In the spring of 2010, Urs Tinner was sitting in a noisy bar next to the Hotel Buchserhof, a modest stucco building in the village of Buchs in eastern Switzerland. He cradled a glass of Coca-Cola in his hands, which were nicked from his constant work with tools and machinery. His face was thinner and more lined than the passport photograph that had been published on the Internet when the Khan ring came crashing down in early 2004. Today, the man who had once been involved with that notorious nuclear black market, who had spied for the CIA in the Middle East and Asia, who had spent more than four years in prison, was working as a mechanic near his hometown, repairing tractors and other farm machinery. But old habits die hard. In an effort to keep his conversation with a visitor from being overheard, Tinner had chosen a table directly beneath one of the speakers blaring rock ’n’ roll.
Tinner was reluctant to talk about the last few years of his life. Instead he wanted to focus on what he regarded as his mistreatment in Swiss prison and the lawsuit he had filed against the Swiss government in the European Court of Human Rights for being held so long without charges. He said he was halfway finished writing a memoir, not about his days as a spy for the CIA, but about how he survived the years of isolation in prison. Pulling out his cell phone, he displayed photographs of intricate nature scenes and tiny model airplanes. These, he said, were how his remarkable technical skills had helped him keep his sanity. After his jailers had refused to provide him with drawing supplies, Tinner said he invented his own. He cooked the jelly that came with his breakfast until it formed a charred black paste, a rudimentary sort of ink. Using a Q-tip for a pen, he had drawn birds and other wildlife on pieces of paper. In another innovation, he collected the ends of candles given to each prisoner at Christmas and shaped the wax into small models of airplanes. The propellers were fashioned from pieces of tin; the aircraft’s trim was crafted from bits of foil rescued from chocolate-bar wrappers. When he left prison, he took his mementos with him.
Tinner’s skill with his hands was one of the reasons his father had sent him to Dubai to work with Khan in the first place. It was certainly a skill that Khan found useful. “I would always know a way to do something, even without the right tools,” he said. “Maybe that is why Khan was interested in me. Sometimes he would be surprised that I could do things. Maybe that is why he trusted me. Maybe more than he should have trusted me.”
There was no hint of bitterness toward Khan, though Tinner claims that he did not realize until it was too late that the parts he was manufacturing were for a nuclear weapons project in Libya. “I know Khan as a normal person,” he said. “He’s an old man. He was always friendly to me. I went to his home and he said, ‘Oh, can you help me make all those pictures hang right?’ Do you know what I was discussing with Khan so many times? How to make electricity out of windmills. He had so many projects.”
Tinner was less forthcoming about his father, saying only, “For me, my father was always my hero. He was an engineer and very clever in whatever he did.” Yet Roman Boegli, Urs’s lawyer, blamed Friedrich Tinner for involving his unwitting son in the Libyan project. “He trusted his father,” said Boegli.
His work for the CIA was off-limits in the conversation, Tinner said. He acknowledged that he had expected the family enterprise to attract the attention of an intelligence service, but he said he thought the first contact would have come from the British. “I had not planned on the CIA,” he said. “I was waiting for somebody else.” Yes, he said, he had met the man he knew as Jim, but he would say nothing about the specifics of their dealings or any money that the American might have given him for services rendered. He acknowledged tampering with equipment bound for Libya, and he admitted that he had been worried about being discovered by Tahir or someone else associated with the project. He ignored questions about specific meetings with the Americans or what happened to the money he and his family had received from the CIA. “Let’s not talk about the CIA,” he said. “It’s too early.”
In his mid-forties and with little formal education, Tinner said he did not know what his future holds. The Swiss police investigation was still open, but given the lack of access to the evidence, few people expected any of the Tinners to be charged. His brother Marco’s passport was returned soon after he was released in 2009, allowing him to move back to Bangkok, where he was living with his wife and young daughter.
Over several years, the CIA had paid the Tinners a substantial amount of money for their services. The total remains a secret; it was certainly several million dollars, with estimates ranging as high as $10 million. As part of the criminal proceedings, the Swiss government froze what it could find of the Tinners’ assets, which left Urs back where he was in 1999 when he moved to Dubai in search of a better future. But tax evasion is not a crime in Switzerland and it is unclear how long the government can hold onto the money.
For now, Tinner said he was trying to save enough money to restart the aquarium-building business he had been pursuing a decade earlier when he left for Dubai. He was no longer anonymous—he had been on Swiss television, and thousands of articles had been published about him around the world. But the notoriety was beginning to fade. Television crews and photographers were no longer camped on the street in front of his parents’ home in Haag. Tinner remained wary of outsiders, and he was angry at what he viewed as ill-founded accusations about him and his family. Most of all, he was trying to slip a little further from public view. A local shop in Buchs took in his mail because he didn’t want anyone to know where he was living. Tinner wanted to disappear into history.
A. Q. KHAN HAD NO intention of fading away. In August 2008, his nemesis, General Pervez Musharraf, was forced to resign as president of Pakistan. Musharraf’s political support in the country had plummeted after he imposed martial law and removed the chief of justice of Pakistan’s highest court. The resignation sparked intense wrangling among rival political parties. In the ensuing political turbulence, Khan and his supporters mounted a sustained public relations and legal campaign to refurbish his image and release him from house arrest.
The legal aspect of Khan’s rehabilitation had its ups and downs. Throughout 2009 and into 2010, his lawyers petitioned various courts to remove the restrictions on Khan’s movements and ability to communicate with the world outside his estate overlooking the Margalla Hills on the edge of Islamabad. Each time a court ruled in favor of Khan, the government took steps to try to restrain him. Some of the motivation was pressure from the United States, which was pouring billions in military and civilian assistance into Pakistan, and objected to allowing him to go free. At one point a bipartisan group of members of Congress introduced legislation aimed at cutting off military aid to Pakistan unless U.S. officials could question Khan; the bill never went anywhere and the scientist remained outside the reach of American intelligence. Slowly the house arrest was eased, though Pakistani troops still stood guard outside his estate and he was prohibited from traveling outside the country without permission.
While he was off-limits to the IAEA and Americans, the seventy-three-year-old scientist was playing the starring role in his own PR campaign. In the summer of 2009, he started writing a column for the News, one of the country’s leading newspapers. He wrote about a wide range of topics, though he seemed most determined to rewrite his own role in Pakistan’s nuclear history. His career as a columnist ran into trouble when he was accused of plagiarizing large sections from the websites of three British universities, including Cambridge, in one of his articles on computer science. The episode raised the old image of Khan as a thief.
He also began granting telephone interviews with select reporters, claiming that Musharraf had coerced him into confessing to proliferation crimes in 2004 and asserting that he had always acted with the knowledge and approval of Pakistani government and military leaders. Khan’s most outspoken comments were reserved for the country’s Urdu press, where his word reached the vast majority of Pakistan’s 170 million people. In an extensive interview with an Urdu-language Pakistani television network, Khan provided a lengthy description of how his network operated and acknowledged its role in sending nuclear equipment to Iran, North Korea, and Libya—the very actions to which he had supposedly been forced to confess five years earlier. Accusations that he stole designs and lists of suppliers from the Netherlands, Khan said, were “rubbish.” He said he had gotten to know the suppliers while working at Urenco and that he turned to the people and companies that he knew could provide the equipment Pakistan lacked. In a sense he provided a tutorial on how to avoid export regulations, including how he exploited the decision by the U.S. government to ease restrictions on Pakistan’s fledgling nuclear program to secure the country’s support after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979.
“You had admitted in an interview that the Afghan war provided you an opportunity to develop and enhance the nuclear program,” the interviewer, Nadeem Malik, said.
“Yes, I maintain that the war had provided us with space to enhance our nuclear capability,” Khan replied. “The credit goes to me and my team, because it was a very difficult task, which was next to impossible. But given the U.S. and European pressure on our program it is true that had the Afghan war not taken place at that time, we would not have been able to make the bomb as early as we did.”
Khan went on to describe how he purchased equipment from the same suppliers who had worked with Urenco. When his procurement efforts occasionally ran into trouble with export regulators, he said that he shifted the destinations to countries like the United Arab Emirates. He also recounted developing a network of suppliers who later provided technology and expertise for Iran and Libya. “They could not outmaneuver us, as we remained a step ahead always,” he said.
For the first time, Khan offered a public explanation for using his network to sell nuclear technology to Iran, describing the strategic role envisioned for a nuclear alliance between Iran and Pakistan that would counter Israel’s nuclear advantage. “Iran was interested in acquiring nuclear technology,” he said. “Since Iran was an important Muslim country, we wished Iran to acquire this technology. Western countries pressured us unfairly. If Iran succeeds in acquiring nuclear technology, we will be a strong bloc in the region to counter international pressure. Iran’s nuclear capability will neutralize Israel’s power.”
Khan’s comments were designed to appeal directly to Islamic hardliners in Pakistan and elsewhere as part of the campaign to rehabilitate him. His defense of nuclear weapons for Muslim countries coincided with Pakistan’s own work to scale up its atomic arsenal by increasing its production of enriched uranium and designing more powerful bombs. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official, said in May 2010 that Pakistan has “the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world.”
American concerns about Pakistan’s eighty to one hundred nuclear weapons have increased steadily in the decade since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The fears focused primarily on the security surrounding the country’s arsenal. As security conditions deteriorated in Afghanistan and the threat of instability spilled across the border into neighboring Pakistan, American worries increased. The threat posed by radical militant groups inside Pakistan, some of them aided by sympathizers in Pakistan’s military, led the Obama administration to develop secret contingency plans for using U.S. troops to take control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal if the government collapsed.
IN WASHINGTON, NATIONAL SECURITY OFFICIALS were more focused on the dangers posed by the Iranian nuclear program to which Khan and his network had provided critical technology and expertise over the years. After eight years of verbal warnings from the Bush administration to Iran, President Obama had come into office with a new strategy based on diplomatic engagement with Tehran. But the change in American strategy did not lead to a change in Iranian behavior, leaving the new administration with little to show for its policy. Instead of negotiating with Iran, Washington found itself trying to build support from Europe, Russia, and China for yet another round of sanctions against Iran by the United Nations. And all the while, Iran pressed ahead with its uranium enrichment.
Iran’s progress raised worries, particularly in Israel and the United States, that Tehran was closing in on the ability to produce enough highly enriched uranium for its first nuclear weapon. But no outsiders had a clear view inside Iran’s nuclear operations, and the two allies were at odds over how far along the Iranians were. The biggest dispute centered on whether Iran had stopped work on designing a nuclear warhead in 2003, as American intelligence had concluded in November 2007, or whether the work had proceeded, as the Israelis and some European intelligence agencies believed. Estimates of when the Iranians might be able to build their first bomb ranged from a year to three or five years, though the consensus was that the country’s leaders had not yet made the political decision to complete the process. Like other countries before it, including Israel, India, and Pakistan, Iran was clinging to the charade of a civilian nuclear program. There was no reason for its leaders to abandon that position until they were ready to show the world that they possessed the capacity to complete a nuclear weapon.
In an appearance on the NBC-TV program Meet the Press in April 2010, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates confronted the inability of U.S. intelligence to determine exactly where Iran was in its quest for an atomic bomb. “If their policy is to go to the threshold but not assemble a nuclear weapon, how do you tell that they have not assembled?” he said. Cautioning that Iran had run into difficulties at its main enrichment plant at Natanz, Gates said, “It’s going slow—slower than they anticipated—but they are moving in that direction.”
At various points in recent years, Iranian nuclear officials acknowledged publicly that they were running into problems with centrifuges and other equipment at the vast underground enrichment plant they had built near Natanz, in the central part of the country. Some of Iran’s difficulties were predictable. Within American intelligence circles, there was a small sense of satisfaction; some of the sabotage efforts appeared to be paying off when centrifuges spun out of control or regulators controlling the flow of electricity to the machines malfunctioned. Still, the Iranian technicians had recovered from each setback and resumed the enrichment process that would lead them to the edge of possessing the bomb and changing the balance of power in the Middle East.
On May 31, the IAEA issued another in its long series of reports documenting Iran’s nuclear progress and the failure of the international community to stop that progress. The agency’s inspectors concluded that Iran was enriching uranium to the 3 to 4 percent level required for civilian reactors, at a steady pace. Since February 2007, the report said, Iran’s stockpile of enriched material had reached 5,300 pounds, enough for two nuclear weapons if it were processed to weapons-grade levels of 90 percent. The plant at Natanz relied on P-1 centrifuges produced from the designs that Khan had sold to Iran in 1987. At the pilot plant next door to the main facility, however, Iran was testing the more efficient P-2 centrifuges and a third generation that the Iranians called the IR-4. The IAEA report did not discuss the origins of the IR-4, but the centrifuges were based on the third set of designs that Khan had stolen from Urenco decades before. The more advanced design was based on a German machine called the G-4 or M-4, which incorporated four rotors in a single centrifuge. Khan’s theft had not been discovered until IAEA officials examined the documents seized from the Tinners in the fall of 2005. Yet at some point along the way, Khan had provided the G-4 design to the Iranians, and they were now testing it at the pilot enrichment plant. The disclosure raised new questions about whether the CIA missed even more technology that Khan had supplied to Tehran—and possibly other customers.
The IAEA was having no more luck understanding the full extent of Iran’s nuclear program than were the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies. From the start of its inspections, the international agency had raised questions about whether aspects of Iran’s nuclear program were intertwined with its military. Some of the research was carried out on military bases and defense officials had been involved in the procurement of nuclear technology, including meetings with Khan in the mid-1990s. In August 2008, Iran stopped answering questions from the IAEA about the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program, claiming that the United States and Israel had fabricated evidence. But the fears ratcheted up in September 2009 when it was disclosed that Iran was building a secret enrichment plant in a tunnel on a military installation near the holy city of Qom. The May 2010 report highlighted the suspicions of the IAEA, and the paucity of hard proof about Iran’s intentions. “Based on an overall analysis undertaken by the Agency of all the information available to it, the Agency remains concerned about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed nuclear-related activities, involving military-related organizations, including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile,” said the report.
IRAN WAS NOT THE ONLY threat. A report earlier in 2010 by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former senior CIA and Energy Department official, warned that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda had not abandoned their goal of attacking the United States with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Drawing on his experience hunting for weapons of mass destruction for the CIA, Mowatt-Larssen said that Al Qaeda’s leaders were determined and patient in their pursuit of unconventional weapons. In the report, which was published by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the former intelligence official said bin Laden’s threat to attack the West with weapons of mass destruction was a strategic goal, not an empty threat.
President Obama was well aware of the stakes involved in keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of Al Qaeda and like-minded terrorist organizations. “If there was ever a detonation in New York City or London or Johannesburg, the ramifications economically, politically, and from a security perspective would be devastating,” Obama said on the eve of a summit meeting of world leaders in Washington to discuss ways to safeguard bomb-making material. “And we know that organizations like Al Qaeda are in the process of trying to secure a nuclear weapon, a weapon of mass destruction that they have no compunction at using.”
The connection between the Khan network and Al Qaeda was never direct, but that does not mean it was not a concern. In August 2001, bin Laden spent several days talking with two Pakistani nuclear scientists about his desire for nuclear weapons at a camp outside the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. The scientists were later arrested in Pakistan. No evidence has surfaced that Khan, despite his oft-expressed anger toward the United States and Israel, ever dealt with bin Laden or anyone associated with his network. Still, a former senior U.S. intelligence officer said that the failure to completely eradicate the Khan network left open the possibility that one of its members could still be open for business. “You could have someone in the Khan network who is really disgruntled now and out of work,” he said. “Someone who still has lots of important stuff on disks that he can sell the Iranians or another customer.”
It is simplistic to blame Iran’s nuclear advances or Al Qaeda’s quest for the ultimate terrorist weapon on the failures of American intelligence and U.S. policymakers. The omnipotent CIA of spy novels and movies does not exist. But the outcome of the last thirty years could have been very different if the agency had seen the world as it was, not as its case officers and spymasters wanted it to be. In 1975, the CIA persuaded the Dutch to let Khan go. The CIA never imagined that he could help usher a backward country like Pakistan into the elite club of nuclear weapons states. Similarly, U.S. intelligence underestimated Khan and his network in the late 1980s when evidence first suggested that they were helping Iran. A decade later, when the CIA and MI6 penetrated the network through Urs Tinner and other means, no one foresaw how quickly and easily some of the most dangerous designs in the nuclear world could be spread to computers and customers around the world.
Even after the analysts at Langley and the smartest scientists from the national weapons laboratories saw the threat posed by the designs on the Tinner computers, the CIA left the material in the hands of known traffickers. They could have cooperated with the Swiss in investigating and prosecuting the Tinners. They could have worked with Germany, South Africa, and other countries to make sure that every aspect of the network was rooted out, its participants identified and brought to justice. The CIA had the evidence to turn all of these cases into a potent deterrent for future proliferaters. Instead they went into cover-up mode. The CIA and other U.S. officials interfered with the criminal process of an allied nation, creating a ripple effect that derailed prosecutions not only in Switzerland but in many other countries. Instead of promoting the toughest possible legal approach to stopping proliferation, the message was that national interests once again trumped the greater necessity of international cooperation to thwart the catastrophic danger of a nuclear attack.
Nuclear terrorism has become the ultimate threat to the United States and the rest of the world, but it does not get the attention it demands. The opportunity to forge an aggressive and effective response to nuclear proliferation was defeated in places like Bern, Johannesburg, Tehran, and Tripoli. And Washington.