The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was fresh in the minds of officials in South Africa, Malaysia, and even some European countries. Because the Bush administration had relied on bad intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction to justify its invasion of Iraq, American credibility on nuclear issues was at an all-time low, even though the stakes seemed to be at an all-time high. Still, with time and hard evidence emerging from other sources, law enforcement and intelligence officials outside the United States were beginning to act.
South Africa had voluntarily given up nuclear weapons more than a decade earlier. Officials there believed that they had attained the moral high ground on the topic. At IAEA board meetings, the strong-willed South African ambassador, Abdul Minty, was an outspoken leader of the nonaligned movement. He was fond of buttonholing American diplomats to lecture them about their double standard. So when the Americans came knocking on South Africa’s door with a request to go after a major arm of the Khan network in early 2004, they had been cautious.
When the South Africans asked for proof, the Americans provided them with details about a flow-forming lathe that they said had been imported illegally by a South African company to manufacture centrifuge rotors. The lathe had been built in Spain, shipped to Dubai, and forwarded to South Africa through the network’s shipping hub. The Americans turned over the names of the participants—two veterans of South Africa’s defunct nuclear program, Gerhard Wisser and Johan Meyer, and their companies, Krisch Engineering and Tradefin Engineering, both of which operated in suburbs of Johannesburg. South African export officers questioned Wisser about the lathe. He acknowledged importing it from Dubai, but he said it had nothing to do with any nuclear project. And he insisted that it operated at specifications below those that required an import license. Wisser explained that the project for which he planned to use the lathe had not worked out, so he had returned it to Dubai months earlier. Without evidence, the South Africans dropped the inquiry.
The Americans had also provided the German intelligence service with extensive information about the involvement of Gotthard Lerch, a German living in Switzerland, and Wisser, a German citizen who had lived for years in South Africa. In August, Wisser had gone to Germany for a holiday. As he was leaving the country on August 25, he was detained by the police and taken into custody for questioning. He was confronted with a detailed recitation of his work for the Libyans, his involvement with Lerch and other members of the Khan network, and the Swiss bank accounts where he deposited his payments. Told that he faced charges of trafficking in nuclear technology for Libya and accessory to treason, Wisser waived his right to an attorney and offered an answer for every accusation. Certainly he knew Lerch, he said. They had worked together many years earlier and Wisser managed some real estate for him. Yes, he had done some work for B. S. A. Tahir, but it was for a water purification system. He said there was nothing illegal about the deal and that he had contracted the work to another firm, Tradefin Engineering. Yes, he had spent considerable time in Dubai, but it was because the weather helped his arthritis. As for helping Moammar Kaddafi build a nuclear weapon, he replied indignantly, “I swear to God I did not supply anything to Libya.” The police sent out for pizza and the interview continued until almost midnight. As the night wore on, the sixty-five-year-old Wisser began to fade. He asked for a lawyer. An attorney arrived, and the questioning continued in his presence. When he was pressed again on the Libyan connection, Wisser acknowledged that he had suspected that the system being built at Tradefin had something to do with a nuclear program. That was why, he claimed, he had urged the owner of Tradefin, Johan Meyer, to destroy the system a year earlier.
Even after his lengthy statement, the German prosecutors were not sure they had enough evidence to charge Wisser. They decided to hold him for a couple of days to give the South African police a chance to check out his story. A transcript of the interrogation was prepared the following day, but it had to be reviewed and signed by Wisser before it could be considered evidence under German law. By the time it was ready to be sent to the South African embassy in Berlin, it was late on the afternoon of August 27, a Friday. The embassy was closed, so the transcript and accompanying information were not transmitted to South Africa until Monday, August 30. Once it was delivered, police and prosecutors in Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa, read the transcript, which contained far more evidence than the Americans had provided months earlier. Search warrants were obtained immediately for Krisch and Tradefin. Wisser was being released from jail in Germany. If there was any physical evidence there, they wanted to beat him to it.
On the morning of September 1, armed with their search warrants, the police arrived at Krisch’s nondescript offices in Randburg, about twenty miles northwest of Johannesburg. There wasn’t much to find; nearly a year earlier, Wisser had destroyed his computer hard drives and records of the Libyan transaction after the warning from Lerch. But it was another story when the team arrived at Tradefin’s workshop and offices in Vanderbijlpark, an industrial city about thirty miles southwest of Johannesburg.
Tradefin was located behind a metal fence, inside a massive blue metal warehouse on a dusty road lined with small factories manufacturing nothing more sophisticated than paint, tiles, and tires. At fifty-three years old, Johan Meyer was a moderately successful engineer, but he had never built anything as spectacular and complex as the system he affectionately called “the beast.” After the system had been tested and deemed workable a year earlier, Meyer and his workers had dismantled the two hundred tons of pipes and valves, carefully numbering each part so that it could be reassembled in Libya. The works were then packed into eleven shipping containers, and the forty-foot-long containers were stacked three high behind some tall metal shelves. The plan had been to truck the containers to a port and ship them to their destination, but the final shipping notice had never come. The beast, which Wisser had urged Meyer to melt into oblivion, would turn out to be Wisser’s downfall.
When the South African police entered Tradefin, they initially saw the mundane workings of any tool-and-die shop. There were rusting tanks and idled machines. But they also noticed something behind the shelves. Two police officers scaled the shelving and looked down on the eleven containers. After moving the shelves aside, the police opened the first container and found what they had been told to look for—an elaborate system of pipes. Then they sealed the containers so they could not be opened again without their knowledge and secured the premises. The search also turned up extensive records of transactions with other members of the network, including the Tinners and Lerch. Shipping documents indicated that plans had been made months earlier to send the containers to Dubai and on to Tripoli. In an old trunk in Meyer’s office, they found blueprints for the piping system from Khan’s laboratory in Pakistan and an instructional video filmed at Kahuta—proof that this was no water purification system and a direct link to Khan.
The South African authorities were now moving fast. On the same day as the searches, they took Wisser, Meyer, and a third man who worked for Krisch and Tradefin on the project, Daniel Geiges, into custody. A judge agreed to hold them without bail as flight risks. On September 7, after authorities studied records taken from Tradefin and made a cursory examination of the contents of the containers, all three were charged with violating export laws and illegally manufacturing equipment for use in a nuclear weapons facility. Within days, Meyer began cooperating, laying out the history of his dealings with Lerch, Tahir, and Wisser. He described receiving designs from Lerch, which he was told had been prepared by a Swiss technician named Urs Tinner, along with the additional help from Khan’s lab. He said that the Libyans had sent two nuclear experts to inspect the work just a few months earlier. He acknowledged that the elaborate system had nothing to do with water purification and everything to do with uranium enrichment.
The South African authorities shared their haul with the Germans and the Swiss. The hard evidence provided new momentum for the investigations in both of those countries, creating a new set of problems for the CIA’s cover-up.
WATCHING EVENTS UNFOLD IN SOUTH Africa from CIA headquarters, Jim Kinsman had repeated his warning to Urs Tinner to stay put in Switzerland. The Germans were preparing evidence to seek the arrest and extradition of Lerch from Switzerland and Wisser from South Africa. The American government had set those events in motion by providing evidence against both of those men to the Germans. Helping the Germans and others, however, was risky from the CIA point of view. The agency would no longer be able to control the flow of information once arrests began. Protecting the Tinners would be harder if the Germans started gathering evidence against other participants in the Khan ring. The CIA suspected that the Tinners might already be on the German radar. Some of the network’s goods had moved through German ports, which meant the Germans could assert jurisdiction. The CIA and the German federal intelligence service, or BND, had a close working relationship. The Americans had asked them not to seek arrest warrants against the Tinners because of what the CIA described as an ongoing intelligence operation. Kinsman didn’t know if the request would hold.
Tinner may have felt that his work for the CIA conveyed more immunity than it did. Despite his handler’s warnings, in October he flew from Zurich to Frankfurt to visit a friend. When he passed through passport control, his name was flagged on the computer and he was taken aside by the customs police. In a way, it was a mistake. The BND knew enough to keep hands off Tinner, but his name had gotten into the national police computer system and he found himself in a German jail.
Tinner’s arrest constituted the biggest threat yet to the CIA. Kinsman and his colleagues would have to do everything in their power to stop the Germans from putting Tinner on trial, particularly in an open courtroom where all their secrets would be bared to the public. One strategy was to persuade the Swiss not to share any evidence about Tinner with the Germans. CIA representatives met again with their Swiss counterparts, arguing that they should not cooperate with the German investigation. “The Swiss were going to turn over documents to the Germans, but we convinced them not to do so and to extradite him instead,” a former CIA officer said. The Swiss investigation was still going slow, operating under restraints imposed by the Justice Ministry. They had not gotten to the point where anyone had been arrested, and no search warrants had been issued. But the Wyss report and information provided by the IAEA and other agencies filled several folders, and the information was being prepared for transfer to the Germans.
As expected, in November the German police filed an arrest warrant for Gotthard Lerch with the Swiss government. Based on information from the Americans and the South Africans, the Germans were charging the longtime trafficker with export violations and treason for his role in the Libyan nuclear project. Lerch was taken into custody at his home in Grabs and held for extradition proceedings. The two arrests offered a chance for the CIA and its allies in the Swiss government to get Tinner back on Swiss soil and limit the potential damage of putting him on trial in Germany. The idea of a prisoner swap was broached with the Swiss: Lerch would be extradited to Germany in return for Tinner coming back to Switzerland. Negotiations were slow, but Kinsman saw a chance to save his cover-up.
The American ambassador to Switzerland, Pamela Willeford, was a political appointee with no experience in diplomacy. She was a longtime friend of first lady Laura Bush, had served on a statewide education committee in Texas, and contributed to various Republican committees from 2000 to 2004. She would later become famous as a witness when Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a lawyer during a quail hunt on a Texas ranch. But by late 2004 she had been on the job in Bern a little more than a year and had not had to deal with anything more troubling than the persistent anti-American attitudes of the Swiss and other Europeans angered by the Iraq War and the detentions at Guantanamo Bay.
In early December, the CIA asked Willeford if she would meet with Christoph Blocher to discuss the Tinner case. It was a sensitive task, but the hope was that she could convince the Swiss justice minister that the relationship between the Tinners and the CIA was too sensitive to risk exposure in the German case against Urs Tinner. Willeford wasn’t given a full briefing, but she was told enough to make what the CIA hoped would be a good case. On December 4, she went to the Justice Ministry to meet with Blocher and the head of the federal police, Jean-Luc Vez. When she returned to the embassy, Willeford reported back to the CIA station chief that she believed she had convinced the Swiss to restrict any information sharing with the Germans.
The arrest of his son had outraged Friedrich Tinner. He told Kinsman and Sharon that there would be no more debriefing sessions with them or with officials from the IAEA. He felt betrayed by the CIA, which had promised to protect Urs and the rest of the family. He was no longer sure that the Americans would even provide a defense for them if he and Marco were arrested, too. He worried that Kinsman and Sharon might crawl back into their secret world, leaving him and his family to face arrest and conviction.
Tinner also blamed Olli Heinonen for the arrest of Urs. He telephoned the IAEA official and accused him of leaking the information to the Germans that led to his son’s incarceration. But despite his anger at the IAEA, Tinner was desperate for protection. He expected nothing from the Americans; their sole interest seemed to be pretending they had never heard of the Tinners, since they had no further use for them. Instead he clung to the hope that he might find salvation with the IAEA in Vienna. The international nuclear agency could explain to the Swiss and German authorities that the family had cooperated with its investigations of Khan and the other participants. In the best possible scenario, Heinonen would confirm to the other authorities that the Tinners had worked with the CIA for several years, in case his friends from America really had abandoned his family.
Tinner telephoned Heinonen, asking for a meeting as soon as possible. He refused to say what he wanted to talk about. Heinonen had never fully trusted Friedrich Tinner, and he wasn’t sure why Tinner wanted to see him when the Swiss engineer called. He had agreed to meet with Tinner, but he insisted that he come to the agency’s headquarters in Vienna this time. Out of an abundance of caution, Heinonen arranged for one of the IAEA’s senior lawyers, a no-nonsense American named Laura Rockwood, to join him.
Rockwood had been one of the primary forces behind the IAEA’s attempts to become more aggressive in its inspections in recent years. She had drafted an addendum to the international Non-Proliferation Treaty that required signatories to permit more intrusive inspections of suspicious facilities by the IAEA. But she was not always content to work behind a desk. On a couple of occasions, Rockwood had accompanied inspectors on trips to see clandestine nuclear facilities in Iran. And she had kept a close eye on Heinonen’s inquiry into the Khan network, helping negotiate with reluctant governments over access to records and advising Heinonen and others on how far they could push to get information.
Tinner flew into Vienna on December 10 and went directly to the IAEA. He was processed through the guard station on the perimeter of the agency’s complex and given directions to Heinonen’s office on the twenty-sixth floor of one of the towers. Heinonen met him at the security door outside the hallway of offices and escorted Tinner into his office. Rockwood was already there.
Tinner wasted no time. He said Urs had been arrested in Germany, which the IAEA officials already knew, and he said he feared that he and Marco were next. The key to their defense, Tinner said, would be that the family had begun providing information to the CIA long before the Khan network was exposed, that they had initiated the contact with the Americans out of concern about proliferation, and that their intelligence had played a central role in bringing down a threat to world security. Tinner said he was worried that the CIA would not defend him and his sons, that they would not tell anyone what an important role he and his sons had played in bringing down A. Q. Khan. Tinner said the only way out was for Heinonen to go to Bern and tell the appropriate Swiss authorities how the family had helped the IAEA. At the same time, Tinner said, Heinonen could tell the Swiss about the assistance they had provided to the CIA, too. Heinonen could even tell them about Urs sabotaging equipment.
But Heinonen explained that he could not corroborate such a story. He reminded Friedrich that he had not met any of the Tinners until February 2004. That, he said, was after the exposure of Khan’s operations. He pointed out that he knew nothing about when the family started working with American intelligence.
Tinner interrupted, explaining that he had started providing information to the Americans long before he met with Heinonen in Vienna. He described how he had personally gone to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna in December 2002 to offer his help. Surely, he insisted, the CIA had told Heinonen of that early contact. But the CIA had never told Heinonen more than it thought he needed to know. He repeated that he had no idea when the Tinners had started cooperating. Indeed, Heinonen was adamant that he knew nothing about the relationship between the Tinners and American intelligence until February 2004. Tinner left the meeting dejected and more concerned than ever that he and his sons would be abandoned.
HEINONEN HAD HAD LITTLE CONTACT with the CIA in recent weeks, and no contact with the man he knew as Jim Kinsman. So he had no way of knowing that the CIA case officer had no intention of abandoning his spies. Throughout his career spotting and recruiting assets, Kinsman had told every person he signed up that he would protect them as long as necessary. Even the stupid decision by Urs to travel to Germany had not caused his commitment to waver. But the CIA was in turmoil. The case officer was having trouble getting the right people to listen to his pleas.
In June, George Tenet had abruptly announced that he was resigning as head of the CIA. He had been under attack for months over a series of intelligence failures, ranging from the missed clues to the September 11 attacks to his own promise that finding nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in Iraq was a “slam dunk.” On June 3, President Bush had just completed a press conference with Australian prime minister John Howard in the White House Rose Garden and he headed for the helicopter waiting on the South Lawn. While reporters were still milling around on the lawn, Bush returned and told them that Tenet had resigned. It almost seemed like an afterthought. Later that morning, a teary Tenet told employees at the agency’s headquarters in Langley that the resignation was “the most difficult decision I have ever had to make.” He said he would be leaving in early July.
Tenet’s departure had left Kinsman without a key ally. And worse was coming. The new CIA chief was Porter J. Goss, a former covert operative for the CIA who had gone on to serve in Congress and eventually as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Goss had taken the CIA director’s job after promising to increase the number of case officers in the field in the battle against Al Qaeda. But he soon found himself at loggerheads with the clandestine side of the spy service. First he installed several cronies in key positions. For instance, he handed the number-three position at the CIA to Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, whose previous job was chief of the agency’s logistics office in Germany. But Foggo had ingratiated himself with Goss by funneling inside information to him while he was a congressman. There were other appointments that smacked of favoritism, but the anger among old hands at the agency boiled over when Goss pushed out the popular chief of the directorate of operations, Stephen Kappes. After the Libyan episode, people had expected that Kappes might eventually become director of central intelligence. But he got into a dispute with Foggo and Kappes was fired. Several other top operations officers followed him out the door, either voluntarily or with a shove. The last laugh would belong to Kappes: A year later, Foggo was indicted for steering CIA procurement contracts to a friend and he was later convicted and sentenced to three years in federal prison.
As Kappes and others left, Kinsman watched helplessly as his support network was decimated. He found himself without the patrons who are essential to operating in a bureaucracy as big and sometimes vicious as the CIA. With only a year until he could retire with his full pension, Kinsman wondered whether he could hang on to his job. He also wondered whether he had the backing he needed to protect the Tinners.
On the one hand, keeping the Tinners quiet had been complicated by Urs’s arrest in Germany. There was a chance that he would begin talking to try to save himself. Part of his story would no doubt be that he had helped the CIA. The agency could deny it. Criminals often tried to win leniency by concocting tales of assisting various intelligence and law enforcement agencies. There was no way a German court could get to the bottom of the relationship between the CIA and the Tinners. But Tinner could name names. He could provide dates and places for meetings that would, at the very least, create an embarrassing media sensation. If that happened, the Swiss authorities would start to get more interested. So far, the investigation there was moving slowly, and Kinsman was certain it could be contained before any damage was done. But if the headlines started coming, and the Swiss started digging, it would be harder for the CIA to maintain the stone wall it had erected around the real story of how the Khan network was brought down—and how much nuclear know-how had gotten out before it happened.