On the morning of July 9, Mueller gathered seven cantonal police officers in his conference room. As instructed, the officers were armed and in uniform. Based on his partial inspection, Mueller knew precisely where the material was being kept inside the police headquarters a few hundred yards from his own office. That morning, he explained to the officers that they were going to accompany him to the federal police headquarters, where he would demand access to the Tinner files. Their presence was purely symbolic. Mueller told the assembled officers: “We are not going to make this into High Noon. But if I go there alone, they will ignore me.”
The contingent walked out of Mueller’s offices and down a passageway that connected to the police headquarters. There they encountered several surprised police officers. The scene was more kabuki theater than Western standoff. The cantonal police knew their federal counterparts well; some of them were friends. The police summoned Kurt Senn, the chief of the national security division of the police. Senn and Mueller were well acquainted, and the senior police officer was sympathetic to the magistrate’s determination to get the evidence. But when Mueller presented him with a warrant authorizing access to the files, Senn replied that the police were under orders not to allow anyone into the locked room where the documents were held in a safe. The orders, he explained, had come from the top of the Justice Ministry.
Mueller expected the response, and he had a contingency plan. He told Senn to turn over the lockbox that contained the key to the room where the documents were stored. No one had ordered Senn to maintain possession of the lockbox, especially when the police official was confronted by a legal search warrant. So he handed Mueller the box and the magistrate and his team left with it. While Mueller did not get the actual records, he thought his bold step might have prevented their destruction.
Word of what Mueller had done leaked to the press within hours. Some of the language was hyperbolic, with accounts describing cantonal police storming the federal police offices and seizing the keys to the room to stop anyone from destroying the evidence. One account suggested that Switzerland had become “the 51st State,” arguing that the Federal Council was more concerned with protecting American interests than prosecuting wrongdoers. The following day, the Federal Council responded with its own press statement, saying that there were other keys to the room and that it still had access to the records. Mueller returned the box to Senn.
Mueller’s confrontation and the resulting criticism of the council forced the Swiss government to make a final decision on the fate of the records. At the request of the federal police, Trevor Edwards returned to Bern to explain once again the significance of the evidence and discuss the options for dealing with it. The police began the meeting by outlining for Edwards the dispute between the Federal Council and parliament over how to handle the material. Once Edwards understood the political terrain, he and the police were joined by Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf and Senator Janiak in the storage room where the documents were kept.
The two senior Swiss officials, the chief antagonists in the dispute, asked Edwards to explain the difference between the various categories of documents he had identified by the colored tabs back in March. Picking up one of the files, he said the most dangerous folders were those that contained the nuclear designs that originated in Pakistan. Using a sliding scale of threat level, he reviewed the other files and tried to explain their relevance to a potential prosecution of the Tinners and the risk they posed if they became public through a trial.
“If you have only two or three drawings, what can you learn from that? Can you make a bomb?” asked Widmer-Schlumpf.
“You can’t make a bomb with just a few drawings,” Edwards said.
“What would be wrong with having them in an open courtroom?” she asked.
“Let’s put it like this: I am cleared in the United Kingdom for certain nuclear information, but I was never cleared to see nuclear weapons designs,” he said. “Just because I’m from a nuclear weapons state, it doesn’t mean that I have open access. For example, I have never seen drawings showing a hemisphere. It looks just a like a football.”
“Then could you make a bomb?” asked the justice minister.
“No, but you could learn an awful lot,” he said. “You can see how many detonators it takes to cause an implosion. I had never known that before. Knowledge is cumulative.”
Finally, Widmer-Schlumpf seemed to understand. The tons of material seized from the Tinners did not contain a magic formula for a nuclear weapon. Over the years, however, the family’s involvement with the Khan network and its own considerable expertise in manufacturing nuclear-related components had led to the creation of a trove of designs, specifications, blueprints, and instructions. Taken as a whole, the material constituted a library in which a competent researcher could find the answers to many, if not most, of the technological problems that have to be solved to build the most destructive weapon in history. Within that context, a few pages could make a difference in the quest to develop a nuclear weapon. The Swiss government had a responsibility to protect all of the records. But for people like Kurt Senn and Andreas Mueller, there was an equal responsibility to prosecute those who profited from trafficking in these sorts of dangerous designs.
Edwards and the IAEA, however, had the responsibility of understanding attempts by countries, companies, and individuals to traffic in prohibited nuclear technology. A balance had to be struck. Even the most sensitive records could be protected and access restricted for the length of time required to determine whether to prosecute the Tinners. Then the records could be destroyed.
Securing and sparing the remaining records long enough to determine whether to prosecute the Tinners would have represented a balance between legitimate concerns. But the chance to reach a solution that gave equal weight to prosecuting the guilty and stopping proliferation had been wrecked by the interference of the CIA and senior officials of the Bush administration.
AT CIA HEADQUARTERS, THE ATTITUDE was that the battle with the Swiss had been fought and won. With the help of powerful figures in the Bush administration, the agency had succeeded in derailing the prosecution of its spies, the Tinners. It had also avoided the potential embarrassment of seeing six of its officers facing Swiss charges of espionage and breaking into Marco Tinner’s office and apartment. And the CIA had kept the world from learning how its decisions over three decades had allowed Khan and his network to disseminate far more dangerous nuclear secrets than any outsider knew. The charade that shutting down the network and forcing Libya to relinquish its nuclear ambitions was a major intelligence victory would be preserved.
Since retiring, the CIA case officer who went by the name Jim Kinsman had continued his no-profile existence. He did some work for the agency, and he gave lectures and training seminars on counterproliferation and espionage techniques to people at the CIA and other government agencies. He must have felt vindicated—and relieved—when the Swiss destroyed the originals in 2007. In the months that followed, Kinsman had no reason to expect the Tinners would ever come to trial. He might even have found some satisfaction in reports trickling out of Iran that its technicians were having trouble getting centrifuges to enrich uranium at optimal efficiency. Perhaps the sabotage efforts were paying off, too.
Not everyone wished Kinsman a peaceful retirement. Back in Bern, Inspector Kurt Senn of the Swiss federal police was still angry about the six CIA operatives who had violated Swiss sovereignty. The government may have forbidden him from pursuing them, but the dogged officer was still on the lookout for a chance to exact some retribution. In the months after the destruction of the Tinner records, Senn had pulled the files on a number of American visitors over the last several years in the hopes of identifying some or all of the CIA people. He knew enough from the interrogations of the Tinners and conversations with his own intelligence officers to single out half a dozen suspects. He told the Swiss border authorities to notify him if any of them entered the country.
After resigning in anger in 2004, Stephen Kappes had returned to the CIA two years later as deputy director, the highest post ever achieved by someone from the operations side of the agency. He received a standing ovation the day he returned to Langley. One of the primary justifications for his return and elevation was his role in cracking the Khan network and persuading Libya to relinquish its nuclear ambitions. When President Barack Obama appointed former congressman Leon Panetta as his new CIA director in 2009, Panetta retained Kappes and gave him wide latitude in running the agency. Kappes still harbored ambitions of becoming director of the CIA, and he had powerful patrons on Capitol Hill. Chief among them was Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. There was widespread speculation that, after Panetta spent a few months in the job, Kappes would take over as director of central intelligence. So he would have had no desire to revisit any aspect of the Khan case or resurrect the Tinner affair.
But Kappes had other problems that could not be contained. After Obama’s election, the new administration’s intelligence transition team had interviewed Kappes. He and other CIA officials pushed to retain the option of building more secret prisons and resuming the use of torture techniques, euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation.” David Boren, the moderate Oklahoma Democrat who had once chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee was the head of the transition team. He was shocked that Kappes and others would continue to advocate using fear to justify policies and practices that violated American values. “It was one of the most deeply disturbing experiences I have had,” Boren later told the Washington Post. “I wanted to take a bath when I heard it.”
Kappes weathered Boren’s outrage, but he was besieged by other difficulties. There was the inability to capture Osama bin Laden and the conflicting accounts of how videotapes of torture sessions of Al Qaeda suspects had come to be destroyed. The agency’s Directorate of Operations, which Kappes had headed, had been deeply embarrassed in late 2009 when a judge in Italy convicted a base chief for the CIA and twenty-two other Americans, almost all of them CIA operatives, of kidnapping a Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003.
A tougher and more personal blow occurred on December 30, 2009. In one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent blew himself up in the midst of a CIA base in Afghanistan, killing seven Americans. Among the dead was a forty-five-year-old mother of three who was the agency’s base chief at Camp Chapman, the outpost in eastern Afghanistan. The attack sparked enormous criticism of the agency’s operational security and raised questions about whether the CIA had abandoned the in-depth training that had been mandatory for agents sent into the field.
No one blamed Kappes personally, but the deaths in Afghanistan and the embarrassment in Italy cast a dark shadow across the portion of the CIA that he was supposed to have mastered. Rumors began to circulate at Langley that the agency’s No. 2 was on his way out because it was clear that he would never be elevated to the director’s job. In April, the agency released a brief statement saying that Kappes was resigning. No reason was given, but Panetta praised Kappes for his “skill, loyalty, dedication and discipline, integrity and candor.”