| India-Pakistan |
| Pakistan: New curbs imposed on Doc Strangelove |
| 2009-02-11 |
| (AKI/DAWN) - The Pakistani government is reported to have stopped nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan from meeting people, after the United States and Britain expressed serious concern over his release on a court order. Sources close to A.Q. Khan told Pakistani daily Dawn that after the court had declared him a free citizen, a few people met him, but no one was allowed to enter his residence on Monday. The Islamabad High Court on Friday declared A.Q. Khan a 'free citizen' but kept secret an agreement reached between him and the government. Legal experts said that unless the secret agreement was made public, restrictions on Khan's movement could be considered as contempt of court because he had been allowed by the court to meet anyone and go anywhere he wanted to. The move came a day after Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told reporters that the government had reserved the right to go in appeal against the release of Khan. "If they have a right to contest, I too reserve the right to ask the court to uphold its decision," Khan told Dawn on Monday. Brushing aside West's concerns that he could again be involved in nuclear proliferation, Khan said he had nothing to do with his previous department (Khan Research Laboratories). "I have no links with KRL since 2001," he added. He reiterated that he had nothing to do with the country's nuclear programme and said that due to his bad health he could not resume work. "What I was doing in KRL was very sophisticated work and I cannot resume it because it required continuous involvement," he said. "Now I am passing my time reading poetry and with my family. I have passed very difficult time in detention, but now I feel relief as my family is with me." |
| Link |
| Africa North |
| Intelligence Success: Details of How Khadhafi Came to Give Up His WMD, and What We Learned |
| 2006-05-17 |
| This is too important to excerpt, I think, so I present it here complete. From the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com. Moderators, edit for length if you feel it's necessary. Gadhafi's Leap of Faith: Libya's strongman feared appearing weak. BY JUDITH MILLER On Dec. 16, 2003, three days after Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole near Tikrit, Robert G. Joseph, who headed counterproliferation on the White House National Security Council, flew to London for a secret meeting with his British and Libyan counterparts to discuss how and when Libya would announce the abandonment of its weapons of mass destruction. "The trip was so close-hold that it was cleared neither with the British Embassy in Washington nor the American Embassy in London," a senior U.S. official recalled. Neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Colin Powell knew of it in advance. Seated around an antique wooden table with senior British and Libyan officials at the Traveler's Club in London--chosen by the British for being a discreet place to meet--Mr. Joseph was stunned by the evasiveness of the draft announcement initially presented by Musa Kusa, Libya's U.S.-educated foreign intelligence chief and de facto head of its six-man delegation. The statement failed to mention even the existence of banned weapons or programs in Libya, nor did it say that Moammar al-Gadhafi, Libya's strongman, was prepared to abandon them. Instead, the draft spoke of the "spirit of Christmas," of all things, and Libya's desire to establish a "WMD-free zone" in the Middle East, according to an official who saw several early drafts. "It was a mushy mess," he recalled. The Libyans also wanted an explicit quid pro quo: In exchange for Libya's renunciation of WMD, the U.S. would abandon any effort to foment "regime change" in Libya, ensure that sanctions were lifted, and restore diplomatic relations. Mr. Joseph balked. There would be no such deal, or even negotiations about it, he insisted. Libya and the West still had differences to resolve on terrorism and other fronts. Pan Am 103 Of all the U.S. officials involved in the secret talks, Mr. Joseph was the most skeptical of Col. Gadhafi's intentions, colleagues recalled. He had reason to be. "Bob and I were supposed to be on Pam Am 103 the day it crashed," said Ron Lehman, who heads the Center for Global Security Research at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Messrs. Lehman and Joseph had arrived at Heathrow Airport early enough that morning to get seats on Pan Am 107, direct to Washington, without stopping in New York, 103's destination. So they switched flights. Mr. Joseph later told friends he had seen the long lines of Americans assembling at the gate for the flight that exploded over Lockerbie soon after takeoff. He recalled a lively group of students and thought of his own son and daughter. Mr. Joseph never said a word about his narrow escape to his Libyan interlocutors. But he had no illusions about those with whom he negotiated. Did Libya not want the world to believe that it had made a voluntary, strategic decision to renounce its weapons and programs? Mr. Joseph asked Musa Kusa, rumored to have been a coordinator of the Pan Am attack, and Abdullahi Obeidi, Col. Gadhafi's close aide who was then Libya's ambassador in Rome. It was not in Libya's or the West's interests for critics to think that Col. Gadhafi had been forced, or bribed, into doing so, Mr. Joseph argued. Libya, moreover, had to be specific about what "eliminating" its programs meant. Would it commit to destroying and removing all dangerous equipment and material? Would it destroy empty chemical munitions and lethal agents, as well as sign the treaty banning such weapons? Would Libya destroy its imported centrifuges? Would it eliminate conventional missiles that violated a treaty banning weapons capable of carrying a 500-kilo payload with a range of more than 300 kilometers? Because nothing is ever easy with Col. Gadhafi, Tony Blair had to phone the Libyan leader the next day--their first conversation ever--to encourage him to be bold in announcing his decision. Col. Gadhafi was still hesitant, a diplomat recalled, concerned about appearances that he was caving in to pressure. Mr. Blair assured him that both he and George W. Bush would be supportive if Col. Gadhafi's renunciation were explicit. "But until the last minute," said an official who watched amended drafts of Libya's statement as they were faxed back and forth between Tripoli, London and Washington less than four hours before the announcement was scheduled, "we really weren't sure we would have an agreement." As it happened, the announcement of the renunciation of Libya's WMD programs was delayed by an official reluctance to interrupt the broadcast of a major soccer game that Col. Gadhafi was watching. The statement he was supposed to deliver was read, instead, by Libya's foreign minister. The Brother Leader, as Col. Gadhafi styles himself, had suddenly gotten a cold--in his feet, a diplomat suggested. He had a sore throat and couldn't talk, the Libyans said. The date: Dec. 19, 2003. Afraid that Col. Gadhafi might change his mind even after having publicly renounced his WMD, U.S. officials rushed to move sensitive nuclear equipment and material out of Libya. The mission fell to the State Department, and specifically to John Bolton, then undersecretary of state for verification and arms control, and Assistant Secretary Paula DeSutter. Donald Mahley, a veteran Foreign Service officer and former Army colonel who was deputy assistant secretary for arms control implementation, was chosen as "on the ground" coordinator. Over Christmas, a team of experts assembled by Ms. DeSutter pieced together an emergency plan. Because the Libyans insisted on a "small footprint" in Libya, the size of a joint U.S.-U.K. team was limited to 15 experts (10 Americans and five Brits). They had to rotate in and out of Libya to stay under the limit. Even getting to Libya was challenging. "Americans were not allowed to travel there," Ms. De Sutter said. "So when our first team secretly flew in, the airline's computer kicked their reservations and tickets out of the system." The teams also needed licenses for everything, given the sanctions--even to buy Libyan officials a cup of coffee. And there was the map problem. "I wanted a detailed, but nonclassified, map of the country," said Mr. Mahley. "But there was none in the entire U.S. government." Mr. Mahley said that nothing he had done before, including commanding two companies in Vietnam, facing down the Russians over arms-control disputes, or negotiating the germ and chemical weapons treaties in Geneva, was as complicated as dismantling Libya's WMD infrastructure in less than four months between January and April 2004. Several things surprised him: first, the relatively small number of Libyans involved in the WMD programs. "Though the Libyans I dealt with were knowledgeable, dedicated, and innovative," he said, "there was almost no bench." "The same six people--most of them American-educated--did almost everything," said Harry L. Heintzelman IV, senior adviser on noncompliance. A second lesson was how relatively easy it was to hide elements of a WMD program, even in an open desert, "if there is a national dedication to do so," Mr. Mahley wrote in a "Lessons Learned" paper for an arms-control newsletter. "Tony" Sylvester Ryan, known as "Chemical Tony" to distinguish him from the team's other Tony who helped dismantle banned missiles, recalled being taken to a place they wound up calling the "turkey farm." Other officials said that the site, previously unknown to U.S. intelligence, was where Libyans had hidden unfilled chemical bombs and where they were going to set up centrifuges to enrich uranium. Libya, Mr. Ryan said, came clean in stages: "They'd start by saying 'I think we have only 1,500 unfilled bombs,' and by the end of the visit, they'd acknowledge having stored about 3,000. But we never would have found the place at all if the Libyans hadn't shown it to us." Team members were also struck by the extent to which sanctions had complicated Libya's hunt for unconventional weapons, especially biological. Though U.S. intelligence officials still debate whether Libya has disclosed all aspects of its early effort to make or acquire germ weapons--in particular, how much help, if any, was provided by Wouter Basson, head of South Africa's illicit germ-warfare program under apartheid--sanctions apparently helped dissuade Col. Gadhafi from building an indigenous program. "The program, if you can call it that, just kind of fizzled out," said a member of the British-led biological team that first toured suspect Libyan sites and interviewed some 25 scientists during a two-week trip in the late spring of 2004. In 1985, for example, the three Libyans who headed the germ-weapons program, known as the Scientific Medical Research Establishment, got $55 million to build a medical lab with Bio-safety Level Three and Four capacity to handle the most dangerous germs. Though the Libyans said the facility was for peaceful medical purposes, two companies they approached--from Finland and South Korea--both declined, citing the sanctions ban on selling Libya dual-use facilities, officials disclosed. Sanctions also meant that Libya often imported shoddy merchandise at exorbitant prices: for instance, four different systems to fill white plastic bottles with mustard agent, none of which worked. One German system "leaked all over the place," Mr. Mahley recalled. "Seeing the liquid on the warehouse floor, we were hesitant even to look inside without protective gear." The Italians had sold Libya a system that involved filling containers atop trucks. That, too, was a disaster. "In the end," said Mr. Ryan, "they manufactured small tanks themselves, set them on metal legs, put a petcock on the tanks, put on their protective gear, and filled the plastic containers by hand. Not exactly high-tech, but it worked." Then the Libyans seemingly forgot about the chemical weapons they had stored away. Libyan officials insisted that, contrary to Western intelligence reports, they had never used the weapons in their war with Chad, or anywhere else; and while they had tested agents for potency and filled shells with nonlethal material, they had never field-tested shells filled with chemical agents. The Libyans also shrugged when team members asked about some of the more antiquated spare parts Libya had bought on the black market for its chemical weapons program. "They told us, 'Yeah, we know we've been had. But what were we going to do? Take them to small claims court for selling us junk?' " Mr. Ryan recalled. "They knew they had no recourse if they were sold a pig in a poke." Although sanctions had made acquisition more expensive and time-consuming, it had not stopped the programs. Instead, Libyans had turned to one-stop shops, like the network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, "father" of the Pakistani bomb, for their nuclear program; and for chemical weapons they improvised. "Libya still pursued WMD, but sanctions raised the cost sharply and impeded the programs" Ms. DeSutter said. The dismantlement effort did not always go smoothly. A chartered 747 that was supposed to take team member Christopher T. Yeaw and the sensitive warhead design blueprints back to Washington, for instance, broke a wing flap while landing at Metiga Airport, the former Wheelus Air Force Base, which the U.S. vacated in 1970. Because Libya had no spare parts, his return was delayed until the part could be flown in and the wing repaired. In the meantime, Dr. Yeaw, one of the few team members whose "Q" security clearance authorized him to handle such sensitive drawings, could not find a safe enough place to store the blueprints. So for the next two days, "I took it to restaurants, to the restroom. I even slept alongside it in the double bed in our villa," he said. "It was closer to me than my wife--like a baby, which is what the Libyans called it: Chris's 'baby.' " Aides to Ma'atouq Mohammed Ma'atouq, head of Libya's nuclear program, recalled that the "baby" was the focus of tension between the Americans who came to his office to retrieve the documents and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, who arrived even earlier that same day at the Ministry of Scientific Research, well in advance of the Americans, to examine the two-inch thick sheaf of Xeroxed engineering blueprints. The IAEA thought it should keep the blueprints and asked the U.S. to turn them over, prompting a standoff before the bewildered Libyans. "My mandate was clear: Collect the documents and deliver them to Paula DeSutter in Washington," said Dr. Yeaw, a nuclear engineer who now teaches at the Naval War College in Rhode Island. "So unless they wanted to remove them from my hand, they were not going to get them." Ms. DeSutter, in fact, was waiting at the airport when the unmarked 747 finally taxied into Dulles on Jan. 22, 2004. Dr. Yeaw, fellow members of his team and his "baby" were the only cargo. Tanks and Bulldozers The dismantlement mission was completed in record time. In four months, the U.S.-U.K. team managed to airlift 55,000 pounds of the most sensitive documents and nuclear components, including several containers of uranium hexafluoride and two P-2 centrifuges, of some 10,000 that Libya had ordered from the Khan Research Laboratories in Pakistan. By mid-February, the inspection team and a representative from the Hague-based Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, which Libya had finally agreed to join, watched Libyans crush with tanks and bulldozers more than 3,200 unfilled chemical weapons shells they had laid out on the desert floor. By March, the team had sent out by chartered ship over 1,000 tons of additional centrifuge and missile parts, including the five SCUD-C missiles (minus warheads), launchers and related equipment. And Russia had removed 13 kilos of fresh, 80% highly enriched uranium from the Tajura reactor--a uniquely successful joint venture in WMD disarmament. Libya's continuing political repression and human rights abuses have prompted officials to cite Reagan's motto for dealing with the Soviet Union during its own tumultuous transformation: Trust, but Verify. "And this is exactly how we approached the case of Libya," said Mr. Bolton, now U.S. ambassador to the U.N., in a July 2004 speech. But not even the very conservative Mr. Bolton defends the halfhearted effort to assure Col. Gadhafi that he was right to renounce WMD. Calling Libya's about-face "an important nonproliferation success" because it "proves that a country can renounce WMD and keep its regime in power," Mr. Bolton told me recently that preventing the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons "requires long-term strategic thinking and concentration." The preoccupation with the continuing insurgency in Iraq, the inability to stop Iran and North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons, and plunging domestic support at home for Mr. Bush may explain Washington's distraction. Libya's removal from the list of state sponsors of terror was also delayed by its alleged plot to assassinate King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, as late as 2003. A new factor that complicated the U.S.-Libyan rapprochement was Congress's refusal to permit a company based in Dubai, a key ally in the war on terror, to operate U.S. ports. Blindsided by the virulence of the opposition, the White House was even less inclined to inform Congress that it intended to remove Libya from the terrorism sponsor list. Moreover, apart from a few men--notably Reps. Tom Lantos (D., Calif.), Curt Weldon (R., Pa.) and Peter Hoekstra, the Intelligence Committee chairman; and Sens. Richard Lugar, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, and Joe Biden--few legislators have taken the time to monitor Libyan affairs closely. Libyan exile groups expressed dismay yesterday over Libya's removal from the terrorist list. And there will undoubtedly be objections from Congress and elsewhere. But for all the possible questions, Libya stands as one of the few countries to have voluntarily abandoned its WMD programs, and out of options for countering Iran's stonewalling, the White House belatedly opted to do more to make Libya a true model for the region. Human rights abuses are more likely to be remedied in a full bilateral relationship. Ms. Miller, a former New York Times reporter, is a writer in Manhattan. This concludes a two-part essay on Libyan WMD. |
| Link |
| India-Pakistan |
| Pakistan Frees Scientist Held for 2 Years |
| 2006-04-30 |
| The old revolving door. Now with Uranium! A senior Pakistani scientist suspected of helping leak nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea has been released after two years in detention, an army spokesman said Sunday. Mohammed Farooq, who worked at Pakistan's top nuclear weapons facility, was detained in December 2003, along with 10 other people, when it was revealed that the head of the facility, Abdul Qadeer Khan, gave sensitive technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Farooq, who was director general at Khan Research Laboratories, was suspected of allegedly leaking technology on Khan's orders. He was freed last week, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan told The Associated Press. Asked whether Farooq would be allowed to keep his job at the laboratories, Sultan said only that "he has been advised to restrict his movement and activities and stay at home for security reasons." Sultan would not say whether Farooq had been found guilty of any wrongdoing. Farooq was the last of the 11 people detained in 2003 who remained in custody. The 11 scientists, security and administration personnel who worked at the lab were detained for questioning over the spread of nuclear technology in the alleged black market network that Khan headed. Rest at link. |
| Link |
| India-Pakistan |
| Explosion kills N-technician |
| 2006-02-09 |
 ISLAMABAD An explosion killed a technician at Pakistans main nuclear research facility, an army spokesman said yesterday. The man died while handling explosives on Tuesday at Khan Research Laboratories, near Islamabad, spokesman Maj-Gen. Shuakat Sultan said. There were no other injuries, and no damage to nuclear facilities at the laboratory, he said.It was a normal conventional explosive that he was handling when the accident happened and he died, Sultan said. |
| Link |
| Science & Technology |
| Intelligence report claims nuclear black market thriving |
| 2006-01-05 |
 It is intended as an alarm bell sounding in the boardrooms of western Europe's leading engineering companies as well as the common rooms of campuses and cutting-edge science labs. It is also a wake-up call to EU governments, spy agencies and customs officials struggling to keep the ingredients for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) out of the hands of some of the most unsavoury regimes in the Middle East and the far east.But if the 55-page confidential "early warning" intelligence assessment is impressive in the sheer mass of detail on the names and locations of suspect players in the global WMD game, the information may be seen as deeply troubling. It emphasises that west European engineering firms, germ laboratories, scientific thinktanks and university campuses are successfully preyed on by multitudes of middlemen, front companies, scholars with hidden agendas and bureaucrats working for the Iranian, Syrian or Pakistani regimes. The report from a leading EU intelligence service obtained by the Guardian represent, it seems, the pooled knowledge of at least four major EU member-states on how countries such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea orchestrate a vast network of traders, phoney companies, state institutions and diplomatic missions internationally to procure the means to develop chemical, biological, nuclear and conventional weapons. Given the hi-tech nature of the coveted parts and materials, the west European marketplace is the principal shopping mall, while Russia and the former Soviet Union are targeted for talented if impoverished brainpower. The Iranians, for example, are using middlemen in the neighbouring and post-Soviet countries of Azerbaijan and Armenia to tap the post-Soviet market, the document states. Or the Pakistanis. The world's biggest clandestine nuclear proliferation racket, centred around the Pakistani metallurgist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was exposed more than two years ago. Khan is under house arrest and several of his collaborators in Europe have been arrested in Germany, Switzerland and South Africa. Yet the business rolls on, according to the document almost from the moment Khan went on Pakistani television to "confess" in February 2004. "Since the beginning of 2004 extensive procurement efforts for the Pakistani nuclear sector have been registered." Furthermore, the range of materials and components being bought "clearly exceeds" that required for spare parts and replacements in Islamabad's nuclear programme. That suggests the nuclear black market is trading on the surplus goods. The report notes, for example, that Khan's shopping sprees included high-grade aluminium tubing for the centrifuges that spin uranium into bomb fuel. He sold the pipes to Libya's Colonel Muammar Gadafy, who has since given them up. "The procurement efforts for such tubing were not halted after the uncovering of the procurement network." Khan's power base outside Islamabad, the Khan Research Laboratories (named after him), remain a central institution in the Pakistani nuclear programme, according to the document, served by an array of front companies who are past masters at disguising the real "end users" for the components and equipment they purchase in western Europe. While the Pakistani bomb project has long been realised, Iran's nuclear ambitions are not as advanced and have the makings of an international crisis. So it is not surprising that much of the document focuses on Iranian activities - not only in the nuclear field, but in bio-chemical and conventional weapons, notably its "very ambitious" missile programmes. The document lists more than 200 Iranian companies, institutes, government offices and academic outfits said to be engaged in weapons research, development and procurement, and mostly subordinate to the defence ministry in Tehran's armed forces logistics department. Russia, which has just clinched a billion-dollar missile deal with Iran, is identified as crucial to Iran's military programmes, especially the missile development; 16 Russian companies and academic institutes are named as helping and profiting from the Iranian military effort. They range from the Glavkosmos space agency to St Petersburg's Technical University. The Iranians, as well as the Pakistanis and the Syrians, are also benefiting from North Korean military prowess and exports, the document says, noting that "the export of arms equipment is currently reckoned to be North Korea's most important source of income." To maintain this performance, the document says, the North Koreans increasingly depend on being able to import western goods and equipment. To this end they use a dense web of firms and offices, their roots going back to the 1970s. More than 30 of the named companies and institutions said to be involved in the North Korean arms procurement endeavour are in China and most of those are Chinese state firms or bodies. Last week the US State Department slapped sanctions on six Chinese companies for their alleged supplies to Iran's military industries. The main market for the North Korean exports is the Middle East. "The most important buyers are Egypt, Iran, Pakistan and Syria." Damascus, the document says, has been striving for self-sufficiency in its WMD efforts for years through substantial supplies of material and knowhow from Russia and through purchases in western Europe. Most surprisingly perhaps, the report says that Syria "has recently strengthened cooperation in the [arms] sector, particularly with Iran". The 55 pages list hundreds of companies and institutions from Pyongyang to Beijing to Sofia said to be in the WMD business, often using front companies in Dubai to disguise their true dealings. The aim is to "name and shame", to warn off EU companies from doing business with the listed organisations. What the intelligence assessment does not include are the names of the west European firms and scholars believed to be profiting handsomely from the trade in military knowhow and components. |
| Link |
| Europe |
| Dutchman guilty of exporting nuclear equipment to Khan |
| 2005-12-17 |
| A Dutch court has found two men guilty of illegally exporting materials to Pakistan that could be used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Dutch businessman Henk S., 61, and his business Zoran F., 37, sent the materials, which required an export licence, to the Institute of Industrial Automation in Pakistan, which was linked to Khan Research Laboratories (KRL). KRL, run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, was the driving force behind Pakistan's development of a nuclear arsenal. S. was the Dutch business partner of Khan, who is believed to have stolen plans from a lab in the Netherlands in the 1970s, helping him to become the father of the Islamic A-bomb. The court sentenced S., 61, from Sint Pancras to 12-months in jail, with the last eight months suspended. F., Heerhugowaard, was ordered to do 180 hours community service. The exports by the company headed by S. took place between 1999 and 2002. F. coordinated the transaction. The prosecution had sought an 18-month sentence for S., with the last six months suspended. F. faced a demand for 240 hours community service and a EUR 20,000 fine. S. was bound over to good behaviour for two years and was fined EUR 100,000. If he doesn't pay the fine, he will have to go to jail for 360 days. Two of S.'s companies were fined EUR 65,000 and EUR 32,500 respectively. F. was fined EUR 5,000. |
| Link |
| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and Nuclear Proliferation |
| 2005-09-01 |
| From South Asia Analysis Group, an article by B. Raman, Distinguished Fellow, International Terrorism Watch Programme The methods followed by Musharraf for hoodwinking the international community ... have again become evident in his recent admission in an interview to the Kyodo news agency of Japan that Dr.A.Q.Khan had supplied centrifuges for uranium enrichment to North Korea. ..... After Libya made a clean breast of the project, Musharraf came out with more details. .... He admitted the role of Khan in the supply of centrifuges to Iran only after Teheran admitted this to inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Vienna, who found traces of enriched uranium in some of the centrifuges in the Iranian plant. The Iranian officials ... contended that the traces seemed to have come from the plant of the suppliers -- meaning Pakistan â- from whom it had bought them second-hand. .... Musharraf and other Pakistani authorities had for long been denying any nuclear or missile supply relationship with North Korea, even though Mrs.Benazir Bhutto under whose prime ministership it started had been talking about it. .... Musharraf ... has now admitted that Khan did supply centrifuges to North Korea, but has insisted that Khan would have had no role in helping North Korea acquire a military nuclear capability since his expertise was confined to uranium enrichment. .... For many months, the IAEA had been demanding that Pakistan should hand over to it some of its old centrifuges from the Kahuta plant in order to enable it to compare them with the centrifuges in the Iranian plant to see whether the Iranian contention was correct. Musharraf resisted this demand till March last, when Ms.Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, visited Pakistan. After the visit, Musharraf agreed to hand over some of the centrifuges to the IAEA. Media reports from Vienna indicate that the examination of the centrifuges handed over by Pakistan indicate that the Iranian contention was correct. In the 1990s, Khan had got the centrifuges of the 1970 vintage in Kahuta replaced by new ones. Of the replaced old centrifuges, he supplied some to Iran and some to North Korea and allegedly some to Iraq of Saddam Hussein. After the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, there were reports from reliable sources in Pakistan that before the US occupation, Khan had taken a plane to Damascus and airlifted from there to Pakistan some nuclear-related âmaterialâ, which had been moved by road from Baghdad to Damacus. .... those were second-hand centrifuges from Kahuta and documents relating to their assembling. It was said that the Saddam Hussein Government had not been able to install them .... To prevent their falling into American hands, Khan managed to have them brought back to Pakistan via Damascus. .... In the hope of pre-empting a detailed enquiry, Musharraf has admitted the supply of some of the centrifuges to North Korea. He feels that while he could limit the damages, if any, to Pakistanâs relations with the US by admitting the supplies to North Korea, he may not be able to do so if the supply to Iraq is exposed. He is frantically trying to limit the enquiries to North Korea. .... Pakistan's arms supply relationship with North Korea dates back to 1971 when the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then foreign minister under the late General Yahya Khan, visited Pyongyang and sought North Korean arms supplies to strengthen the Pakistani armed forces in the face of a looming war with India. .... The visit led to the signing of an agreement on September 18, 1971, 10 weeks before the outbreak of the war with India, for the supply of North Korea-made conventional weapons to Pakistan. .... Under the September agreement, Pakistan received from North Korea, in return for payment in US dollars, many shipments of items such as rocket launchers, ammunition, etc. In the 1980s, Pakistan also acted as an intermediary in facilitating arms supply agreements concluded by Pyongyang with Libya and Iran. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, North Korea became the principal supplier of weapons to Iran, which was the target of an arms embargo imposed by the Western countries. To escape detection by Western intelligence agencies, North Korean arms shipments meant for Iran used to be received by sea at Karachi and from there transported in Pakistani trucks to Iran across Balochistan. Amongst the supplies made by North Korea to Iran via Karachi were more than 100 Scud-B (known as the Hwasong 5 in North Korea) ballistic missiles and equipment for the assembly, maintenance and ultimate production of these missiles on Iranian territory. In this transaction, Pakistan played a double game. On one hand, the then ruling military regime of the late Zia-ul-Haq collaborated with the US Central Intelligence Agency and Iraqi intelligence in destabilisation operations directed at the Sunni Balochis living on the Iranian side of the border. At the same time, it clandestinely allowed the transport by road of North Korean arms and ammunition meant for use by the Iranian army against the Iraqis. Pakistani army officers were also sent to Libya to help train Libyan army officers in the use and maintenance of North Korean weaponry. During the Zia regime, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and its North Korean counterpart collaborated closely for the clandestine acquisition of nuclear- and missile-related equipment and technology from erstwhile West Germany and other Western countries. Since North Korea did not have either a presence or funds and other capability to indulge in clandestine procurement from the West, it gave lists of its requirements to the ISI, which procured them and passed them on. This co-operation between the two countries, the foundation for which was laid by Bhutto, was strengthened during the two tenures of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister (1988-90 and 1993-96). It was during this time that Pakistan failed in its efforts to develop indigenous missile production capability (the Hatf series) and sought Chinese and North Korean supplies of missiles as well as technology for their production in Pakistan. In her second tenure, Benazir Bhutto visited Pyongyang during which the scope of the arms supply agreement concluded when her father was foreign minister was expanded to include co-operation in the nuclear and missile fields -- including the training of Khan Research Laboratories' scientists and engineers in North Korea, the training of North Korean scientists and engineers at the Pakistani uranium enrichment plant at Kahuta, and the supply of No-Dong missiles and related technology to Pakistan. Earlier, during Nawaz Sharief's first tenure as prime minister (1990-93), Lieutenant General Javed Nasir, then director-general of the ISI, visited Pyongyang to sign a secret agreement with North Korea's intelligence organisation for joint production, through reverse engineering, of the US-made, shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and their batteries. Some of the missiles in the Pakistani army's stock were given to North Korean intelligence for this purpose. Iranian intelligence agreed to fund the project. It is not known whether this project succeeded in producing an imitation of the Stingers and their batteries. The ISI was particularly interested in the batteries because it was unable to use a large number of the Stinger missiles in its stocks since the life period of the batteries supplied by the US before 1988 for use of the missiles against the Soviets in Afghanistan had expired. Throughout the 1990s, whoever was at the helm in Islamabad, the trilateral co-operation involving Pakistan, Iran and North Korea in the development and production of the Scud-C (called Hwasong 6 in North Korea) and the No-Dong missiles continued without interruption, despite Tehran's anger against Pakistan for backing the Taliban and failing to prevent the periodic massacre of Pakistani Shias and Iranian nationals by the Sunni extremist Sipah-e-Sahaba and its militant wing, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. In 1992, when Nawaz Sharief was prime minister, a team of Pakistani scientists and engineers had visited North Korea's missile development centre, reportedly for joint examination of some technical problems encountered by the Koreans in the development of the No-Dong. The same year saw a visit by Kim Yong-nam, then North Korea's foreign minister and deputy prime minister, to Syria, Iran and Pakistan in July-August. Pakistani and Iranian scientists and engineers visited North Korea in May 1993 to witness the launching of one No-Dong and three Scud missiles (model not known). Benazir's visit to Beijing and Pyongyang in December 1993 was followed by the visits of a number of North Korean personalities to Pakistan in 1994-95 to discuss bilateral nuclear and missile co-operation. Important amongst these were: * In April 1994, Pak Chung-kuk, deputy to the Supreme People's Assembly, visited Iran and Pakistan with a team of officials from the North Korean foreign ministry and the nuclear and missile establishment. * In September the same year, Choe Hui-chong, chairman of the State Commission of Science and Technology, visited Pakistan at the head of a team of North Korean nuclear and missile experts. * In November 1995, a delegation of North Korean military officers and nuclear and missile experts headed by Choe Kwang, vice-chairman of the National Defence Commission, minister of the People's Armed Forces and marshal of the Korean People's Army, visited Pakistan. The delegation met senior officials of the armed forces and visited Pakistan's nuclear and missile establishments, including KRL. The team included senior officials of the fourth machine industry bureau of the second economic committee and the Changgwang Sinyong Corporation (also known as the North Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation). During the visit, KRL and the Changgwang Sinyong Corporation signed an agreement to supply Pakistan with No-Dong missiles as well as fuel tanks and rocket engines. The agreement also provided for stationing North Korean missile experts in KRL to train their Pakistani counterparts in the use and maintenance of the missiles supplied by North Korea and for the supply and development of mobile erector launchers for the missiles. These visits contributed to the speeding up of Pakistan's missile programme and culminated in KRL firing the Ghauri missile on April 6, 1998. Pakistan projected Ghauri as its own, indigenously developed missile. .... KRL and the North Korean corporation are State-owned entities, run and managed by officers of the armed forces of the two countries. Pakistan used a US-supplied aircraft from its air force for transporting the missiles. Missiles and other weapons sent by North Korea to Iran in the 1980s transited through Pakistan, escorted by Pakistani troops. Pakistan and North Korea have a joint project for reverse-engineering US-made Stingers. North Korean scientists witnessed Pakistan's Chagai nuclear tests in May 1998. Pakistan has been helping North Korea in the development of its uranium enrichment facility. The two countries have been training each other's nuclear and missile scientists in their respective establishments. In return for North Korea's assistance, Pakistan diverted to it wheat purchased from the US and Australia, paying for the grain from its huge dollar reserves built up after 9/11, thereby enabling Pyongyang to withstand the economic boycott imposed by the West. To hoodwink US intelligence, Pakistan transported some of the Chinese and North Korean missiles by road via the Karakoram Highway. Pakistan's diplomatic mission in Pyongyang is generally headed and staffed by serving or retired army officers, who had previously served in the ISI's clandestine nuclear and missile procurement set-up. The latest instance in this regard is Major General (retd) Fazle Ghafoor. .... For the US to pretend, despite all this, that Pakistan's repeated violations of nuclear and missile-related regulations are the misdeeds of errant individual entities for which the State cannot be held responsible shows the extent to which it is prepared to close its eyes to what Pakistan has been doing. If there is one country in the world which has been systematically violating all regulations relating to nuclear and missile proliferation and from which there is a real danger of leakage of weapons of mass destruction and related technologies to pan-Islamic terrorists, it is Pakistan. US's double standards in this matter are evident from the alacrity and vigour with which it has acted against Iraq despite the lack of credible evidence against it and the care with which it protects the regime in Pakistan, despite all the evidence available against it. |
| Link |
| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| Dr Qadeer back home after angioplasty |
| 2005-06-18 |
 Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan has been declared healthy after a heart scare, the government said on Friday. Khan, 69, suffered minor chest pains on Tuesday and was taken to hospital earlier Friday to undergo an angioplasty, which checks arteries for blockages, before returning home. "Khan is absolutely fine and stable. He is healthy," President General Pervez Musharraf's press secretary and the country's military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said.Sultan denied press reports that Khan had suffered a cardiac arrest. "He did not have any heart attack. He is back at his home," he added. The scientist's angioplasty took place at Pakistan's Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology and he was under observation by doctors from the clinic and from his own Khan Research Laboratories Hospital, Sultan said. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid told AFP late on Thursday that "Qadeer Khan felt pain in his chest two days ago." |
| Link |
| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| Pakistan admits Khan sold secrets to Iran: UK paper |
| 2005-02-14 |
| Pakistan has reportedly 'admitted' for the first time that Dr A Q Khan passed nuclear secrets and equipment to Iranian officials, says The Sunday Telegraph, a respected British newspaper. The paper's report yesterday said that an investigation by Pakistan's premier intelligence agency, details of which were disclosed to The Telegraph according to the paper, confirmed that Khan and his associates sold nuclear codes, materials, components and plans that left his "signature" at the core of the Iranian nuclear programme. The newspaper claims that the admission came during private talks in Brussels at the end of last month between European Union officials and senior ministers from Pakistan and India. The EU officials were told that cooperation between Teheran and Khan, 68, and associates from his Khan Research Laboratories began in the mid-1990s and included more than a dozen meetings over several years. Most of these meetings were between Mohammad Farooq, a centrifuge expert from KRL, and Iranians in Karachi, Kuala Lumpur and Teheran. Pakistani investigators have told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that centrifuge drawings acquired by Iran closely resemble the design of the first-generation Pakistan-1 centrifuge. Khan also helped the Iranians to set up a secret procurement network involving companies and middlemen around the world, ISI investigators found. The IAEA told Pakistani officials that centrifuges they had discovered at the Doshan Tapeh military base in eastern Teheran closely resembled the more advanced Pakistan-2 centrifuges. The Sunday Telegraph says that Pakistan had previously resisted admitting Khan's role in Iran's nuclear plans for fear of diplomatic repercussions. Teheran claims that it "plans to enrich only to the levels that are used to generate nuclear fuel". A CIA report, however, concluded this was a lie. The ISI found that Khan and his associates had approached some potential buyers of weapons of mass destruction, including Saddam Hussein's regime. "Iraqi officials initially agreed but later backed out because they thought it might be a sting operation or a ploy by the US to implicate them," said one official, according to The Sunday Telegraph. Pakistani investigators found that Khan's network tried not only to satisfy existing demand but also to create new markets for their proliferation activities. "They started working it both ways. They provided options to those who wanted to buy this sensitive material but also developed new markets for their wares." |
| Link |
| Afghanistan/South Asia | |
| Pakistan rejects Time Magazine report | |
| 2005-02-08 | |
 Pakistan has denied allegations that its disgraced nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan may have sold secrets to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab countries.
"The inventory is complete," he said, adding that there was "no way to deliver A Q Khan to anyone". The extent of Dr Khan's arms network may be raised by [Britain's] foreign secretary, Jack Straw, when he visits Islamabad next week. Pakistan says it is conducting its own investigation of Dr Khan's network, but the US and Britain are worried that the nuclear secrets could end up with al-Qaida or other terrorists. The US ambassador in Islamabad said Pakistan had undertaken to share the results of the investigation. Pakistani nuclear analysts believe the extent of Dr Khan's network suggests that other officials were involved, hence the reluctance to let foreigners question him. | |
| Link |
| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| Pakistan denies it sold N-tech to Arab states |
| 2005-02-08 |
| Pakistan denied on Monday that nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan sold nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries after Time magazine reported that the United States was investigating the matter. AQ Khan admitted last year to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. The latest edition of Time said US officials were investigating whether Khan also sold sensitive technology to Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed dismissed the report as "baseless and sensationalised", though a Foreign Office spokesman said the case was not yet closed. "As far as Iran, Libya and North Korea are concerned, there was an admission. But there is no truth as far as Saudi Arabia and other countries are concerned," the minister said. "Nothing has gone (to these countries) from the KRL. Its complete record is available," he told Reuters, referring to the Khan Research Laboratories. Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan said Pakistan was ready to investigate further if fresh evidence emerged. But, he insisted the government had dismantled Khan's network. "The international black market network, as far as it is related to Pakistan, has been dismantled. It has been neutralised," he told a weekly news conference. "The allegation has been made several times in the past, but this is part of a disinformation campaign. It is baseless (and) does not have any substance," he added. "It is a rehash of several speculative stories which have appeared in the media in the recent past." Masood Khan said the probe into AQ Khan's nuclear black market was not over and insisted that Islamabad had done its duty to the international community. "We have not closed investigations. If new fresh leads emerge we would like to check them out and if fresh evidence is furnished to us we would like to look into that," he said. "We have done more than any other country in the world. There are other countries... it was alleged that they were involved in the international black market. We are yet to see if they are looking for skeletons in their cupboards." The information minister and the Foreign Office spokesman both denied claims that 16 cylinders of uranium hexafluoride gas used for uranium enrichment were missing from KRL. "Our inventory is complete and nothing is missing from KRL," Rashid said. He added that there is no pressure on Pakistan to hand AQ Khan over to another country or the IAEA for interrogation. |
| Link |
| Afghanistan/South Asia | |
| Khan network still operational: TIME | |
| 2005-02-07 | |
 While the world is focused on a possible showdown over the Iranian nuclear programme, a recent investigation has revealed that Pakistan's AQ Khan network played a larger role in helping Tehran and Pyongyang than had been previously disclosed, TIME magazine reported on Sunday. According to US intelligence officials, the magazine said, Dr Khan sold North Korea much of the necessary material to build a nuclear bomb, including high-speed centrifuges used to enrich uranium and the equipment required to manufacture more of them. They, along with officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), also believe that Iran may have bought the same set of goods — centrifuges and possibly weapons designs — from Khan in the mid-1990s. Although the IAEA says it has so far not found any definitive proof of an Iranian weapons programme, its investigators have revealed that Tehran privately confirmed at least 13 meetings (from 1994 to 1999) with representatives of the Khan network. Many fear that these disclosures represent the tip of the iceberg, given that the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb travelled the world for more than a decade, visiting countries in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. US officials are currently investigating the possibility that Khan's network sold nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, the magazine quotes a Pakistani defence official as saying. He also confirmed that the US has submitted questions to Khan on whether North Korea and Iran sold such equipment to third parties. The report said that although Washington has no concrete evidence that any of Khan's clients have passed along nuclear technology and expertise to terrorist groups, they cannot rule out the possibility that Khan did business with Osama Bin Laden's Qaeda network. US officials point to the fact that several members of Pakistan's military and intelligence establishment, which worked closely with Khan in his role as the government's top nuclear scientist, are known to sympathise with the Qaeda group. This fear is compounded by the fact that colleagues close to Khan claim he was driven by a devout faith and a burning belief that a nexus existed between returning Islam to its former glory and Muslim nations acquiring nuclear capability. The report goes on to say that if Washington discovers that Khan sold nuclear warhead blueprints to Iran, as he did with Libya, it find immediate justification to ratchet up its charges that Tehran's nuclear research has a military purpose. Indeed, such a US move might even gain acceptance in the international community given that sources close to the Khan Research Laboratories in Islamabad have claimed that Khan's illicit network of suppliers and middlemen is still operational, the magazine reported. "Nothing has changed," TIME quoted one of Khan's former aides as saying. "The hardware is still available, and the network hasn't stopped". Sources close to the lab have also revealed that 16 cylinders of uranium hexafluoride gas, a critical ingredient for uranium enrichment, are missing from the lab. | |
| Link |