As the ship from Kuala Lumpur was steaming through the Indian Ocean and nearing the conclusion of the first leg of its voyage in the Persian Gulf port of Dubai in early September 2003, A. Q. Khan arrived in Singapore, the city-state at the southern tip of the Malaysia peninsula. Singapore is a bustling international financial and technology center, the sort of place where the Pakistani scientist felt at home and blended in easily with the thousands of foreigners who work and visit there. Indeed, his network had purchased material from Singapore and he had visited several times, so he was familiar with the country. Khan had come from Islamabad to get an update on operations at his Malaysian centrifuge factory from his site manager, Urs Tinner. Khan had initially planned to meet Tinner and B. S. A. Tahir in Kuala Lumpur and visit the factory. But his normal security concerns had increased sharply in recent months after the disclosure of the secret Iranian nuclear facilities. After years of operating with a wink and a nod from various Pakistani military and civilian regimes, Khan also had seen his relationship with General Musharraf sour in recent months. Musharraf had ordered an investigation of Khan not long after the general took power in a coup in late 1999. The results showed that the scientist had accumulated wealth far beyond his government salary, and it had turned up indications that much of that money may have come from selling nuclear technology abroad. But Musharraf had decided not to risk taking on a man of Khan’s influence, so the only action he had taken was to demote the scientist and keep a closer eye on him. Khan was not sure that Musharraf would protect him if he were exposed by the international community, and he had been unsettled by the discovery of Iran’s secret nuclear program and the search of Tahir’s offices in Dubai. At the last minute he had changed his plans and told Tinner and Tahir to meet him in Singapore.
The late switch in locations made Tinner more nervous. He had complained a few weeks earlier to Kinsman about the risks that he was taking. The American had assured him that he would be protected. Now he was expected to record a meeting, the biggest risk he had taken. After rejecting the older cell phone that Kinsman had given him for recording his conversation with Khan, Tinner had bought a new one on his own. Using his mechanical expertise, he adjusted the inner workings so that the phone would record a conversation without the red “on” light signaling that it was even in use.
Telephone and e-mail communications among the participants in the network were always cryptic because of fears of eavesdroppers, so face-to-face meetings were crucial opportunities for Khan to determine how the various elements of his far-flung enterprise were working.
The meeting was in Khan’s suite at one of those Singapore’s and anonymous hotels. As he sat down in the room, Tinner pulled his cell phone from his pocket and put it on the coffee table. For the next hour or so, Tinner and Tahir provided the boss with a thorough rundown of production cycles at the factory, bringing him up to date on the latest shipment of components to Libya. Tinner sought Khan’s advice about the modifications under way to shift production from the old P-1 centrifuge to the more advanced P-2 version, which the Libyans were demanding for their factory. Tinner assured the Pakistani scientist that he could handle the changeover and that the workers at SCOPE were skilled enough to follow orders. The last thing the Swiss technician wanted was for Khan to send one of his people from Pakistan to go over the designs. A competent engineer might spot Tinner’s subtle sabotage.
Khan had an almost fatherly faith in the son of his longtime Swiss associate, so he was pleased to hear about the progress. For his part, Tinner struggled to control his nerves as he spoke with Khan about events that he knew would not happen. Tinner knew that the latest Libyan shipment would not arrive at its destination. He knew that the Americans were going to intercept the shipment somewhere along its journey to Tripoli, although he was not privy to exactly how the CIA would stop the shipment. He knew only that whatever they did would set in motion events that would shut down the network and rupture the bond that had been built over the years between Khan and the Tinner family. The CIA didn’t want to spring its trap on Khan’s network until after it had seized the cargo. The plan was to first use the evidence to convince the reluctant Moammar Kaddafi to abandon his clandestine nuclear program and turn over the information that could be used to indict Khan.
Even without knowing the details, Tinner knew his world would never be the same. Perhaps because of his anxiety, he could not bring himself to carry out Kinsman’s instructions to press Khan for information about the fourth customer. Every time he started to ask, Tinner changed his mind. He said good-bye to his patron without raising the issue. As he stood to go, Tinner stuck the cell phone he rigged as a recorder into his pocket.
On the short flight back to Malaysia, Tinner went over a mental checklist of steps he needed to take in preparation for his exit. Much as he wanted to run, he could not just pack up and return to Switzerland; Tahir continued to watch him carefully and any deviation from his routine would set off alarms within the network. Kinsman had given him explicit instructions to stay in place as long as possible. Tinner was trapped as the days passed and he waited for word that he could escape his double life. While he waited, he began carefully erasing records from his computer that could implicate him in the production of nuclear technology. Transferring the recording to a digital file, he sent it to Kinsman via e-mail from his home computer. Before the BBC China arrived in Tripoli, Marco had flown to Miami to meet with Kinsman and a colleague from the CIA. They had told him about the plan to seize the cargo, warning that word of the missing material would find its way to Khan quickly once the ship arrived in Tripoli. Marco was concerned that fingers would be pointed at his brother because Tahir was already suspicious of Urs. Kinsman proposed a two-part plan to deflect suspicion from Urs. First, he told Marco to tell his brother that he should complain to Khan and others about Tahir’s terrible security, accusing the Sri Lankan of attracting too much attention to the operation in Malaysia by his ostentatious lifestyle. Second, he said the CIA was already applying pressure on the Turkish government to go after the two Turkish electronics manufacturers involved in the Khan network. When word leaked about the Turkish investigation, it would be logical for Khan to assume that one of his partners there had turned on him.
Still, when Marco spoke with his brother after the Miami meeting, he warned Urs that his days were numbered and that he should get out of Malaysia as quickly as possible. Urs agreed, but before leaving he still needed to arrange a meeting to sell the P-2 rotor to the CIA.
As the net was beginning to close around Khan’s enterprise, a leak demonstrated the dangers of what could happen if the CIA did not sweep up the entire operation. In September, someone alerted Gotthard Lerch, a key player in the Libyan project, that the Americans had gotten wind of what was going on.
Lerch was a German immigrant to Switzerland who had done business with Khan and the Tinners for more than twenty years. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Lerch had worked for Leybold-Heraeus, the big German manufacturer of vacuum equipment used in centrifuge plants and other machinery. In 1983, the German authorities discovered that Lerch had engineered the sale of a million dollars’ worth of highly sophisticated valves and other components to Pakistan. The company pressured Lerch to leave, and he moved his operations to Switzerland. He set up his own business and lived in a tidy house in the village of Grabs, not far from Friedrich Tinner, and continued supplying Pakistan. In fact, some evidence indicated that Lerch had been involved in the network’s original sale of centrifuge designs, components, and other equipment to Iran in 1987. When the Libyan project was hatched a decade later, he was in the thick of the operation, working closely with the Tinners to coordinate production of components and get the right material delivered to Tripoli. He also provided the overall schematic designs for the Libyan centrifuge plant and found an engineering firm in South Africa to do some of the most complicated work.
Lerch’s involvement wasn’t a secret, at least to the intelligence services of the countries that cared about such things. Shortly before midnight on Valentine’s Day in 2002, someone had tacked a note on the door of his home in Grabs. Addressed formally to “Herr Lerch” and written in German, the note read: “After many years of watching your business efforts we are alarmed at your current plans to sell the P-2 design to Iran…. If you carry out these plans there will be grave consequences for all concerned. We have traveled many hours and come to your house to talk with you. Please take our advice! We will contact you soon to talk and perhaps to find a way to meet both your goals and ours.” It was signed, “Your sincere friends.”
Lerch did not take the threat seriously enough to report it to the police. His attitude changed sharply a month later when a second note was left at his house. “We are concerned,” said this one, which was in French. “Police report they have found a body in a very bad state and it has a very small brain and a badly damaged penis. We are concerned it is you.” This time he was frightened enough to go to the police and turn over copies of both notes.
The notes didn’t amount to much in the way of evidence. Whoever had made the threats had not followed up by contacting Lerch, so the local police turned the matter over to the federal police. A senior Swiss intelligence official was called into the case. He suspected Lerch was involved in trafficking in nuclear technology, but there was no evidence that he had violated Swiss export laws. The intelligence official speculated that the note had been left by either the CIA or the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. The Swiss official leaned toward the Israelis, who had a history of both threats and actions against people perceived as dangers to its security.
In September 2003, Lerch got a different kind of message. He was tipped off that a shipment of centrifuge components to Libya was about to be grabbed by the Americans. Only a small circle of people within the American and British governments knew of the impending seizure. The CIA had kept the knowledge tightly compartmentalized. Within the Bush administration, only the president, vice president, and national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, were aware of the details. The Tinners were among the very few outsiders who knew what was about to happen. It is possible that one of them alerted Lerch, as doing so would protect their long-standing business partner and keep their options open for the future. Lerch was concerned enough to pass on the warning to Gerhard Wisser, a German engineer who lived in South Africa and was overseeing work being done there for the Libyan project. Wisser later told German police that Lerch warned him that trouble was coming, urging him to destroy all evidence of the Libyan project, from the massive centrifuge piping system to computer designs provided by Khan and others. Wisser promised to comply. Destroying the extensive work that had been done in South Africa for the Libyan nuclear project would have eliminated a significant element in the Khan network before the CIA or any other authorities could have exposed it. The people involved there would have been able to cover their tracks, resurfacing later in another form.
When Wisser returned home after the warning from Lerch, he immediately destroyed three computer hard drives and other documentation related to the Libya project in the offices of his firm, Krisch Engineering, in a Johannesburg suburb called Vanderbijlpark. But when he tried to persuade one of his accomplices, Johan Meyer, to do the same, he ran into a wall. The huge system of pipes and valves to connect and operate the Libyan centrifuges was complete. It had been tested and dismantled for shipment. The system had been packed into eleven shipping containers that were each forty feet long and labeled “water purification” equipment, bound for Dubai and ultimately Tripoli. The containers were sitting in Meyer’s factory when Wisser arrived with orders to destroy everything. Send it to the smelter and melt it down, Wisser said. The instructional videos from Khan and a stack of design documents, he said, should be committed to “an Easter bonfire.” Meyer refused. He argued that he had not been paid his final installment of $150,000. Wisser promised to transfer the money to Meyer’s Swiss account out of his own pocket. Meyer still refused, and Wisser left, angry and worried. The following day he sent a text message to Meyer’s cellular phone. “The bird must be destroyed, feathers and all,” he wrote. “They have fed us to the dogs.”
SEVERAL THOUSAND MILES AWAY, THE endgame was approaching. On September 24, George Tenet met with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in the president’s suite at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City, where the Pakistani was attending a United Nations conference. It was what is called in intelligence parlance a “four-eyes” meeting, which meant that it was just Tenet and Musharraf, with no aides present. Tenet had brought copies of some of the designs and diagrams that had been obtained from the Tinner computers; they were clearly marked as property of the Pakistani government.
“A. Q. Khan is betraying your country,” Tenet said to Musharaff. “He has stolen some of your nation’s most sensitive secrets and sold them to the highest bidders. Khan has stolen your nuclear weapons secrets. We know this, because we stole them from him.”
Tenet tossed the blueprints on the table. Musharraf showed no emotion as he examined the documents. “Mr. President,” said Tenet, “if a country like Libya or Iran or, God forbid, an organization like Al Qaeda, gets a working nuclear device and the world learns it came from your country, I’m afraid the consequences would be devastating.”
After asking a few questions, Musharraf said, “Thank you, George, I will take care of this.”
But it would take more than a warning from the CIA director to prompt Musharraf to take action against an opponent of Khan’s stature, no matter what secrets he had sold.
In late September, the Malaysian ship carrying goods to Libya arrived in Dubai’s Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone. The crates marked “agricultural product” were never inspected and never left the free-trade zone. Instead they were offloaded and taken to storage in the warehouse of Aryash Trading Company. Two days later, the crates were back in the port and being lifted into the hold of the four-hundred-foot freighter BBC China. The ship was registered to a reputable chartering company based in Hamburg, Germany, and the captain had no idea he was being watched carefully by American spy satellites as the vessel steamed out the southern end of the Persian Gulf, through the Red Sea, and into the Suez Canal.
Midway through the canal, the BBC China captain was hailed on the ship’s radio by a dispatcher in Hamburg. A senior official with the company that owned the freighter wanted to talk to him. The captain was given a puzzling new itinerary: After leaving the canal and entering the Mediterranean Sea, he was told to make way to the southern Italian port of Taranto. It was an unusual order and no explanation was offered. What the captain did not know was that the German security service had contacted the ship’s owners and requested the course change. The ship’s owners were told the ship was the unwitting carrier of a load of nuclear technology. They were ordered to keep the cargo secret, even from the captain of the BBC China.
The BBC China was shadowed on its journey across the Mediterranean by two frigates from the U.S. Navy. As the ship neared the port on October 4, the captain was directed away from the commercial section to an out-of-way spot under the control of the Italian naval operation. There the vessel was met by American and Italian naval officers and several men in civilian clothes. The civilians had a list of exact crates that they wanted removed from the ship’s hold. The process took some time, but eventually the five forty-foot-long crates were lifted from the hold by one of the ship’s twin cranes and deposited on the dock. The BBC China was sent on its way with a warning to the captain and crew not to discuss the detour with anyone.
The containers were loaded onto military trucks and the convoy drove directly to a secure warehouse within the navy compound. There the CIA agents watched as the crates were opened, exposing thousands of components for centrifuges. Word of the huge coup was sent immediately to headquarters at Langley, but there was no time to celebrate. Events were unfolding quickly. The CIA moved immediately into the next phase of the operation.
For months the United States and Britain had been trying to persuade the Libyans to shut down their once-secret nuclear program. The Libyan leader’s eldest son, Saif, had initiated the negotiations back in March as part of his father’s efforts to rejoin the international community, which had considered his country a pariah because of its involvement in terrorism incidents like the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Libyans seemed willing to give up their stocks of chemical weapons, but Saif was refusing to even acknowledge the existence of the nuclear program. As a result the talks had been stalled for several weeks. Giving up the chemical program would be easy compared with sacrificing Moammar Kaddafi’s nuclear ambitions, which had already cost tens of millions of dollars and were central to his outsize ambitions to be recognized as the leader of the Arab world.
The CIA now had evidence that would prove beyond any doubt that Libya was pursuing a nuclear weapon. Kaddafi would face a stark choice: He could either give up his nuclear ambitions as a first step toward rejoining the international community or he could refuse to do so and find himself to be an even greater outcast and possibly the next target of a preemptive strike by the Bush administration. Inside the CIA, Stephen Kappes and other senior officers believed that they had the proof to convince the Libyan leader that his plans to build a nuclear weapons factory were doomed. He would have no choice except to give up.
The day after the crates were opened, Mark Allen, a senior member of MI6 and fluent Arabic speaker who had been leading the negotiations, telephoned Musa Kousa, the Libyan security chief. He asked for an immediate meeting to discuss new developments on the nuclear front. Kousa agreed, and two days later Allen and Kappes, his American equivalent, were on an unmarked CIA jet headed for Tripoli. Kousa met them at an isolated portion of the military airfield and ushered them aboard one of Kaddafi’s personal jets. They flew to an airstrip in the desert about two hours away, where they found the Libyan strongman waiting for them in an ornate tent.
As far as the brash Kappes was concerned, the time for negotiations was over. The proof that Kaddafi was engaged in a nuclear weapons program was already on its way back to the national weapons laboratory at Oak Ridge, where experts would piece together the centrifuges that had been intended to enrich uranium to fulfill the Libyan’s dream of joining the nuclear elite. If Kaddafi refused to abandon the program, negotiations would end and there would be consequences for him and his country. The neoconservatives of the Bush administration would later argue that Kaddafi didn’t need to imagine what those consequences might be. In April 1986, the United States launched an air attack on Kaddafi’s compound in retaliation for Libya’s involvement in the bombing of a Berlin nightclub that killed two American servicemen. The strike killed sixty people, including Kaddafi’s fifteen-month-old adopted daughter. In their view, he needed only look north to Iraq, where American troops were scouring the country for Saddam Hussein, another Arab leader who once had nuclear ambitions of his own. Never mind that the Americans had failed to find evidence of any nuclear program in Iraq. The image of another strongman on the run in his own country was a strong one for Kaddafi. But Kaddafi was a shrewd man whose survival over the years had depended on accurately reading the intentions of the United States and other adversaries. He recognized that the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was little more than a pretext and that Bush’s decision to oust Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq was a foregone conclusion. No such predetermination had been made for Libya, something that Kaddafi must surely have known. Rather than the specter of American forces prying him from a spider hole in the desert, Kaddafi was driven by a desire to regain Libya’s place in the international community and put his country on a sounder footing for his eventual succession by his son.
Still, the American intelligence official played the role of tough guy when he encountered Kaddafi in his tent.
“You are the drowning man, and I am the lifeguard,” Kappes told the man referred to by six million Libyans as “the guide of the revolution” and “brotherly leader.”
Kaddafi knew when to fold his hand. So he agreed to be “saved.” Kaddafi said that he would renounce his nuclear program. He sent Kappes and Allen back to their respective capitals to begin preparations for the announcement, which would give much-needed political boosts to their own leaders, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, who were weathering heavy criticism for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Secrecy was important before, and it was vital now. The Americans and British did not want word of Kaddafi’s decision to leak before everything was in place, out of fear that the mercurial Libyan might change his mind if he were faced with a barrage of criticism from the Arab world. Secrecy was also important as the CIA began preparations for rounding up the participants in Khan’s global nuclear network. But news that something was afoot would not be kept from Khan and his associates for long.
A few days after the meeting in the desert, the BBC China arrived at its berth in Tripoli. When Libyan military personnel arrived to take control of the containers from Malaysia, they were surprised to find that five of the seven containers expected from the network were missing. The missing crates were the ones from Malaysia; two containers of electrical components, including the sabotaged regulators, from Turkey had arrived safely. The ship’s captain and his crew offered no explanation, suggesting that the cargo must not have been loaded in Dubai. Word of the missing containers quickly spread up the chain of command in Libya. The senior Libyan nuclear official, Mohammad Matuq Mohammad, telephoned Khan and told him about the missing containers. It made no sense that five containers had gone missing. The Pakistani scientist had no idea what had happened, but he promised to find out.
Since the disclosure of the Iranian nuclear program the previous year, Khan had been on alert for security breaches. He knew that five crates had left Malaysia. When he checked with the freight forwarders at Ayrash Trading in Dubai, they swore that the containers had been loaded onto the BBC China. Somewhere along the line, five huge containers, with thousands of dollars’ worth of components, had vanished. Khan suspected a leak in his operation, but he didn’t know who it might have been.
SITTING IN HIS OFFICE AT the SCOPE factory in mid-October, Urs Tinner got a telephone call from Tahir, who was in Dubai. The Sri Lankan was in a frenzy, saying he had terrible news. Khan had just called. The containers from SCOPE never made it to Libya. They had arrived safely in Dubai, but somewhere after leaving the Persian Gulf port, the crates had disappeared. No one knew what exactly had happened, but Khan feared that the British or the Americans had gotten them.
“Why were they looking for those five containers?” Tahir demanded. “There must be a spy somewhere in our operation.”
“Why are you asking me?” said Tinner.
The two men argued. Tahir’s long-held suspicions about Tinner seemed to be coming true. Tinner claimed that he was innocent. He maintained that he had not known the containers were going beyond Dubai. So how, he demanded, could he be responsible for something that happened on a part of the journey he didn’t even know about?
“Tahir, if I’m the spy, then the goods would have been found before Dubai, not after,” Tinner said.
Tahir was not persuaded. He ordered Tinner to get on the first plane to Dubai. Tinner did as he was told.
When Tinner arrived in Dubai the next day, he went directly to the SMB offices. Tahir was still shaken by the disappearance of the crates. He was suspicious that someone within the network was a spy, and those suspicions pointed at the Swiss technician. Tahir was waiting for Tinner at SMB and he angrily repeated the accusations. But Tinner had had time on the flight to rehearse his responses.
Once again Tinner suggested that the problem was in Dubai, not Malaysia. Someone at the shipping company could have been working for one of the Western intelligence agencies. He said there had been rumors in the past week or so that the two Turks involved with the network had come under scrutiny from their government. Perhaps they had provided the tip to save themselves. Why else would their two containers have gotten through and SCOPE’s been seized?
Tinner did not know if Tahir believed him, but it was apparent that his colleague was unnerved and suspicious. Rather than stay in Dubai, where he feared he might fall into the hands of MI6 or the Americans, Tahir went home to Kuala Lumpur. There he and his wife lived in one of the city’s most secure buildings. He also expected that his political connections would protect him. Before leaving, he told Tinner to stay in Dubai until he got orders from Khan.
The person who mattered most still trusted Tinner. Khan was rattled by the missing containers, though he did not know the Americans had them. He wanted to get rid of as much evidence as possible in case more trouble was on the way. Khan telephoned Tinner and told him to go to SMB and help scrub the computers there. Most of the information was to be destroyed outright. But Khan told Tinner to make electronic copies of the weapons plans and e-mail them to him before erasing them from the computers. Tinner also was told to dispose of any equipment left in Dubai, including the second P-2 rotor.
Tinner followed Khan’s instructions, though not to the letter. He destroyed most of the evidence, but not all of it. Instead of throwing the rotor in the sea, as he would later claim to Tahir and others, he turned it over to a CIA agent. When it came to the nuclear weapons designs and other critical information, he sent copies to Khan—and to his brother, his father, and his own Yahoo e-mail account. Later, he would boast to investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency that he posted copies of the information “out in the ether where no one can find them.” Many of those records were already on the laptop that Urs had left behind at Marco’s apartment in Jenins and on other computers owned by the Tinners, and Tinner knew that the CIA had copied them weeks earlier. But the claim by Urs that he had posted some of the material on the Internet, if true, raised the stakes to a higher level. It meant that he could retrieve the records at any time from any place—and sell them to anyone.
After carrying out the assignment from Khan, Tinner returned to Kuala Lumpur. When he encountered Tahir, he could not tell if the Sri Lankan still suspected he was the spy. A few days after his return, Tinner’s fears increased when one of his coworkers at SCOPE told him that someone at the shipping company in Dubai had died under mysterious circumstances. “It was very scary and I was afraid,” Tinner said later. “After that, I did not live at home. For a couple weeks, I stayed in hotels where no one knew I was staying. At least I could sleep.”
Tinner knew his days in Malaysia were numbered. At work he continued quietly cleaning out his desk and removing as much evidence as possible. One day he risked returning to his house so that he could hide some documents and a flash drive under the floorboards of the house he shared with his Malay girlfriend, a young dancer named Ang.
On the night of October 27, Tinner carried out another assignment from Kinsman. Shortly before ten o’clock, he drove his car to a country club on the outskirts of the Malaysian capital. He pulled into the far end of the parking lot, away from any lights, and waited. A few minutes later, Tinner saw a second car pull into the lot and make its way toward him. Eventually the driver pulled alongside Tinner’s vehicle and rolled down his window. Tinner recognized him. He was one of the CIA officers who worked with Kinsman in Kuala Lumpur.
The man got out of his car and motioned for Tinner to do the same. Both of them popped the trunks of their cars. Tinner took out a slender cylinder and passed it to the American, who put it in his trunk. The cylinder was about the size of a set of golf clubs and didn’t weigh much. A casual observer might have assumed two golfers were repacking their gear after a round and a few drinks. But Tinner had just given the CIA the second P-2 rotor, which he had been instructed by Tahir to destroy.
On November 10, four days after Tinner’s thirty-eighth birthday, two intelligence agents, one from the CIA and one from MI6, arrived at the headquarters of the Malaysian Special Branch, the country’s security service. The world still did not know about the material removed from the BBC China or Libya’s decision to renounce its nuclear program. The two intelligence officers told the director of the agency, Bukit Aman, that the SCOPE factory in Shah Alam was part of a nuclear black market that had been supplying material to Libya. They asked for his help, suggesting that B. S. A. Tahir, one of the officers of the factory, be placed under surveillance and not allowed to leave the country.
It is unclear whether the intelligence agents raised Tinner’s name in their conversation with Aman. A police report issued later by the Malaysian government made no mention of any request regarding the Swiss technician at the time. But Tinner later said that he was telephoned by a Malaysian security officer and told that he should leave the country as soon as possible. In case Tinner doubted the urgency of the request, the security officer said he was canceling Tinner’s work permit and his visa, effective immediately. About the same time, a director at SCOPE telephoned and told Tinner that he was being fired for stealing material from the company’s computers.
Tinner was frightened and furious. He later complained that he had no time to pack his belongings. He did not even retrieve the material hidden under the floorboards of his house before boarding the next flight to Switzerland.
When he arrived home, Tinner hoped he was outside the reach of Tahir and Khan. The tension and fears of his double life had taken a toll. Before he had a chance to settle in, Marco called. He said he was in New Orleans with some friends and they wanted Urs to join them.
The trip turned out to be part holiday, part debriefing, part payday. Over the course of five days, Urs and Marco met in a hotel suite with Kinsman and the nuclear weapons expert from the national lab at Oak Ridge. The parts from the five containers were being examined at the lab and the expert had lots of questions for Urs. They went over the events of the past two months carefully and thoroughly. Urs provided a detailed inventory of material left behind at the SCOPE factory in Malaysia and in the various warehouses and offices in Dubai, providing the CIA with an idea of what its agents would need to do to mop up that part of the network. He and Marco described once again the entire setup in Libya, outlining the extensive enrichment facility that was planned. They identified the components from photos that the expert had brought along.
They also explained again, as they had in Vaduz, that the most complex components for the centrifuges had been manufactured by the Tinners at their own factory in Switzerland. Thousands of them were still stored there; the inventory represented a substantial investment by the Tinners. It also would be evidence against them if the Swiss government investigated their role in the network. Marco wanted the CIA to buy the components; he demanded the same price that Libya would have paid. After the meeting with Urs and Marco in New Orleans in November, the CIA spymaster came up with a strategy to help them get rid of the evidence of their involvement in the Libyan project and get paid for the material.
Even though the Tinners were outliving their usefulness to the CIA, the case officer retained a strong loyalty to his spies. They had taken risks and performed admirably in his eyes, even if they had withheld information. He cautioned Urs that, if his role in Khan’s operation surfaced in public, he should take care not to leave Switzerland. Kinsman said he remained committed to protecting all three Tinners, but he warned that the CIA’s ability to keep them out of the hands of law enforcement officials was limited. They would all be safer sticking close to home in the coming months. Before the Tinners departed from New Orleans, they received confirmation that another five hundred thousand dollars—payment for the two rotors—had been deposited in Marco’s account in the British Virgin Islands.
On December 19, a little more than a month later, with the Tinners tucked away at home, Libya’s foreign minister went on national television and announced to the world that the country would disclose and dismantle its nuclear and chemical weapons programs. The Americans had insisted that Kaddafi himself participate in the announcement to drive home that it was endorsed by the country’s leader. He appeared briefly on television, calling it a “wise decision and a courageous step.”
In Washington and London, Bush and Blair held their own press conferences to praise Libya’s decision and bask in the glory of a much-needed political victory. The full repercussions of Libya’s action were not evident yet. Tahir had been taken into custody by the Malaysian security service and he was being interrogated. Khan, however, remained free while Musharraf pondered what he could get away with politically when it came to dealing with the popular scientist.
For Kinsman and his colleagues in the Counter-Proliferation Division, the announcement in Tripoli was the culmination of what they regarded as a textbook example of a successful intelligence operation. They fully expected that authorities around the world would begin rolling up the nodes of the Khan network, and that Khan himself would finally face justice in Pakistan. But unforeseen complications were about to arise. They would raise troubling questions about just how great an intelligence victory had been achieved.
On one hand, the seizure of the material from the BBC China exemplified the integration of intelligence collection and policy initiatives. The CIA and MI6 finally had obtained the evidence required to fulfill the policy objective of persuading Kaddafi to abandon his nuclear program and return to the norms of the international community. And certainly in the months to come, the operation would be touted as a significant intelligence success, especially by the Americans. But viewed more skeptically, or some would say more pragmatically, the operation against Libya represented an intelligence and policy failure that exemplified the long-term refusal of the CIA and MI6 to shut down A. Q. Khan. The intelligence agencies of both the United States and Britain had known for years that the Khan network was providing sophisticated nuclear technology to Libya. Key policymakers in both governments knew at least the broad outlines of what was occurring. Yet shutting down the flow of nuclear technology and critical secrets to Tripoli had been delayed over and over, allowing delivery of the Chinese warhead designs to people in Libya who had little reason not to either share them or sell them to other parties. And while the CIA had waited for the right time to strike, the Khan network had sent far more dangerous nuclear secrets to unknown points and Iran had continued its steady progress toward developing the capacity to construct a nuclear weapon. The lessons of 1975, when the CIA helped persuade the Dutch to let Khan go, had gone unobserved and the world was more dangerous because of it, even if the CIA was determined to portray the entire episode as an intelligence victory.