On the morning of November 21, Trevor Edwards and Miharu Yonemura arrived at Zurich airport after a short flight from Vienna. Chasing A. Q. Khan had taken the two IAEA officials to exotic locations, following a labyrinthine trail of the far-flung crime ring that had led from Dubai to Kuala Lumpur, from Tehran to Tripoli. They were getting closer and closer to a danger they still did not understand. Now the chase was headed to Switzerland, the place where much of the network’s nuclear technology originated and where they hoped to find the answers that had so far eluded their global investigation.
Faced with American silence in the face of his requests for assistance, Peter Lehmann had called the IAEA. He explained that he had recovered a cache of drawings and equipment from the homes, offices, and factory of the Tinner family. Lehmann told Heinonen that the volume of the material was enormous, and that he needed help to evaluate its significance. An unmarked police car was at the airport to take Edwards and Yonemura the sixty miles to Bern, where Lehmann was waiting for them in his office overlooking the River Aare.
Coffee was served as Lehmann told his guests that he had turned to them because the Swiss government did not have anyone with the expertise to understand the Tinner material and the Americans had failed to respond to his letters. Thanking Edwards and Yonemura for coming, he spread the first package of drawings on the table, describing them as a fraction of what had been seized at various locations associated with the Tinners.
Before allowing the IAEA officials to dig in, however, Lehmann said his investigators had come across some unusual, coded e-mails on one of the computers seized from Marco Tinner.
“What do you know about codes and how you can use codes to communicate?” he asked.
Edwards said he didn’t know anything about coded messages. But Yonemura flushed and acknowledged that she knew what Lehmann was talking about. Prodded by Lehmann, Yonemura explained the basics of a book-based cipher system. With some hesitation, she described how two people with identical copies of a book could use page numbers, line numbers, and even specific word numbers to encrypt and decode messages. For example, she said, a string of numbers in an e-mail would designate the page to turn to in the book, the line to select, and the exact word in that line that you wanted to use.
“I am glad you told me, Miharu,” said Lehmann.
The prosecutor handed Yonemura a printout of a coded e-mail that she had sent to Marco months before. His investigators had found the e-mail on Marco’s computer. He handed her a second sheet of paper, which contained a decoded version of her e-mail. The contents were innocuous, but Yonemura was surprised that the Swiss had broken the book cipher.
Lehmann said the Tinners were cooperating, at least to some extent. After the searches and arrest of Marco, he and Urs had begun to fill in some of the gaps in what the Swiss knew about their proliferation activities. As they had with the IAEA, they were trying to protect themselves and put the best face on what they had done. But the Tinners had not told the Swiss how to break the code. When he was asked by Lehmann about the encrypted e-mails found on his mother’s computer, Marco had laughed and said he didn’t know what the prosecutor was talking about.
Chief Inspector Kurt Senn, the senior officer on the case and the head of national security for the Swiss federal police, has a reputation for single-minded determination. The secret code was one of the most unusual elements of the investigation he was leading. The first clue to the mysterious code was a receipt from FedEx obtained in the raids. It showed Marco sending what was described on the customs form as a book to Heinonen. The idea that Tinner was communicating with the IAEA had caught Senn’s attention at the time. That Tinner would be sending Heinonen a book seemed odd. Then he remembered hearing something, somewhere about a book cipher.
The key was uncovering the exact book on which the code was based. Going over the coded e-mails again and again, Senn spotted what he suspected were clues. Initials at the start of each message seemed to correspond to book titles. For instance, one of the e-mails started with “TKOTJG.” The last two initials, JG, turned up in other e-mails. It seemed possible that the pattern might represent the author. Turning to his own computer, Senn entered “JG” into a search for book titles. The name John Grisham popped up quickly. A search of books written by the massively popular American writer turned up The King of Torts. Senn had his first hit. By conducting thousands of searches over a number of days, Senn had assembled a list of books that he suspected the Tinners had used. It was an eclectic list, right out of an airport bookstore. There was another Grisham, The Last Juror; Pompeii by Robert Harris; The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; Dude, Where’s My Country by Michael Moore; and, most appropriately, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Senn persuaded Lehmann to get another search warrant, this time for any books found in any of the Tinner residences and businesses. The search turned up copies of all of the ones on the detective’s list.
By the time Yonemura acknowledged her correspondence with Marco, several hundred e-mails had been decoded. Lehmann told the IAEA expert that there was still work to be done. Then he spread his hands about six inches apart and said, “We have a stack of printouts like this.”
Lehmann wasn’t quite done with his demonstration. He pulled out another printout and read from one of the decoded e-mails. Marco had sent it to Urs in July 2003. In it, Marco had instructed his brother to press A. Q. Khan for information about the network’s suspected fourth customer. Someone referred to only as “Jim” was insisting on the information. Yonemura and Edwards recognized the name immediately.
What concerned the IAEA officials was the discovery that the CIA had been pressuring the Tinners to find out more about the network’s elusive fourth customer. The IAEA had been worried for months that there was at least one other buyer. They had taken some solace in the idea that the Americans probably knew at least something about the identity of the other customer. The idea that the CIA was as much in the dark as the IAEA was an unwelcome development.
THE REVELATIONS KEPT COMING. LEHMANN said his technicians had decoded another series of e-mails that he initially thought might be connected to an unknown customer. They said the e-mails showed that the Tinners had sold two P-2 rotors to a customer in a transaction that they had kept secret from Khan and Tahir. The e-mails reflected a dispute over the price of the rotors. The Tinners were demanding a million dollars for the pair, but the buyers argued that the price was too high for something that Urs had essentially stolen from the factory in Malaysia and a storage facility in Dubai. In the end, the buyers had agreed to pay a half million, and Urs had turned them over. When questioned about the deal, however, the brothers said the buyer was the CIA and that the transaction was part of their work for the American intelligence agency. Indeed, cooperating with the CIA was central to the defense the Tinners were trying to build, and they were providing the Swiss with glimpses into the relationship. So far, however, they had refused to provide the real names of the CIA agents, assuming they even knew them. Lehmann suspected that “Jim” was their CIA handler.
These were undoubtedly the same rotors that Urs had told the IAEA eighteen months earlier he had thrown into the Persian Gulf when Khan’s empire began to crumble. That supposition was confirmed when Lehmann showed the IAEA officials an e-mail exchange between Urs and his CIA handler from the week before the Tinners met with the IAEA for the first time in Vienna. Swiss authorities had found the e-mail on one of the Tinner computers and, using Senn’s code-cracking abilities, had decoded it. Mentioning the upcoming meeting, Urs had asked how he should respond if the issue of rotors arose. He was told, “Tell Heinonen and Edwards that you threw the two rotors in the sea.”
The e-mails seemed to prove that the rotors had not ended up in the hands of another customer. The question was, why had the Americans, who had arranged the debriefing with the Tinners and even sat in on the questioning, instructed Urs to lie? No one was naïve enough to imagine that the Americans were sharing everything with the IAEA, or that the Tinners had told the whole truth. But the discovery of the lie raised another question: What else were the CIA and the Tinners hiding?
Finally, Lehmann set aside the stack of e-mails and pointed to the first of the drawings. It showed the floor plan for some kind of huge hall, with places marked for fifteen long lines of machines. The IAEA officials immediately recognized the layout for a uranium enrichment facility, with fifteen cascades of 164 centrifuges each. A quick calculation determined that 2,460 centrifuges specified for the hall could probably produce enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) for one bomb a year, depending on the type of machine and the efficiency with which they operated. If the cascades contained P-1 centrifuges, they would probably fall short of enough HEU for a bomb a year; if they were P-2, they would likely exceed the amount required. A second drawing showed the piping system that would be used to connect the cascades. Lehmann said he believed the system had been designed and built by Marco Tinner.
At that point, it was the IAEA’s turn to share. Edwards reached into his briefcase and showed Lehmann a photograph of the exact system, which he said had been discovered in Libya and later taken by the Americans to Oak Ridge. The plans that Lehmann had were for a small version of the larger system that had been built in South Africa. For Lehmann, the match seemed to connect the Tinners directly to the Libyan nuclear project. It was just the type of evidence he would need to prosecute them. But he would need official confirmation from the Americans that the piping system in the drawings matched the actual system that had been found in Libya.
Lehmann continued to push documents in front of Edwards and Yonemura, covering components manufactured by the Tinners and shipped to various elements of the network. There were also mountains of photographs, invoices, and financial records that appeared to show the Tinners at the very center of the network, buying and shipping equipment around the world for the SCOPE factory in Malaysia and Libya. This was familiar territory for the IAEA: They had seen bits and pieces of this puzzle in many locations.
But there were some surprises. The IAEA, as well as most of the world, was well aware that Khan had stolen plans from Urenco to build two different types of centrifuges, the P-1 and P-2. The packet of documents, however, contained designs for a centrifuge system with four separate rotors; the work appeared to be based on a German design called the G-4, which had been under development at Urenco in the 1970s. Khan had apparently copied those designs, too, but it had escaped notice for three decades.
Another folder of letters and documents mystified the two IAEA officials. Invoices showed that Phitec had shipped large numbers of packages on two occasions to a company called Deramo Systems in Chicago. The first shipment, which occurred on January 16, 2004, contained thirty-two packages of valves valued at $1.5 million; a second shipment of ninety-four boxes of machined parts had been sent four days later. Each was accompanied by a standard customs letter signed by Friedrich’s daughter. Why, asked Lehmann, would the Tinners be shipping what appeared to be valuable nuclear technology to the United States?
The IAEA checked the address later and found that it was an empty building. While some people wondered why the Tinners would be shipping anything to Deramo in Chicago, Heinonen speculated that it was a sham transaction, set up to cover a payment to the Tinners, perhaps from the Americans. “I would be surprised if a lot of equipment went to that address,” he said later. “Maybe it was nothing but a way to give them some money.”
The drawings in Lehmann’s office were only the beginning of what the Swiss showed the IAEA team on its two-day visit. Later on the first day, they went to the federal police headquarters, where they were met by Markus Kellenberger, the head of counterproliferation. He took Edwards and Yonemura down a corridor and stopped at a locked door that bore the word ATOMOS and the trefoil sign of radiation danger. Inside, the only thing radioactive was more Tinner documents, which were locked in two large cabinets. Kellenberger said that a nearby room contained additional records, which had been culled from the files obtained from the Tinners. The records were neatly labeled, but Yonemura and Edwards had only two days in Bern and it was clear that a careful examination of the material would take much more time. Kellenberger offered to show them pieces of equipment and components removed from Phitec and Traco, which had been moved from the jail cell to a storage area in the same building. There they saw an array of high-tech pieces designed for centrifuges. Some of the pieces were finished; others were in the early stages of manufacture. Examining the equipment took the rest of the afternoon, and they agreed to meet the next day back in Lehmann’s office.
The next morning, the prosecutor and a police technician spent several hours reviewing the contents of a hard drive from one of the computers at Marco’s house with Edwards and Yonemura. The technician described how he and his colleagues in the police IT unit had been forced to recover the files because they had been deleted from the computers. The Tinner effort had fallen far short of cleaning the computer, so the technician said that they had been able to retrieve several hundred drawings from that hard drive alone. Work was continuing on additional drives. The drawings amplified the material from the previous day.
Back in Vienna the next day, Edwards and Yonemura provided Heinonen with a description of what they had seen in Bern. The Finn was surprised by the scope of the evidence and how deeply it implicated the Tinners in the Khan network. There also was a recognition of how much more work was involved in running every aspect of the network to ground. The e-mail showing that the Americans suspected there was a fourth customer but appeared to have made no more progress in identifying the country or group than the IAEA, was most alarming.
Well into the description of what had transpired in Bern, Edwards and Yonemura came to the part where they described the e-mails they had seen showing that the CIA had bought the P-2 rotors from Urs Tinner. Not only had the CIA bought the rotors, they said, but the messages indicated that the Americans had instructed Tinner to lie about it to the IAEA.
Heinonen erupted. Why had the Americans told Tinner to lie? Why had the IAEA wasted so much time and energy trying to find those two critical missing rotors when they were probably sitting in a storage room in Oak Ridge? Heinonen tried to figure out the American motive. The CIA knew that the IAEA had found invoices showing that seven rotors had been shipped from Khan’s lab in Pakistan to Dubai. He had told them himself. Yet for some reason, the CIA didn’t want them to know that the rotors were in the United States. One possibility was that the CIA recognized the significance of the rotors to any attempt to prosecute the Tinners in Switzerland. Keeping their location secret could hamper that effort. Or perhaps it was a simple case of industrial espionage. In the 1970s, the British, Dutch, and Germans had set up Urenco as a joint operation to provide enriched uranium for Europe’s commercial nuclear reactors. At the time, the United States controlled the nuclear fuel supplies for the world’s civilian reactors. In developing the P-2, the Europeans wanted to break what some considered an American stranglehold so they would be free to develop nuclear power on their own terms. There had been many advances in centrifuge technology since the late 1970s, when the P-2 was the most efficient machine available, but it was possible that the Americans still didn’t want Urenco to find out that they had two of the rotors. “This was a big problem,” Heinonen said later. “Urenco wouldn’t like it that the U.S. had the rotors because the U.S. could learn, particularly with the P-2.”
In Switzerland, the evidence was still being organized. Lehmann had asked Edwards and Yonemura to return to examine the rest. Heinonen agreed, authorizing them to make as many trips as necessary. “Go see them all,” he said, referring to the documents. “Go see the Swiss and take a full inventory.”
THE SWISS PROGRESS FRUSTRATED THE CIA and Kinsman. The case officer had retired in the fall of 2005 but remained at the agency on a contract, which allowed him to monitor Lehmann’s ongoing investigation. The silence of the U.S. government had not been enough to derail the Swiss inquiry. And now the CIA was learning through its sources that the IAEA was helping the Swiss understand the dimensions of the case. The danger that the Tinners might be charged and wind up in court seemed to be increasing. At Langley, it was becoming clear that stopping the Swiss was going to require some bigger guns.
On January 19, 2006, Ambassador Willeford returned to the Justice Ministry in Bern to repeat her government’s fears about the Swiss investigation of the Tinners and the potential damage to ongoing intelligence operations. The Americans were not sure that Christoph Blocher would come through for them, so Willeford invited the justice minister to meet the following week with Michael Chertoff, the U.S. secretary of homeland security, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Blocher agreed.
Chertoff is an intense man with an impressive résumé, particularly when it comes to terrorism. He had been a federal prosecutor in New Jersey and he was the chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division in the two years after the September 11 attacks, a job in which he had supervised the prosecution of the so-called “twentieth hijacker,” Zacarias Moussaoui. In 2003, President Bush had nominated Chertoff to a prestigious judgeship on the United States Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. When Bush needed a new head of the Department of Homeland Security in early 2005, Chertoff had agreed to resign his lifetime appointment to the bench and return to the administrative branch of government. Since then, he had been a major player in the American antiterrorism effort, particularly on the domestic front. Where Blocher had little experience with international terrorism, Chertoff was steeped in it, which seemed to make him a good choice to explain where the Tinner case fit in the larger context of the fight against terrorism and to underscore the importance of making it disappear.
Davos is best known as the place where the stars of business, government, and entertainment meet to talk about serious topics. The invitation-only event transforms the tiny alpine village into the world’s most extreme networking site, a place where billionaires and mere millionaires rub shoulders with the likes of former president Bill Clinton, Queen Rania of Jordan, and movie star Angelina Jolie. For 2006, there were more than 240 sessions packed into four and a half days, with events running from seven in the morning until past midnight. Topics ranged from the serious, “Could a nuclear bomb go off in your city?” to the frivolous, “All you ever wanted to know about relationships, but were afraid to ask.” The Middle East dominated the political discussion, and seminars on economics focused on the rise of China and India. One of the most popular sessions was a discussion of the digital future between Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, and Skype inventor Niklas Zennström. The best party was thrown on Friday night by Google, which was held at the Kirschner Museum on Davos’s main street and featured an A-list of the powerful and celebrated, topped only by a wine list that started with a 1990 Krug champagne, moved on to a 1989 Château Margaux, and finished with magnum bottles of Château Lynch-Bages, vintage 1955. Much of the business of Davos, however, takes place on the sidelines, in the cafeteria at the conference center and various hotel suites scattered around the village.
It was in one of those suites where Chertoff made his pitch to Blocher. Using his personal knowledge of terrorist threats, the American official tried to convince the justice minister to back off the Tinner investigation. Chertoff stressed the role the Tinners had played in helping bring down the Libyan nuclear program. He said they had knowledge of people involved in ongoing intelligence operations, both assets and targets.
Explaining that it was essential to protect the continued effort to roll up the rest of the Khan network and keep nuclear weapons from ever falling into the hands of terrorists, Chertoff asked for Blocher’s help. Make sure that the relationship between the Tinners and American intelligence is not revealed and that no member of the family will ever testify in open court. They knew too many dangerous secrets.
Blocher understood the gravity of the situation, but he still faced a dilemma. Lehmann’s investigation had turned up evidence that the Tinners had probably violated Swiss export laws for years. Shutting down the investigation now could violate the separation of powers under Swiss law. Blocher also did not want to be portrayed as bowing to American pressure if his actions ever became public. It could mean the end of his political career. He made clear to Chertoff that he understood the sensitivities, but he said he was not ready to interfere with the inquiry quite yet. Not until he understood more about what the Tinners had done, how they had done it, and how to protect the Swiss government.
Chertoff would report back to the White House that he wasn’t certain he had convinced the Swiss justice minister to do the right thing. With Marco and Urs Tinner languishing in jail, the CIA wondered how much longer their Swiss spies would keep their mouths shut. And the upcoming trial of another network participant in Germany added to the nervousness that details of the intelligence operation were about to spill into the public arena.
A MONTH AFTER DAVOS, the reason for Chertoff’s concern was evident at a secret meeting in the interrogation rooms of the police headquarters in Bern. Urs Tinner had been in jail for more than a year, and he was desperate to get out. Kinsman had arranged for his family to receive hefty payments during the time they spent in jail but Urs was losing faith in the ability of the CIA to secure his freedom. After all, he couldn’t spend any money locked away. In early February, he asked the prosecutors if he could talk to the IAEA. He hoped its officials would explain the extent of his cooperation. Lehmann agreed. On February 20, Olli Heinonen and Trevor Edwards arrived in Bern.
Lehmann met the IAEA officials in his office and led them down two flights of stairs to the interrogation rooms in the basement. In one of the windowless rooms, they found Tinner, his lawyer, Roman Boegli, and two senior Swiss federal police officials, Kellenberger from the counter-proliferation office and Chief Inspector Kurt Senn. It was agreed that the meeting would be recorded, but Boegli insisted that Tinner would not sign a statement attesting to the truth of the information. He said he did not want it to be used against his client in the event of a trial. For his part, Heinonen repeated that he and his people were still abiding by the confidentiality requirement set up in the “rules of the game” two years earlier at the first meeting with the Tinners.
Though Heinonen had met with Friedrich Tinner and with Marco and his lawyer, this was the first time he had been face-to-face with Urs since Innsbruck in the fall of 2004. Tinner was paler and the months in jail had robbed him of his swagger. As he started his presentation, Tinner was clearly angry and frustrated about the way he had been treated, but he focused most of the blame on the CIA. He claimed that he had cooperated extensively with the Americans but that neither he nor his family had been able to contact the CIA since his arrest in Germany in October 2004. The assertion was not true, but no one in the room knew it. Tinner’s defense strategy entailed some risks. Swiss law was serious about the country’s neutrality, and cooperating with a foreign intelligence agency violated specification sections of the criminal code. But that crime was less serious than a conviction for helping a foreign country develop nuclear weapons. So Tinner took pains to claim he knew nothing of the ultimate destination of the parts he manufactured and the shipments he orchestrated.
Casting himself in a heroic role, Tinner said that he had only manufactured components in Malaysia, without knowing that they were destined for any nuclear program. Once he learned where the material was going, he described the precise steps he had taken to sabotage centrifuge components produced at SCOPE. This was old news to Heinonen and Edwards. The problem was that Tinner’s supposedly sabotaged designs seemed to work quite well. Tinner was either lying about his sabotage or the alterations had not been enough to cause the centrifuges to malfunction.
Edwards told Tinner that Urenco had conducted tests on the designs from SCOPE and determined that they met the specs for centrifuges. In addition, he said, the IAEA had asked Urenco to build a few P-1 centrifuges using the actual parts produced from Tinner’s designs. Edwards said Urenco had nearly finished the machines and it would soon be clear whether the sabotage had worked—or even occurred.
Flustered, Tinner reached for a life raft. He claimed that he had hidden a hard drive containing sensitive information and some documentation in the house he had rented in Kuala Lumpur. He described the precise spot beneath the floorboards where, so far as he knew, the material was still concealed.
Lehmann was comfortable making Urs Tinner available to the IAEA. He trusted Heinonin, and he desperately needed the expertise the agency had to offer. The same could not be said for the Americans. In recent weeks, some of the prosecutor’s associates had come to believe that there was a leak in the investigation. The Americans seemed to have developed a source inside the Swiss government who was keeping them up to date on developments. The Americans seemed to know every move being made by the Swiss authorities, from the assistance they were receiving from the IAEA to plans under way to try to help the German prosecution of Lerch. They did not suspect the IAEA. The Americans appeared to be receiving far more information about the progress of the Swiss investigation than the IAEA possessed. Instead the concern was that the leak was coming from inside the Swiss government. Suspicion had focused on a senior Swiss intelligence official who had a long-standing relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency. Among the few officials who knew about the Tinner affair, he was the one unashamed friend of Washington’s neoconservatives, and the most vocal evangelist for greater cooperation with the American intelligence service. He shared the CIA’s determination to make the Tinner case disappear. Senior police officials had suggested to Lehmann that the suspect should be prohibited from attending future meetings at which sensitive aspects of the case were on the agenda.
Other signs of outside interest in the case had popped up. The Swiss police detected a spike in attempts to hack into their computer network. The attacks seemed to be aimed at the IT center in Zurich, where the Tinner documents were kept on a secure server. Police computer technicians tracked the attempts to a company in Iraq that had connections to the Pentagon, but they could get no further.
The Swiss investigators were finally getting a sense of the scope of what they had come to call “the Tinner affair.” The Tinners had maintained that they had helped the CIA, something that the Americans had acknowledged somewhat grudgingly. Investigators believed the Tinners and the Americans were withholding information about the full extent of the relationship. The searches had turned up the contract signed by Marco with Big Black River Technologies. As they had with a dozen other companies, the Swiss police followed up by trying to contact the company. But this time they got only the answering machine in Washington.
During a trip to the U.S. capital, a Swiss police official had gone to the address and found that there was no listing for the company. Then there were the names on the contract. The police could find no trace of W. James Kinsman and Sean D. Mahaffey. The names didn’t appear anywhere in databases and didn’t mean much until the investigators read the last will and testament that Marco had left in a lockbox at his Jenins apartment. To assure that his wife received money owed to him, the will mentioned a contact and listed a contact name and telephone number. The name was Jim Kinsman and the phone number appeared to be in Washington. No one answered the number. When the Swiss police asked Marco about Kinsman, he told them a story that led to a new determination among the police to get to the bottom of the CIA’s role in the Tinner affair.
Up to this point in the interrogations, the Tinner brothers had provided few details of their dealings with the CIA. They were trying to protect themselves from being prosecuted for working for a foreign intelligence agency, and they were trying to protect the hush money coming from the CIA. Confronted with his own will, Marco finally shed some light on the arrangements. He acknowledged that he had signed the contract and that Kinsman had been the family’s primary contact. Like his brother, Marco was critical of the Americans. He said the family had tried to help bring down the Khan network but that the Americans did not appreciate their efforts or trust them. To illustrate his point, he said that he had signed the contract with Big Black River the same day that six Americans had insisted on searching his apartment in Jenins and his office in Sax. During the searches, he said, he believed that they had copied all of the records on his computers. He even said that Kinsman had told him to claim that unknown people had broken into the apartment if the incident were ever discovered by the Swiss authorities.
This was the first the Swiss police had heard that the CIA had operated on Swiss soil. The idea that they had searched two locations, even with the coerced permission of Marco Tinner, elevated the anger. From the perspective of the Swiss authorities, recruiting Swiss citizens as spies was bad enough. Violating Swiss sovereignty made the CIA more than common criminals. Some factions within the police and governmental circles of the Swiss government had begun to talk about expanding the Tinner case by prosecuting the CIA for recruiting Swiss citizens for spying and conducting espionage on Swiss territory.