Abdul Qadeer Khan

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer, appeared on Pakistan Television on the 4th of February 2004 and confessed to running a nuclear proliferation ring. At home, he was known as the father of Pakistan's atomic weapons program, and many Pakistanis saw him as a national hero. Abroad, George Tenet, a former director of the CIA, judged him "at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden".

  How did a man who studied alloys in European universities end up at the center of a nation's bomb program? How much of the credit was truly his? And who else knew what he was sending out of the country? The answers run through Dutch laboratories, a letter to a prime minister, and shell companies in Dubai.

  129894524

• 2. Bhopal to Almelo

  ›

  On the 1st of April 1936, Khan was born in Bhopal, a city in a princely state under British rule. He told conflicting stories about his ancestry. In a 2019 convocation address he said his family was Orakzai and long settled in Bhopal. In a column for the newspaper Jang, he traced his mother's line to the Tirah Valley and his father's line to an Uzbek soldier who came to India with the 12th century conqueror Muhammad of Ghor. That ancestor inspired him to name a ballistic missile the Ghauri. In 1994-95 he had a mausoleum built over Ghori's grave in Dhamiak village, about 80 kilometres from Islamabad. At a book event in 2014, he claimed instead to belong to the Khanzada community, whose members had taken the plain surname Khan.

  His father, Abdul Ghafoor, was a schoolteacher who had once worked for the Ministry of Education. His mother, Zulekha, was a housewife with a deeply religious outlook. His older siblings had moved to Pakistan during the partition of India in 1947, and they wrote home about their new lives.

  In 1952, Khan finished school in Bhopal and boarded the Sind Mail train for Pakistan. He later linked the decision partly to reservation politics and to the religious violence of his youth, which left a lasting impression. In Karachi he briefly attended D. J. Science College, then transferred to the University of Karachi. He graduated there in 1956 with a science degree in physics, focused on solid-state physics.

  From 1956 to 1959, Khan worked for the Karachi city government as an inspector of weights and measures. A scholarship then carried him to West Germany in 1961, where he studied materials science at the Technical University in West Berlin. He switched to the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 1965.

  A holiday in The Hague in 1962 brought him together with Hendrina "Henny" Reterink. She held a British passport, had been born in South Africa to Dutch parents, and spoke Dutch. They married in 1963 in a modest Muslim ceremony at Pakistan's embassy in The Hague. They had two daughters, Dina, who became a doctor, and Ayesha.

  In 1967, Khan earned an engineer's degree in materials technology and entered the doctoral program in metallurgical engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. His supervisor was Professor Martin J. Brabers. Khan defended his thesis and received his doctorate in 1972, with fundamental work on martensite. That same year, Brabers recommended him for a job in the Netherlands.

  The job was at the Physics Dynamics Research Laboratory, known by its Dutch initials FDO. It was an Amsterdam engineering subsidiary of Verenigde Machinefabrieken. FDO worked as a subcontractor for Ultra-Centrifuge Nederland, part of URENCO, a British-German-Dutch consortium. URENCO ran a uranium enrichment plant in Almelo, using gas centrifuges to secure fuel for Dutch nuclear power plants. Khan soon left FDO, but URENCO offered him a senior technical position, starting with studies of uranium metallurgy.

  Natural uranium is only 0.71 percent uranium-235, the form that can sustain fission. Some 99.3 percent is uranium-238, which cannot, and a trace of 0.0055 percent is uranium-234. URENCO used the Zippe-type centrifuge, spinning uranium hexafluoride gas at up to about 100,000 revolutions per minute to separate these isotopes. By 1973-74, Khan had turned his metallurgical work toward making those centrifuges more efficient.

  Frits Veerman, a colleague of Khan's at FDO, later described what he saw. According to his account, Khan took classified URENCO documents home to be copied and translated by his Dutch-speaking wife. Khan also asked Veerman to photograph some of them.

  Dutch authorities probed Khan on suspicion of espionage in 1979 but did not prosecute for lack of evidence. A criminal complaint in an Amsterdam court still produced a four-year sentence in his absence, dated 1985 in one account and 1983 in another. His attorney, S. M. Zafar, teamed up with Leuven University and argued that the technical information Khan had requested was routinely taught there. The court overturned the sentence on a legal technicality. Khan said he had asked for the materials because the Kahuta laboratory had no library of its own.

  Ruud Lubbers, Prime Minister of the Netherlands at the time, later said the Dutch intelligence service BVD knew of Khan's activities. He said Khan was allowed to continue because of pressure from the CIA, since the United States was backing Pakistan during the Cold War. The pattern repeated in 1988, when Archie Pervez, Khan's procurement associate in the US, was convicted and no action followed against Khan. Washington needed Pakistan's support during the Soviet-Afghan War.

  3237364338

• 3. A Letter to Bhutto

  ›

  India's surprise nuclear test, code-named Smiling Buddha, took place in May 1974, and Khan wanted to help his country answer it. Officials at the Pakistani Embassy in The Hague discouraged him, saying a metallurgist would find it hard to get a job at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, or PAEC. A letter he wrote in August 1974 went unnoticed. In September, he sent another through the Pakistani ambassador to the Prime Minister's Secretariat.

  Khan did not know that Pakistani scientists had been working on a secretive crash weapons program since the 20th of January 1972. It was directed by Munir Ahmad Khan, a reactor physicist. That timeline casts doubt on the claim that A. Q. Khan fathered the program.

  Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto read the second letter and had his military secretary run a security check on the unknown metallurgist. Bhutto then asked the PAEC to send a team under Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. The team met Khan at his family home in Almelo and handed him a letter from Bhutto, instructing him to come to Islamabad. Khan arrived in December 1974 and took a taxi straight to the Prime Minister's Secretariat. Ghulam Ishaq Khan, Agha Shahi and Mubashir Hassan sat in on the meeting. Khan explained why highly enriched uranium mattered, and Bhutto ended the session with the remark: "He seems to make sense."

  The next day, Khan met Munir Ahmad and other senior scientists. He argued for highly enriched uranium over weapon-grade plutonium and told them why he thought the plutonium idea would fail. Several officials advised him to stay in the Netherlands to learn more about centrifuge technology while consulting on Project-706, the enrichment effort led by Mahmood. By December 1975, URENCO had grown suspicious of his open sessions with Mahmood, in which he instructed him on centrifuges. The company moved Khan to a less sensitive section. He feared for his safety and insisted on going home.

  In April 1976, Khan joined the atomic bomb program, working in the enrichment division beside the physical chemist Khalil Qureshi. He was frustrated at being passed over for director of the uranium division, a job that went to Mahmood. He stopped doing calculations, and tensions with other researchers grew. Most of the program's effort was still aimed at plutonium, and Khan grew bored. He finally sent Bhutto a critical report arguing that the enrichment program was nowhere near success.

  Bhutto saw danger in scientists split between uranium and plutonium. He told Khan to take over the enrichment division from Mahmood. The program was separated from the PAEC as the Engineering Research Laboratories, which answered to the Army's Corps of Engineers, with Khan as chief scientist. Army engineers chose isolated land at Kahuta for the national site, judging it ideal for preventing accidents.

  4853504956

• 4. Centrifuge Khan

  ›

  Ghulam Dastagir Alam led a parallel PAEC effort at the Air Research Laboratories at Chaklala Airbase, even though he had never seen a centrifuge. His knowledge of the Manhattan Project was only rudimentary. Even so, he balanced the rotation of a first-generation centrifuge at about 30,000 revolutions per minute. He was sent at once to Kahuta, where setbacks were piling up in a program that depended on URENCO's methods. Alam described the designs Khan had brought as riddled with technical errors, and the components he had bought as broken pieces. He also warned the PAEC that the blueprints were incomplete.

  The mathematician Tasneem Shah and Alam's team worked through the differential equations of rotation around a fixed axis under gravity. Their calculations, confirmed by Alam, supported the idea that a small number of centrifuges could produce weapon-grade uranium. Khan and Alam then succeeded in separating uranium-235 from uranium-238 in raw natural uranium. Scientists say Khan would never have come close without Alam and others. Khan told his biographer that Shah and Alam had refused to defend the centrifuge approach and work on it. The dispute is still unsettled.

  In military circles Khan was known as "Centrifuge Khan". When President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq visited in 1983, the national laboratory was renamed after him. Yet Khan was never in charge of the weapon designs, the calculations behind them, or the test program. Those stayed under Munir Ahmad Khan and the PAEC.

  Munir Ahmad Khan was blunt about his namesake. He said the scientists on the bomb projects were sobered by the weight of what they did not know, and that "Abdul Qadeer Khan is a showman." Senior PAEC scientists who worked with A. Q. Khan remembered him as "an egomaniacal lightweight". Khan published papers on the mechanics of balancing rotating masses and on thermodynamics, with mathematical rigour, but they failed to impress theorists. In later years he criticized Munir Ahmad Khan's physics, and their rivalry became public in seminars across the country.

  Khan's love of the spotlight repeatedly alarmed his own government. In 1979, the Zia administration was trying to keep its nuclear capability discreet to avoid pressure from the Reagan administration. It nearly lost patience when Khan reportedly tried to meet a local journalist to announce the enrichment program. During India's Operation Brasstacks exercise in 1987, he told the local press that the Americans had known of Pakistan's success. Zia met him in a tough tone and promised severe consequences, and Khan immediately contacted news correspondents to retract. In 1996, he went on national news channels and said the effort to produce 90 percent weapons-grade uranium had never stopped. That was despite an understanding Benazir Bhutto's administration had reached with the Clinton administration in 1990 to cap enrichment at 3 percent.

  India's Pokhran-II tests in 1998 prompted Pakistan to answer with its own. Khan was not chosen to head the project, and his thorny reputation likely played a part. General Jehangir Karamat, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, intervened so that Khan could attend as a witness. At a news conference, Khan confirmed that boosted fission devices were tested on the 28th of May 1998 and that uranium from the Kahuta laboratory had been used.

  Colleagues were irritated that he took so much credit for a project in which his part was small. He answered with an article titled "Torch-Bearers" in The News International, stressing that he had not worked alone. He later tried to work on the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb, but military strategists objected because it ran against the policy of minimum credible deterrence. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a fellow physicist, challenged Khan's grasp of quantum physics, and the Pakistan Physics Society shared the animosity.

  5349556350

• 5. Suppliers and Shell Companies

  ›

  From 1999 onward, Khan travelled to Dubai 41 times, according to the Pakistan government, and kept a penthouse on al-Maktoum Road. The shell companies he set up there were said to consist of "a fax machine and an empty office". They facilitated shipments and were shut down as soon as the deals closed. His Sri Lankan associate in Dubai, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, helped move nuclear parts to Libya.

  The habit of buying abroad dated back to the 1970s. Khan had pushed for a network to import electronic materials from Dutch firms, and he had little trust in the PAEC's domestic manufacturing. Henk Slebos, a Dutch engineer who had studied metallurgy with Khan at Delft, kept supplying goods for enrichment through his company Slebos Research. He was sentenced in 1985 to one year in prison. On appeal in 1986, that became six months of probation and a fine of 20,000 guilders. He kept exporting to Pakistan and was sentenced again.

  Other suppliers were caught later. In 1998, Germany sentenced Ernst Piffl to three and a half years in prison for supplying centrifuge parts to Kahuta through his company Team GmbH. Asher Karni, a Hungarian-South African businessman, received three years in prison in the United States for selling restricted nuclear equipment to Pakistan through Humayun Khan and the Pakland PME Corporation. Khan also imported parts from several Japanese companies.

  China appears in this story in several ways. At a conference there, Khan tried to acquire uranium hexafluoride, but the Pakistani government sent the shipment back and told the Kahuta laboratory to use gas supplied by the PAEC. According to a report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Chinese scientists were present at Kahuta in the early 1980s. In 1996, US intelligence concluded that China had supplied magnetic rings for the special bearings at the top of centrifuge cylinders. Khan himself said the Kahuta laboratory had built a centrifuge facility for China in Hanzhong city.

  In 1982, an unnamed Arab country approached Khan to buy centrifuge technology, and he was receptive to the financial offer. One scientist alerted the Zia administration, and Khan denied everything. Zia assigned Major-General Ali Nawab, an engineering officer, to watch him. Nawab did so until he retired from the army in 1983. After that, Khan's activities went undetected for several years.

  4344828677

• 6. Three Customers

  ›

  In 1990, the United States alleged that highly sensitive information was flowing to North Korea in exchange for rocket engines. Pakistan's Ghauri missile, according to this account, was based entirely on North Korea's Rodong-1. Benazir Bhutto supported the project, consulted with North Korea, and helped bring the technology to the Kahuta laboratory in 1993. Khan later accused her administration of handing North Korea secret enrichment information on a compact disc, which her staff and military personnel denied.

  An even more violent episode followed the 1998 nuclear test. On the 7th of June 1998, ten days after the underground test, Kim Sa Nae was shot to death a few yards from Khan's official residence. She was the wife of a midlevel North Korean diplomat and had been invited as part of a 20-member delegation. Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, suspected her of spying for the United States and then told North Korean authorities. Three days later, centrifuges, warheads and technical data, along with her body, were flown to North Korea on an American-made C-130 cargo plane. The same aircraft made rounds between the two countries from 1997 to 2002.

  Iran came by a different route. Khan secretly passed centrifuge knowledge to Iran between 1987 and 1989, without telling the Pakistani government, though that point remains politically contested. In 2003, the European Union pressed Iran to accept tougher inspections. The International Atomic Energy Agency then revealed an enrichment facility at Natanz that used gas centrifuges based on URENCO designs. Inspectors quickly identified them as P-1 types obtained from a foreign intermediary in 1989. Iranian negotiators handed over supplier names, and Khan was among them. Heinz Mebus, a German engineer and college friend of Khan, was named as a middleman.

  Gotthard Lerch, a German nuclear engineer, was sentenced in 2008 to five years and six months in prison for procuring centrifuges for Libya from Khan. He also acted as a middleman for Iran. Alfred Hempel, a German businessman, arranged shipments of centrifuge parts from Pakistan to Libya and Iran through Dubai. In May 1998, Newsweek reported that Khan had sent centrifuge designs to Iraq, apparently confiscated later by UN inspectors. Iraqi officials said the documents were authentic but claimed they had refused to work with Khan, fearing an ISI sting.

  Libya's turn came in 2003, when the merchant vessel BBC China was caught carrying centrifuges to Libya from Malaysia. The Scomi Group and the Kahuta laboratory were supplying parts through Khan's Dubai associate. The scandal touched Scomi Precision Engineering, whose chief executive was Shah Hakim Zain, and Kamaluddin Abdullah, son of the former Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. Libya negotiated with the United States to roll back its nuclear program and have sanctions lifted. It shipped centrifuges to the US that American inspectors identified as P-1 models. Friedrich Tinner, a nuclear engineer and friend of Khan since their days at Leuven, was a head of Libya's nuclear program. When Libya handed over a list of its suppliers, the Bush administration opened an investigation focused on Khan's personal role.

  818786380

• 7. Pardon and House Arrest

  ›

  Starting in 2001, Khan served as an adviser on science and technology to the Musharraf administration, after leaving the directorship of the Kahuta laboratory. He promoted higher defence spending on missiles to counter India's program and advised on space policy. He proposed using the Ghauri missile as an expendable launcher to put satellites into orbit.

  In 2003, the Bush administration reportedly gave the Musharraf government evidence of a proliferation network implicating Khan. He was dismissed from his post on the 31st of January 2004. His confession named transfers of technology to Iran between 1989 and 1991, and to North Korea and Libya between 1991 and 1997. Under questioning by military investigators, he said that General Mirza Aslam Beg, a former Chief of Army Staff, had authorised the Iran transfer.

  On the 5th of February 2004, President Pervez Musharraf pardoned Khan, fearing his political rivals would make the affair a weapon. Still, the confession badly damaged the credibility of Musharraf's government and America's image at the height of the insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Local television aired sympathetic documentaries about Khan, and opposition parties protested strongly. The US Embassy in Islamabad warned Washington that Musharraf's successor could be less friendly. That calculation held the Bush administration back from pressing Musharraf directly, for fear of losing him as an ally.

  In December 2006, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, headed by Hans Blix, said Khan could not have acted alone without the awareness of the Pakistan Government. An anonymous American intelligence official told the journalist Seymour Hersh something similar, asking whether Edward Teller could have spread nuclear technology around the world without the American government knowing.

  In 2007, politicians in the US and the European Commission, along with IAEA officials, called for Khan to be interrogated by international investigators. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, who spoke highly of Khan, dismissed the calls as "case closed". He also paid tribute on state television, calling Khan's services "unforgettable". In 2008, General Tariq Majid, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, officially ended the security hearings and classified the debriefing details.

  Khan then reversed himself. In a 2008 interview he put the blame on Musharraf, calling him the "Big Boss" of the proliferation deals. In 2012 he implicated Benazir Bhutto's administration, saying she had issued clear directions. He also said he was persecuted because he was a Muhajir.

  He had been under house arrest since 2004. Years later, he sued the Government of Pakistan in the Islamabad High Court. The verdict declared his debriefing unconstitutional and freed him on the 6th of February 2009. The Obama administration reacted with an official statement that Khan remained a "serious proliferation risk".

  929394978

• 8. Hero or Profiteer

  ›

  The Hendrina Khan Hotel in Timbuktu, named after his wife, was one of dozens of Khan's commercial enterprises. To furnish it in the early 2000s, he reportedly used a Pakistan Air Force C-130 to carry carved wooden furniture. The plane landed at Tripoli Airport in Libya because it could not land in Mali, and the cargo went on by road. Khan accompanied the furniture himself from Islamabad. In 2016, the Panama Papers named his wife, his two daughters and his brother Abdul Quyuim Khan as owners of Wahdat Ltd., an offshore company registered in the Bahamas.

  Moisés Naím, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, argued from such evidence that Khan's motives remained essentially financial, whatever ideological cover he had. Bruno Tertrais of the Foundation for Strategic Research saw three layers. The first was to secure the legitimacy of his role in building Pakistan's nuclear force. The second, which grew over time, was personal enrichment. The third, which varied in importance, was a diffuse desire to see other Muslim countries gain nuclear capability.

  Khan offered his own justification in a 2011 interview. He said Pakistan's motivation came from a need to prevent nuclear blackmail by India. Had Iraq and Libya been nuclear powers, he argued, they would not have been destroyed. He added that if Pakistan had possessed the capability before 1971, it would not have lost half the country in a disgraceful defeat.

  His advocacy for sharing nuclear technology led much of the scientific community to shun him. Political and military circles stayed welcoming. In 1996-97, he served as president of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, and he published two books on material science. He was project director of the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, taught physics, and sat on the board of Hamdard University until his death. He also helped found the A. Q. Khan Institute of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering at Karachi University. Universities gave him gold medals, and the state honoured him with the Hilal-e-Imtiaz in 1989 and the Nishan-e-Imtiaz in 1996 and again in 1999. No other Pakistani citizen has received the Nishan-e-Imtiaz twice.

  In 2012, Khan announced a conservative political advocacy group, Tehreek-e-Tahaffuz-e-Pakistan, meaning Movement for the Protection of Pakistan. It was dissolved the following year. He also wrote newspaper columns in English and Urdu on politics, society and Islam. They were collected in the multi-volume Sehar Honay Tak, and he wrote an autobiographical work, Dastan-e-Azam.

  At home in Islamabad, Khan was known as sociable and hospitable. He liked to host friends and serve paya, a trotter stew, along with daal and bhindi. He kept pets and fed the local wildlife near his house.

  In August 2021, Khan was admitted to the Khan Research Laboratories Hospital after testing positive for COVID-19. He died on the 10th of October 2021, aged 85, after a transfer to a hospital in Islamabad for lung problems. He was given a state funeral at Faisal Mosque and buried at the H-8 graveyard in Islamabad. Prime Minister Imran Khan called him a national icon. President Arif Alvi said a grateful nation would never forget his services.

  8929100931