Four years before Pakistan’s Dr Abdul Qadir Khan was publicly humiliated, then pardoned and placed under house arrest, the British and US authorities were briefed about his role in selling nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran.Intriguingly, in both London and Washington, however, officials were told to keep quiet about the findings which were only revealed several years later when the risk of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of so-called rogue states and terrorists is more real than it ever has been.Bhopal-born Khan, who stole nuclear secrets from Holland, is revered in Pakistan as the Father of the Islamic Bomb. But Pakistanis pay scant regard to his parallel role where he enriched himself by setting up a nuclear supermarket that also supplied sensitive components to other aspiring nuclear powers.Under pressure from the US, Khan was arrested on the orders of President Pervez Musharraf in 2004. Later he was pardoned and placed under indefinite house detention after he publicly admitted to selling nuclear weapons technology to Libya.It now turns out that Libya was just the tip of the iceberg. Four years earlier, a dedicated British customs investigator uncovered a huge black market in nuclear technology, presided over by Khan, that sold items to whoever was prepared to pay for them.The customs officer — Atif Amin — had started off by investigating one of Khan’s British-based business partners, Abu Siddiqui, who was later convicted of illegally evading British export laws by shipping key nuclear components to Khan’s laboratories (KRL) in Pakistan. These shipments included computer equipment, a 12-ton heat treatment furnace, sophisticated measuring devices, and high-quality aluminum bars.Amin’s investigations led him to Dubai where he discovered that sensitive technology illegally exported from the West to Pakistan was returning from KRL Labs to Dubai for onward shipping to other countries. Amin’s astonishing detective work is painstakingly covered in a new book published this week, entitled America and the Islamic Bomb, written by Washington DC-based authors David Armstrong and Joe Trento who say the customs investigator’s findings were duly passed on to both Ml6 and the CIA. “He found ring magnets coming back from Khan’s labs and going on to Libya and he told Ml6. The next night they stuck him on a plane and sent him back home. They did it for political considerations,” Armstrong told The Indian Express in an exclusive interview prior to the book’s release.“They were monitoring it and they say it was going to jeopardise their monitoring operation, which is just absolute nonsense. Why should it jeopardise anything if a separate investigation comes in and finds this stuff? You should use it to your own advantage. What’s the point of monitoring if you’re not going to do anything?” he pointed out.Armstrong argues that the US and Britain effectively connived in Islamabad’s nuclear programme as “Pakistan has a get-out-of-jail free card because they were always doing favours for everybody. If it’s not Afghanistan, it’s the Taliban, if it’s not the Taliban it’s always something. They always have some excuse so they can argue that we are too indispensable to you guys to shut down our nuclear smuggling. It’s been one case after another.”To support his case, Armstrong cites a memorandum from former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski sent to President Jimmy Carter on the eve of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In his memo, Brzezinski encourages Carter to support the Afghan resistance and to use Pakistan as a conduit. In order to do this, he adds, US policy should not be dictated by non-proliferation concerns.But Armstrong and Trento’s work also raises the intriguing possibility that after the US and British authorities discovered Khan was making money selling nuclear technology, they used his network to monitor clandestine nuclear purchases by other countries.Two out of three countries contacted by the Khan network, North Korea and Libya, have since renounced their nuclear weapons programmes. Iran, which is also identified as a recipient of nuclear transfers from the Khan network, denies it is seeking nuclear weapons capability.Circumstantial evidence that the Khan network subsequently acted as a cat’s paw for Western intelligence can be deduced from what later happened to some of Khan’s closest business associates. One of them is a Pakistani businessman, formerly based in Dubai, who used his company to help equip the KRL complex outside Islamabad with high quality equipment for uranium centrifuges.The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has recently been granted US citizenship and has set up a multi-million dollar finance company operating out of Florida. The US authorities have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect the man’s identity, even to the extent of issuing him with a false social security number that actually belongs to a convicted drugs smuggler.In his research, Armstrong said he also uncovered some new personal details about Khan himself, including some 41 trips he made to Dubai and five other trips he made to Timbuktu in Africa where he and his South African wife, Henny, purchased a hotel.
