Bomb threat

The Nuclear Jihadist

The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World’s Most Dangerous Secrets . . . and How We Could Have Stopped Him

Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins

Twelve: 414 pp., $25

--

Deception

Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons

Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark

Walker & Co.: 586 pp., $28.95

--

America and the Islamic Bomb

The Deadly Compromise

David Armstrong and Joseph Trento

Steerforth Press: 288 pp., $24.95

--

The Seventh Decade

The New Shape of Nuclear Danger

Jonathan Schell

Metropolitan: 254 pp., $24

--

In the first week of this year, four lions of the American foreign-policy establishment took to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal to jointly champion a view more commonly associated with peaceniks and left-wing utopians. The piece, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” was written by two GOP former secretaries of State (Henry Kissinger and George Shultz), a former Democratic secretary of Defense (William Perry) and a former Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (Sam Nunn).

“Nuclear weapons,” they wrote, “were essential to maintaining international security during the Cold War” but had since become “increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” After outlining the disappointing history of nonproliferation measures, they concluded unequivocally: “We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.”

The article, given its placement and its provenance, made waves in the foreign-policy world. What had persuaded four veterans of Cold War nuclear diplomacy that abolition had become the only responsible defense against catastrophe? The article set out a few explanations. Hostile or potentially unstable states -- Iran, North Korea, Pakistan -- had made major strides in developing weapons programs, signaling the onset of a “new and dangerous nuclear era.” Groups such as Al Qaeda, meanwhile, seemed intent on getting their hands on nuclear devices and turning them into “the ultimate means of mass devastation.” All of this, the authors argued, had rendered the traditional logic of deterrence largely obsolete.

The op-ed did not mention it, but all of these developments related, directly or indirectly, to the exploits of one ingenious and megalomaniacal Pakistani metallurgist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man maligned in the West -- and celebrated in much of the world -- as “the father of the Islamic bomb.” Khan gave Pakistan the capacity to build its own nuclear weapons, then turned around and sold his expertise to others. By the time he went on television to offer his “confession” in 2004 -- after pressure from Washington had compelled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to put him under house arrest -- his wares had made it to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Even more ominously, there was evidence that two veterans of Khan’s nuclear laboratory had met with Osama Bin Laden in August 2001.

Khan’s story is a three-decade-long cloak-and-dagger saga, one that jumps from Washington, Amsterdam and Johannesburg to Islamabad, Tehran and Timbuktu and drags in corrupt Pakstani generals, unscrupulous European businessmen and dissembling American diplomats. It’s no surprise that there has been a cascade of books on Khan in recent years. But the three newest -- “The Nuclear Jihadist” by Douglas Frantz (a former L.A. Times managing editor) and Catherine Collins, “Deception” by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark and “America and the Islamic Bomb” by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento -- drive home the point that Khan is not the real story here. More important is how and why he was able to flout the nuclear nonproliferation regime for so many years, “ushering in,” as Frantz and Collins put it, “the second nuclear age.” Jonathan Schell, in his new book “The Seventh Decade,” calls this the era of “nuclear anarchy.”

In the 1970s, Khan was working in a Dutch laboratory that was developing uranium-enrichment technology for European nuclear reactors. By all appearances, he was a middle-class technocrat with a European wife, two daughters and a house in the suburbs. But when India tested a nuclear weapon and Pakistan responded by kick-starting its own program, Khan was in the perfect position to act, as Frantz and Collins write, on “his fierce desire to be perceived as both a brilliant scientist and the savior of his nation.” (Or, as Khan’s onetime psychiatrist puts it to Levy and Scott-Clark: “He had a Hitler complex. . . . Always overcompensating.”) He launched a one-man nuclear espionage campaign, stealing plans for enrichment technology, translating them into Urdu and taking them back to Pakistan.

So began Khan’s quest to give his country the capability to enrich uranium to fuel a nuclear weapon -- a technique long considered beyond the reach of Pakistan. Both “The Nuclear Jihadist” and “Deception,” richly reported works of investigative journalism, add considerable detail to what we know about how Khan built his program. While a series of Pakistani leaders poured in resources -- with the help of other governments, including Libya and Saudi Arabia, enamored of the idea of an indigenously developed “Islamic bomb” -- Khan’s representatives fanned out across the world to buy the components from Western companies.

They duly exploited the fact that regulations prohibited the sale of nuclear technology but only very imperfectly controlled the sale of the parts to build it. They also took advantage of amateurish customs officials and the greed of European and American businessmen willing to overlook the “end use” of the technology. “They have begged us to purchase their goods,” Khan once said of the companies with whom he did business. “For the first time the truth of the saying ‘They will sell their mothers for money’ dawned on me.”

By the time Western governments were aware of just how serious Khan’s uranium program was, it had already made substantial progress. “Khan had done it so quickly that everyone was trying to catch up,” a State Department nonproliferation expert told Levy and Scott-Clark. Pakistan did not test its bomb until 1998. By then, Khan had moved on to the second phase of his career: running his “nuclear Wal-Mart” for Iran, North Korea and Libya -- and perhaps others -- in return for millions of dollars for himself and his lab. Khan’s operation included a centrifuge-manufacturing plant in Malaysia, a front company in Dubai and various middlemen around the world. He handed out splashy brochures and free gifts -- secret weapons blueprints -- to his best customers. As the extent of the venture became clear, an aide to Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, called it “the most dangerous phenomenon we’ve seen in many years . . . a global network, spanning three continents and maybe a dozen countries.”

Khan’s operation was shut down after a U.S.-led operation seized a ship loaded with wares for Libya’s nuclear program. The Pakistani government, even as it pardoned Khan and continued to celebrate him as a national hero, was careful to portray this nuclear bazaar as a one-man operation unknown to all but a handful of officials. Levy and Scott-Clark argue, however, that a significant portion of Pakistan’s military and political elite must have been on board. The military “had always been in charge of Khan -- in that all of his activities were governed by their orders,” a former advisor to two Pakistani prime ministers tells them. “And now he was being portrayed as operating beyond the state. It was a put-on show for the U.S.”

What dominates these books is not just the lurid details of Khan’s exploits but also the authors’ outrage at the United States’ failure to stop him. “Deception,” the most strident of the three, begins: “This is a story of how our elected representatives have conjured a grand deception, the terrible consequences of which may not become clear for decades to come. It is a chronicle of moral lapses, abysmal judgments, failures of oversight, careless and frequently lazy analyses of the changing world around us which have served to further destabilize it and to empower those bent on global jihad.” Similarly, Armstrong and Trento call the Khan saga “a scandal of U.S. foreign policy.” The story that all three books present, however, is much more nuanced -- and if anything more unsettling -- than such initial outrage suggests.

To be sure, there were plenty of instances in which American officials did less than they could have. Diplomats or politicians intent on preserving the relationship with Pakistan for other strategic reasons (its help in the Cold War and then the war on terror) downplayed evidence of its nuclear chicanery for fear that any revelations would undermine cooperation.

The most egregious case involved Richard Barlow, a young CIA analyst who figures prominently in all three books. Barlow defied the cautious dissembling about the Pakistani nuclear program that was the official line -- and then was run out of the CIA for calling the intelligence as he saw it. In another instance, the State Department apparently intervened to downplay the potential proliferation implications of a smuggling trial. Customs officials also repeatedly failed to ask questions that would have quickly led them to realize what Khan and his operatives were up to.

But despite such missed opportunities, what becomes clear in these books is that the United States at various points drew on most of the tools it had to influence Pakistan, and none of them had much effect on its nuclear ambitions. The fact is, Pakistan was dead-set on getting its own nuclear weapons program -- a determination that had mostly to do with the program being developed by its rival next door. “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own,” Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leader who first patronized Khan’s efforts, famously said. “We have no alternative.”

Given this resolve, there was little Washington could have done -- short of a preemptive strike or covert operation against Khan’s laboratory, the hard-line options U.S. officials came up with over the years -- to keep Pakistan from its goal. Withholding U.S. aid as punishment for nuclear misbehavior only provoked defiance: “We shall eat crumbs,” a Pakistani leader said in response, “but we will not allow our national interest to be compromised.” When the European technological pipeline was effectively cut off, China replaced it. If Khan (hardly a singular scientific mind) had been arrested or assassinated, someone else would have taken his place.

In their Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kissinger, Shultz, Perry and Nunn acknowledged that theirs was hardly the first high-minded clarion call to issue from the mouths or pens of American statesmen: Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan all made appeals to work toward the end of the nuclear age -- and all the while, proliferation proceeded apace. Still the op-ed pronounces that we now have “an historic opportunity” to start eradicating nuclear weapons.

Khan’s story suggests that such optimism may be misplaced. For all Khan’s craftiness, for all of the missed chances to block his purchases or forcefully confront his official overseers, the books do not, ultimately, underscore the maniacal genius of one metallurgist, the rank malfeasance of Western officials or the out-of-control militancy of Pakistani presidents and army officers.

Instead, they point to a darker possibility: What if that “historic opportunity” came and went long, long ago?