PAKISTAN'S DR. STRANGELOVE CHANGES HIS STORY

Dr. A. Q. Khan whose nicknames include Doctor Strangelove, The Merchant of Menace and Father of the Islamic bomb now says he did not sell nuclear bomb parts and design plans to Muslim nations like Iran and Libya.
According to Dr. Kahn, 72, his country’s military dictator, President Pervez Musharraf, forced him to lie in the world in 2004 as part of a deal that guaranteed him immunity from prosecution. Regarded by most Pakistanis as a hero for making his country a nuclear nation, Kahn says the television address he gave in 2004 in which he admitted to nuclear proliferation was written by others. Since he made that admission, he has been under house arrest but in the past year curbs on his movements have been relaxed, allowing him to see friends and make statements to the media. His latest recantation coincided with his claim that it mattered little if countries like Iran joined the nuclear club. In his opinion, it was better for Muslim nations to have nuclear bombs because it contributed to global deterrence, meaning all countries with nukes would not use them for fear of annihilation in a retaliatory nuclear strike.
The most startling thing about Dr. Kahn is that despite the overwhelming evidence of his nuclear smuggling activities over several decades, the Pakistani authorities have never allowed the CIA, Britain’s MI6 or the IAEA – International Atomic Energy Agency – to interview him. Kahn has said he will not make himself available to the AIEA because he has not been found guilty of a crime outside Pakistan. He refutes charges that he ever visited Iran or sold nuclear centrifuges to the Iranians.
Since his exposure as the greatest nuclear proliferator in history, he has been insulated from international scrutiny thanks to President Musharraf and his inner circle of advisors, many of them members of the armed forces. Kahn would not be so fortunate had Benazir Bhutto been elected as prime minister. Sadly, she was assassinated while campaigning in December last year. Before her death, she promised if she came to power she would drag Dr. Kahn in front of the IAEA for questioning and would also set up a commission to investigate the true scale of his smuggling network. In her words it was “important to know if other elements were involved.” To date, no one in Pakistan, including Kahn, has been has been charged with nuclear smuggling.
With the ongoing controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, it has been widely reported that the US and Britain have begun to take a second look at the history of the Kahn network. Recently, it was claimed Kahn and his people sold Iran, and possibly other Muslim states, designs for a small nuclear warhead that could be fired from an Iranian missile. On the face of it, a re-investigation of Kahn seems a pointless exercise unless it has some covert political agenda. The fact is that the US and the Europeans dropped the ball on the investigation of Kahn decades ago when it really mattered. Still, they know the reasons why Pakistan has been unwillingly to sacrifice him to its courts or to international investigators. Kahn did not act alone and the nuclear smuggling network he presided over reached into the higher echelons of his country’s military and business classes. In January 2004, following his arrest, he informed President Musharraf and other high ranking military officials that he had sent documents to friends abroad, showing how his nuclear smuggling had the imprimatur of high ranking Pakistani figures. He said his friends had order to make the documents public if Musharraf or his successors tried to prosecute him. In order to fend off an international scandal, Musharraf placed him under house arrest but pardoned him weeks later. The pardon would have meant little had the late Benazir Bhutto become the country’s prime minister in 2008.
From the early 1980s, the CIA and European intelligence services, especially Britain’s MI6, were well briefed on the activities of Dr. Kahn. They knew he had been a nuclear spy from the mid-1970s. While working at Urenco, a European institute, which was creating a new centrifuge to enrich uranium, he stole the plans for the machine. Those plans became the framework for building Pakistan’s first nuclear bomb.
The CIA took its eye off Kahn after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The agency focused instead on helping defeat the Soviets by spending billions of dollars arming and training the Mujahedeen, of which Osama Bin Laden was a member. They did it with the help of Pakistani intelligence and established a close alliance with Pakistan’s government. By the time the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Pakistan was a fully fledged nuclear nation and Kahn had established a sophisticated smuggling network to export nuclear materials to other nations. Today, Pakistan has between 50 and 90 nuclear devices.
During the 1990s, Kahn was busy selling nuclear know-how across the globe yet he did not surface in western intelligence reports. Had the CIA and its European counterparts been doing their jobs that would have been the time to roll up his network. On the other hand, the CIA could argue that the fault lay with the US government, which regarded Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions as a low priority issue since it was an important ally. History may show, however, that Congress was misled by the CIA about the Pakistani nuclear program until the cat was finally out of the bag in 1989 when Pakistan was on the eve of carrying out five nuclear tests.
There is plenty of evidence that Kahn supplied Iran with designs for advanced centrifuges and that his motivation was as much ideological as financial. He wanted Muslim nations to be members of the nuclear club. While he supplied Libya and North Korea with nuclear designs and parts, it is not known how many customers he had in the Arab world, or elsewhere around the globe. In 2003, when Libya decided to come clean about its nuclear ambitions, it exposed Kahn’s proliferation and led to his exposure. Only then did the Bush administration confront President Musharraf.
Suspicion about Kahn’s nuclear network was soon directed at Iran, which vehemently denied it had ever been a Kahn customer. However, a strange thing happened that linked the two. A British IAEA inspector, who had worked alongside Kahn at the Dutch firm, Urenco, in the 1970s, made an interesting discovery during the inspection of an Iranian nuclear site. He spotted centrifuges of the type he remembered from Urenco. Kahn had stolen the plans for those same centrifuges to build the first Islamic bomb for his nation.
The Kahn saga represents a failure by the CIA and its European counterparts to keep their eye on the ball over several decades, as well as reluctance by the US and Britain to confront an ally until it was too late. Kahn has refused to tell what he knows, or to name those who backed him. He has not revealed the identities of his many customers and there is speculation his desire to make Muslim nations part of the nuclear club may have included more than Iran and Libya. The truth will only be revealed when Iran or another Muslim nation carries out a nuclear test.