The Tinners had been receiving relatively small payments from Kinsman for several months. The total for all three of them didn’t amount to much more than pocket change for the CIA, a few hundred thousand dollars at the most—Urs had received the most because he had been working with the agency for the longest and had taken the biggest risks. As he prepared for the lengthy debriefing session, Kinsman knew he would have to come up with more cash. The stakes were high. The long pursuit of Khan and his accomplices was nearing its conclusion. The CIA was willing to pay a substantial sum to its spies to try to get as much intelligence as possible to close down every known element of the network. If action were taken against the nuclear black market without identifying all of the individuals and companies involved, there was a high risk that they would start up again in some new iteration.
The plan called for using a CIA front company to launder the first large payment to the Tinners. The company was called Big Black River Technologies, and it came complete with an address, phone number, website, and business cards for its phony employees. According to the cover story, the company was located in Washington, D.C., at 1825 I Street Northwest, an office building that occupied a full city block not far from the White House. Listings for the company had been inserted in various business directories and its website, www.bigblackriver.com, boasted that it provided “top quality products and services” to the aerospace and defense industries. Anyone who went looking for the office, however, would find an empty suite and mailroom clerks who said the company had never received a letter or a package.
A million dollars was wired to Traco Group International, a subsidiary of his Swiss company that Marco had set up on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. The transfer was made on June 21, the day after the midnight intrusion at his apartment. As part of the cover story, Marco had signed a fictional contract with Big Black River Technologies. The contract claimed that the Tinners were selling the rights for manufacturing vacuum equipment and proprietary information about the valves and other devices. The two agents who signed on behalf of Big Black River used cover names, W. James Kinsman and Sean D. Mahaffey.
The CIA has a long history of using fronts, called proprietary companies, to support secret operations. The phony companies work as mail drops, provide apparently legal means of making payments to assets, and support false identities for the CIA’s most clandestine frontline agents, who work without diplomatic immunity and are known as “nonofficial cover officers,” or NOCs. During the Vietnam War, the CIA set up an entire airline, Air America, to ferry shipments and troops for the secret war in Laos. At one point more than three hundred pilots and mechanics were working for the CIA’s secret airline in Laos and Thailand. Later, after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the agency established dozens of front groups around the world to arrange flights for detainees in the war on terror and to run the “black” prisons where many of them were tortured.
Most fronts are more prosaic. In 1994, the Counter-Proliferation Division had established a company called Brewster Jennings & Associates to provide cover for NOCs working in Europe. Its address was an elegant downtown office building in Boston and it had a listing under Dun & Bradstreet, the business credit agency. But the company was nothing more than a post office box and a telephone number connected to an answering machine. One of the NOCs who used Brewster Jennings & Associates was the case officer Valerie Plame.
Recruited by the agency straight out of Pennsylvania State University in 1985, Plame had trained as a covert officer in the Directorate of Operations and was eventually posted to Athens, a dangerous assignment for a CIA officer. In 1975, the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch, was gunned down outside his home there by the terrorist organization known as 17 November. It was the beginning of a campaign by the group to target American and British intelligence agents and diplomats. In Athens, Plame posed as a State Department employee and her job was to spot and recruit spies for the agency. In the early 1990s, she moved deeper into the clandestine world when she began working under nonofficial cover, the most secretive of the agency’s frontline officers. NOCs do not pretend to work for the U.S. government and, if arrested, they face jail because they do not have diplomatic immunity. It is a high-wire act, only for the smartest and most unflappable of officers. By 1997, Plame had joined the Counter-Proliferation Division, where she posed as a businesswoman working for the energy consulting firm Brewster Jennings & Associates.
In the summer of 2003, Plame was gathering information on Iraq’s supposed nuclear weapons program when her world was turned upside down. Her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written an opinion piece in The New York Times accusing the Bush administration of twisting intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the Iraq War. The White House retaliated with a whispering campaign to reporters aimed at undercutting Wilson’s credibility by exposing his wife as a CIA officer. On July 10, the conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote a column identifying Plame as a CIA officer, effectively ending her ability to work undercover and endangering her and the sources she had developed over the years. The incident eventually led to an investigation by a special prosecutor and the conviction of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, for perjury and obstruction of justice for his role in revealing Plame’s CIA role.
The CIA was at the heart of the debacle over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The episode showed that the CIA had become deeply politicized during the Bush administration, damaging its credibility and threatening its independence. The accusations angered agency veterans, who were determined to demonstrate that the CIA still had a significant role to play in American foreign policy. Jim Kinsman was trying to bring home the kind of victory that might repair the agency’s tarnished reputation. His ultimate success depended heavily on squeezing every possible piece of intelligence from the Tinners. And in case the Tinners were not forthcoming, Kinsman and his colleagues had developed an insurance plan.
For the meeting with the Tinners, Kinsman chose Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein, the tiny principality of about sixty square miles bordered on its west by Switzerland and on the east by Austria, for the meeting with the Tinner family. The city sits along the Rhine River and the royal family lives in a medieval castle high above its restored houses and quiet streets. The location was selected because it was outside Switzerland and convenient for the Tinners, who lived just a few miles across the border.
The strategy was straightforward. Kinsman brought a team of CIA experts and a nuclear weapons specialist from the national laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Vaduz for the meetings. The sessions would continue until the Americans were satisfied that they knew the tiniest details of Khan’s network and precisely what had been sold to Libya, Iran, and anyplace else the ring had done business. To persuade the Tinners to talk, Kinsman had the authority from his superiors within the Directorate of Operations to pay them a million dollars. It was an unusually large amount of money to offer to assets in one installment, but the stakes made it seem like a worthwhile investment.
Kinsman had met Friedrich and Marco several times since Friedrich agreed to work for the agency back in December. In January, Kinsman had spent two days eating, drinking, and skiing with both men at a resort in Innsbruck, Austria. Those initial sessions had been not so much to gather information as to make the Tinners comfortable with him. In meetings with Marco alone in March and May, Kinsman had worked hard to obtain useful intelligence from his new spy. But the early meetings were only the preliminaries to Vaduz. On the morning of June 16, when the Tinners drove the short distance to a quiet hotel in Vaduz, the intention was to keep them there as long as necessary to extract as much information as possible.
Despite their seeming cooperation, there were concerns that the Tinners might not be divulging all of their secrets; after all, the family had been involved in deceptive trafficking in nuclear-related technology for three decades. So Kinsman and his colleagues had hatched a strategy to verify what they were being told and to try to confirm that nothing was being withheld. As they sat in the hotel the first day, the CIA case officer explained that part of what the agency required for its million dollars was free access to their records. The payment would be conditioned on the CIA conducting a thorough search of the records of the family’s dealings with Khan and the rest of the network. To protect the Tinners down the road, the search would be disguised as a burglary in case the Swiss authorities later discovered that the family had broken Swiss law by cooperating with American intelligence. Even with permission from the Tinners, the CIA would be breaking Swiss law. Discovery would lead to a huge scandal, and possibly even criminal charges against the agents who were operating without diplomatic immunity. Kinsman stressed the need for secrecy to the Tinners. In the unlikely event the CIA team was discovered, the Tinners were admonished to say they knew nothing of what the Americans were doing. The Tinners had no choice if they wanted to get their million dollars and remain under the protection of the CIA.
On the night of June 20, while the Tinners were tucked away in the hotel in Vaduz, a six-person team broke into Traco’s offices. Along with Kinsman and four other CIA agents, the team included the nuclear expert from Oak Ridge who had been participating in the debriefing sessions. The team members copied the contents of the office computer and photographed documents from the file cabinets. The intrusion netted a fair amount of information, but the decision was made to take another step, one that might not have been disclosed to the Tinners.
The following night, the same six people broke into Marco’s apartment in the holiday village of Jenins. The search at Marco’s apartment yielded a far bigger cache. In the living room of the apartment, the Oak Ridge expert paused to examine some of the material on the computers. What he saw was enough to conclude that they contained potentially dangerous designs for nuclear weapons. As the team scoured the apartment and the computers, thousands of files and e-mails were downloaded onto portable devices, which the two technical specialists on the team immediately carried back to Langley for detailed evaluation.
For reasons that have yet to be explained, instead of taking the computers and these highly dangerous files, Kinsman and his colleagues left everything behind. They did so even though they had seen enough from the preliminary examination to understand that the computers contained some of the most sensitive proliferation information imaginable. There is no rational explanation for leaving the material in place. The job of the CIA, and of the agents who broke into Tinner’s apartment, was to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. So why leave blueprints for nuclear weapons in an unsecure location, in the hands of known traffickers? Even the fleeting first glance at the documents had confirmed the fears that the Tinners had not been telling the CIA everything. It was a conclusion that would be even clearer after the copies were evaluated by experts back at Langley.
THE DEBRIEFINGS CONTINUED FOR FOUR more days, but the investigation’s momentum had shifted to Langley. There, analysts were poring over the thousands of computer files, e-mails, documents, and CDs that the burglars had copied from Marco’s computers. Many of the e-mails were written in code and work was still going on to crack the system because the Tinners had not been asked to provide the CIA with the keys to the encryption. But the files had already yielded important information, some of which the Tinners had neglected to mention. As expected, the files contained the designs for two types of centrifuges that Khan had stolen from Urenco in the 1970s and developed in Pakistan, called the P-1 and P-2. The CIA already knew that he had provided prototypes and designs for both types to Iran and Libya. But the analysts were surprised to find that the computers also held designs for a third, more advanced centrifuge known as the G-4. The version bundled four of the slender cylinders together, providing a faster, more efficient means of enriching uranium. Nuclear experts from the national weapons labs and the CIA analysts had no idea that Khan possessed plans for this type of centrifuge, and the discovery caused a stir. The basic model was similar to the designs for the two types of centrifuges he had stolen from Urenco. The best guess was that Khan had also gotten away with an even more advanced version, which was under development at Urenco at the time. Somehow Khan had managed to keep it secret for nearly thirty years. The discovery in Switzerland raised a number of troubling possibilities, including the prospect that the G-4 design had been sold to Iran and was under development at a secret facility there. If that were true, the Iranians could be closer than the outside world knew to enriching enough uranium to build its first nuclear bomb.
Even more troubling than the ghost centrifuge were indications that centrifuge components and manufacturing equipment were being siphoned off for an unknown fourth customer. As the CIA analysts evaluated the files taken from the Tinner computers, they confirmed that the greatest danger in the espionage world is often not what you know but what you don’t know. It was apparent that, despite years of monitoring by the CIA and MI6, the Khan network may have provided nuclear equipment and know-how to a still-unknown customer.
Some of the files contained invoices for shipments that had escaped the monitoring by American intelligence—and that the Tinners had failed to mention in any of their many debriefings. In fact, no one back at Langley could be certain that there were not multiple additional buyers, possibly including other countries, perhaps even a terrorist organization with deep financial resources like Al Qaeda. As the analysts reconstructing the transactions from the computers built their new portrait of the Khan network, they found that several thousand centrifuge components had disappeared. The stuff could have gone almost anywhere. Outposts of the network were strung across the globe, from the centrifuge factory in Malaysia to an engineering firm in South Africa where veterans of that country’s nuclear program were at work on the Libyan project, from the high-tech operations in Switzerland and Germany to the hermit kingdom of North Korea, which was also contributing to the long shopping list. The Tinners were only one part of the network with their own business operations in Switzerland, Dubai, Italy, Singapore, and Russia.
The banking records on the computers hinted at the sums involved—tens of millions of dollars passing through accounts in Dubai, Zurich, Liechtenstein, and even Macao, the semiautonomous Chinese city. There was still more information on the computers that Marco or someone had encrypted, waiting for the experts at the National Security Agency to crack the code.
Then there was the matter of the designs for nuclear weapons, which had popped up on the hard drive of the laptop that belonged to Urs that Kinsman had found on the closet shelf. The first impression of the nuclear expert inside Marco’s apartment was accurate: These were blueprints for a sophisticated nuclear warhead. The plans appeared to be incomplete, but there was no way of knowing whether a more complete set existed somewhere else within the Khan network. Even the incomplete designs were deemed dangerous enough that experts from Los Alamos and Oak Ridge were summoned to Washington to examine them. The verdict was that they were portions of the design for a Pakistani nuclear warhead. Their origin was confirmed by the initials on each document, “PAB,” which the analysts concluded stood for “Pakistani Atomic Bomb.” The same hard drive also contained a more complete set of blueprints for a second nuclear device, one that experts said appeared to be from a 1960s-era Chinese warhead, which the CIA knew Khan had sold to Libya already. But the greatest concern was the Pakistani design; it was more sophisticated and small enough to fit on missiles already in the Iranian arsenal. There were two pressing questions: Did more of these designs exist on other computers connected with the network and had others already received copies?
The stakes had been high from the start. But now, the prospect of advanced nuclear weapons designs floating freely around the Internet made it more vital than ever to track down every element of the Khan network before moving in for the kill.
The new peek inside the Khan network was causing grave concerns within the CIA. They thought they had monitored the technology that the Pakistani was selling very closely, particularly in recent years. But the contents of the Tinners’ computers were shaking that confidence. In addition to the bomb plans from the Pakistani arsenal, the computers contained designs for the G-4 centrifuge, which the CIA had no idea Khan was peddling, along with evidence that significant amounts of equipment had vanished. Most of the alarming disclosures were contained on the laptop that belonged to Urs Tinner, who had traveled widely.
In a later interview, Urs acknowledged that he had made copies on his personal computer of virtually every piece of information about the network’s business that passed through his hands in Dubai and Malaysia. But he said that he had not bothered to read much of what he had copied, adding that he knew nothing of any designs for nuclear weapons. “There were many documents on my computer that I did not know because they were copies of Tahir’s files,” he said. “I copied everything from Tahir and everything that I gave to the third party. I didn’t read it all. I may have read the names, but I was not that interested and my English is not good enough to read all that.” (The phrase “third party” was a reference by Tinner to the CIA; though he acknowledged working with the Americans, he refused to use the agency’s formal name or discuss his relations with Kinsman or other individuals.)
At CIA headquarters, the contents of the computers in Jenins raised serious questions about what else may have gone to Iran, Libya, and North Korea—or to an unknown customer. For some within the agency, the decision to let the network operate for this long was beginning to look like a bigger gamble than anyone realized. Clearly more technology had been set loose than anyone had known. And there was no way to know where some of it might have wound up. Certainly American and Israeli intelligence knew at the time that Iran was working on a design for a nuclear warhead. Had Khan or someone else in the network sold the Iranians the blueprints from Pakistan? It was well-known that Khan had provided the centrifuge designs and components that jump-started Iran’s uranium enrichment program in the late 1980s. Why wouldn’t Khan have sold them the rest of what they needed to build an atomic bomb? No one would be able to answer that question until Khan was arrested and interrogated.
The new evidence demanded urgent action. But closing down Khan completely was still not a sure thing. In the years since Pakistan joined the world’s nuclear powers, Khan had become a revered and influential figure in his homeland. Persuading any Pakistani leader to arrest the man known as “the father of the Islamic bomb” would be a tall order. When it came to the current leader, the military dictator Pervez Musharraf, it was a particularly big request. Musharraf was increasingly unpopular in Pakistan, where he was seen by many as a puppet of the American government in its war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The U.S. invasion of Iraq a few months earlier had ratcheted up anti-American fervor in Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world. It would take a rock-solid case against Khan to force Musharraf to risk further wrath from his own people by arresting a national hero. Finally, the Americans did not have unlimited leverage over Musharraf. The United States may have been providing billions of dollars in military assistance to Pakistan to keep the country on its side in the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, which had hunkered down in the lawless tribal belt of northwestern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan, but the sense in many quarters was that the United States needed Pakistan more than Pakistan needed the United States. Even if Washington wanted to force Musharraf to act against Khan, it might not be able to do so.
Along with the potential resistance from Musharraf, the agency was concerned about whether it could force Colonel Kaddafi to abandon his dream of possessing nuclear weapons. He had already spent tens of millions of dollars buying equipment from Khan’s network, much of which was sitting in crates in warehouses around Tripoli. The CIA’s nuclear weapons experts thought it was unlikely that Libya could build a weapon for many years, but Kaddafi had not survived more than three decades in power by being a pushover. He would have to be convinced that relinquishing his nuclear ambitions was in his best interests.
Over the years, the debate within the CIA and other branches of the U.S. government had focused on when to pull the plug on the Khan network. The step could have been taken on any number of occasions, and some members of the intelligence community and other agencies had argued for taking action sooner because they were alarmed by the growing reach of the black market. The discussion began during the second Clinton administration, when U.S. intelligence began taking Iran’s nuclear ambitions seriously and finally understood the connection to Khan. It continued into the early years of the Bush administration.
No matter which administration was arguing, the debate was over the significance of what they did not know. Some within the CIA and others from different government agencies contended that the Khan network should be allowed to continue until they understood its full parameters. Others inside government were more concerned that a country secretly building a nuclear weapon might buy the technology required to put it over the finish line while the United States waited to get more information.
“We began talking about what to do about Khan almost from the beginning of the administration,” said Bolton, the chief arms control official under Bush. “I would characterize the debate as between views of what to do. One view was, we need to watch this and learn more about it and find out where all its tentacles reach and we shouldn’t take action prematurely. The opposing view was, this is very serious, we don’t live in a perfect world, and we have to stop this as soon as we can. For that side, it means acting against what we knew, so we don’t lose track of elements that, by definition, we don’t know about.”
In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, former CIA director George Tenet described the conundrum facing the Bush administration in mid-2003. He said that taking action earlier against Khan “might have dealt a temporary setback to Khan’s scheme but would not have prevented it from springing up again somewhere else…. We had the goods on A. Q. Khan and his cohorts and we had reached a point where we had to act, but there were still some important matters to resolve.”
Not all of the pressure to act came from within the U.S. government. MI6 had played a key role in uncovering information about the network and British agents had been involved in the initial negotiations with the Libyans. In fact, not long after the discovery of Khan’s mega-deal with Libya, the British intelligence service had pressed the Americans to move immediately to close down the network. Senior M16 officers worried that too much highly sensitive information had leaked already, creating an urgent need to act. Despite the new threat, those who argued that they needed more time to gather more information carried the day. But pressure was mounting to take action—the more the CIA learned about the operation, the more concerned even the doubters became about the advisability of allowing it to operate longer. The discovery of the Pakistani nuclear weapon designs on Tinner’s hard drive reinforced the urgency.
WITH THE NEW PARTNERSHIP BOUGHT and paid for, the Vaduz debriefings ended on June 25. Friedrich and Marco drove home to Switzerland while Urs headed back to work in Malaysia. He left with strict instructions from his contacts to gather as much information as possible in the coming weeks, and plans were made for a follow-up meeting the next month in Singapore. Before his departure, Urs received a symbol of his significance to the CIA. Kinsman provided him with a code name and a telephone number in northern Virginia. The arrangement was straightforward: Urs would call the number, identify himself by his code name, and ask to speak to Kinsman. The call would trigger a personal meeting or sometimes a follow-up telephone call. The CIA uses the system with vetted sources worldwide, maintaining more than five hundred dedicated telephone numbers at headquarters in Langley to handle the calls. By using only cover names and by not having to leave a message, callers minimize the possibility of unfriendly governments overhearing sensitive information over the phone lines. The phones at the other end of the five hundred numbers are answered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, by clerks who match the caller’s name with the name of the person to whom he asks to speak. A match triggers a response, according to the prearranged code established between the case officer and his asset.
On July 16, Kinsman and one of his CIA colleagues, a counter-proliferation expert named Sharon who worked in the Vienna station, met with Urs in Singapore. Tinner insisted on meeting outside Malaysia because Tahir seemed to be growing more suspicious of him. The Sri Lankan had insisted on cutting off markings that linked technical drawings to Khan’s operation in Pakistan before turning them over to Tinner. Tahir also tried to monitor the technical work that Tinner did in the factory, but he lacked the expertise to understand what was going on there. The fears might seem small taken individually, but as they built up over the months, Tinner was left struggling to control the strands of his double life even as the factory seemed to be humming along. He had a sense of always looking over his shoulder, wondering whether Tahir or someone else suspected he was a spy for the CIA. Later Tinner described the mental strain in physical terms, saying: “There was a physical stress in working as a spy. Working, always looking behind you to see who is coming, it makes you stronger.”
Singapore was a perfect location for the clandestine meeting. The SCOPE factory in Malaysia was buying lots of specialty metals from a supplier there, and Tinner had his own trading company in Singapore, too, giving plenty of reasons to travel there. During the meeting, Tinner provided a rundown on plans for another shipment of centrifuge parts to Libya. He said the shipment would be leaving early the next month and it was likely to contain as many as twenty-five thousand components. Some critical components in the shipment had been secretly sabotaged by Tinner, but the CIA still wanted to stop this batch of material before it got to Libya. At Kinsman’s urging, Tinner promised to provide as much detailed information as possible on the shipment.
As a potential bonus, Tinner said that Khan was planning to visit the factory in Malaysia on August 27. Khan wanted to see for himself how the production was progressing. Kinsman seized on the opportunity to record Khan discussing nuclear proliferation, exactly the kind of proof that would force Musharraf to act. They discussed having Tinner wear a concealed recorder to the meeting, but Tinner balked. As an alternative, Kinsman offered him a cellular telephone capable of recording conversations. Tinner took one look at the phone and knew it would not work. The model was at least five years old, and he was well-known for always carrying the latest mobile phone. “Tahir would say, what are you doing with that old thing?” Tinner told Kinsman. He refused to accept the CIA phone, saying he would find his own means of recording the meeting. Before Tinner left to return to Malaysia, Kinsman reminded him to press Khan for information about any unknown customers.
Tinner himself had pondered the existence of an unknown customer. Before the move to Malaysia, when Tahir had claimed to have sold off all the equipment in Dubai, Tinner wondered just where it might have gone. But Tinner said he had no idea whether there was another customer. His view of the network’s undertakings, while essential to the CIA, was relatively narrow. He was cut off from his family and, after moving to Malaysia, from any regular contact with Khan, too.
Kinsman continued to fill in as many gaps as possible in the agency’s knowledge of the Khan network through the other Tinners and additional intelligence assets. Shortly after Tinner returned to Malaysia, he sent Marco an encrypted e-mail instructing him to remind his brother to find out as much as possible about the unidentified customer. He also told Marco to have Urs question where Khan had gotten the two tons of uranium hexafluoride gas that he had supplied to Libya several months earlier. International supplies of the gas are limited and highly regulated, and the CIA could not figure out how the Pakistani scientist had come up with the material he had sold to Libya. Marco sent the message, instructing his brother to press “the boss” for any information about the unknown customer and the origin of the uranium gas in Libya. He was not worried that anyone who intercepted the message would have been able to decipher its contents. When it came to sensitive communications about their illicit business, the Tinners used an old-fashioned book cipher encryption system.
The method is simple and effective: The people corresponding with each other must have identical editions of the same book. The book forms what is called the key text. To an outsider, the message appears to be a random series of numbers. To the recipient, however, each number directs the reader to a specific page, line, and word in the book serving as the original text. Unscrambling the message can take some time for the recipient, but the Tinners generally kept their communications brief, often using only text messages between mobile telephones or short e-mails. The book they were using at the time was the newest thriller by John Grisham, The King of Torts.
Urs received his brother’s coded message while the factory outside Kuala Lumpur was making final preparations for the August shipment to Libya. The demands from Kinsman, especially the request to record his upcoming meeting with Khan, increased the pressure on Tinner. He discussed the strain in a 2009 interview on Swiss television. His description was instructive about his mind-set and actions as he prepared the shipment for Libya, which was scheduled to leave Kuala Lumpur for Dubai and then travel on to Libya aboard a German freighter called the BBC China. “I had identified the last delivery of the BBC China, the biggest cargo,” he told the interviewer, Swiss journalist Hansjuerg Zumstein. “I said to myself, we must prevent this material from reaching its destination.”
As the date approached for the shipment to leave the factory, Tinner was desperate to get as many details as he could. He knew that he needed to provide the name of the shipping line and to identify the containers as completely as possible. As the Swiss technician pondered his assignment, he realized that the best item he could pass to Kinsman would be a copy of the shipping invoice. It would list the precise route for the shipment and the registration numbers of the crates holding the centrifuge components. But Tinner had no business with a copy of the invoice. Tahir, already suspicious of his Swiss colleague, kept tight control over all the paperwork.
The opportunity arose when Khan contacted the factory and demanded a copy of the invoice for the upcoming shipment.
“We have to send an urgent fax about the shipment,” Tahir told Tinner. “Go tell the office lady.”
In the hierarchy of an East Asian office, it would have aroused suspicion if Tinner had volunteered to fax the invoice himself. But it was not suspicious for him to supervise the secretary while she sent an important fax to Khan in Dubai. As the secretary began to feed the papers into the fax machine, Tinner reached forward and pressed the “copy” button. He immediately swore loudly enough for everyone nearby to hear.
“Why are you copying?” he said to the woman. “You have to fax it.”
Tinner took the copy and threw it in the trash while the secretary faxed the originals to Khan.
A short time later, everyone in the office left for afternoon prayers. Tinner had only a few minutes, so he hurried back to the fax machine, retrieved the papers from the wastebasket, and folded them carefully into his pocket. Later he went to a public telephone shop and faxed the invoice to Kinsman at the CIA.
Tinner had taken a big risk. If he had been caught, Tahir’s suspicions would have been confirmed. At the very least, Tinner would have been fired. But in his mind, he would have faced more dire punishment. The result was a major intelligence coup that would make it far easier for the CIA to keep track of the crates that were soon leaving Malaysia.
Keeping track of the crates on their journey was essential, and there had been a spirited discussion between the CIA and Tinner over how to do so. Normal practice at SCOPE was to pack the crates in a single, large shipping container for the voyage. The CIA suggested that Tinner attach a small GPS beacon to the container during the loading process. He objected on two grounds. First, he said Tahir was too careful not to spot even a tiny device. Even if the locator escaped notice, Tinner said the crates would probably be transferred to another container when the ship arrived in Dubai. The counterproposal was to drop the beacon inside one of the crates. Again Tinner objected. “There would be no signal,” he said. “On the inside, it would be surrounded by metal.” In the end, the CIA would rely on observation, with the help of its eyes in the sky. Satellites would be tasked to track the shipment across the Indian Ocean.
On August 4, five crates labeled “agriculture parts” were loaded onto a freighter in Kuala Lumpur harbor. The forty-foot-long wooden containers were being shipped from SCOPE to Aryash Trading Company in Dubai, but that was not the final destination—and they did not contain agriculture parts. Instead, the massive crates contained roughly twenty-five thousand casings, pumps, tubes, flanges, and other parts, all manufactured to precise tolerances from high-strength aluminum and bound for warehouses in Libya. There the components would eventually be assembled into centrifuges for the clandestine enrichment plant. Two CIA agents watched as the ship left the port. Along its route, the vessel would be tracked by satellites through the Indian Ocean until it reached Dubai. There agents on the ground would be on hand to monitor the transfer to Aryash Trading and the subsequent loading onto a German-registered ship, the BBC China. Then the final leg of the journey would begin through the Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean Sea to Tripoli. If all went according to plan, the shipment would never reach Libya. At a point along its route that was still to be determined, the U.S. Navy would intercept the ship and remove the five wooden crates.
Back in June in Vaduz, Tinner had mentioned that Khan had taken two prototype rotors for the P-2 centrifuge from his stock in Pakistan and planned to use them for manufacturing the advanced version for Libya, and possibly Iran. The Malaysian factory had been manufacturing the more primitive P-1 model for the Libyans, but Tripoli was demanding that its enrichment plant be upgraded by stocking it with P-2s, which enriched uranium faster and more efficiently. One of the prototypes was still in a warehouse in Dubai, but the other one had been sent to Malaysia and work was under way to shift production to the advanced version. Once they were no longer necessary, Tahir told Tinner to destroy the rotors and to dispose of the remnants. Instead Tinner offered to sell both of the rotors to the CIA. He and Marco wanted another million dollars for them.
For Kinsman, getting hold of the rotors would accomplish two important tasks. First, it would allow the CIA’s scientists to examine the more advanced centrifuge, which they suspected had been supplied long ago to Iran. Second, and at least as important, it would keep the prototypes off the black market. But the CIA accountants, already alarmed at the amount of money going to the Tinners, balked at the price, especially for something the Tinners had acquired at no expense. The CIA officer sent Urs a message telling him, “The people who must approve such a large expenditure doubt whether your price has been sufficiently justified.” Urs and Marco cut their price in half, agreeing to take five hundred thousand dollars for the pair.
Jim Kinsman was riding high. He was on the brink of closing the biggest operation of his career, bringing down the world’s most dangerous nuclear proliferation ring, fulfilling that boyhood dream of stopping the bad guys from getting atomic bombs. And the icing on the cake was that Kinsman was headed to the White House. Soon after the ship carrying the five containers left Kuala Lumpur, with the plans in place to intercept the merchandise before it reached Tripoli, Kinsman had the rare opportunity to join Tenet in briefing President Bush about the impending victory over the Khan network. “Mr. President,” Kinsman said when he and Tenet met with Bush at the White House, “with the information we’ve just gotten our hands on—soup to nuts—about uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons design, we could make CIA its own nuclear weapons state.”
Bush had been kept up to date on the pursuit of the Khan network and the ongoing negotiations with the Libyans over giving up their nuclear program. Now he was being told that the CIA had collected enough intelligence about Khan—the existence of nuclear weapons plans, the hundreds of tons of material already in Libya, and the shipment that the CIA intended to intercept—to finally bring down the Pakistani scientist and the nuclear black market he had created.