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In 1987, just as Iran-US relations were reaching their nadir – the year before the Iran Air shoot down and the Pan Am 103 tragedy – the head of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon program, A.Q. Khan, announced to the world that Pakistan had the capability to build nuclear bombs. The missiles and rockets to launch these weapons would come in a series of technology exchanges with North Korea. Pakistan had pursued its nuclear bomb building capabilities with abandon in the 1980s while it had the chance – while the Reagan administration was supplying it with weapons and money to support the Afghan mujahedin fighting the Soviet Union.
As Washington looked the other way, and even provided cover, Islamabad spent tens of millions of dollars purchasing equipment from the United States, Europe and Asia with which it created its nuclear weapon. From that point forward, every confrontation with India had the potential to go nuclear. Pakistan was not about to give up its bomb and would, in fact, expand its arsenal even though it was losing its political protection and financial support as the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988 and 1989.
The bomb that Pakistan had developed with America’s acquiescence would not be used simply to stave off an attack by India. The bomb technology would be sold and traded as a commodity. The network that had become so adept at procuring equipment for Pakistan’s bomb program would now, for a price, provide other countries everything they needed to build their own nuclear weapons. A.Q. Khan himself had declared that Pakistan’s nuclear bomb shop was open for business. But Khan’s giant ego did not take into account that the jihadi-dominated Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Service), could make certain that its allies in Al Qaeda would get access to Khan’s supermarket.
Compounding the problems created by this international bazaar for nuclear weapons technology is the fact that the CIA, MI5 (British domestic intelligence), other foreign intelligence agencies as well as her Majesty’s Royal Customs Service all had sources inside the A.Q. Khan network yet declined to shut down the nuclear supermarket. In order to protect its intelligence sources in Khan’s ring and ISI, the West decided the risk of proliferation was worth taking. The result: old Russian bomb designs ended up in Iran’s hands via China, North Korea and Pakistan.
Just days after Khan’s interview claiming to have a bomb appeared in print in March 1987, Senator John H. Glenn, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated, “Pakistani nuclear weapons production will, sooner or later, whether by design or by espionage, result in the wider transfer of nuclear weapons technology to countries in the Middle East.” Although Glenn could not have known it, that process had already begun.
Pakistan’s entry into the retail nuclear bomb business began with a pair of meetings in 1987. The first is believed to have taken place early in the year in Switzerland at the Zurich-Kloten International Airport. There, a member of A.Q. Khan’s network reportedly presented a top official of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization with what amounted to an order form for a nuclear weapons starter kit. The one-page, handwritten document listed everything necessary to attain a full-fledged uranium enrichment capability. Among the items on the list were dismantled centrifuges and components; auxiliary equipment, such as vacuum pumps and electrical drives; and drawings, plans, and specifications for a complete centrifuge plant complete with a workshop for manufacturing additional parts. The list also included equipment for casting enriched uranium into the hemispherical forms used as the cores of atomic bombs as well as technical reports on the process — normally, one of the most difficult to master and closely guarded secrets of the bomb-making arts. Yet Khan’s network was offering all of this to Iran in a straight cash deal. Prices ranged from millions of dollars for individual items to hundreds of millions for the complete package.
The offer came against a backdrop of increased nuclear cooperation between Iran and Pakistan. Iran’s nuclear ambitions stretched back to the mid-1970s. As money poured into the country following the 1973 oil crisis, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi not only doled out large sums to Pakistan’s Ali Bhutto, who was then raising funds for his Islamic bomb, but also announced plans to launch his own large-scale nuclear power program.
Work soon began on four French- and German-designed reactors with four more on the drawing board. By the late 1970s, US intelligence had determined that in addition to this ostensibly peaceful program, the shah had also established a secret nuclear weapons development effort. But in 1979, the shah’s nuclear ambitions fell victim to the Islamic revolution that drove the monarch himself from power. Many top scientists fled the country, and the nuclear effort languished. But in the mid-1980s, with the country bogged down in a long, bloody war with Iraq, Iran’s clerical leaders took a renewed interest in developing a nuclear option. In 1985, they revived a scaled-back version of the shah’s nuclear power program.
That same year, Iran also launched a secret uranium enrichment effort. Procurement agents quickly obtained critical equipment from a West German firm, and Iranian scientists and engineers began the daunting task of mastering the highly complex technology. They would soon get significant help from outside.
In February 1986, Tehran entered into an agreement with Islamabad to send Iranian engineers to Pakistan for training in nuclear energy. That same month, A.Q. Khan traveled to Iran and paid a secret visit to the nuclear reactor facility in Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf coast. The plant had been heavily damaged in repeated bombings by Saddam Hussein’s air force in the course of the ongoing Iran–Iraq War. In January 1987, shortly before making his public declaration of Pakistan’s nuclear status, Khan returned to Iran, this time, reportedly, to prepare a study for the Tehran regime on the feasibility of using the Bushehr reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. According to an account by conservative journalist Kenneth Timmerman, Khan met with senior Iranian officials at an intelligence ministry guesthouse south of Tehran and, in a revival of his performance for Ali Bhutto more than ten years earlier, made the case for the superiority of enriched uranium as a path to the bomb. It was at about this time that a member of Khan’s supply network extended the offer to provide enrichment technology, plans, and bomb-making equipment to Iran.
The man who reportedly received the hand-printed order form in 1987 was Dr. Masud Naraghi, a US-trained laser and plasma physicist who was a senior project manager in the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). Naraghi, who now lives in the United States, says that it was Khan’s European suppliers who “initiated” the sales. He insists he found out only later that the European “salesmen” were hawking Pakistani technology.
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Whatever the exact genesis of the offer, Iran followed through. But rather than ordering a full-blown, off-the-shelf uranium enrichment capability, the Iranians, by their own account, selected a more modest entry-level kit. This included parts from one or two disassembled first-generation Pakistani centrifuges along with technical specifications, designs, and instructions for the manufacture and assembly of additional machines. Iranian officials have since said that they planned to follow Pakistan’s model and develop an indigenous enrichment capability. As former UN weapons inspector David Albright has noted, acquiring the plans and components would be “tremendously helpful” to the Iranians, allowing them to skip many of the difficult early research steps.
Once the Iranians had placed their order with Khan’s network, they received a summons to travel to Dubai later in 1987 to consummate the deal. The freewheeling Persian Gulf port city had long served as a transshipment point for much of the equipment Pakistan acquired for its own nuclear weapons program. Now it would increasingly become a hub for Khan’s nuclear export business. It was in a dusty Dubai office that the first known transfer took place. Khan himself did not participate in the session. Instead his friend, a Dubai-based businessman named Sinawappu Seeni Mohamed Farook, represented the Pakistani side of the transaction. Farook, who was born in British India and lived in Sri Lanka before moving to Dubai, had a business that reportedly supplied goods to Khan’s operation. He would play a key role in the expansion of Khan’s network. Also at the meeting was Farook’s twenty-eight-year- old nephew, Bukhary Sayed Abu Tahir. Although Tahir, a Sri Lankan national, played only a minor role in the meeting with the Iranians, he would eventually supplant his uncle to become the central figure in Khan’s nuclear smuggling enterprise.
The Iranian side of the bargain was represented by a three-man delegation that included Masud Naraghi. Naraghi says that his role was primarily that of a technical expert, designated to ensure that the goods received from the Pakistanis checked out. UN investigators believe that some of the Iranians at the meeting posed as employees of a front company to disguise their connections to Tehran’s defense ministry. Also at the meeting were three of Khan’s European suppliers. One, a German named Heinz Mebus, was an old college friend of Khan’s from Berlin and had been one of the earliest suppliers to Pakistan’s enrichment program. At least one of the other suppliers at the meeting is believed to have been a German.
The Iranians reportedly paid several million dollars for the items they had ordered. Years later, after the deal was exposed, Iran told UN investigators that the Pakistanis had thrown in the equipment for casting uranium into bomb cores at no extra cost, presumably as an incentive to encourage future purchases. The Iranians would buy more from Khan’s network, but they would also shop elsewhere. Using the plans and specifications they had purchased from Khan and his cohorts as a kind of nuclear shopping list, Iran went bargain hunting, buying much of the equipment and technology they needed at lower prices from competitors in Europe, China, and Russia. Iran quickly developed an extensive procurement network that would eventually rival and possibly exceed Pakistan’s.
But for all the purchases, Iran’s centrifuge program made little progress initially. Scientists at the AEOI encountered serious technical difficulties and the enrichment effort foundered. Within several years, Iran would return to the Khan network for additional help and equipment. When it did, B.S.A. Tahir would play a lead role in the deal.
Throughout 1987 and 1988, Pakistan’s nuclear activity sped up dramatically as Islamabad scrambled to push its bomb program as far forward as possible before the clock struck midnight on its relationship with the United States. A part of that process, Islamabad’s nuclear procurement efforts in the United States and Europe also picked up markedly, according to intelligence sources. Increasingly though, those purchases would now feed into A.Q. Khan’s lucrative new enrichment technology export business. All those involved in the Dubai deal had done very nicely for themselves. Now they would begin to formalize and expand the operation.
Then on August 17, 1988, Pakistani President Mohammed Zia Ul-haq traveled to a military base near Bahawalpur, an hour’s flight from Islamabad, to observe a target practice demonstration by a single American-made M-1 Abrams tank. At the time, Pakistan’s military was considering making a major investment in the highly touted tank to help bolster its defenses in the wake of the latest war scare with India. The demonstration turned out to be a flop, with the M-1 missing its target on each of ten attempts. At the conclusion of the embarrassing presentation, Zia was shuttled back to his waiting aircraft for the return flight to Islamabad. At the last minute, he invited US Ambassador Arnold Raphel to join him on the official presidential plane. Raphel, who had flown to Bahawalpur separately, accepted. Standing on the tarmac waving as the door to Pak One closed was Lt. Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the army vice chief of staff. Beg was the only general in Pakistan’s chain of command who was not on the plane with Zia that day. He would fly back to Islamabad on a smaller aircraft, right behind Zia’s.
Zia’s American-built Hercules C-130b transport plane took off on schedule at 3:56 p.m. But just minutes into the flight, air traffic controllers at Bahawalpur lost contact with the craft. Witnesses later said they saw the plane lurching up and down in the sky like an airborne roller coaster before it barreled into the earth. All thirty-two people on board were killed. In addition to Zia and Raphel, the dead included US Brig. Gen. Herbert Wasson, the head of the American military aid mission to Pakistan, and Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rehman, the chairman of Pakistan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the second most powerful man in the country, after Zia. As head of the ISI for ten years, Rehman had been the main architect of the anti- Soviet campaign in Afghanistan.
Having come to power amid the trauma of Zia’s death, Beg and Ishaq Khan chose to allow previously scheduled elections set for November 1988 to proceed. The contest pitted a wealthy businessman, Nawaz Sharif, who had the backing of Pakistan’s military establishment, against the Western-educated Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar ali Bhutto, the father of the Islamic bomb and the man Zia had overthrown and hanged. Bhutto eked out a narrow victory in the election, and after considerable prodding by the United States, the military agreed to let her take office. As usual, though, there were conditions. Bhutto was not to interfere in military matters or issues related to the bomb. And while she would nominally serve as Pakistan’s first democratically elected prime minister since her father, Beg and Ishaq Khan would maintain tight control over the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
The CIA was convinced that Pakistan’s military and nuclear establishments kept Bhutto in the dark about the full extent of the country’s nuclear capabilities and the activities of Khan and his associates. Bhutto stated that as prime minister she was repeatedly approached by Pakistani military officials and scientists seeking permission to export nuclear technology. The former prime minister acknowledged before her assassination that her efforts to “control the direction of nuclear policy” were “much resisted.” She also noted that she was barred from Khan’s labs and had little influence over the Kahuta operation, which was protected by the military. After her assassination in 2007, a journalist who knew her well wrote that on a state visit to North Korea in 1993, Bhutto smuggled in critical data on uranium enrichment – a key to making a nuclear weapon – to help facilitate a missile deal with Pyongyang.
