No one had a greater interest in preserving the idea that Libya’s abandonment of its nuclear ambitions was a major intelligence victory than George Tenet. By early 2004, the CIA director’s star was tarnished. He and his agency had been criticized sharply for failing to act on clues about Al Qaeda’s plans before the 2001 attacks. Some experts had even gone so far to suggest that the plot could have been disrupted if the CIA had taken the Al Qaeda threat seriously. While the failures of 9/11 may have been the result of not connecting the dots, the controversy swirling around Tenet in early 2004 was based on seeing dots that didn’t exist. The agency, with Tenet as a willing cheerleader, had provided the president with deeply flawed intelligence before the start of the Iraq War in March 2003. The president’s public justification for the war, a mantra repeated over and over by administration officials and by Tony Blair in Britain, was that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, which he was likely to unleash on his enemies at any moment. Tenet had repeatedly assured Bush that Saddam harbored weapons of mass destruction, reaching a climax when he told the president it was a “slam dunk” that Iraq possessed the banned weapons. As the months passed after the invasion and America’s massive inspection efforts turned up no evidence of active WMD programs, the pressure mounted on the CIA and its director. Some thought that Tenet would be forced to resign.
Kaddafi’s announcement offered him a life raft. The efforts of Jim Kinsman and his colleagues had shut down the world’s most dangerous proliferator and his network. Tenet was justifiably thrilled, and he later saw to it that the agent known as Mad Dog and the entire team were awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the agency’s highest and most coveted honor. Even before those honors were bestowed, however, Tenet was determined to use the episode to burnish his image and that of the agency. In an unusual step, he enlisted Kinsman and half a dozen senior intelligence officials to craft a major public speech that would showcase the Kaddafi decision and the penetration of the Khan network.
In early February, Tenet and his crew got some good news from half a world away. For years American officials had lobbied Pakistani leaders to take action against A. Q. Khan because of his proliferation activities. But Khan was the proud public face of the country’s nuclear arsenal, and a long line of Pakistani leaders had refused to take him on. The demise of the Libyan program changed the situation. The Libyans had turned over reams of documents and tons of equipment, which all traced back to Khan and his network. Some of the material had come directly from Khan’s government-funded enrichment complex outside Islamabad. The Libyans had gone a step further, explicitly identifying Khan as their main supplier. When Tenet himself flew to Pakistan and laid out the evidence for President Pervez Musharraf in late 2003, the Pakistani dictator had realized that he had no choice. Khan, who was sixty-six years old and living on a comfortable estate on the outskirts of Islamabad, was arrested and, after several days of interrogation, he agreed to sign a written confession and make a public apology. In exchange Musharraf agreed to pardon Khan for his crimes and reduce his sentence to an indefinite term of house arrest.
On February 4, Khan appeared on national television in Pakistan. Reading from a script prepared by the government, the scientist appeared somber and even contrite as he expressed his sorrow and regret for passing nuclear weapons secrets to other countries without government authorization. He didn’t explain why he had sold them. For many people, his remarks raised as many questions as they answered. But within the Counter-Proliferation Division at the CIA, the confession was cause for celebration, a signal victory in the war against the spread of nuclear weapons. All they needed now was for Tenet or someone else to persuade Musharraf to grant them access to the disgraced scientist so that they could complete their picture of his operation and roll up the outliers, including the mysterious fourth customer.
The next day, Tenet delivered his speech. The location was chosen carefully to guarantee both a prestigious and receptive audience—students and the press at Georgetown University in northwestern Washington. Tenet was a graduate of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, and he used the friendly confines of his alma mater to defend the CIA and presumably try to save his own job.
“I have come here today to talk to you and to the American people about something important to our nation and central to our future: how the United States intelligence community evaluated Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program over the past decade, leading to a national intelligence estimate in October of 2002,” he said, launching into a spirited and detailed defense of the CIA and its methods in assessing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. Over the course of nearly an hour, he spoke in unprecedented detail about the agency’s operations. At one point he acknowledged that “we may have overestimated the progress Saddam was making,” but he never apologized for the mistakes that had led the nation to war. Instead Tenet sought to explain the complexity of intelligence work and extol the courage of his officers. “The risks are always high,” he said. “Success and perfect outcomes are never guaranteed. But there’s one unassailable fact: We will always call it as we see it. Our professional ethic demands no less.”
Near the end of the hour, Tenet sought to leave his audience with a positive image of America’s intelligence professionals at work by highlighting Libya’s abandonment of its nuclear program and the shutting down of the Khan network. “Let’s talk about Libya, where a sitting regime has volunteered to dismantle its WMD program,” he said. “Somebody on television said we completely missed it. Well, he completely missed it. This was an intelligence success. Why? Because American and British intelligence officers understood the Libyan programs.” Tenet praised what he called “the powerful combination of technical intelligence, careful and painstaking analytic work, operational daring and, yes, the kind of human intelligence that people have led the American people to believe we no longer have.”
Then the CIA director singled out Khan and his network, accusing them of “shaving years off the nuclear weapons development timelines of several states, including Libya.” He boasted about delivering a “crushing blow” to the network, saying that several of Khan’s senior officers were in custody and its operations had been shut down worldwide.
“What did intelligence have to do with this?” Tenet asked rhetorically. “First, we discovered the extent of Khan’s hidden network. We tagged the proliferators, we detected the networks stretching across four continents offering its wares to countries like North Korea and Iran. Working with our British colleagues, we pieced together the picture of the network, revealing its subsidiaries, its scientists, its front companies, its agents, its finances and manufacturing plants on three continents,” he said. “Our spies penetrated the network through a series of daring operations over several years.”
Few in the audience challenged the implications of that final phrase—“a series of daring operations over several years.” Tenet’s acknowledgment that the CIA and British intelligence had penetrated Khan’s operation years earlier should have raised questions about why it had taken so long to close it down, and how much damage had been done during the time that the CIA was collecting its information.
The CIA could have stopped Khan before he had even begun to help Pakistan build its nuclear arsenal, and before he ever provided the technology and expertise that was even then leading Iran to the brink of possessing a nuclear weapon, further destabilizing the Middle East. In his memoir, Tenet would go so far as to brag about how much the CIA knew about the Libyan nuclear program before it was shut down. “Sometimes we knew more than the Libyans themselves did,” he wrote. “At one point we told them, ‘Hey, we know you guys paid a hundred million dollars for all that stuff from A. Q. Khan.’ There was a puzzled silence on the other side. ‘A hundred million? We thought the price was two hundred million!’ Apparently someone had made a heck of a profit on the side.” Tenet also discussed the internal debates over the right time to take down Khan. He would defend the decision to wait until the agency had built what he regarded as an airtight case.
TENET’S CLAIM THAT BRINGING DOWN the Khan network was a major intelligence victory, and his later assertion that the agency had acted at the optimal moment, hinged on the CIA’s ability to shape the events that followed the speech. Agency experts, or at least someone from the outside world, needed to interrogate Khan to understand the full extent of his perfidy. Among the most pressing questions was exactly what Khan and his accomplices had sold to Iran. CIA and Pentagon nuclear experts poring over the seizures in Libya had reached the same conclusion as the IAEA: Khan had sold much of the same material and designs to Iran, from extensive plans for building an enrichment plant to blueprints and prototypes for the P-2 centrifuge. But there was at least one critical discrepancy: The Libyans had turned over plans for a Chinese nuclear warhead that Khan had delivered to them in a shopping bag from a tailor shop in Islamabad, and no similar plans had been uncovered in Iran by the IAEA inspectors who had been examining Iran’s nuclear facilities for several months. Ever since its secret enrichment program was exposed by an exile group in mid-2002, Tehran had maintained that its program was designed solely to develop civilian reactors to generate electricity. Iranian officials denied repeated accusations by the United States and other countries that it was developing a nuclear weapon, and they denied receiving any weapons blueprints from Khan. So far, neither the IAEA nor the CIA had come up with proof to contradict the Iranian claims. But it was logical to assume that, if Khan had provided weapons blueprints to Libya, he had also offered them to Iran. The stakes were raised dramatically by the discovery of electronic versions of the Chinese warhead and the more advanced Pakistani warhead design on Urs Tinner’s computer. The Tinners had told Kinsman that they knew of no weapons plans that had been provided to Iran, but Khan was the only person who could provide the definitive answer. He could provide the ultimate proof of the true goal of Iran’s nuclear program. In addition to developing a complete understanding of what Iran had obtained, only Khan could identify every major element of the network and the missing customer—or customers.
In order to protect the idea that this had been a major intelligence victory, the agency devoted to uncovering the secrets of other governments and individuals had to mount its own massive cover-up to make sure the world never found out how much critical information, from nuclear weapons designs to missing equipment, had gotten loose while the CIA waited for the right time to act. Even as Tenet spoke at Georgetown, Kinsman was already working to manage the disclosures that would shape what the world would come to know about how the network was brought down and what lethal secrets were revealed before that happened. The challenge would soon grow more difficult and require enlisting senior officials of the Bush administration to subvert the laws of a foreign government.
The first task was protecting the Tinners. As he had promised Urs and Marco back in New Orleans in November, Kinsman had come up with a way for them to destroy evidence and collect more money. In the middle of January, he contacted Friedrich Tinner and laid out his plan: Destroy the remaining cache of valves and components. The CIA would pay the Tinners as if they were actually sold to the U.S. government. He even provided details for the fake shipping records. On January 16, Friedrich’s daughter signed customs documents to ship thirty-two packages containing high-tech vacuum valves to a CIA front in Chicago called Deramo Systems. Four days later, she signed paperwork for a second shipment of ninety-four boxes of centrifuge components to Deramo. The shipments were valued at a total of $1.5 million, roughly the amount the Tinners said they would have gotten from Libya. The CIA wired that amount to the Traco account in the British Virgin Islands.
The substantial payment was authorized for the Tinners despite doubts about their truthfulness and even though they were no longer essential to the intelligence agency. Kinsman had long suspected they weren’t telling him everything. But there is no indication that Kinsman or his associates ever took the standard step of hooking the Tinners up to a polygraph machine to determine just how much information they were withholding. Instead, suspicions about the gaps in the story had led to the break-in at Marco’s house in Jenins, which had proved that critical information was being withheld. With each meeting, the CIA officer peeled back another layer of the onion, but the Tinners were shrewd enough to realize that information was money and leverage. The ongoing attempt to get the full story was why the CIA paid for Friedrich, Urs, and Marco to travel to the British Virgin Islands at the end of January. The meetings occurred on Tortola, the largest of the sixty inhabited and uninhabited islands that make up the archipelago in the Caribbean Sea. The Tinners were more than happy to get a break from the Swiss winter, and they were familiar with Tortola. And they could visit their money at Marco’s bank.
From January 26 to 30, Kinsman and a couple of his colleagues met with the Tinners at a luxury hotel on Tortola. The days were spent going over the details of the network’s operations with the Tinners. The CIA debriefers pushed them to recall details of what had been produced at the Malaysian factory and to identify every other supplier and manufacturer involved with the network. One topic of discussion was how the network obtained maraging steel, an alloy that is on restricted export lists worldwide, for use in the P-2 rotors the factory was gearing up to produce for Libya.
As the conversation continued, the CIA agents kept circling back to what worried them most—the possible existence of other customers. They asked whether the Tinners were aware of any dealings with other countries or terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. They pressed them on what had happened to equipment that had gone missing. Each time, the Tinners said they knew nothing about any other customers and they knew nothing about the final destination for any missing material. Khan kept much of what he did to himself, they said repeatedly.
What Kinsman and his colleagues could not know was whether the Tinners were withholding information for their own purposes, either to sell it down the road or as insurance in case the CIA abandoned them. The Tinners clearly remained concerned about what might happen if their involvement in the network were exposed by the Swiss government or the investigators from the IAEA in Vienna who were using information provided by Libya to try to unravel Khan’s operation.
After consulting with his superiors back at Langley, including a senior agency officer who had served as Vienna station chief, Kinsman proposed that the Tinners cooperate with the IAEA investigation, at least up to a point. The idea was to win some immunity by helping the IAEA. Before the Tinners returned to Switzerland, they agreed to the plan. Kinsman said he would set up a time and place for a meeting. He cautioned the Tinners to sit tight and promised to get back in touch as soon as the arrangements were set.
Like every other big government agency, the CIA is a bureaucracy, with rules to obey and turfs to be protected. In order to put his plan in motion, Kinsman had to get the approval of the chief of the agency’s European division, who controlled the Vienna station. The two men were old friends and the European division chief readily agreed to instruct the Vienna station to quietly reach out to the IAEA on behalf of the Tinners. Before any arrangements were made, however, events veered way outside the CIA’s control and threatened to upset all of the plans.
Tahir had remained in Malaysian custody since his role in the network was disclosed to the authorities there back in November. The Malaysians were alarmed by the disclosure that a factory in their country was associated with a nuclear black market that was now generating headlines around the world. The concerns focused not only on the proliferation aspects but also on the potential political fallout. The SCOPE factory was partly owned by the son of the country’s prime minister, Abdullah Badawi, though there is no evidence the son was involved in the nuclear trade.
Under an agreement with the Americans and British to avoid tipping their hand, the Malaysians had not arrested Tahir immediately. Instead he had been placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance until Libya’s announcement. Only then was he taken into custody and held incommunicado on vague charges of violating the national security act. He could be held indefinitely without the embarrassment of a public trial that would embarrass the prime minister’s son. During his detention, Tahir described the extent of his involvement in the Khan network. He named names, implicating more than two dozen participants worldwide. The Americans and the British pressed the Malaysians to keep the wraps on Tahir’s disclosures while they went around the world trying to roll up portions of the network in their own time. The Malaysians agreed reluctantly.
On February 11, President Bush delivered what the White House billed as a major address on weapons of mass destruction at the National Defense University in Washington. Still defensive about the failures in Iraq, Bush emphasized the success against Khan and his network. “A. Q. Khan is known throughout the world as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program,” the president said. “What was not publicly known until recently is that he also led an extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how.” Instead of disclosing the full scope of Khan’s operation, however, Bush singled out the factory in Malaysia and Tahir, whom he accused of being “the network’s chief financial officer and money launderer.” The president, who had already demonstrated his resolve by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, vowed to wipe out the entire Khan network. “We will find you and we’re not going to rest until you are stopped,” he said.
Back in Kuala Lumpur, the president’s speech hit like a bomb. The Malaysian authorities had been playing ball and keeping Tahir under wraps, but senior officials were angered by the shift in focus to the SCOPE factory, and fearful of its political implications. Their response would be swift and orchestrated for maximum exposure worldwide. It would make Kinsman’s damage control efforts much harder and much more urgent. Defying requests from the CIA and MI6, the Malaysians were going to identify key participants in Khan’s network to deflect criticism from their own role. Among the names would be all three Tinners. All that remained was for the Malaysians to determine the best way to get the message out.