On March 24, 2007, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to ban all Iranian arms exports and freeze the financial assets of twenty-eight Iranians linked to the country’s nuclear and military programs. The fifteen-to-zero vote came a day after the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had canceled a planned trip to New York City to confront the Security Council. The resolution was the third set of sanctions imposed on Iran over its refusal to suspend its uranium-enrichment-related activities until the IAEA could verify that it was not secretly pursuing a nuclear weapon. Even as the latest sanctions were being approved, the consensus among experts was that they would be ineffective in persuading Iran to stop enriching uranium or open its facilities fully to IAEA inspectors. Although previous sanctions had taken a toll on the Iranian economy, they had not persuaded the country’s leaders to back away from what they contended was their right to enrich uranium for what they said was a civilian energy program. Instead, Iran continued to make strides in its enrichment program.
In February, diplomats at the IAEA had reported that Iran had moved nine tons of uranium hexafluoride, the feedstock for centrifuges, to the underground enrichment plant at Natanz. The amount was enough to make at least one atom bomb if the Khan-supplied centrifuges enriched it to a weapons-grade level. The report caused new concern in Israel, which viewed the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat. The Israelis stepped up their surveillance of Iran and began to push the Americans quietly for a green light to launch air strikes on the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz and other nuclear installations.
The U.S. government had developed its own contingency plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities as early as 2003, but knew that the prospect was fraught with dangers. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made clear to his Israeli counterparts that, while a military strike was feasible, the repercussions would be impossible to control. Iran could increase its efforts to destabilize the fragile government in Iraq and provide new help for insurgents attacking U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Retaliation against Israel could involve missile strikes on major cities, and Tehran would most certainly provide more weapons and encouragement to its anti-Israeli proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
In early 2007, Bush said publicly that he did not support military strikes against Iran. “I think it’s absolutely absurd that people suspect I am trying to find a pretext to attack Iran,” he told a group of White House reporters.
Against such a volatile mix of foreign policy woes, the problem of persuading the Swiss government to cooperate in covering up the role of three of its citizens in helping bring down the Khan network may have seemed small. But the Swiss saw events through a different lens. The CIA and its illegally recruited Swiss agents contributed to the most serious proliferation violations in the history of nuclear science. The CIA and its Swiss spies may have helped enable Iran to develop a nuclear weapons capacity, and they were so cavalier that the same technology was probably on hard drives and the far reaches of the Internet, which put them within reach of international terrorists and rogue regimes. In the spring of 2007, U.S. patience with the Swiss was wearing thin, too. The decision was made to take a more aggressive approach.
The Americans had long believed that Blocher was inclined to cooperate in closing down the Tinner case. The criminal investigation of the Tinner family for export violations was clearly within the Justice Ministry’s portfolio. But Gonzales and other administration officials recognized how difficult it would be for Blocher to turn over the documents and eviscerate the espionage case against both the Tinners and the CIA agents who had searched Marco’s places in 2003. A decision of that magnitude would require the backing of the Swiss Federal Council, which acted by consensus on major issues. Even then there was a constitutional question about whether the council had the legal right to intervene in a criminal investigation under the separation of powers in Switzerland. So the sense in Washington was that Blocher had not made the final decision on how to raise the issue with the six other members of the Federal Council.
The Americans developed a new strategy. They would take their argument beyond Blocher to two other ministries, Defense and Foreign Affairs. Both agencies had responsibility for aspects of the Tinner affair and perhaps together they could sway the rest of the council. If turning over the records to the United States offended Swiss neutrality, the Americans would suggest that they could be destroyed. The effect would be the same—the cases against the Tinners and the CIA agents who had searched Marco’s properties would disappear. And the Americans already had their own copies of everything.
THE CAMPAIGN BEGAN IN APRIL. Samuel Schmid, the Swiss defense minister, arrived in Washington for three days of talks on bilateral defense issues and Afghanistan. Like Blocher, Schmid was a member of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, but he was regarded as a moderate counterweight to the hard-line attitudes of the justice minister. Before entering politics, Schmid had been a lawyer in Bern, and he retained a lawyer’s disciplined and cautious outlook. Since taking over as defense minister in 2000, his primary mission had been to reform the Swiss military.
In Washington, Schmid met with Gates and the deputy defense secretary, Gordon England. Gates had just returned from Quebec, where he had made a plea to NATO allies to increase their troop commitment in Afghanistan in anticipation of a spring offensive by the Taliban. Switzerland is not a NATO member, and the country had only two advisers assigned to the international forces in Afghanistan. Schmid resisted efforts by Gates to provide a symbolic increase in troops, arguing that the Swiss were more comfortable at peacekeeping missions.
The Swiss official was more receptive when Gates and other administration officials raised the issue of the Tinner case. Along with the defense secretary, Schmid met with Chertoff, the administration’s top terrorism official, and Charlie Allen, who was running the new intelligence office that Chertoff had set up at the Department of Homeland Security. All three U.S. officials made the same basic argument to Schmid. Putting the Tinners on trial would jeopardize critical intelligence operations aimed at eradicating the rest of Khan’s nuclear network. The highly sensitive nuclear weapons plans would be safer in American hands. If Swiss law would not allow them to hand over the records, they suggested that the Swiss could destroy them.
Allen argued with the most authority. Before joining Homeland Security two years earlier, he had spent his career in the CIA. As a young analyst in 1962, he had worked on a team that planned to set up a new Cuban government in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion. He had achieved a measure of fame in the 1980s when he was identified as the CIA analyst who blew the whistle on the Reagan administration’s illegal efforts to finance antigovernment rebels in Nicaragua, leading to the Iran-Contra scandal. As a veteran of the antiterrorism world who was now in his early seventies, Allen’s views carried particular weight with the Swiss minister.
On the last morning of his trip, Schmid flew to Houston to visit the NASA space center and two military bases. While he was there, he paid a visit to former president George H. W. Bush. The unusual meeting had been arranged by the White House. Schmid was accompanied to Houston by Urs Ziswiler, the Swiss ambassador to Washington. The topics for the session with the former president hardly seemed earthshattering: Schmid and Bush were to talk about a host of international issues, ranging from relations with Russia to the troubling Iranian nuclear program. Near the end of the meeting, Ziswiler was asked to step out of Bush’s office, leaving Schmid and the former president alone. The ambassador later told associates that he believed Bush raised the Tinner issue, urging Schmid to go along with American requests to exercise caution in handling the case. “Maybe he was involved because some of this happened while he was president,” Ziswiler said. “Maybe his son asked for his help.”
Schmid returned to Washington and talked with Swiss reporters about his trip. He said he had ruled out sending more Swiss troops to Afghanistan. He also spoke glowingly about Bush, describing the former president as “very switched on, very interested and very up to date on the topics.” There was no mention of the Tinner case, but the Americans were confident the defense minister was firmly in their corner. The next target was the Swiss foreign minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey, and of course, they would reinforce earlier conversations with Blocher. At this time Calmy-Rey also held the rotating post of Swiss president.
THE AMERICANS HAD MISREAD BLOCHER slightly. The blustery justice minister had not decided to rein in his investigators. He remained torn about whether to try to shut down the entire Tinner mess. The nationalist in him wanted to prosecute the Tinners and the CIA. The politician in him worried that trials could lead to embarrassing disclosures about how little the Swiss had done to stop proliferation in previous years. Embarrassment could turn to scandal if the Americans claimed to the world that the Swiss trials were jeopardizing ongoing intelligence operations. Also, he did not want to do anything that would create obstacles in the fight against nuclear proliferation.
On July 2, Blocher wrote a letter to Schmid and Calmy-Rey seeking their opinions on how to proceed with the investigations of the Tinners and what Blocher referred to as a “suspected foreign intelligence service.” Police investigators had found that six CIA agents had searched Marco Tinner’s house when they recruited him as a spy in 2003, he wrote. The search compounded the violation of Swiss law by the CIA, leading Blocher to write that he thought there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the specific agents for espionage. As for the Tinners, Blocher wrote that there was no doubt that their cooperation with the CIA broke Swiss law, too. He believed the legal conditions for the criminal prosecution of the Tinners and the CIA agents for espionage had been met. But the letter was not a recommendation for going forward. It was more a search for political cover within the Federal Council if the decision were made to abandon the investigation and turn over or destroy the records, as the Americans were demanding.
Schmid already agreed with the Americans, but Calmy-Rey knew little about the Tinner case beyond a couple of earlier statements that Blocher had submitted to the council. She assigned a member of her staff to research the history of the Tinners, sending him deep into the government archives. There he found a trail of official notifications from the United States and Britain about suspected nuclear trafficking by a host of Swiss individuals and companies. Among those singled out by the Americans was Friedrich Tinner, the patriarch of the very family that the CIA would later recruit. The warnings from the late 1970s focused on Friedrich Tinner’s sales to Pakistan. The Swiss had never taken the American and British notifications seriously. The findings could be used to justify the Americans’ actions, suggesting that they had acted unilaterally because the Swiss had failed to take action against possible proliferation activities within their country. The staffer concluded in a written report to Calmy-Rey that the foreign minister should oppose opening criminal proceedings against the Tinners or the CIA. Accepting the logic required a leap of faith that no one would ever uncover the degree to which the Swiss had buckled to American pressure. It would soon prove to be an unfortunate leap for the Swiss government.
Calmy-Rey, the foreign minister, was a veteran politician who had worked her way up through the Social Democratic Party, which was the most left-leaning of the major parties. In 2002 she had been elected to the Federal Council and in January 2007 she had taken the one-year post of Swiss president. The position is more ceremonial than influential. As first among equals, the president presides over the council meetings and carries out the formal functions of a head of state. As president, CalmyRey could act on behalf of the entire council only in an emergency.
After more than two decades in Swiss politics, she recognized the potential dangers outlined in the report. The Swiss could find themselves held up to international ridicule for ignoring serious export violations and then obstructing the American efforts to clean up their mess. On the other side of the coin, killing a criminal investigation and destroying evidence carried its own potential for scandal. One Swiss official compared the dilemma to “a train coming, about to hit us full face.” In July, she set up a series of discreet lunches with some of her colleagues on the council to brief them on the situation and search for a way to escape the locomotive heading down the tracks at Switzerland. Calmy-Rey told her colleagues that she was inclined to grant the requests of the Americans. She said she favored destroying the documents instead of giving them to another country.
Toward the end of July, the justice minister traveled to Washington again. The public purpose was further discussions with Alberto Gonzales on cooperation in prosecuting terrorists. The undisclosed agenda was the Tinners, and the key meeting was with Michael McConnell, the director of the Office of National Intelligence.
McConnell was sixty-five years old, about the same age as Blocher. He had served in the navy during the Vietnam War, patrolling the Mekong Delta in search of Vietcong fighters. Later he was director of the National Security Agency, the biggest of the intelligence agencies and charged with responsibility for monitoring worldwide communications to protect the United States. He had retired from government service a decade earlier and earned a fortune helping big corporations protect their computers from intrusion. Bush had enticed McConnell back into government to head the new Office of National Intelligence, which was established after the September 11 attacks to coordinate the activities of one hundred thousand people spread over sixteen government intelligence agencies. On paper at least, McConnell oversaw the CIA. In reality, his office and the older intelligence agency were sometimes bitter rivals.
But on July 27, when he met with Blocher, McConnell was fully on the side of the CIA. He tried to impress upon the Swiss justice minister that essential intelligence operations would be jeopardized unless the Swiss agreed not to prosecute the Tinners or the CIA agents. The arguments were the same ones Blocher had been hearing for the past year from his American interlocutors. This time, however, he provided the answer that the Americans had been eager to hear. The Federal Council would soon be asked to rule on formal requests to institute legal action against the Tinners and the CIA, he said. Blocher said that he had consulted the defense minister and the foreign minister. He told McConnell that he expected those two ministers to join him in recommending that the request be refused.
Finally the U.S. intelligence community and the Bush administration could imagine an end to the Tinner affair. All that was left was executing the third leg of the strategy by ensuring that Calmy-Rey was firmly in the American camp.
AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS second term in 2005, President Bush named Condoleeza Rice his secretary of state. Even after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and systematically marginalizing and weakening the State Department, Rice was a major star and the chief architect of the administration’s morally fervent foreign policy. Forbes ranked her as the most powerful woman in the world, and Time listed her three times as one of the world’s most influential people. Rice was a natural to put an end to the difficulties with Switzerland by making sure her counterpart in Bern was on board.
On August 9, Rice telephoned Calmy-Rey in Bern. After discussing some general foreign policy matters, Rice said she was happy to hear that the situation involving the Tinners appeared to be on the verge of resolution. In case the Swiss foreign minister did not understand the stakes, Rice provided a quick synopsis. The Swiss government had known for years about the nuclear trafficking of the Tinners and had failed to act. This failure, she said, had come despite years of official and unofficial warnings from the United States about the dangers of Swiss involvement in nuclear proliferation. Now, Rice warned, initiating legal proceedings against the CIA agents and the Tinners risked exposing intelligence that would give the international community the impression that the Swiss were once again obstructing international efforts to prevent proliferation. The mere publicity from the trial, according to Rice, would inhibit further efforts by the United States and the IAEA to dismantle the remainder of the Khan network. Rice also suggested that the Swiss government would jeopardize its relations with the United States if it proceeded with a case that would embarrass the Bush administration. The conversation was conducted in the polite language of international diplomacy, but the meaning was clear: If the Swiss didn’t dispose of the cases against the Tinners and the CIA, the United States would portray them as a hindrance to worldwide counterproliferation efforts and roll out the years of warnings that went unheeded by Swiss officials.
Stripped of its niceties, the conversation was extortion. The Swiss had the option of caving in to the U.S. plan or being made to look like collaborators in the spread of nuclear weapons. Instead of challenging Rice, Calmy-Rey repeated what she had already told her own colleagues. She understood the dangers of proceeding against the Tinners and the CIA. And she was certainly not willing to risk rupturing relations with the United States. She assured Rice that she would oppose any step that would damage international efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons or embarrass her allies in Washington. Neither Calmy-Rey nor anyone else in authority in the Swiss government was prepared to make the obvious counterargument: that it was the Americans who watched and waited over the years and decades as Khan and his accomplices sold nuclear technology, even advanced bomb designs, to some of the most dangerous regimes on the planet.
On August 27, Blocher submitted a formal proposal to the Federal Council asking that the attorney general be denied authorization to institute legal proceedings against the Tinners or the CIA agents who had searched their properties. He said that “current indications led to the suspicion of illegal intervention of the United States on Swiss territory,” but he also argued that the American actions “played an important role in interrupting the program aimed at granting nuclear arms to Libya.” As part of his proposal, Blocher also asked the council to authorize the destruction of all of the material seized from the Tinner family that could contribute in any way to nuclear proliferation.
Such blatant interference in a criminal investigation was deeply troubling for some of Blocher’s colleagues on the Swiss Federal Council. The Swiss system of government provided a clear separation of power between the executive branch, which was represented by the council, and the judiciary, which was represented by the attorney general’s office and the police. Stopping an ongoing case, and destroying the documentary evidence on which it was based, had never occurred before in Swiss history.
Blocher and his staff had, however, developed a rationale that they thought might carry the day. The war articles in the constitution, the justice minister informed his colleagues, granted authority to the council over national security matters such as espionage. The articles were designed to give the Federal Council unusual powers in time of war. But they had been applied broadly in the past to foreign affairs, such as freezing the assets of dictators in Swiss banks. Still, invoking the war articles in an espionage case did not have a legal precedent.
The council seemed to be on solid constitutional ground when it came to deciding not to pursue the espionage cases against the Tinners or the CIA; most of them thought it was not too big a stretch to determine that those investigations could be covered by the war articles. More troubling, however, was the effect that destroying the documents would have on the investigation into the export violations by the Tinners. Those potential crimes were not covered by the war articles, yet the destruction of the evidence in the espionage case could make it impossible to prosecute the export violations.
And some council members were angered by what they viewed as Blocher’s high-handedness in monopolizing negotiations with the Americans until recent weeks. They also resented the American pressure, seeing it as an intrusion on Swiss neutrality. But two days after Blocher’s presentation, the council unanimously ordered the attorney general to halt legal proceedings against the CIA officers and the Tinners in connection with espionage.
The issue of whether to destroy the documents lingered for nearly three months. Finally, in November, Blocher pushed for a final debate and a decision. He told the other six ministers that the Americans had pledged to make the documents available to Swiss prosecutors if they proceeded with the case against the Tinners for export violations. No one believed the Americans would relinquish the documents once they gained custody, so there was no support for turning them over to Washington. In addition, such an act would constitute a major and politically indefensible breach of Swiss sovereignty in the face of U.S. pressure.
Despite their reservations, particularly when it came to interfering with the judicial process, on November 12 the council members voted unanimously to destroy all of the documents that were related to nuclear proliferation and the Tinners. The destruction would take place as soon as the police and prosecutors could identify which among the tens of thousands of blueprints, plans, and documents constituted a nuclear threat.
ON DECEMBER 4, THREE OFFICIALS from the IAEA arrived in Bern. Jacques Baute, the French nuclear weapons expert, led the delegation. He was accompanied by Trevor Edwards and a Swiss national who worked at the IAEA. They had come to review the Tinner records to determine what should be destroyed immediately and what might be held a little longer for review to help the IAEA understand the inner workings of the Khan network.
As the group gathered in Lehmann’s office overlooking the River Aare, the tone was frosty. The Swiss police were bristling over the order to destroy the records. They saw three years of investigation about to disappear, and they worried that it would be impossible to prosecute the Tinners once the evidence was gone. They blamed international pressure for forcing the Federal Council to acquiesce and suspected that the IAEA had supplied some of that pressure.
When one of the Swiss police officials hinted that they blamed the IAEA, the IAEA group was surprised. They said the Swiss misunderstood their position. Months before, the IAEA and the Swiss had discussed the agency taking possession of all the documents. In the end, concerns about the ability to maintain the security of the proliferation-related records stopped the deal. The IAEA had then suggested that the Swiss could retain everything under secure conditions until the conclusion of the criminal prosecution; they could turn the material over to one of the five approved nuclear powers; or the documents related directly to nuclear weapons could be destroyed. IAEA officials had made it clear that they preferred the first two options. It was the Americans who had given the Swiss the ultimatum to either turn over everything to them or destroy it. When the IAEA was told that the Federal Council had ordered the destruction, the team had been dispatched to try to help identify what did not pose a proliferation danger and could therefore be safely retained for review.
That morning Baute said that he hoped to identify nonsensitive documents that would help the agency understand the scale and method of operation of clandestine networks like Khan’s. This was not a fishing expedition. The IAEA knew that the material contained extensive information about elements of the Khan network that had not yet been exposed or investigated. There were records pointing to a prominent Belgian businessman who appeared to have sold nuclear-related technology to the network. A Bulgarian company had shipped nine tons of special metals to Dubai on behalf of the network. A company in Singapore had provided three hundred tons of high-strength aluminum alloy to the factory in Malaysia. A company in Zug, Switzerland, appeared to have shipped material to a Russian firm with connections to the Tinners. Then there was the mystery of the fourth customer, which constituted the biggest security risk of all. Destroying the material would make it far more difficult, and maybe impossible, to track down these sorts of leads.
Baute wanted to come up with a plan that would allow the agency to obtain copies of e-mails and faxes between these and other network members, their suppliers, and customers. He wanted copies of shipping and financial transactions, and the hundreds of business cards from potential suppliers found in the Tinner offices. There also were photographs of buildings, equipment, and network members that he wanted to salvage. None of the material would help anyone build a bomb, he explained, but it would provide a road map to identify undisclosed elements of the network and to understand how it operated. Even with Khan under house arrest and presumably retired from the black market, the network could not be reconstituted unless every aspect of it was identified.
“The problem is that we see everything in terms of Khan,” Baute said later. “The boss is gone, so therefore the problem is gone. I don’t think so. The Khan network was simply a bunch of people benefiting their bank accounts. These guys could come together another time in a way that would not be labeled Khan.” The IAEA was given two days to review the records and come up with a list of what should be destroyed as soon as possible and what could be examined and possibly copied later. It was a ridiculously short amount of time, but the IAEA officials were already familiar with much of the material.
The computers, much of the written material, and some sample components had been transferred to three storerooms just down the hill at the federal police headquarters after the Swiss realized how sensitive the records were. Lehmann had removed some of the material that he was using to build his case against the Tinners and he kept it in a safe in his office. Before the IAEA began its review, the police said additional documents were being kept at another secure site.
For the remainder of that day and the following day, the three IAEA experts reviewed the records in Bern under the supervision of the police. At the end of the process, the two groups reconvened in Leh mann’s office. Baute said that they had not discovered “a scoop” among the documents or the computer records. But he said that new information was found that could be helpful to future investigations of the network. Baute agreed that it was desirable to destroy some of the equipment and the designs related to building a weapon as soon as possible. He asked, however, that the destruction of information useful to understanding the network be delayed until he could report his findings to Olli Heinonen in Vienna. He promised to provide a list as soon as possible.
The meeting continued into the evening. Before the IAEA team left to catch the last plane to Vienna, the discussion turned to whether copies of these records existed elsewhere. Lehmann said that he believed six or seven copies of the information from Tinner’s hard drive existed elsewhere. He suspected that one copy remained in Malaysia; Tinner had told IAEA investigators and the Swiss police that he had left it under the floorboards of his house when he had to leave on short notice in 2003. IAEA officials had taken Tinner seriously enough that they traveled to Kuala Lumpur in search of the cache. They needed help from the Malaysian authorities to get access to Tinner’s former house, and they were made to wait several days while the police said they were securing a search warrant. When the IAEA officials finally got to the house and pried up the floorboards, they found nothing. Perhaps Tinner had been lying and there was never anything hidden there. Perhaps, and this theory seemed most plausible to the IAEA, the Malaysian police had used the extra time in which they claimed to be getting the warrant to search the house and discovered the records themselves.
Another set of drawings was in the custody of the police in Thailand. Marco had been living in Bangkok with his Thai wife for several months. But in September 2005 he had returned to Switzerland to visit his father and mother and he was arrested. The Swiss police had asked the Thais to search his home in Bangkok. A few days later, the Swiss learned that the Thais had retrieved a computer containing twenty-two thousand files, which they copied onto a CD and sent to Switzerland. The police in Bangkok, however, had retained the computer, and the files were presumably still on it.
Still another set of the records had been in the possession of Johan Meyer, the South African engineer. When he started cooperating with the South African authorities, he had turned over his copy, which he said had originated with Gotthard Lerch.
Then there was the inadvertent proliferation by the Swiss prosecutor himself. Lehmann had passed some of the same information to the German prosecutors for use in the failed case against Lerch. He also had provided copies to Marco’s lawyer, Peter Volkart.
No one knew whether other copies existed, either hidden by the Tinners or sold to other customers. But those in Swiss hands were destined for destruction.