On February 18, 2004, a week after Bush’s big speech, Friedrich, Urs, and Marco Tinner checked into a suite at the InterContinental hotel in Vienna. Waiting for them were Kinsman, Sharon, and two technical agents from the Vienna station who would operate the recording equipment in the room next to the suite. After operating in the shadows for so long, the Tinners were about to meet investigators from the IAEA. All three were nervous as Kinsman rehearsed the script for the session, coaching them on what to say and what to withhold. He assured them that he and Sharon would be there, ready to intervene if anything went awry.
Kinsman had heard from colleagues that the Malaysians might be releasing information about the network in the coming days, and he knew that it would be difficult to contain the fallout if the Tinners and other participants in the ring were identified. So he was under pressure to enlist the assistance of the IAEA, trading access to the Tinners for the agency’s future help in protecting the Swiss family—and ultimately the CIA. Fortunately for the CIA, the atomic energy agency was in the market for some help.
Two weeks earlier, the thirty-five countries that comprise the IAEA board of governors had voted unanimously to open a formal inquiry into the worldwide activities of the Khan network, which ElBaradei referred to as a “nuclear Wal-Mart.” It was an unusually aggressive step for a generally timid agency, but ElBaradei had persuaded his board to formalize the inquiry he had authorized Heinonen to start right after the Libyan disclosure in December. Still, the IAEA had no legal authority to demand that individuals or companies cooperate with its inquiries. Instead Heinonen and his colleagues would have to rely on persuading people to cooperate with them—and on information parceled out to it by the world’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
A few days after the board approved his inquiry, Heinonen got a major break. A woman with an American accent called his office. She did not identify herself, but she seemed strangely familiar with his investigation. When the woman said she had valuable information and proposed meeting him at a Starbucks near the State Opera House on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, Heinonen agreed. The next day he found himself sitting across from an attractive young Asian woman who said her name was Jackie. Heinonen suspected she was from the CIA. There was no casual conversation to break the ice. The woman got straight to the point. She said she was willing to set up a meeting between Heinonen and the Tinners to help the IAEA understand the inner workings of the Khan network. She said that the Swiss businessmen were cooperating with the U.S. government and that they were willing to assist the IAEA, too. Jackie, who actually worked in the counterproliferation section at the CIA station in Vienna, made no mention that the plan was to provide the IAEA with enough information to later enlist the agency’s assistance in protecting the Tinners from possible reprisals in Switzerland.
Friedrich Tinner had long been on the agency’s radar screen for his proliferation activities. Swiss authorities had warned the IAEA as early as 1979 that Friedrich Tinner was helping Pakistan. But the agency had never had any solid information about his involvement in nuclear trafficking. Since he started investigating Iran’s nuclear program the previous year, Heinonen’s interest in the emerging picture of a worldwide nuclear black market had ratcheted up. The Iranians never volunteered anything, however, and extracting evidence of their ties to Khan required time-consuming and often maddening negotiations. The Americans and the Israelis had been feeding bits of intelligence to the IAEA about Iran’s program, but Heinonen knew there was more to the network than he had been told. So when Jackie offered up the Tinners, he jumped at the chance to meet with participants in the network.
On February 18, Heinonen knocked on the door of the InterContinental suite. It was opened by a man who appeared to be in his late sixties. He introduced himself as Friedrich Tinner. Seated in the room were his two sons, Urs and Marco. There also were two Americans who introduced themselves only by their first names, Jim and Sharon. Heinonen assumed they were from the CIA. Before the conversation began, the Americans insisted that Heinonen agree to treat the information as highly confidential. They said it could not be shared beyond a small circle within the IAEA. It could not be disseminated to other countries that were part of the agency’s governing board. Heinonen agreed to what he later called “rules of the game.” One rule was unspoken: The CIA would expect the IAEA to go to bat for the Tinners with the Swiss authorities if it came to that.
Over the next two hours, the Tinners revealed the architecture of Khan’s operation. As the names, dates, and transactions gradually un-spooled, the IAEA official learned that the Tinners were not just suppliers to Khan. They were at the heart of the network, aware of shipments to Libya and Iran, the identities of other participants, the nuts and bolts of the enterprise’s day-to-day operations. They could lead the agency deep into the network, provided Heinonen played his cards carefully. The IAEA official listened intently as the Tinners described the massive enrichment and bomb-making facilities that the network had been building in Libya.
According to the Tinners, the enrichment plant was based on drawings that Gotthard Lerch had taken from Leybold-Heraeus nearly twenty years before and schematics of Pakistan’s plant provided by Khan. The Pakistani scientist had also sold the Libyans technical data on enriching uranium for nuclear weapons, data drawn from years of his own experience and tests. The plant was designed to produce highly enriched uranium through 5,832 centrifuges arrayed in four levels of cascades. The Tinners described how the uranium would be enriched to progressively higher levels as it passed through the four tiers of cascades, ending with a final product that would be 90 percent enriched—perfect for weapons. They said that the thousands of centrifuges, and tens of thousands of components required to build the machines, had been built at the SCOPE factory and at the Tinners’ own plant in Switzerland. Additional equipment had been bought secretly from suppliers across Europe and Asia, they explained. Some of the most technical work had been contracted out to engineers in South Africa who were veterans of that country’s nuclear weapons program more than a decade earlier. Some of the equipment had been flowing directly from Khan’s facilities in Pakistan to Libya, but most of it had been shipped to Dubai first and then forwarded to Libya, according to the Tinners.
The scope of the operation described by the Tinners was far beyond anything that Heinonen had imagined. He and his team knew nothing about the South African end of the network, and they had no idea that such detailed plans had made their way to Libya. This was more than the Libyans had disclosed, and it raised new questions about whether Kaddafi was concealing material. The disclosure also focused new concerns on Iran. Had Khan and his accomplices shared far more knowledge with the Iranians than anyone knew? When Heinonen expressed his alarm at the sophistication of the enrichment setup planned for Libya, Urs Tinner said the situation was not as bad as it appeared. He said the Libyans would never have been able to make the crucial leap of getting their centrifuges running at the ultrahigh speeds required to enrich uranium to weapons grade. “I sabotaged the machines at the factory in Malaysia,” he said, providing details of the steps he had taken to ensure that the centrifuges would not operate properly.
Heinonen did not have the technical background to understand the significance of the sabotage that Tinner was describing. He stopped the proceedings and said that he wanted to bring in a colleague who could verify whether Tinner’s supposed alterations were feasible and whether they would have an impact on the operation of the centrifuges. Heinonen asked Jim and Sharon if he could come back the next day with the IAEA’s top centrifuge expert. The CIA officers agreed.
No one at the IAEA was better positioned to understand what Tinner was saying about the centrifuge components and the broader concept of building an entire enrichment facility than Trevor Edwards, a British engineer who had worked at the IAEA for several years. In the 1970s, Edwards had been a project manager for Britain at the Urenco plant in the Netherlands, helping develop advanced centrifuges for enriching uranium for civilian electric plants. While working at Urenco, he had met a young scientist named A. Q. Khan. They had even exchanged a few words in English.
When Edwards and Heinonen returned to the hotel the next morning, Urs Tinner was asked to go over his sabotage efforts again, in greater detail. Much of what he heard sounded right to Edwards. Tinner had a grasp of the architecture of the components, and he seemed to understand the impact of his alterations. Still, Edwards wondered whether the subtle changes would lead to malfunctions. It was possible the machines would run, albeit more slowly or for a shorter period of time.
Heinonen and Edwards spent the second day pushing the Tinners to try to fill gaps in their knowledge. The Libyans had turned over copies of thousands of invoices for nuclear equipment to the IAEA. Using them, Heinonen’s team was assembling a vast matrix of the companies involved in the network and trying to determine the precise quantities of equipment sold to Libya. The goal was to use the Libyan information to understand the full extent of the network’s reach, and to confront Iran down the road. In reconstructing the shipments to Libya, one of Heinonen’s colleagues had discovered that Khan had shipped seven rotors for the P-2 centrifuge from Pakistan to Dubai, but only five had made it to Libya. The missing rotors were significant for several reasons. Could they have gone to Iran? Were they an indication that there was a still-unidentified customer?
“Two P-2 rotors seem to missing,” Heinonen said. “Do you know what happened to them?”
“As the network started to fall apart, I took those remaining rotors out into the gulf on my boat and threw them overboard,” Urs said, following Kinsman’s script. “I was worried that they would fall into the wrong hands.”
After several hours on the second day, Kinsman suggested that the IAEA officials return for a third day to complete the debriefing. Heinonen said that he could not be there. He would send Edwards back alone.
The next day, Edwards brought his laptop computer and a computer disk that the IAEA had been given by the senior Libyan nuclear technician, Karim. The disk was an instructional manual for planning and constructing a centrifuge plant. Most of the information appeared to have originated at Khan’s research lab in Pakistan. Some of it, however, had come from other sources. As soon as Edwards played the disk on his computer for the Tinners and the two CIA agents, Urs interrupted. “Oh, that isn’t my latest,” he said. “I gave another to Karim that was more up to date.”
Edwards was surprised. After Kaddafi’s public mea culpa, the Libyans had asserted that they had turned over everything from the network. There were suspicions that they had held back information and possibly equipment in case their leader changed his mind about closing down the program; Tinner’s revelation seemed to confirm that the IAEA had not gotten everything, as promised. As he thought about the existence of the second disk, Edwards caught a glimmer of a far bigger threat. How much information had the Tinners and others involved with the network transferred to digital formats?
Edwards did not know it, but the CIA was already well aware of the danger that bomb plans and centrifuge designs were floating around the electronic world. The Khan network had digitized and distributed the blueprints to enrich uranium and construct a nuclear device. The CIA had known that Khan was selling nuclear plans as early as 2001, when Urs Tinner had copied them from the black cases in Khan’s Dubai apartment. Two years later, the CIA had discovered digital copies of those same construction plans as well as more advanced Pakistani weapons plans at Marco’s home in Jenins. Where else could those plans have gone in the intervening years? Even now, with much of the network shut down, the CIA had ordered the Tinners not to mention electronic copies of the weapons designs to the IAEA or anyone else. American intelligence officials were determined to keep the lid on how much highly sensitive technology and information the Khan network had loosed on the world, even if it required lying to the international agency charged with stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, even if it meant efforts by the IAEA to understand the reach of Khan’s enterprise would be undermined. The CIA had its own interests to protect.
By the time Edwards was wrapping up the third day at the InterContinental, Heinonen and one of his assistants, Miharu Yonemura, were making plans to go to Dubai to check out the information from the Tinners. They contacted the Dubai police and, after several calls higher and higher up the chain of command, they reached an agreement for escorts to several locations that had been mentioned in the debriefing.
A few days later, Heinonen, Yonemura, and Edwards boarded an airplane and flew to Dubai, a sunny and warm respite from the bone-chilling cold of Vienna. After checking into a hotel and meeting with the police officers who would accompany them, the group drove to the free-trade zone where SMB Computers had its office and warehouses. This was, according to the Tinners, the hub of the network’s shipping operation. Essential equipment had been stored there over the years, and the IAEA team hoped to at least get some sense of the operation’s scale. Urs Tinner had said the locations were cleared out, but Yonemura had brought along a technical kit that would allow her to take samples from the warehouses to determine whether any radioactive material had been on the premises. The results would answer the most critical question of all: Had Khan sold Libya or Iran not only the means to produce fissile material for a bomb, but the actual material itself?