by John Bolton and Bob Joseph[7] and had not been vetted by the State Department. The notion of a special safeguards committee, although ostensibly a good way to strengthen the Agency’s verification program, was born out of their desire to micromanage the IAEA’s verification work and particularly to force a hard-line approach on Iran’s nuclear program. The intent behind the proposal to exclude “countries under investigation” from serving on the Board—clearly targeting Iran—was not even well camouflaged and would not have worked. It revealed, more than anything, a lack of understanding: the protocols of multilateral diplomacy and mutual respect that make international organizations effective—much like the laws that govern democratic society—are not well served by prejudice, bullying, or a rush to judgment.
When I met with President Bush in Washington in March 2004, our conversation touched on the threat of the emerging nuclear black market. I mentioned that, while A. Q. Khan may have been the ringleader, it was clear he was at least in some cases not working on his own. For example, in the case of Iran, elements of the Pakistani army may have been involved, and in the case of North Korea, Khan may have been acting as part of state-to-state cooperation.[8]
I based my assessment in part on a letter I had seen, handwritten by Khan himself. He had managed to get the letter out of Pakistan as a sort of insurance policy in the event of his arrest by Pakistani authorities. The letter asserted that he had been instructed by senior officers in the Pakistani Army to cooperate with Iran and North Korea.
Bush agreed that there were definite signs pointing to other Pakistani actors. However, it was clear that the complex relationship between the two countries—including the extensive help Pakistan was providing for U.S. operations in Afghanistan—would make it awkward for Washington to press the Pakistani government too hard.
Striving for a pragmatic approach, I concluded that our first priority was to find out who else had acquired technology through Khan’s network.
In the weeks that followed, international support built rapidly for new prohibitions against nonstate actors, designed specifically to criminalize and impede the types of clandestine activities carried out by the Khan network. In May, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1540, requiring UN Member States to enact and enforce laws targeting individuals who in any way lend a hand to WMD proliferation. The resolution also called for new domestic controls, to tighten up access to nuclear and nuclear-related materials.
Not all the proposals in Bush’s speech fared as well, however. The exclusion of Member States under investigation from serving on the Board—a symbolic gesture designed to humiliate—never received serious consideration. And for the next two years, the Americans lobbied the Board to approve a special safeguards committee. I saw a useful role for such a committee if it focused on “ways and means to strengthen safeguards,” for example, by beefing up the IAEA’s forensic laboratories, which were in a dilapidated state. Once in existence, the committee did not last long. Major North-South differences quickly surfaced relevant to the fairness and effectiveness of the nonproliferation regime. After a series of rather nondescript meetings, the Board allowed it, in the words of one of the ambassadors, to “die a quiet and natural death.”
The emergence of the Khan network—the news that a high-level Pakistani government official had been running an international smuggling ring—was an enormous embarrassment for Islamabad. President Musharraf had no choice but to take action. On February 4, 2004, A. Q. Khan was forced to confess on a government-owned television network that he had been the ringleader of the illicit international nuclear network. But the very next day, Musharraf pardoned him, noting his service to Pakistan, although Khan remained under house arrest until 2009. To a non-Pakistani audience, the sequence of events was baffling: why an immediate, official pardon for the man who had single-handedly engineered nuclear proliferation on a massive scale?
Musharraf could not afford to be too critical. Khan’s status as national hero—the perception that he had made immense contributions to his country’s national security by helping Islamabad build a nuclear capability to counter that of India—gave him a degree of immunity from prosecution. Also, Khan quite likely could have implicated others in Pakistan’s government. There has been a great deal of speculation about how much the government knew about Khan’s activities and to what extent he had support from other government or military officials. Khan is reported to have used Pakistani government aircraft, on occasion, to transport nuclear-related equipment to non-Pakistani clients.[9] His affluent lifestyle clearly suggested income well above his government salary, a direct indicator of his moonlighting activities. And press reports indicated that Pakistan’s National Accountability Bureau accumulated an extensive dossier on Khan but chose not to act on it.[10]
As the Agency’s understanding of the Khan network matured, we also learned of the “watch-and-wait” strategy that had been employed by Western intelligence agencies. American officials claimed they had known about Khan’s activities all along but had decided not to act. If true, this made nonsense of the American claim that the discovery of Libya’s WMD was a triumph of intelligence work. Ruud Lubbers, the former Dutch prime minister, told me that the Dutch had wanted to arrest Khan as early as the 1970s, only to be told not to by the CIA. This was corroborated by other sources. Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker in March 2004, reported a senior U.S. intelligence officer as saying, “We had every opportunity to put a stop to the A. Q. Khan network fifteen years ago. Some of those involved today in the smuggling are the children of those we knew about in the eighties. It’s the second generation now.”[11] Robert Einhorn, who held the post of U.S. assistant secretary for nonproliferation from 1991 to 2001, later made a similar statement: “We could have stopped the Khan network, as we knew it, at any time. The debate was, do you stop it now or do you watch it and understand it better so that you are in a stronger position to pull it up by the roots later? The case for waiting prevailed.”[12]
“Can you explain what was gained?” I wanted to shout. Where were all the bigger fish who should now be ready for the catch? How could the IAEA expect to make headway against nuclear proliferation if vital information was withheld from us? Was there no recognition in the United States—or in the United Kingdom, or other countries that had known about A. Q. Khan—of their obligation, as a member of the NPT, to inform the IAEA of such underground dealings? Even more to the point, would it not have made more sense to stop the clandestine programs of Iran, Libya, and others in their infancy?
Whatever the circumstances or arguments at the time, in hindsight the decision to watch and wait was a royal blunder. Among the ways in which the strategy backfired was that it alerted members of the network. Interviews with middlemen have suggested that, at least in some cases, they knew for some time that they were under surveillance. This allowed them to destroy extensive records, which in turn made it difficult for the IAEA and other investigators to pin down additional dimensions of the network, including the identities of other customers.
Did Khan have other customers? Robert Gallucci has referred to A. Q. Khan as the Johnny Appleseed of nuclear enrichment for his role in spreading centrifuge technology far and wide. Khan’s travels took him across the Middle East and Africa. In most cases, there is little record of what happened in those places. But rumors persist and disturbing signs sometimes emerge.
7
From 2001 to 2005, Joseph worked for Condoleezza Rice at the National Security Council, as the senior director for proliferation strategy, counterproliferation, and homeland defense. He was heavily involved with Bolton in the development of the Proliferation Security Initiative and in the negotiations to persuade Libya to give up its WMD.
8
Since Pakistan is not part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and also not a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group subscribing to export control guidelines, it is not bound by the obligations of either.
12
Robert Einhorn was quoted in Douglas Frantz, “A High-Risk Nuclear Stakeout,”