Spy Games
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Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan was a hero to the Pakistani people, a convenient scapegoat for the Pakistani state, and a villain for much of the rest of the world. All these sentiments were visible after his death, which saw tributes from the people, and a state funeral without the trappings, or even the official participation, of the State. The headlines and analysis in Western and Indian media were predictable: he was called a spy and a thief who stole documents on centrifuge design and delivered them to Pakistan, prompting then PM Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to abandon plans to develop a plutonium based nuclear device in favor of a device using enriched uranium. Subsequently he helped create an elaborate network, often relying on deception, to obtain the materials needed to make a nuclear device.
All these accusations are true, and far from denying them, we should be proud of them. Let’s start with the ‘why’. What prompted Pakistan to embark on the road to possessing nuclear weapons? Three years after the East Pakistan debacle, India conducted successful nuclear tests and as the Buddha smiled a nuclear smile, Pakistan frowned. By a stroke of fate, Dr. Khan was then employed at a Dutch firm called URENCO and, while he was not a nuclear scientist but a metallurgist, he nonetheless realized that the centrifuge designs he was tasked with translating were of critical importance. Then he wrote a letter to the PM of Pakistan impressing upon him the need to pursue this path to a nuclear device, in an echo of the letter written in 1939 by Albert Einstein to Franklin D Roosevelt. The rest, as they say is history.
Global nuclear espionage, of course, has a history of its own – one that parallels and intersects with the spy story of how Pakistan obtained the bomb in rather unusual ways.
All these accusations are true, and far from denying them, we should be proud of them.
Zarrar Khuhro
The peril of game-changing technology is that once it’s been created, it will invariably be copied for fear of being left behind and made vulnerable. And so, much as Pakistan’s program was a reaction to India’s nuclear test, so too did the USSR’s development of the nuclear bomb go into high gear when they realized how close America was to a breakthrough. While Soviet scientists had certainly laid the groundwork, it was the input of Soviet spy rings working within the Manhattan project that provided crucial information. Central to this was physicist Klaus Fuchs, a German communist who fled Nazi Germany to seek refuge in Great Britain and then Canada. In 1944 he joined the Los Alamos laboratory from where he funnelled crucial information to his ideological brethren in the USSR. Then there’s the Cambridge Five, a group of highly-educated and well-placed Englishmen who were secretly soviet agents. One of them was John Cairncross who, in his position as secretary to the chairman of Britain’s scientific advisory committee, accessed a secret report in 1941 that confirmed the feasibility of a uranium bomb and promptly passed it to the Soviets. So deep was the infiltration into British intelligence that any classified info sent from the US to the UK invariable ended up in Soviet hands. The result was that the USSR carried out a successful test just four years after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, far earlier than anyone would have imagined.
If this is the stuff of spy movies, then Israel’s development of the bomb is, quite literally, straight out of Hollywood. And that’s because a central player in that espionage game was none other than Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer with films like Pretty Woman and ‘12 Years a Slave’ to his credit. Recruited by none other than Shimon Perez while at a nightclub, Milchan went to work, using his Hollywood contacts to lure in targets. For example, he used the lure of a visit to Richard Dreyfuss’s home to get nuclear scientist Arthur Biel to join the board of one of his companies. He also bribed a German executive to ‘accidentally’ leave centrifuge blueprints on his kitchen table, which he then copied and sent off to Israel. In an interesting twist, that executive worked for URENCO, the same company AQ Khan later obtained designs from just a few days later! One of the reasons that the Israeli Stuxnet virus wreaked such havoc on the Iranian nuclear program was that the targeted centrifuges were similar to the ones used in Israel.
Milchan made no secret of his exploits either, openly admitting his actions to numerous publications and none other than Robert De Niro, saying ‘Yeah, I did that. Israel’s my country.’
Of course, no one in the Western media calls him a thief or a proliferator, for reasons that we all understand. But if anything, AQ Khan’s exploits outrank those of the Soviets and of Israel, as Pakistan lacked the resources of the former, or the outright (if officially denied) support received by the latter. AQ Khan achieved the impossible, in the face of a world determined to preserve its monopoly on nuclear weapons, and for that, he deserves the eternal gratitude of this nation.
- Zarrar Khuhro is a Pakistani journalist who has worked extensively in both the print and electronic media industry. He is currently hosting a talk show on Dawn News. Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro
