The toughest part of being an investigative reporter is when bureaucrats decide to go after someone they’ve decided is your source and has embarrassed them. The stakes get much higher when the person they’ve targeted can prove that two major Western intelligence services deliberately allowed the A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network to peddle its deadly wares unhindered for an extra three years. And the stakes rise exponentially when the distinct possibility exists that Iran, one of the Khan network’s customers, obtained or developed a working nuclear bomb design during those three years—a fact that would kick the legs out from under the intelligence community’s recent attempt to make the Iran threat disappear.
Those three factors came together in dramatic fashion last week. On December 5, just two days after this nation’s spy services unveiled their less-than-convincing estimate that Iran had halted work on the design and construction of nuclear warheads in 2003, British authorities burst into the home of a UK Customs agent whose story raises serious doubts about the reliability of that assessment. The authorities were ostensibly looking for evidence that the Customs agent, Atif Amin, had disclosed information about two confidential British investigations into the Khan network to my colleague, David Armstrong, and myself. The details of those investigations, well known in the intelligence world from Europe to the United States, were first publicly revealed in late October with the publication of the book Armstrong and I wrote, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise.
As our book documents, in April 2000, Amin, then part of an elite counter-proliferation team within British Customs, turned up evidence in Dubai that Khan’s gang was providing nuclear technology to Libya. This, of course, was more than three years before Washington and London finally chose to publicly expose the Pakistani nuclear smuggling ring. Amin dutifully reported his discovery to the British Secret Service, known as MI6, which shared the information with the CIA. But instead of embracing Amin’s investigation, allowing it to continue and using it to shut down Khan’s black market operation, the intelligence services put a halt to Amin’s work. They did so in a misguided effort to protect their own longstanding infiltration and monitoring of the Pakistani nuclear arms trafficking network—an operation that had long since determined that Khan and his gang were providing nuclear technology to rogue nations and state sponsors of terror. As a result of that decision, Khan’s deadly trade was allowed to continue for another three years and the nuclear weapons programs of his clients, Libya, North Korea and Iran, moved forward. It was certainly not a story the spy services in Washington and London wanted told.
The publication of our book, which draws on a multitude of sources to tell the story of Atif Amin’s remarkable, albeit short-circuited, investigation, presented a clear dilemma for the U.S. intelligence community, which at the time was deep in the process of crafting a new National Intelligence Estimate that would reverse its earlier assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. That new NIE, we now know, would be silent on one crucial issue—how far Iran had progressed in developing a workable nuclear warhead design at the time it allegedly suspended work on the effort in the fall of 2003 (perhaps not coincidentally the very time that the United States and Great Britain belatedly chose to take action against the Khan network). Had Iranian scientists already mastered the art of bomb making? Did the Khan network provide Iran with plans for an already tested Chinese-designed warhead, just as it had done for Libya several years earlier? Or did Iranian engineers work out the flaws deliberately embedded in top-secret warhead designs passed to Tehran as part of a botched CIA plot in 2000 to sabotage the regime’s bomb program? The NIE simply doesn’t say, leaving open the possibility that Iran halted the warhead design effort only because it was finished. Perhaps there was simply nothing left to do, except produce enough fuel for a nuclear weapon, something Iran’s on-going uranium enrichment program—based on technology obtained from the Khan network—could accomplish within the next few years. If that is the case, then the three-year gap between the time Atif Amin’s investigation was shut down and Iran halted its warhead design effort takes on entirely new—and, for MI6 and the CIA, highly embarrassing—significance. But if Amin was for some reason discredited, then his story, told in our book, would cease to be a problem.
Less than 48 hours after the release of the new NIE, as many in this country and around the world rejoiced in the fact that the United States would apparently not be going to war over Iran’s nuclear program, British investigators were rifling through Atif Amin’s belongings, looking for evidence that he had leaked information about Pakistan’s nuclear trafficking network. At the time, we now know, the lead investigator in the case, Catherine Hall, had not even obtained, much less read, our book. In an email message to me a few days later, Ms. Hall wrote that she had ordered the book on-line and looked forward to reading it. And yet, she had stood before a magistrate and sworn out a complaint against Amin to obtain a search warrant. Based on what evidence, one might reasonably ask? Perhaps the spooks at Vauxhall Cross know the answer.
The one thing intelligence services know how to do is defend their interests. They will use any tool they have to roll over an opponent—or someone they see as trouble. The NIE, for example, is a blatant slap in the face for President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. It pulls the rug out from under any plans they had to launch a quick little war with Iran, a prospect vigorously opposed by the Pentagon and elements within the intelligence hierarchy. If the intelligence community would undermine the plans of a sitting President and Vice-President, might they not also inspire a raid that would cause the media to doubt what Atif Amin reported to Her Majesty’s Secret Service in the spring of 2000—information that could call into question the conclusions contained in their Swiss cheese NIE.
For the good of the United States and Great Britain it is imperative that the public and the media seek to understand what transpired in the period between April 2000 and the fall of 2003—a time span conspicuously left unaddressed in the new NIE. The first question that must be answered is whether the failure of MI6 and the CIA to shut down the Khan network and expose its clients when the chance existed in 2000 allowed Iran to develop a functional nuclear warhead. If so, then the spy agencies have much to answer for. Another question is whether the attempt to ruin Atif Amin’s reputation and career on the basis of mere assumptions is part of an attempt by the U.S. and British intelligence services to cover their own tracks for their earlier failures. And finally, it must be asked, would our respective governments’ time not be better spent trying to apprehend the members of the Khan network who remain on the loose to this day rather than harassing the brave Customs agent who—much to the displeasure of the intelligence community—tried through his investigation to expose their nuclear smuggling? Or do the intelligence services have some reason for seeing that certain members of Khan’s gang remain undisturbed? Let us hope that the answers are quickly forthcoming.
