As the US hands over the $600 million a year it has promised Pakistan, it might ask itself this: was this really not enough to buy a single interview with A. Q. Khan?
According to the account which President Musharraf has doggedly peddled, the country’s most famous nuclear scientist not only equipped his own country with its first nuclear weapons, but then – acting alone, Musharraf insists – sold to North Korea, Libya and possibly Iran the starter kits that helped them to win nuclear self-sufficiency.
This solitary villain and his “nuclear supermarket” would have been incredible even in a James Bond film. As an account of the spawning of the most serious nuclear threats the world now faces it has always been
implausible. But even though Khan has done more damage to the cause of peace than Osama bin Laden, the US, since it coopted the Pakistani Government to its “war on terror” in 2001, has chosen to accept the portrayal of him as a “rogue scientist”, acting largely without government help for 20 years. Its officials have not managed to get a single face-to-face interview with him.
It is a public service, then, to try to answer the unanswered questions about Khan: Was Pakistan’s government complicit? How much did the US know? And where did the money go? The International Institute of Strategic Studies has done that (in what it bravely describes as a “dossier”, despite its ill-fated predecessors in that genre), although the answers are patchy.
The report usefully deflates the myth that Khan was “the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb”. He was a technician who helped it to master uranium enrichment, one of the trickier barriers, and illicitly to bring in the material to do so.
But even though successive Pakistani governments gave Khan great autonomy from the start, the IISS concludes that “it is logical to assume that the intelligence apparatus did know more than Pakistan has ever let on.”
The IISS is not the first to point out that Khan’s trades with North Korea particularly suggest government complicity, but it puts the point bluntly. It argues that the centrifuges, blueprints and uranium hexafluoride which Khan admits supplying to North Korea “were probably transported . . . on chartered Pakistani Air Force flights”. It is sceptical of the claim by Pakistani governments that they bought missiles from North Korea for cash, not for a barter of nuclear technology. “The broad cooperation between Pyongyang and Islamabad is significant reason to suspect state complicity” – at least knowing of the deal and “implicitly condoning” it, the report says.
But in Libya, Khan’s sales of centrifuge equipment “were almost exclusively private business transactions”, it argues. Mark Fitzpatrick, the report’s main author, points out that Khan would have had to share most of the reputed $100 million price of the Libyan contract with members of his network (40 of whom have been named).
Fitzpatrick, formerly of the US State Department, argues that the US knew about some of Pakistan’s efforts to acquire its own bomb but probably much less about Khan’s sales until much later. Details of his North Korean sales surfaced in a US intelligence report only in 2000.
