The British eavesdropping in Casablanca dovetailed perfectly with the earlier information from the CIA’s spy inside Tinner’s operation and with other intelligence being gathered about Khan’s network. Kinsman and his colleagues knew that Khan had embarked on the Libyan project, and they were developing new avenues into the network. One of them started with a tip that arrived at the CIA at about the same time as the British transcript. Confirming the contents of the transcript, a German intelligence agent told the Americans that the Tinners and other longtime associates of Khan were shipping a lot of sensitive material from Germany and Switzerland to Dubai. Faced with a wealth of intelligence, Kinsman and his superiors decided the time had come to try to recruit someone directly inside Khan’s operation—and Urs Tinner fit the bill perfectly.
No one ever paid much attention to Urs Tinner. He was a plain-looking man with no distinguishing features. In late 1999, he had just turned thirty-four and his life seemed to be on a downward spiral. The elder of two sons, he had barely finished high school and he seemed incapable of holding a job for very long. He idolized his father, who nonetheless regarded him as a failure. His Swiss wife had divorced him and refused to give him visiting rights to their two daughters. When he had tried to stay with a high school friend, the friend’s wife had forbidden Tinner from even entering the home. His second marriage to a Russian dancer he met in a bar was collapsing, and he owed back taxes and debts from child support and other obligations. At one point he was working three jobs—days at his father’s business, evenings as a cook at a restaurant, and nights as a bartender at a nightclub. Still, as he later acknowledged, he was barely scraping by. In an effort to escape his financial troubles in Switzerland, he was looking for work outside the country. When his father described Khan’s offer of a job in Dubai, Urs jumped at the chance for a fresh start.
It would turn out to be a good choice, on a couple of levels. Despite his social and financial troubles, Urs was brilliant at making almost anything in a machine shop. He had trained in mechanics at vocational school and during four years in the Swiss army. After going to work for his father, he had taken on various temporary assignments for the company on installations of machinery in Germany, France, and the United States. His hands were scarred from the years of working with metal, transforming it almost magically into intricate components for vacuum valves and other equipment. He would prove to be a valuable addition to Khan’s growing operation in Dubai. Urs also would be a brilliant choice from the perspective of the CIA, providing a path deep into the Khan network.
INTELLIGENCE COMES IN MANY FORMS and from many sources. Satellites provide precise photographs of secret installations, and conversations intercepted by the ubiquitous ears of the National Security Agency can prove invaluable. But the gold standard is “humint,” the information that comes directly from a person with intimate knowledge of the target. When that person is cooperating and providing information while continuing to play a role in the targeted organization, the results can be a bonanza. But it’s a bonanza that often carries risks, too.
The axiom that it takes a thief to catch a thief applies to espionage as well. Spymasters must recruit their spies from the world of traitors, lawbreakers, and con men. In the trade, they are referred to as “dirty assets.” John le Carré captured the phenomenon when he described Alec Leamas’s response to his girlfriend’s complaint that he was getting information from a villain. “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London, balancing the rights and wrongs?”
The law requires the CIA to apply a balance. Guidelines were established in 1995 requiring case officers to weigh criminal violations committed by their agents against the positive value of intelligence supplied, or likely to be supplied, by these assets.
Kinsman was a creative case officer and he had learned long ago to work with what he was given. A human source directly inside the Khan network, even a questionable one, could prove invaluable. He began crafting a strategy for going to Dubai and ensnaring Tinner.
When Tinner arrived at the airport in Dubai in 1999 to begin his new career, he was met by B. S. A. Tahir, who introduced himself as Dr. Khan’s right-hand man. Tinner and Tahir were about the same age, and there was an immediate tension between them. Tahir was worldlier and infinitely more successful, and he saw the newcomer as a potential rival for Khan’s affection and largesse. Tahir’s business, SMB Computers, was successful in its own right, but it also served as the primary front company for shipping nuclear technology to Iran and Libya. The start of the Libyan project had increased the amount of equipment arriving in Dubai, which meant that the commissions being collected by Tahir and Khan were growing, too. Tahir was making enough money to drive around town in a Rolls-Royce and live in a fancy apartment in the fast-growing metropolis. Tinner, however, occupied a different sphere and would later describe his job in Dubai as something almost menial, calling himself “a normal engineer, an employee of Tahir.”
Tinner adjusted to life in Dubai faster than he expected. He had missed the summer, when temperatures regularly exceeded a hundred degrees. He started out in a shabby apartment, so he spent most his off hours in the glitzy hotel bars, where he watched wealthy Arabs pick up thousand-dollar-a-night hookers. But his new boss and his patron, A. Q. Khan, were generous enough to provide him with money to soon move from a tiny apartment to a small house fifty yards from the Persian Gulf in Ajman, the tiniest of the seven city-states that make up the United Arab Emirates. There he started every day by hauling his scuba gear to the beach and going for a dive. At night he hung out in the bars that proliferate throughout Dubai, the biggest and showiest of the emirates and a short drive from his house in Ajman.
Khan had long been a distant figure in Tinner’s life. In the late 1970s, Khan had sometimes had dinner at the Tinner family’s modest home in Haag. Urs had rarely seen the Pakistani since then, but in Dubai he found himself spending considerable time with Khan. Soon after arriving in the Emirates, he had gone to visit Khan in the scientist’s luxury apartment in the heart of Dubai. He helped Khan hang some new pictures of birds and flowers. Khan had kept an apartment—and a mistress—in Dubai since the days of the first Iran deal. But he maintained a low profile when he visited, so he was pleased with Tinner’s company. For his part, Tinner regarded Khan as a friendly old man, someone who would stop his car by the side of the road to offer a lift to a stranger on foot. Their conversations were a welcome respite from a world in which few people spoke German. “He spoke proper German rather well, and in fact that’s why he was the only one with whom I could talk,” Tinner said later. “When you are abroad, you can’t understand what people say. Suddenly somebody arrived who could speak German and I could talk to him. What is more, we talked a lot.”
Amid the pictures of birds and flowers inside Khan’s tranquil apartment was an unattractive anomaly. Twelve black cases similar to those carried by airline pilots and lawyers were always lined up against one wall in the living room. These were the bulky cases in which Khan had brought most of the documents to Dubai. He never bothered to buy filing cabinets for the material, probably figuring that he never knew when he might have to leave in a hurry. Emptying filing cabinets would take far more time than carrying briefcases to a getaway car. Each case was secured with a combination lock and each bore a letter of the alphabet, which delineated the various aspects of the Iranian and Libyan nuclear programs. One of the cases, for instance, contained copies of a 1966-era nuclear warhead designed by the Chinese. Another held designs for centrifuges that were far more sophisticated than the ones the network was selling to Libya and Iran. At this point, however, the contents were a mystery to Tinner.
KHAN HAD IDENTIFIED MOST OF the cast for his Libyan production by early 2000. That spring, he decided to set the most ambitious aspects of the project in motion by summoning the main participants to his apartment in Dubai. Khan was clearly in charge, and everyone referred to him as “Boss.” Because the boss was worried about ever letting any of his partners see the whole picture of what was going on, he invited each of his accomplices to meet with him separately. Gotthard Lerch flew down from Germany. He was given the assignment of finding someone to manufacture the elaborate equipment required to process the uranium gas that would fuel the centrifuges in Libya. Friedrich Tinner arrived; he was there to help Urs set up a plant in Dubai to manufacture most of the components for the thousands of centrifuges that would be needed for Libya’s enrichment plant. Some of the most delicate pieces would still be made at the Tinner factory in Switzerland. Two Turkish businessmen, Gunes Cire and Selim Alguadis, were instructed to supply the sophisticated electronics. Khan also established a system for handling the money. Libya would be paying exorbitant commissions to the suppliers, payments likely to run into the tens of millions of dollars. Khan said the money would be funneled through a series of bank accounts in Switzerland, Dubai, and Liechtenstein in order to conceal the source and size of the payments.
Dubai prides itself on being what is benignly called “business friendly”; in point of fact, the gleaming new city on the Persian Gulf has a reputation as a modern Casablanca, where anything goes in terms of deals and dealers. But it is also a center of international espionage, a vantage point from which the world’s intelligence services monitor shipments going to Iran and other dubious locations. In fact, Khan’s expanded operation there had already attracted unwanted attention.
In May 1999, a shipment of specialty aluminum bound for Tahir’s office in Dubai was seized on the docks of London by British customs agents. An MI6 agent had tipped customs that the aluminum, which required an export license, was destined for the Khan network. The shipment had been arranged by Abu Bakr Siddiqui, a British-based businessman. A search of his home found records of millions of dollars worth of equipment shipped to Khan and related people over the past decade, much of it through Dubai. They also found a photo of Siddiqui and Khan together.
After spending weeks sorting through the records, customs submitted a formal request to the Ministry of Justice in Dubai in August, asking permission to carry out an investigation. The request listed the names of several entities suspected of being part of Khan’s network in Dubai, including Tahir and SMB Computers. After several months the authorities gave permission for the lead British customs investigator, Atif Amin, to pursue his investigation of the Khan ring there.
Amin was a young member of the special counterproliferation team at customs and he was eager to pursue his investigation of the biggest proliferator in history. Before he could leave for Dubai in March 2000, however, he was warned by MI6 to steer clear of one of the companies on his list, Desert Electrical Equipment Factory. No reason was given. When Amin arrived in Dubai, he met with the chief of the MI6 station for the United Arab Emirates. This time he was cautioned to stay away from one of the financial institutions on his list, Habib Bank. The bank had been used by Tahir to send payments to Siddiqui. Again, Amin was not told why.
With the help of a Dubai police lieutenant, Alwari Essam, Amin went ahead with his investigation and the young customs agent turned up evidence that SMB Computers and other companies were involved in the Khan network. When Amin discussed the information with the MI6 chief in Dubai, he had the distinct impression that no one wanted to see his investigation proceed. A few days later, the documents he had found implicating several companies and at least one bank in the network were confiscated by British intelligence. Amin was ordered back to London because the intelligence officials said they had uncovered threats against his life. “These people are dangerous,” the MI6 officer in Dubai warned him. “They have assets in the local mafia they use for smuggling. They won’t hesitate to kill people.”
The threats against Amin were most likely manufactured. The truth was that senior MI6 officials back at Thames House in London wanted him out of the way. The young British customs investigator had stumbled into the ongoing intelligence operation monitoring Khan’s network. Desert Electrical Equipment Factory was not just another Khan supplier; it was the company set up by Urs Tinner. And Tinner was not just another supplier, either. He had been rectuited by the CIA, in cooperation with the British.
Several months before Amin got on the case, Jim Kinsman had arrived in Dubai, armed with a plan to enlist Urs Tinner. The circumstances surrounding the recruitment of Tinner are murky. Kinsman had to weigh the role he might play in bringing down the Khan network against the dangers of permitting Tinner to continue trafficking in nuclear technology. He would adjust the ledger as he went along, but from the outset the CIA case officer was convinced that overlooking Tinner’s criminal activities was worth the opportunity to go after the network.
Tinner later acknowledged that he started working for the CIA in late 1999, but he refused to discuss how he was recruited. One version of the recruitment, provided by a former senior CIA official and confirmed by an outsider, was that Kinsman had used allegations that Tinner had engaged in criminal behavior in France to blackmail him into working for the CIA. A senior Swiss official discounted that story, claiming instead that Tinner was turned into a paid informant after being threatened with the exposure of his role in the Khan network. Either way, there appears to have been an element of blackmail, which is one of the most delicate recruitment methods. In the jargon of the espionage world, it’s called a “coerced recruitment,” and its fruits are always suspect because the case officer can never be certain of the asset’s loyalties.
CIA operatives assigned to the agency’s base in Dubai had assembled a picture of Tinner’s daily routine. The agents had watched him shuttle between Tahir’s office in the Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone and his own nearby office at Desert Electrical, where he was beginning to train workers for the planned centrifuge plant. At the end of each day, Tinner still stopped by the bar at one of the hotels to unwind before the drive to Ajman.
One evening Kinsman waited patiently in a hotel bar until his quarry entered. When Tinner sat down, the CIA officer took the seat next to him. Introducing himself, the American started what seemed at first to be a casual conversation. Eventually, according to one account of the recruitment, Kinsman got to the point, telling his companion that he knew Tinner had potential problems with law enforcement that could land him in jail. The American alluded to vague criminal charges in France. Tinner had no idea what this stranger was talking about but he was too frightened to stop listening. Perhaps, Kinsman suggested, he could use his position with the American government to resolve those legal problems with the French. In exchange, perhaps Tinner would share some information about his work in Dubai with the American. Kinsman did not identify himself as a CIA officer; he left his affiliation vague. The vagueness left Tinner room to avoid confronting the fact that he was betraying Khan and even his father. Only later, after his spy was in too deep to get out, would Kinsman let Tinner know that he had been turned into a CIA asset.
Uncertain of the American’s true purpose, Tinner was worried by the approach, but he was not necessarily surprised. He understood that his work for Khan was far outside what anyone would regard as normal business channels. He was aware that his father had long helped Pakistan’s nuclear program, and he had heard the elder Tinner’s rationalizations that he was not doing anything that was actually illegal. Urs would later maintain that he did not understand that his work in Dubai involved developing a nuclear weapon for Libya, but he knew that he was operating on the dark side of the ledger. His surprise was that the approach had come from an American, not Britain’s MI6, the agency that Tinner had expected to hear from. He tried to extricate himself from the uncomfortable situation with Kinsman several times that first night. Each time he stood to leave, Kinsman persisted and persuaded Tinner to sit back down. Finally Tinner said he would think about the offer and accepted an invitation for dinner a few nights later at the same hotel.
At the dinner, the American sweetened his proposal, saying he might be willing to pay for the right information. Several conversations took place at various hotels in the following days, all part of the slow seduction of Urs Tinner. Eventually Tinner agreed to begin providing information on shipments coming into Dubai for the Khan network. In exchange, Kinsman would pay him small sums in cash.
The work of an intelligence service in any democracy requires maintaining a delicate balance between openness and secrecy, a bargain between the public’s right to know and its need for protection. The balance is never more delicate than when the security service has to work with criminals to catch people deemed to be a bigger threat. Striking a deal for information with someone involved in illegal activities requires weighing the costs of allowing them to remain in business against the value of the intelligence they are providing. In Kinsman’s world, Tinner and his family were less important than bringing down Khan and his entire network. If he needed to absolve Urs of wrongdoing to get the evidence required to shut down the network, so be it.
From their first days at the Farm, the secretive Virginia facility where the CIA trains young recruits, those determined to join the agency’s covert arm get careful instruction in how to develop potential sources. They learn about the laws they must follow and the ones they can ignore. The instructors stress that loyalty is essential and that it takes many forms. The first loyalty is to their country and the second is to their colleagues in the agency. But they are also instilled with an obligation to be loyal to the people they recruit. As unappetizing as it can be under some circumstances, loyalty is a two-way street in these sorts of transactions.
Kinsman expected Tinner to provide him with accurate information, though he was savvy enough to know that he would have to corroborate everything possible and that he could never count on being told everything. In exchange for his help, Tinner received absolution from Kinsman and the promise of future protection.
“Once they have signed on with the CIA, they are absolved of all past wrongdoing and the case officer is committed to doing everything he can to protect them,” said a veteran CIA officer, explaining the bond formed between case officer and asset. “How could you ever recruit someone else if you didn’t protect your recruits? These aren’t nuns or choir boys, but you have to absolve them.” There is pragmatic honor in this code of loyalty. There is also a danger: The case officer can become hooked on the flow of information, entranced by the inside view, loyal to a fault when it comes to protecting his asset. This is more than an individual threat; it is systemic. Locked in a secretive, tribal world, the case officer runs the risk of losing sight of the larger goal of espionage, which is translating intelligence into timely action. An operational success can still end in a policy failure.
Kinsman recruited his new inside source at an opportune moment in the long history of the Khan network. The Libyan project required a dramatic expansion in business. The CIA would have an inside track on everything that transpired in the coming weeks and months. Or so the case officer hoped.
EVEN WITH TINNER’S ARRIVAL, plans to start the factory to build Libya’s centrifuges in Dubai were going poorly. Tahir leased several warehouses and they were filling up with equipment—centrifuge prototypes from Pakistan, lathes from Spain, a specialized furnace from Japan, electronics from Turkey, specialty metals from Singapore, valves and pumps from Switzerland and Germany. Some of the equipment was destined for Libya, some for Iran, and some remained in the warehouses for use in the centrifuge factory. The problem was recruiting enough skilled technicians to get the plant up and running. Shipping sensitive technology into and out of Dubai was easy enough. The government’s own website bragged that its customs laws were written to enable “traders to transit their shipments… without any hassles.” But most of the workers from developing countries who made up the city-state’s workforce were unskilled laborers and training them was proving difficult for Urs.
Tinner set up the training operation at his warehouse at Desert Electrical. There were two types of students. The largest group was the foreign workers who would be trained to run the initial centrifuge manufacturing plant in Dubai. They were Sri Lankans, Filipinos, Indians, Pakistanis—the floating mass of unskilled workers from developing countries who search for work throughout the Middle East. These workers were taught to use basic machinery to cut pieces of steel, mill the metal, and shape it on lathes; the goal at the start was to create nothing more complicated than a small steel box. Once those simple steps were mastered, the plan was for the workers to move on to the more elaborate work of turning out precision parts for centrifuges. But the workers from Dubai were more accustomed to cleaning offices or sweeping streets, and they proved incapable of accomplishing even the basic jobs. Over several months Tinner was unable to develop even a skeleton crew for a proposed centrifuge manufacturing plant.
The second group of students was smaller and fared better overall. The Libyan government had sent several groups of men with some technical experience to Tinner’s workshop. There he taught them the same basic steps so that they could one day supervise the centrifuge production, either in Dubai or at a factory in Libya. The Libyans had more experience than the previous trainees, but Tinner still had difficulty teaching them to master the complexities of precision machine tools, so the project lagged.
Khan had a reputation at his laboratory in Pakistan as a demanding taskmaster. Despite his affection for Tinner, he was growing impatient with the delays. Tinner explained repeatedly that the foreign workers had no aptitude for even the most basic mechanical work. Finally Khan agreed that Dubai might not work as the location of his centrifuge plant. For a short time the focus shifted to Turkey. The education and skill levels of workers there were higher. And the network already had a strong Turkish connection through Cire and Alguadis, the owners of two large Turkish electronics businesses. The Turks agreed to look for a location and the skilled workers required for the plant. But Turkey was a NATO member with a sharp-eyed military and much tougher border controls than Dubai, so the idea was abandoned before it got far.
Whether Tinner fully understood what sort of work he was engaged in remains unclear. He would later claim that he wasn’t sure about the final use of the tons of sensitive technology coming into Dubai. He was excluded from the strategy sessions conducted by Khan when he was in Dubai, and explained that Tahir kept him in the dark about the destinations of some of the equipment. Mostly, he said, he concentrated on the narrow task of manufacturing the same sorts of components he had produced for his father over the years.
There is plenty of evidence to cast doubt on the notion that Tinner was fully in the dark, both about his work with Khan and his work with Kinsman. After all, his father had collaborated with Khan since the beginning of his nuclear black market. Another obvious clue that the work was not legitimate was the shroud of secrecy wrapped around almost every aspect of the project. Shipping invoices were routinely falsified and even the most apparently innocuous documents were shredded. Tahir was constantly telling Tinner to avoid drawing attention to their work. For instance, one day Tahir arrived in the office with a stack of documents that he wanted scanned into the computer. Saying he could not entrust the work to a clerk, he told Tinner to help. As he fed documents into the scanner, Tinner noticed that some of the designs were not related to any kind of centrifuge he had seen before. “It’s logical that you end up seeing things, documents which you start to read and which are bizarre,” he said later. His suspicions were deepened when Tahir transferred the scanned material to a hard drive and ordered Tinner to shred the originals. On many occasions, Tinner said, he found himself working from paper blueprints from which Tahir had carefully trimmed anything that would have identified their origin.
After several weeks of meetings with Kinsman, Tinner must have suspected strongly that he was dealing with someone from the Central Intelligence Agency. Kinsman always paid for their expensive meals, which tended to be eaten in the city’s most lavish hotels and restaurants. He routinely paid Tinner small amounts of cash—five hundred dollars here, a thousand dollars there—for passing on information about the shipments to and from Dubai or for handing over names of some of the principal network participants and the companies that were helping get the Libyan project up and running.
Kinsman unfailingly treated his spy with respect. He thanked him for his work and praised his bravery. Tinner was tacitly grateful for the guidance, believing that he was being taken seriously for the first time. In one of their conversations, Tinner mentioned the row of black cases in Khan’s apartment to his American friend. The spymaster perked up. This could be important. Kinsman pressed his spy: How many were there? Were they locked? Could he find out what was inside them? Tinner thought for a minute. He said the cases were locked and he wasn’t sure how to get into them.
The chance to get into the black cases arrived a few weeks later. Khan was in Dubai and he summoned Tinner to the apartment. The Pakistani used one of the bedrooms as an office, and it contained a copy machine along with a computer and file cabinets. This particular day, Khan asked Tinner to take some documents out of some of the black cases in the living room and copy them for him. It was a menial task, but Tinner was one of the few people Khan could trust to do it. The Pakistani spun the combinations and opened several of the cases, withdrawing stacks of documents for Tinner to copy. Khan said he was leaving for a couple of hours and he hoped that Tinner could finish the task by the time he returned.
Tinner faced a stomach-churning task. He had no idea what would happen if Khan caught him copying documents for himself. Perhaps Tinner would be killed. There were stories that a North Korean spy had been shot to death in Khan’s own backyard in Islamabad. The Pakistani scientist also had a nasty temper, which Tinner had seen directed at Tahir on more than one occasion.
As the episode was explained later by someone involved in the investigation of the network, Tinner worked frenetically to copy the documents—making two copies of each page, instead of the one for which Khan had asked. As he worked, he strained to hear over the whir of the copy machine, listening for Khan’s return, thankful that the apartment was at the end of a long marble hallway, that the door key made a loud grating noise every time it was turned. Tinner was good with his hands and he worked fast. By the time Khan got back, Tinner had stacked one set of copies on the desk in the room. The other set had been tucked into his own bag.
Later Tinner met with Kinsman and turned over the copies he had made. The documents told a story well beyond the work being done for Libya. Some of them provided new information about Iran’s nuclear program. One thick stack contained the complete plans for converting processed uranium ore into uranium hexafluoride, the feedstock for centrifuges. Other papers contained blueprints for centrifuges themselves, floor plans for massive halls for the cascades of centrifuges required to transform uranium into the fissile material used in weapons. Tinner may not have understood everything that he pulled from the cases, but the cache represented an unprecedented window into the extent of the assistance that Khan and his accomplices were providing not only to Libya but also to Iran. Kinsman paid his spy and returned to Washington with his treasure.
Back in the offices of the Counter-Proliferation Division at the CIA, the intelligence was plugged into a massive and growing matrix of suppliers around the world who were contributing to the illicit nuclear network. The flow of intelligence was increasing concerns at the CIA and White House about the progress Iran was making toward a nuclear weapon. President George W. Bush was receiving regular updates on the Iranian program through the daily presidential briefing from senior CIA officials. But no one could tell him how close they were getting. Regardless, even with the arrival of this new intelligence, Iran never got the full attention of the president and his top national security advisers. They were engaged in what they believed was far more pressing business: They were planning for the invasion of Iraq, where they believed Saddam Hussein was working on his own nuclear weapon.