Within days of seeing the two weapons designs and other material, Heinonen sent Edwards, Yonemura, and Baute back to Switzerland. He wanted a more thorough assessment of the threat posed by the Swiss cache of electronic files. Baute would be the key this time. He had spent the first part of his career as a nuclear weapons physicist, working for the French national program. Unlike his colleagues, Baute had the expertise to review the records and determine the extent of the weapons designs, as well as the security clearances to allow him to assess them. Heinonen instructed his team not to tell the Swiss exactly what they were searching for; that was a decision that would be made later, once they understood the threat. From the IAEA’s perspective, the bigger the threat, the more the need to fully understand and expose the Khan network through a thorough investigation of the Tinners in Switzerland.
Heinonen’s visit to Pelindaba in South Africa in early 2005 had made a lasting impression on him. Though the South Africans had abandoned their nuclear weapons program a decade earlier and destroyed the related design documents, they had retained a complete catalog of the documents, parts, and blueprints required for a nuclear weapon. More than a historical record, his review of the catalog had helped Heinonen understand the process of assembling the technology on the black market to build an atomic bomb. In the case of the Tinner records, he wanted a similar record of what the Khan network had sold to the world, as a means of assessing both the current threat and future vulnerabilities. “I was certain we would have to return someday to the topic,” he said later.
Even with Baute’s assistance, assembling this new catalog of horrors would be a daunting job. The Swiss had seized an electronic cache that exceeded a terabyte, the equivalent of five million pages of paper. In addition to the huge amount of material to digest, there was no order to the computers or the files on them. Each time a new computer was purchased, it appeared that the hard drive from the old one was dumped onto the new one. As a result, countless files were repeated, sometimes with variations that might be important.
Examining every single file would take at least two years, and the IAEA clearly did not have that kind of time. The obvious solution would be to search by key words, which could pull up records related to specific topics. Plugging in “PAB” would presumably uncover every document containing those initials. But there was no guarantee that all of the weapons designs were labeled “PAB,” so other words and phrases would be necessary. They also wanted to throw in other search terms to reduce the risk of alerting the Swiss technicians that they were looking for weapons designs.
Searching only for key words could not be their sole approach, however; they would not be able to find what they did not know was there. As a remedy, Baute planned to employ what’s known as “the Monte Carlo method” of random selection to scan everything. The term, first used by physicists developing the atomic bomb at Los Alamos in the 1940s, refers to a number of techniques that rely on repeated random samplings to examine a problem. The simplest type is called “hit-and-miss” integration, which employs random samples to reflect the system as a whole. In Baute’s case, he would choose computer files at random, with a scientist’s confidence that they would portray the larger whole.
YONEMURA AND EDWARDS COULD NOT show up unannounced at the police building in Zurich, so Edwards had telephoned ahead to his police contact and made an appointment. Peter Lehmann knew that Edwards and Yonemura were returning, but the prosecutor had not realized they were bringing someone else. So when he learned that a third IAEA official had arrived, he drove from Bern to Zurich immediately to find out what was going on.
“Why are you here?” he asked after being introduced to Baute.
The response that Lehmann got was not satisfactory. “We found something interesting the last time,” he was told by Edwards. Lehmann couldn’t be sure whether the IAEA had found clues to the weapons plans that the Americans said were in the files but he decided not to interfere with their search. Once the IAEA experts were done, he would insist on full disclosure. Then he would find out for himself if the Americans were telling the truth about the danger in the computers, or trying to frighten the Swiss into turning over the evidence that he needed to build his case against the Tinners.
When the technician was finally asked to search for documents bearing the initials “PAB,” he turned up more than three hundred pages of designs. Examining the drawings as they popped onto the monitor, Baute understood that he was looking at blueprints for two separate nuclear weapons. Both were so-called implosion devices, more advanced and more powerful than the Chinese weapon. The initials certainly indicated that they were from Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and the designs themselves reflected what Baute knew about Pakistan’s development of such weapons.
There are two basic types of nuclear weapons. The simplest to build is the gun type, which crashes two hemispheres of weapons-grade uranium together to create the critical mass for an explosion. The second type, known as an implosion device, relies on high explosives arrayed in a sphere around the fissile material. The explosives must be timed to go off simultaneously to compress the fissile material and create the critical reaction that unleashes the nuclear blast. Implosion devices can use either highly enriched uranium or plutonium as the fissile material. While they are regarded as more difficult to construct because of the precision requirements, they also are more compact and pack more power.
The PAB drawings represented only part of the information necessary to build a weapon. The files also contained the extensive lists and precise specifications for mechanical and electrical items required for such a device. To an engineer, such lists provide a road map to building something, whether a bicycle or a nuclear bomb. The PAB search turned up dozens of separate files for mechanical parts and electrical components. There also were specifications for the electronic initiators to set off the high explosives simultaneously, and typed notes for the type and amount of explosives required to force a supercritical blast. The inventory was far more extensive that anything Baute had seen in Libya, and the device itself was far more lethal because it was smaller and more powerful.
When the search switched from key phrases to the Monte Carlo method of random selection, they found fewer nuclear-related documents. Sixty-seven files describing the Chinese warhead were retrieved, a more extensive collection than Baute had seen in Libya but not a complete package. The same appeared to be true with the PAB material: There were hundreds of drawings and an extensive shopping list of parts, many readily available on the open market to someone with the knowledge to ask for them. But in Baute’s mind, what he saw in Zurich did not add up to a complete weapon design. “This information did not mean that a bunch of terrorists can assemble a weapon,” he said. “There are still some technical issues to be resolved.”
Despite the technical gaps, the drawings constituted a grave proliferation threat. What no one could understand was why Khan would have let these copies out of his personal control. They were the crown jewels, the most valuable item in the inventory he could offer potential customers and the item that would cause the biggest outrage among his countrymen should his theft of them be discovered. Yet the material already had been transferred to at least one computer in the Tinner enterprise. And no one knew how many electronic versions existed elsewhere.
“I am one hundred percent convinced there are more somewhere,” Baute said later.
Baute could not know, however, exactly where.
While Baute was most concerned about the weapons plans, the files contained important information on aspects of the network’s operations. There were business cards for suppliers around the world and endless invoices for shipments of sensitive technology to Pakistan, Dubai, Malaysia, Singapore, Libya, and many other countries, dating back to the late 1970s. For the IAEA and other investigators, this was uncharted territory. Many of the names had never come up before in connection with nuclear trafficking; many of the specific companies receiving or supplying equipment had never been on anyone’s radar.
One of the most puzzling finds was a set of files describing Syria’s attempted purchase of a type of remote manipulator devices for handling radioactive material, almost never used outside a plutonium reprocessing facility. Remote manipulators have many uses in the handling of dangerous materials. But the version sought by Syria had the unusually long reach required to handle highly radioactive material from behind a thick protective wall. Syria had been on the IAEA’s list as the potential fourth customer. Khan had gone there in the 1990s and urged the Syrian military to develop its own nuclear arsenal. There were no indications that Damascus had taken up Khan’s offer, but the discovery was sure to increase Heinonen’s concern when his team returned to Vienna with the news.
DESPITE HIS REPUTATION FOR HOARDING sensitive information, Heinonen was not about to keep revelations of this magnitude from Mohamed ElBaradei, particularly since the director general of the IAEA was scheduled to give a major speech on counterproliferation efforts in a few days.
On October 14, Heinonen had sat in the director general’s twenty-eighth-floor office in Vienna and delivered a rundown on the weapons plans and other records found on the Tinners’ computers in Switzerland. He explained how the agency had obtained a handful of designs from Switzerland that appeared to be related to nuclear weapons. Heinonen said he had ordered them sealed and transferred to the U.S. mission immediately. But he said he had sent Baute back to Zurich in order to get an expert’s assessment of the drawings. He told ElBaradei that the Frenchman had returned convinced that the designs were for two Pakistani warheads that were more advanced than the Chinese version discovered earlier in Libya. Heinonen said that he had not yet informed the Swiss prosecutor or police about the dangerous records in their possession. When ElBaradei asked about the security of the documents, Heinonen explained how the Swiss were storing them on an isolated server in a police building.
But Heinonen could not reassure ElBaradei that others might not have copies of the designs. In the worst news he could possibly have delivered to his boss, the Finn cautioned ElBaradei that the IAEA’s own investigation had found that electronic copies of sensitive designs were already in wide circulation among the participants in the Khan network.
“What is alarming is that we have found these sorts of records on several computers in several places,” he said. “These guys had been copying information and collecting it everywhere they went. These weapons components, we found less of them, practically all of them were in one place, Switzerland. But the P-1 and P-2 designs were all over. Practically every computer had those. That’s the way these guys worked, in their hotel rooms and homes. When they left in a hurry, they didn’t clean up, so electronic information was left behind.”
ElBaradei’s reaction reflected his training as a lawyer and diplomat. He told Heinonen that the Swiss government would have to be informed quickly about the nature of the material it possessed so officials there could take the proper steps to secure the information. Even before that step was taken, ElBaradei said he believed that the agency’s mandate required informing the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China, all nuclear powers themselves—that Switzerland, a nonnuclear nation, possessed plans to manufacture atomic weapons. The Americans, and probably the British, were well aware of the cache of material in Switzerland. The French, Russians, and Chinese, on the other hand, got an unwelcome surprise.
On October 16, 2006, two days after his startling conversation with Heinonen, the television cameras were on their stands and more than a dozen international reporters were waiting when ElBaradei opened a conference on tightening controls on nuclear proliferation. The weapons plans in Switzerland were not the only item weighing on his mind. The previous week, North Korea had conducted its first detonation of a nuclear device. Iran was continuing to defy demands by the Security Council that it suspend its enrichment activities. There were fears in capitals around the world that international controls might prove too weak to prevent a new arms race in both Asia and the Middle East.
“Unfortunately the political environment is not a very secure one,” he told the audience. “So it’s becoming very fashionable, if you like, for countries to look into the possibilities of protecting themselves through nuclear weapons.” He warned that twenty to thirty countries “have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons in a very short time span. We are dealing with almost, as I call them, virtual nuclear weapons states.”
ElBaradei did not single out any particular country, though he was clearly alluding to North Korea and Iran. Other countries, however, had recently announced that they were considering developing enrichment programs, the first step down a road that could lead to weapons. Among them were Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa. Countries like Germany and Japan already had the means to produce weapons-grade uranium if they chose to do so. While none of those countries had indicated any desire to develop a nuclear weapon, ElBaradei’s point was that they and many others had the technology to go nuclear almost overnight.
“The knowledge is out, both for peaceful purposes and unfortunately also for not peaceful purposes,” he said.
Few people in the room that day knew the full scope of his warning about the spread of nuclear knowledge.
On October 25, nine days after the speech and once the notification of the nuclear powers concerning the Swiss weapons designs was completed, ElBaradei summoned the Swiss ambassador to his office. There he provided a bare-bones description of what his team had found in the Tinner records. The Swiss police have in their possession highly sensitive, proliferation-related drawings and other material that must be held under the tightest security, ElBaradei said. The five nuclear powers had been notified already, but he said it was now up to the Swiss to guarantee that the information did not fall into the wrong hands. The IAEA review of the documents so far had been informal. ElBaradei asked that the Swiss government, as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and member of the IAEA, allow the agency to conduct a more thorough official inspection of the evidence. The ambassador promised to contact the Foreign Ministry in Bern immediately.
THE NEWS FROM THE IAEA reverberated through the Foreign Ministry. Up until now, the concerns about the contents of the Tinner files had been shared only among a select number of officials within the Justice Ministry, the federal police, and the prosecutor’s office. The foreign minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey, telephoned Blocher at the Justice Ministry and demanded a full explanation. He promised to get back to her as soon as possible.
Two days after the meeting between ElBaradei and the Swiss ambassador in Vienna, Swiss police conducted another series of surprise raids on the offices and homes of the Tinners. Even though Urs and Marco were still in jail, their residences were searched again, too. Blocher had ordered the second round of searches to make certain that nothing had been missed the first time around. At the same time, the paper records and equipment that was being stored in jail cells were moved to a more secure location.
Blocher recognized that he could no longer keep a lid on the Tinner case, despite the pressure from the Americans to make the whole matter disappear somehow. There was a real risk that word of the nuclear weapons plans in Swiss custody could leak, either from the Swiss government or the IAEA, resulting in a wave of bad publicity. After the raids and securing the material, his next move was to spread the responsibility to his fellow members of the Federal Council.
On November 1, Blocher presented the council with a written statement describing the existence of nuclear weapons plans in the Tinner files. It was accompanied by the request from the IAEA for formal access to the material in order to determine the extent of the proliferation risk. Blocher acknowledged that he and others on his staff had met several times with their American counterparts in recent months to discuss the Swiss investigation of the Tinners. The Americans were arguing, he said, that the documents were so explosive in nature that they should be turned over to the United States for safekeeping. Blocher recommended providing the IAEA with access to the records, writing that the international agency had the expertise and authority to evaluate them. He did not recommend turning over any material to the Americans at this point. The full council accepted the justice minister’s recommendations.
The Swiss police involved in the investigation were outraged when the IAEA confirmed that its people had found weapons plans on the Tinner computers. The Americans knew the plans had been there all along; in fact, they had made copies of the records for themselves in June 2003, if Marco Tinner was to be believed. For some of the police team, the discovery of the weapons plans put the American pressure to destroy the documents in a completely new light. If the Americans were truly determined to stop the spread of nuclear knowledge, they would not have left the material on unprotected computers. For more than three years, the CIA had allowed the most sensitive material possible to remain in the hands of some of the worst traffickers in history, people with a track record of helping Libya and perhaps some other country or group. Only now did the Americans want everything destroyed, said one of the investigators, “to hide their own stupidity. They are responsible for the spread of this dangerous technology. You cannot stop it now. The Tinners were free. They were computer freaks, traveling, living in different countries, and duplicating all those files.”
On top of the anger that such sensitive files had been left on the Tinner computers, the Swiss investigators were growing increasingly suspicious that someone inside their intelligence circle was providing confidential information to the Americans. The latest example involved Blocher’s presentation to the Federal Council, which was supposed to be secret. But the next day, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice wrote a letter to the justice minister, suggesting that the United States take control of the Tinner documents to ensure their security. Rice said that Swiss prosecutors would be allowed access to the records for any criminal investigation. The next month, the CIA station chief in Switzerland and other U.S. officials met with Blocher. The Americans knew that the IAEA had discovered the weapons plans. They repeated the offer to take them for safekeeping. They also asked Blocher again to make certain that the Tinners’ collaboration with the CIA would not be revealed or pursued in criminal proceedings.