AB035UMQ Deception Notes B-fomat 17/12/07 13:15 Page 1 NOTES 1: THE ANGRY YOUNG MAN 1 Former information minister Maulana K. Niazi writes of this letter in his Urdu book Aur Line Kat Gayee (Lahore, 1987), Chapter 9, ‘Unknown Facts about the Reprocessing Plant’. 2 Moments after the blast, the Foreign Ministry in New Delhi signalled its success with a prearranged telegram that enigmatically read: ‘The Buddha is smiling.’ 3 This episode was recounted by Agha Shahi, former foreign secretary of Pakistan, to the authors in an interview in Islamabad, April 2006. See also Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan 1947–2000 (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington, DC, 2001), pp. 211–19. 4 The phrase ‘most allied ally’ comes from the autobiography of Pakistani dictator General Ayub Khan, Friends Not Masters (OUP, London, 1967). Pakistan had joined the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954 and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) four years later. In 1959 it also signed the Mutual Security Pact with the US. For more details of this early relationship, see also Kux. 5 National Security Archive (NSA) 65/4205, NSA, George Washington University, Washington, DC. Letter from Thomas Hughes (INR) to CIA director W. F. Raborn, 21 July 1965. 6 The Islamic Republic was accused of preferring to attend conferences with the Chinese in April 1963, and in Moscow in April 1965, rather than those sponsored by the US. For more, see Kux. 7 In December 1970, East Pakistan’s first general election had seen the East Pakistanis overwhelmingly vote for autonomy, while in West Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former foreign minister from the 1960s, won a surprise victory with his Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). However, the country’s president, General Yahya Khan, failed to honour either result, launching a brutal crackdown in East Pakistan with thousands shot dead in the streets. Islamabad had also launched air strikes into Indian territory in Kashmir. 8 Pakistanis like to say that they had an army before they had a country and at partition the Islamic Republic received 30 per cent of British India’s army, 40 per cent of its navy and 20 per cent of its air force. But all munitions and armaments factories were situated on the Indian side, leaving Pakistan struggling to build a defence 1 AB035UMQ Deception Notes B-fomat 17/12/07 13:15 Page 2 NOTES TO PAGES 14–20 industry. For many years it relied on the generosity of allies like the US. But Pakistan had stopped receiving military assistance in 1965 after President Lyndon Johnson, enraged that the Islamic Republic had deployed US-manufactured Sherman tanks against India in Kashmir, imposed an arms embargo. Even after India had launched its East Pakistan offensive in 1971, the US embargo held, leaving Pakistan incapable of holding the Indian advance. 9 This quote comes from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto , If I Am Assassinated (Classic Books, Lahore, 1994). 10 Author interview, Islamabad, April 2006. For more on the fallout from the Indian test, see Kux. 11 NSA 7613887, Department of State, Memorandum of Conversation, Proposed Cable to Tehran on Pakistani Nuclear Reprocessing, 12 May 1976. 12 Frank Barnaby, How to Build a Nuclear Bomb (Granta Publications, London, 2003). 13 Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission chairman Dr Ishrat Usmani had also helped to negotiate the deal. 14 Maulana Niazi. 15 Much of the ISI material comes from author interviews with a former ISI officer in Islamabad in April 2006. He wishes to remain anonymous. 16 Barnaby. 17 A. Q. Khan quoted by Niazi. 18 For more detail on the centrifugal process, see Barnaby. 19 The Commercial Nuclear Obreptitious Rotor. 20 Maulana Niazi. 21 General Ayub Khan, the then ruler of Pakistan, had appointed him. 22 Eisenhower’s programme came into being as a result of debates at the UN in 1953. 23 Bhutto, If I Am Assassinated. 24 Bhutto, If I Am Assassinated. Re: training in the US: for developing nations like Pakistan, by far the most significant aspect of Atoms for Peace was the access it gave scientists to the US Department of Energy laboratories at Argonne, Illinois, founded by the University of Chicago in 1946 to conduct atomic research. It constituted the West’s most advanced nuclear research facility, with supercomputer technology and a working accelerator where atomic particles were bombarded against each other in order to study fission. 25 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, The Myth of Independence (OUP, Karachi, 1969), p. 153. 26 In November 1973 the nawab would be appointed chief minister of the Punjab. 27 Dr Samar Mubarakmand, ‘A Science Odyssey’, Khwarzimic Science Society speech, 30 November 1998. Author archives. 28 Steve Weissman and Herbert Krosney, The Islamic Bomb (Times Books, New York, 1981), p. 47. 29 He was there from January to May 1957, according to a letter from Argonne National Laboratory, 8 May 1987, quoted in Zahid Malik, Dr A. Q. Khan and the Islamic Bomb (Hurmat Publications, Islamabad, 1992), p. 129. 30 Bashiruddin was named by President George W. Bush as a terrorist in a speech in October 2003, when the US accused him and others of meeting Osama bin Laden to discuss building a nuclear bomb for al-Qaeda. 31 See Chapter 2. 2 AB035UMQ Deception Notes B-fomat 17/12/07 13:15 Page 3 NOTES TO PAGES 20–25 32 Bhutto visited Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Syria, Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and China. 33 This phrase, favoured by Bhutto for the Western powers, is referred to in Kux. 34 See Kux for more on this promotional tour. 35 For full details on Pakistan’s failed attempt to purchase a reprocessing plant from France, see Weissman and Krosney. 36 Niazi recalled: ‘The prime minister sent instructions in August 1974 to Dr Qadeer that without operating a doubt in the mind of anybody, he should take leave in the normal course and come to Pakistan and meet [Bhutto’s] military secretary, Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmed.’ 37 Weissman and Krosney. 38 Author interviews with Dr Shafiq ur-Rehman, Islamabad, April 2006. 39 There was a commander called General Malik Haji Bahbal, but his ancestry recorded no connection to Khan. Story recounted by Zahid Malik. 40 Malik. 41 Malik. 42 A. Q. Khan remained at home with his elderly parents. 43 Malik. 44 Khan presented the painting to the Senate on 11 November 1995. For a photograph of it, see S. Shabbir Hussain and Mujahid Kamran, Dr A. Q. Khan on Science and Education (Sang-E-Meel Publications, Lahore, 1997). 45 Malik. 46 Badrul Islam, recollections of former classmate at D. J. Sindh College, Malik, p. 48. 47 Malik. 48 This interview originally appeared in Hurmat weekly newspaper, 17 May 1986. It is reproduced in Malik. 49 Malik. 50 Slebos was interviewed by Hilversum Nederland-3 TV network for its Zembla current affairs programme special report, ‘The Netherlands Atomic Bomb’, 7 November 2005. 51 The photograph is reproduced in Malik. 52 See letters of A. Q. Khan, quoted by Sreedhar, Pakistan’s Bomb (ABC Publishing House, New Delhi, 1986). 53 ‘Experiments with a Small Cupola Furnace,’ report, Tech. Univ. Delft, Dept Metallurgy, 1965; ‘The Development of Aluminium-Lithium Alloys’, report, Delft, 1965; ‘Anisotropy in Cold Rolled Copper,’ report, Delft, 1966. 54 In 1965 he became involved in a particularly vitriolic exchange with a notable Dutch historian, Professor de Jong, who had presented a documentary series on the Indo–Pakistan wars. 55 Malik and Hurmat newspaper. 56 For a full CV, see Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan, 26 March 2001, Convocation, honours degree conferred on A. Q. Khan. Author archive. 57 The trial was suspended while prosecutors attempted to gain testimony from witnesses living outside Germany and appealed to the US intelligence community to assist in providing critical evidence. Lerch had been charged in the 1980s, having admitted to shipping valves, vacuum pumps and a gas purification system to Pakistan through his 3 AB035UMQ Deception Notes B-fomat 17/12/07 13:15 Page 4 NOTES TO PAGES 25–7 employer Leybold Heraeus, although he was not convicted. In 1987 the German authorities once again investigated Lerch’s business links to Pakistan, but by then he had moved to Switzerland, which declined to extradite him on the grounds that the statute of limitations had passed. When he was interrogated in 2005 in connection with the Mannheim trial he claimed that he was unable to recall whether he had ever seen Khan again after leaving Leybold Heraeus in 1985. See Juergen Dahlkamp, Georg Mascolo and Holger Stark, ‘The Network of Death on Trial,’ Der Spiegel, 13 March 2006. See also Steve Coll, ‘The Atomic Emporium’, New Yorker, 7 and 14 August 2006; Kenley Butler, Sammy Salama and Leonard S. Spector, ‘Where is the Justice?,’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November–December 2006. Lerch’s name has repeatedly come up in evidence prepared for the forthcoming trial in South Africa of Daniel Geiges and Gerhard Wisser at the Pretoria High Court, where they are charged under the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction Act and the Nuclear Energy Act of activities connected to the A. Q. Khan network. In several instances Lerch’s name appeared on documentation connected to the manufacture of a centrifuge cascade ordered by an associate of A. Q. Khan’s on behalf of Libya. At the time of writing this trial was pending. See also Coll. 58 Mebus died of natural causes in 1992. 59 Migule would later tell a court in Germany, where he was prosecuted for violating foreign trade laws, that he had ‘built and delivered to Pakistan a laboratory with test equipment, test devices, which, in my opinion, has nothing to do with nuclear bombs’.