JUST AFTER 11:00 P.M. on May 28, 1993, a shock wave spread out across several hundred miles of the Australian outback. The Mundaring Seismic Observatory near Perth in southwestern Australia, registered a 3.6 magnitude reading. Truck drivers crossing the region, as well as aboriginal gold prospectors camping in the vicinity, witnessed bright flashes that lit up the night sky. Miners and engineers in the region also heard the rumble of loud explosions in the distance.1
That shock wave would lead a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs to investigate whether a terrorist group had actually acquired or built a nuclear device. But that investigation would not be launched until almost two years later, following the terrorist group’s implication in a March 20, 1995, attack that killed twelve people and caused physical or mental trauma to another six thousand. The targets of the attack were the riders of Tokyo’s subway system. The means of attack was not a nuclear device or dirty bomb but sarin, a colorless, odorless poisonous gas. Discovered in Germany in 1938, sarin is estimated to be five hundred times more toxic than cyanide, and capable of killing within a minute. Had it been dispersed as planned, casualties could have reached ten thousand.2
It was not the group’s first venture into terrorism. In June 1994, in Matsumoto, Japan, it also used sarin, spraying it from a truck, killing seven and injuring two hundred people. Early in March 1995, the group had attempted to assassinate the chief of Japan’s National Police. The group had also released anthrax in Tokyo on two occasions, although the attacks failed to produce any casualties.3
Known as Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth), the group had been established in 1987 with the initially modest objective of assuming control of Japan. Approved as a religious organization in 1989, it ran a slate of candidates in the Japanese parliamentary election in 1990, which resulted in a humiliating defeat. Subsequently, the group began to preach that the world’s end was imminent, that the United States would initiate Armageddon by starting World War III with an attack on Japan using fission or hydrogen bombs, and that salvation would come only to those who adopted the Aum faith. The cult’s founder, Shoko Asahara, blind in his left eye from a young age and only partially sighted in his right, graduated from a school for the blind in 1977 and joined Agononshu, a Buddhist religious group, in the early 1980s. Despite offerings to the Buddhist group for a thousand consecutive days, the enlightenment promised never arrived, although Asahara did manage to attract a few disciples of his own. After returning, in 1987, from a trip to India, he told his followers that he had attained enlightenment, which now allowed him to take the money they offered.4
By the time of the Tokyo attack, the cult had grown from a single office in Japan to thirty offices in six different countries, with a worldwide membership of about 50,000—including about 10,000 in Japan and 30,000 in Russia. All together Aum recruited more than three hundred scientists with degrees in medicine, biochemistry, biology, and genetic engineering who were promised unlimited funding, although many were second-raters given a second chance by the cult. Included were a former researcher from the Japanese National Space Development Agency, an expert on chemical weapons who had majored in organic physics, a researcher who had studied particle physics, and a physicist from Osaka University. The savings that they and other members had turned over to Aum gave the group assets exceeding $1 billion.5
One connection between Aum and the seismic event in the Australian outback was the arrival of a delegation from the cult in April 1993, headed by “Minister of Construction” Kiyohide Hayakawa. The visit was followed by the purchase of a 500,000-acre sheep farm in Banjawam, Australia, about four hundred miles north of Perth. In addition to mining uranium from a nearby site, and then enriching it, the group also planned to test chemical weapons. That the group had something beyond raising sheep in mind was indicated by the equipment it brought to the farm: chemicals, gas masks and respirators, as well as picks, shovels, mining equipment, and a mechanical ditch digger. It also established a laboratory equipped with computers, glass tubing, glass evaporators, beakers, Bunsen burners, mixing bowls, and a rock-crushing machine. Details of its activities in Australia, and elsewhere, were derived from documents seized from Hayakawa after the Tokyo attack.6
Presumably, the seismic signals that rippled across the Australian outback in May 1983 were detected at Woomera, also in the outback, by Project Oak Tree—also known as Detachment 421 of the Air Force Technical Applications Center, which operated the U.S. Atomic Energy Detection System (AEDS). But if the Senate investigations subcommittee asked AFTAC for its assessment of the event, it has gone unreported.7
The subcommittee did turn to the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS). Based in Arlington, Virginia, and supported by the National Science Foundation, IRIS had more than eighty member institutions as well as more than one hundred seismometers across the world. A team of IRIS investigators—Gregory van der Vink, the institute’s director of planning, Danny Harvey of the University of Colorado, and Christopher Chyba of Princeton University—calculated that the force of the event was equal to the explosion of 2,000 tons of TNT, or about 170 times larger than the largest mining explosion in the Australian region.8
The estimated force of the event was consistent with a very small nuclear detonation of two kilotons (in contrast to the fifteen kilotons of the Hiroshima bomb). An American geologist observed that a “nuke is a very real possibility.” But the signature of the shock wave was closer to that of an earthquake or meteor strike than a nuclear explosion.* Ultimately, the IRIS trio reported that the signature was “inconsistent with an explosion” while “the meteorite impact scenario is consistent with the eyewitness observations and with the energy levels derived from seismic records for the event.” They also noted that the meteorite scenario was “an intriguing but unconfirmed possibility.”9
But there was more to Aum Shinrikyo’s nuclear activities than the location of the ranch, its interest in uranium mining, and the seismic event of May 1993. In August 1993, it had contacted a Connecticut-based manufacturer of interferometers, hoping to purchase one for research. The laser-based optical measuring device can be employed to determine the velocity of high explosives to be used in an implosion device.10
The cult also tried to acquire a variety of weapons from Russian sources. In 1992 Asahara led a delegation to Russia to meet with senior government officials. Aum’s construction minister, Hayakawa, would travel to Russia more than twenty times, visiting several former Soviet republics. In February 1994, Hayakawa, “Minister of Science and Technology” Hideo Murai (the physicist from Osaka University), and three other members arrived in Russia to acquire AK-74’s, 7.62 millimeter Kalashnikovs that weighed over seven pounds and can fire 600 to 650 rounds per minute.11
But Aum’s ambitions didn’t end with the acquisition of rifles. It was also interested in bombs, rockets, napalm tanks, and radar-guided missiles. Hayakawa priced a MiG-29 in mint condition at $20 million and a used one at $12 to 14 million. Another piece of firepower that the cult had its eye on was the 195-foot SL-13 Proton rocket, which could propel satellites into geostationary orbit. Hayakawa also recorded in his notes the need to build a launch site in Japan for the Proton. What he wanted to put on top of the rocket was not a satellite. In 1993 Aum’s branch in Moscow asked to meet with Viktor Mikhailov, the minister of nuclear energy. The request was denied, so Mikhailov never heard what Hayakawa wanted. But an entry in the construction minister’s notebook read, “Nuclear warhead. How much?”12
Subsequent entries listed prices for a device, including $15 million. Whether Hayakawa had merely discussed the possibility of acquiring a nuclear weapon or actually had entered into negotiations to buy a nuke is not known. But Aum’s nuclear activities in Russia did go beyond shopping. In 1992, it held talks with Nikolai Basov, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, in Moscow. And at least one of its devotees had infiltrated the I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow, named after the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, and a repository of weapons-grade nuclear material. It was also the home of three research reactors.13
In the aftermath of the Senate subcommittee’s investigation, Senate staffer John Sopko was skeptical that, whatever its goals, Aum was likely to have acquired a nuclear warhead or the skills needed to build one. It was more likely, he believed, that the group could acquire highly radioactive material for use in a dirty bomb. But, according to the Tokyo police, the group did acquire substantial classified information about Russian, Chinese, South Korean, and Ukrainian nuclear installations, including the safety system of the Chernboyl power plant in the Ukraine. It also obtained data on the routes and procedures for the movement of nuclear fuel in Japan. The means was not bribery but computer hacking.14
The sarin attack on the Tokyo subways further undermined the view that terrorists would not seek to kill large numbers of people. According to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, who served as directors of counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration, the attack
pulled the rug out from under one of the hallowed verities of counterterrorism—namely, that terrorist groups might want to acquire weapons of mass destruction for the sake of bargaining leverage but would not actually use them. Because of the general abhorrence of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, it was believed that terrorists would be loath to alienate possible supporters by using them. That kind of mass killing would also harden government attitudes: the only conceivable response to those who would use those weapons would be the complete destruction of their group.15
The difference between Aum Shinrikyo and many other terrorist groups, RAND terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman explained in 1995, is the difference between “secular terror” and “holy terror,” terror driven by a religious imperative. The “holy terrorist” has a radically different value system and worldview as well as different concepts of morality from the “secular terrorist.” While secular terrorists “generally consider indiscriminate violence immoral and counterproductive, religious terrorists regard such violence not only as morally justified, but as a necessary expedient for the attainment of their goals,” wrote Hoffman.16
Hoffman also found that religious terrorists have a different constituency than the secular variety. While the latter attempt to appeal to both actual and potential sympathizers, religious terrorists make a sharp distinction between their religious community and the rest of the world. They employ dehumanizing terms such as “infidels,” “non-believers,” and “children of Satan”—terms designed to erode any restraints on terrorist acts since its victims are portrayed as unworthy of living.17
Islamic terrorism is one type of holy terrorism. It differs from secular terrorism in that it rejects all other ideologies and views itself as a total outsider. Also, Islamic terrorism is conducted as a holy war, which can only end in total victory. Its third characteristic is that it forms “the basis of a whole theory both of individual conduct and state policy.” Killing the enemies of Allah and offering infidels the choice between converting to Islam or being executed is seen as the duty of every individual follower. Thus, Ayatollah Baqer al-Sadr wrote, “The world as it is today is how others shaped it. We have two choices: either to accept it with submission, which means letting Islam die, or to destroy it, so that we can construct the world as Islam desires.”18
A number of groups qualify for the label of “Islamic terrorist organization,” including Hamas and Hezbollah. Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) is a Sunni Muslim Palestinian group that triumphed over Fatah in the Palestinian elections in 2005. Its terrorist activities have included the June 2001 bombing of a Tel Aviv discotheque, which killed twenty-one, and an August 2001 suicide bombing in a Jerusalem pizza restaurant that left eighteen dead. Reportedly, many of its senior members are well educated and have graduate degrees in engineering, chemistry, physics, and medicine.19
The Lebanese-based, Iranian-supported Hezbollah (Party of God) battled Israeli forces in Lebanon in 2006. It is known or suspected to have been involved in a number of major terrorist attacks over the last several decades, including the suicide truck bombings of the U.S. embassy in April 1983, the U.S. Marine barracks in October 1983, and the U.S. embassy annex in September 1984, all in Beirut. In March 1992, it was responsible for the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. The group is also suspected of involvement in the June 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex, near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which housed U.S. military personnel.20 But the group that represents the greatest threat—in terms of its ability to recruit trained personnel and procure the raw materials needed—is Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda’s founder, Osama bin Laden, born in July 1957, is one of fifty-seven children of a Saudi construction magnate. The thin, six-foot-five-inch bin Laden appeared to be awkward but was apparently very athletic, showing prowess as a horseman, runner, climber, and soccer player. He attended King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia, which had been founded in 1967, to study civil engineering. According to some accounts, he also became interested in religious studies, inspired by the taped sermons of Abdullah Azzam, a disciple of Sayyid Qutb, the leading intellectual of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s and disparager of almost everything American, including the “animal-like” mixing of the sexes at church dances.21
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, bin Laden became one of a legion of young Muslims from around the world who arrived to fight in a jihad, or “holy war,” as part of the mujaheddin, the Afghan resistance forces. With some of those forces receiving substantial outside support from Pakistan and the United States, including Stinger missiles that could disrupt Soviet air operations, they managed to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan by the end of 1988, a departure the Soviets announced that April. Although bin Laden took part in a 1986 battle in Jalabad and a 1987 assault against Soviet armor, he became known primarily for his ability to use some of his family’s wealth to support the anti-Soviet effort.22
He was instrumental in establishing a financial support network, relying on Saudi and Persian Gulf financiers, that came to be known as the Golden Chain. Donations passed through charities and other non-governmental organizations and were used to purchase arms and supplies for the holy warriors. Mosques and schools in the United States and other parts of the world doubled as recruiting stations. To channel recruits to Afghanistan, bin Laden and Islamic cleric Abdullah Azzam established a “Bureau of Services.”23
Defeat of the Soviet forces was not the end of bin Laden’s Islamic activism, but only the beginning. He and Azzam agreed that the organization they had established should not be permitted to disappear. The result was creation of a base or foundation—Al-Qaeda—as a general headquarters for future jihad. By August 1988 bin Laden was clearly in charge, and supervised an organization that included an intelligence unit and military, financial, political, media affairs, and propaganda committees.24
In the fall of 1989, bin Laden accepted an invitation from the Sudanese political leader Hassan al Turabi to move his organization to the Sudan. He also agreed to help Turabi in his war against African Christian separatists in southern Sudan as well as build some roads. While his representatives were searching for property, he moved back to Saudi Arabia. In the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, bin Laden’s public opposition to the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia led the government to seize his passport. After he managed to get out of the country in April 1991, he relocated to the Sudan.25
In his new home, he created an “Islamic Army Shura” as a coordinating body for the federation of terrorist groups with which he was establishing links. Groups from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Oman, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Somalia, and Eritrea were among the organizations that formed alliances with bin Laden’s group. Less formal relationships were established with other extremist groups in Africa and Southeast Asia. Bin Laden also maintained a connection with the conflict in Bosnia.26
On several occasions in 1992, his organization called for jihad against the Western “occupation” of Islamic territory, including the U.S. forces that first arrived in Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and those that deployed to Somalia in late 1992. To help Somalia warlords in fighting U.S. forces, Al-Qaeda set up a cell in Nairobi and used it to provide weapons and training.27
In 1996, a brief CIA biography of bin Laden characterized him as an “Islamic Extremist Financier” and “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today.” It went on to list a number of efforts funded by bin Ladin, including the attempted bombings of U.S. servicemen in Aden in December 1992, the operation of three terrorist training camps in northern Sudan, the Egyptian extremist group al-Jihad, and the Kunar terrorist camp in Afghanistan.28
But by the end of 2000, bin Laden would become America’s public enemy number one—no longer just an Islamic extremist financier, but a terrorist mastermind who the highest authority in the country wanted to see dead, if the CIA could arrange it. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States noted a number of terrorist attacks in the 1990s where bin Laden’s involvement was cloudy, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1995 Manila plot to bomb a dozen airliners over the Pacific, and the 1996 Dhahran bombing.29
But there was no ambiguity when it came to bin Laden and Al-Qaeda’s bombing, in concert with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, of two U.S. embassies in Africa during the summer of 1998, after the public issuance of a fatwa that February for “Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders”—a fatwa that declared it was “an individual duty for every Muslim who is able” to “kill the Americans and their allies, both civil and military,” until their armies “depart from all the lands of Islam.” On the morning of August 7, two bomb-laden trucks drove into the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, only minutes apart—about 10:35 in Nairobi and 10:39 in Dar es Salaam. The attack in Nairobi left 213 dead. Twelve were Americans while almost all of the remaining dead were Kenyans. The Dar es Salaam bombing was less deadly, killing eleven, none of whom were Americans, and injuring eighty-five.30
When asked about the death of the non-Americans, bin Laden responded that “when it becomes apparent that it would be impossible to repel these Americans without assaulting them, even if this involved the killing of Muslims, this is permissible under Islam.” When questioned about whether he had been the mastermind behind the attacks, he answered that the World Islamic Front for jihad against “Jews and Crusaders” had released a fatwa that was “crystal clear.” He added that if the instigation for jihad against the Jews and Americans to liberate the holy places “is considered a crime let history be a witness that I am a criminal.”31
The attacks produced a tepid U.S. response—Operation Infinite Reach—on August 27, 1998. Despite its name, it involved only the launch of eighty cruise missiles against a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan (where it was believed bin Laden might be attending a conference) and a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, believed to be involved in the production of chemical weapons. The failure of those attacks to curb bin Laden’s lust for American blood was demonstrated in the fall of 2000. On October 12, a small boat packed with explosives and driven by Al-Qaeda operatives attacked a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Cole. The blast tore a hole in the Cole’s side and, more importantly, killed seventeen members of the crew and injured at least forty others.32
Then on September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda’s status as a terrorist enemy of the United States took a quantum leap. The hijacking of four planes by nineteen of its operatives and the successful use of three as missiles packed with jet fuel—destroying the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, tearing a hole in the Pentagon, and killing three thousand people—required more intricate planning than did the group’s other terrorist attacks and unequivocally demonstrated Al-Qaeda’s willingness to kill en masse. It seemed clear that Al-Qaeda, bin Laden, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of 9/11, would have had no regrets had all the tens of thousands of people who worked in the Trade Center died that day.
Indeed, they have said so on several occasions. In May 1998, bin Laden issued a statement with the title “The Nuclear Bomb of Islam,” which declared that “it is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God.” When the subject of his nuclear ambitions came up in a December 1998 interview with Time magazine, bin Laden told the magazine’s reporter, “Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so.” During an interview with ABC News, he had much the same response: “If I seek to acquire such weapons, this is a religious duty. How we use them is up to us.”33
And documents found in a house in an upscale neighborhood of Kabul in late 2001—a building apparently used by Al-Qaeda operatives—provided evidence of Al-Qaeda’s interest in obtaining nuclear weapons. The house showed signs of a quick exit, and in the haste to leave, the resident left behind a number of documents—discovered not by the CIA but by CNN.34
One document labeled “Superbombs” appeared to be a plan for a nuclear device, judged to be unworkable by experts, but it indicated that its author understood the various methods for detonating such a device. It described a little-known shortcut to initiate a nuclear explosion. A third document concerned the mining of uranium inside Afghanistan.35
In June 2002, Al-Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith posted “In the Shadow of the Lances,” a three-part article, on the web site of the Center for Islamic Research and Studies. After counting up all the alleged victims of the United States and Israel, he declared, “We have the right to kill 4 million Americans—2 million of them children—and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands.” He also claimed, “It is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons.”36 Nuclear weapons are not mentioned, but given the desired death toll and the indiscriminate killing envisioned, they would go a long way to making it possible to achieve the desired level of devastation.
In May 2003, bin Laden’s desire to obtain, and willingness to use, nuclear weapons was sanctioned by the prominent Saudi cleric Sheikh Nasir Bin Hamd al-Fahd. His twenty-two-page, single-spaced “A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction against Infidels” was a response to a request, posted over the Internet, for a legal ruling on the use of such weapons “by Muslims engaged in jihad.” He answered, “If the infidels can be repelled from the Muslims only by using such weapons, their use is permissible, even if you kill them without exception and destroy their village and stock.”37
But that answer was only the prelude for his treatise. In his first chapter, al-Fahd observed that terms such as “contrary to legitimate international authority,” “in violation of the Charter of Human Rights,” and “in violation of the Geneva Convention” “have no standing in Islamic law, because God Almighty has reserved judgment and legislation to Himself.” Judgment of such weapons depends only, he wrote, on “the Koran, the Sunnah, and the statements of Muslim scholars.”38
Before turning to the pronouncements of Muslim scholars, al-Fahd wrote of arguments for permissibility of using weapons of mass destruction. Not surprisingly he accepted a number of such arguments. The Koran, he reported, includes God’s edict that “whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him like as he has committed against you.” In addition, he wrote, “If those engaged in jihad establish that the evil of the infidels can be repelled only by attacking them at night with weapons of mass destruction, they may be used even if they annihilate all the infidels.” Not surprisingly, “setting fire to enemy territory is permissible if the fighting requires it.” And using an analogy from much earlier times, al-Fahd noted that scholars have agreed that it is permissible “to bombard the enemy with a catapult” and “a catapult stone does not distinguish between women, children, and other; it destroys anything that it hits.”39
The scholars whose proclamations he examined include the Hanafis, Malikis, Shafi’is, Hanbalis, Zahiris, and “other jurists.” Those arguments were made long before the advent of nuclear weapons and concerned killing through such older means as fire, scorpions, snakes, and flooding. While the scholars may come from different schools of Islam, their bottom line was similar: “if necessary, anything goes.” It was permissible to use the weapons of mass destruction of the time to “kill the infidels and their children.” One scholar whom al-Fahd quoted argued, “God has commanded that the polytheists should be killed. He did not specify the manner in which it should be done, nor did he obligate us to do it in a certain manner. Therefore there is nothing to prevent their being killed by every cause of death: shooting, piercing, drowning, razing, casting from a cliff, and so forth.”40 Presumably, if he were alive today, that “so forth” would include chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
More recently, Sheikh Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, the spiritual leader of Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiya, an Al-Qaeda–affiliated organization, said that Muslims must embrace nuclear weapons “if necessary” because places like London and New York should fear more than conventional attacks. He also observed, “In battle it is best to cause as many casualties as possible.”41
Of course, fantasies of inflicting nuclear terror are not by themselves a problem. But they become one when a group actively seeks to acquire the means of inflicting such terror and they have even a remote chance of succeeding. A 1998 U.S. federal indictment charged that “at various times from at least early 1993, Osama bin Laden and others known and unknown, made efforts to obtain components of nuclear weapons.”42
One step for a nation or group in obtaining nuclear weapons is finding someone to manage the nuclear program—terrorist versions of Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer. But one person can’t do it alone, even if a nuclear device were to be stolen and detonated, much less constructed from scratch. Building a dirty bomb also takes some knowledge of physics and explosives.
Since the early 1990s, bin Laden has charged a succession of military commanders with the responsibility for procuring or developing weapons of mass destruction—nuclear as well as chemical and biological. The WMD hunt killed Abu-Ubaydah al-Banshiri, who drowned in Lake Victoria in Africa’s Great Rift Valley in May 1996 while on a mission to procure radioactive material for a dirty bomb. His successor, Mohammed Atef, was killed in an air attack in November 2001, not specifically for his quest for WMD but for a multitude of sins. Atef would be replaced by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, both now in U.S. custody. Presumably, today’s military commander has picked up his predecessors’ responsibilities.43
A senior member of Al-Qaeda who was reported to have been the operational head of its unconventional-weapons program, code-named al Zabadi (“curdled milk”), was Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, better known by those who care—including jihadists and Western intelligence services—as Abu Khabab al-Masri. An engineer, born in April 1953, al-Masri was initially thought to have been killed in an airstrike on Damadola in Pakistan in January 2006. But in early 2008 he was believed by U.S. intelligence officials to be alive. Then, in August, Al-Qaeda announced that he had been killed.44
As far as is known publicly, al-Masri’s efforts focused on chemical weapons, first coming to attention for his role in running Al-Qaeda’s Darunta training camp in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda videotapes, shown on CNN in 2002, showed al-Masri and several assistants killing three dogs in chemical weapons experiments, using what was believed to be hydrogen cyanide, previously used in Nazi gas chambers. In addition to his close supervision of work on chemical weapons, he may have had ambitions of helping to build a dirty bomb, at least according to a report in the New York Post. His successor may be Abu Bashir Yemeni, who was reported to have worked closely with al-Masri.45
Al-Qaeda has also received an unknown level of assistance from members of Pakistan’s nuclear establishment. Two of the members who discussed nuclear matters with bin Laden and his key lieutenants are Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudhry Abdul Majeed. Mahmood and Majeed ostensibly were in Afghanistan in connection with the Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN), Reconstruction of the Muslim Ummah, an Afghan-based private relief organization whose announced mission was development, educational reform, and feeding the Afghan population. It was an organization that Mahmood founded after he resigned from Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Agency in 1999, reportedly to protest Pakistan’s willingness to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.46
But there was also pressure for his resignation, partly at the behest of the United States, which had learned of Mahmood’s sympathy for Islamic militant groups. He publicly supported the Taliban and suggested, in speeches at Pakistani universities, that Pakistan should be ruled in the manner that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. Pakistani officials were also concerned about his suggestion that other Islamic nations should be supplied with weapons-grade uranium and plutonium produced by Pakistan. Pakistan’s nuclear capability was “the property of the whole Ummah [Muslim community],” he claimed.47
After studying nuclear engineering in Britain in the 1960s, he returned home. According to one report, he became prominent in the 1970s after developing a technique to detect heavy water leaks in steam pipes at a nuclear power reactor near Karachi. After India’s 1974 nuclear test, he attended, as a junior scientist, a meeting called by President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to discuss Pakistan’s response, and argued for a Pakistani bomb. He subsequently worked on Pakistan’s clandestine gas centrifuge program and has been credited with playing a key role in establishing Pakistan’s uranium enrichment program. His design of the unsafeguarded Khushab reactor, which was heavily dependent on illicit foreign procurement, was his most prestigious accomplishment.48
He also published articles on a variety of topics—electric motors used in radiation environments, quality assurance, technology transfer, and project management. But other publications demonstrated his strange fascination with the occult. In 1987, he was the author of a 232-page treatise titled Doomsday and Life after Death—The Ultimate Fate of the Universe as Seen through the Holy Quran. Included was a chapter that purported to explain how the world would end. In 1998, he produced Cosmology and Human Destiny, in which he claimed that sunspots have influenced major events in world history, including the French and Russian revolutions and World War II.49
Majeed, in the 1960s, trained at a plutonium facility in Belgium and then spent part of the 1970s or early 1980s at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. When he returned to Pakistan, he began a long, successful career in the Nuclear Materials Division of the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) at Rawalpindi, before retiring in 2000. He was also reported to have been associated with the New Labs at Rawalpindi, a facility where plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons was separated. The U.S. government has described him as an expert in nuclear fuels.50
Like Mahmood, Majeed had an extensive publication record, but unlike his colleague his resume did not include digressions into the occult. In the 1980s and 1990s, his works focused on nuclear detectors and the use of X-ray diffraction, fluorescence, and crystallography.51
Over a period of two or three days in August 2001, the two met with bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and two other Al-Qaeda officials on several occasions at a compound in Kabul. According to the pair, who were detained and interrogated that October at the insistence of U.S. intelligence, bin Laden was intensely interested in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and according to Pakistani officials, the two “spoke extensively about weapons of mass destruction.” Bin Laden, according to Mahmood and Majeed, wanted to know if some radioactive material that he had obtained or had access to could be made into a weapon or something that could be used—they told him it was not possible. They also insisted that they did not provide the Al-Qaeda chief with any material or specific plans but took part in wide-ranging “academic discussion.”52
No evidence has emerged that they did provide bin Laden with anything beyond words to help him in the nuclear field. But the discovery, in the office they had occupied in Kabul, of documents describing ways to employ anthrax as a weapon and powdered chemicals and, according to one report, “large amounts of significant data on nuclear weapons” indicated they were willing to go beyond purely academic discussions. Some U.S. intelligence officials suggested that the two, despite their nuclear backgrounds, did not know enough to help build a nuclear weapon. One of those officials told the New York Times that “these two guys were nuclear scientists who didn’t know how to build one themselves” and that “if you had to have guys go bad, these are the guys you’d want—they didn’t know much”—assertions that some experts viewed with a degree of skepticism.53
Whatever their ability to aid Al-Qaeda’s nuclear ambitions, Mahmood and Majeed were not the only Pakistani nuclear scientists whose possible affection for the Taliban and bin Laden worried the United States. After they were interrogated, U.S. and Pakistani officials received reports that other scientists—ones with actual experience in the production of nuclear weapons and related technology—had been in contact with Al-Qaeda. Among the scientists named were Suleiman Asad and Mohammed Ali Mukhtar, who had extensive experience at Pakistan’s most sensitive nuclear installations. Neither could be found in Pakistan when U.S. representatives asked that they be interrogated. They were, the Pakistanis responded, in Burma, doing research with local scientists. One may have tried to sell weapon designs to “unsavory customers.” The CIA also reportedly wanted to investigate another four scientists for suspected links to Al-Qaeda.54
But bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have done more than talk about nuclear weapons and try to enlist physicists and engineers in their cause. During his time in Sudan, he plotted, with the assistance of a small group of engineers and physicists, to build a nuclear device. A key to the plan, which was formulated in 1993, was to buy highly enriched uranium from the former Soviet Union or—as an alternative—purchase a complete nuclear missile.55
An Al-Qaeda official, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, told an American court, during the trial of four men charged with assisting Al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, that in 1993 he was sent to meet an individual outside of Khartoum in an effort to purchase uranium, allegedly from South Africa, for $1.5 million. He also claimed that he did not know whether the deal was ever completed.56
One of bin Laden’s senior aides is believed to have visited at least three Central Asian countries to meet officials reported as good contacts, possibly by bin Laden sympathizers in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. Over the following year, the aide traveled back and forth from bin Laden’s Sudanese headquarters to a number of Middle Eastern capitals and Central Asian cities and towns. He found no intercontinental ballistic missiles for sale, but he met one gang who thought it knew a sucker when it saw one. He was offered, and possibly bought, what was represented as more than 220 pounds of enriched uranium, but the gang had only low-grade fuel from a nuclear reactor, material that could never be used for a fission bomb.57
Other Al-Qaeda representatives were sent to Kazakhstan on the same mission, causing Israel to dispatch a senior official to that nation to attempt to short-circuit any sale. The Israeli intervention apparently worked, although bin Laden “still secured a network of friends and paid accomplices in the former Soviet Central Asian states and the Ukraine.”58
According to one account, intelligence analysts believed that at some point, criminals had sold Al-Qaeda irradiated canisters alleged to contain uranium from Russian military bases, but the actual contents had no value to rogue nuclear scientists interested in building a bomb. They may also have fallen victim to smugglers who claimed to have Red Mercury, a mythical form of nuclear material, in some cases being nothing more than radiological waste.59
The early setbacks did not halt bin Laden’s quest for radioactive material for a dirty bomb, fissile material for a nuclear device, or an intact nuclear warhead. According to Ivan Ivanov, a Bulgarian businessman connected to a Dubai company that supplies Asian laborers to Middle Eastern construction firms, he was approached by a bin Laden emissary in April 2001. The immediate result, Ivanov claimed, was a trip to Pakistan. Upon arrival he realized that his hosts were enthusiastic bin Laden supporters and that they apparently viewed his political connections in Eastern Europe as useful. Ivanov was then taken to meet the Al-Qaeda chief at a secret location along Pakistan’s border with China, and then to a Rawalpindi villa. At the villa, Ivanov was introduced to a Pakistani scientist who described himself as a chemical engineer.60
The scientist told his visitor that he was looking for a way to obtain spent nuclear fuel rods from the Kozlodui nuclear electricity plant in Bulgaria. What he wanted, according to Ivanov, was “a legitimate way of buying nuclear waste from the power plant,” and he was ready to give Ivanov money in advance so he could find local companies that would help him export the fuel rods. The Bulgarian businessman was offered $200,000 to establish an environmental firm to purchase nuclear waste, and was asked if he would run the company. Instead, he declined and, after his return home, reported the offer to Bulgarian authorities.61
Yet another attempt may have been planned for early 2001, according to Gen. Col. Igor Valynkin, who at the time was head of the 12th Main Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the organization responsible for the storage, transportation, safety, and security of nuclear warheads, as well as for the oversight of nuclear warhead research, design, testing, and production. According to Valynkin, there were two attempts to reconnoiter the 12th Main Directorate’s S-shelters, heavily fortified concrete bunkers where nuclear warheads, when not attached to delivery systems, are stored. Valynkin also reported that there had been dozens of attempts to steal enriched uranium or plutonium since 1990.62
It was also reported that in 2002, Adnan El Shukrijumah, who is still being sought by the FBI for his alleged connection with an Al-Qaeda dirty bomb plot, posed as a student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario—a university with a five-megawatt research reactor. U.S. officials believed he was there to obtain radioactive material. El Shukrijumah lived in the same part of Florida and worshipped at the same mosque as the American-born Jose Padilla, who was originally charged with plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States.63
Al-Qaeda’s effort was ongoing in 2003, according to Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence early in the year that “Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are seeking to acquire chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear [CBRN] capabilities.” There was no argument from Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, who told the same committee, “We continue to receive information indicating that [Al-Qaeda] still seeks chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons.”64
Four years later, senior intelligence officials were saying much the same thing. Lowell Jacoby’s successor at DIA, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in late February 2007 that “reporting continues to indicate that non-state actors, specifically [Al-Qaeda], continue to pursue CBRN options . . . The recent press claim made by the al-Qaida in Iraq leader asking for nuclear scientists to make ‘germ’ and ‘dirty’ weapons reinforces [Al-Qaeda’s] interest and desire to acquire CBRN materials.” Five months later, Edward Gistaro, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, and Michael Leiter, the principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told two congressional committees, “We assess that [Al-Qaeda] will continue to try to acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear material in attacks and would not hesitate to use them if it develops what it deems is sufficient capability.”65
But according to some claims and reports, Al-Qaeda has done more than try to acquire nuclear material or nuclear weapons—it has succeeded. One of those claims came from Osama bin Laden himself. In early November 2001 he was interviewed by Pakistani newspaper editor Hamid Mir, who was blindfolded and driven in a jeep from Kabul to an undisclosed location. Once he arrived, bin Laden told him, “We have chemical and nuclear weapons as a deterrent and if America used them against us we reserve the right to use them.”66
In April 2002, Abu Zubaydah, the senior Al-Qaeda official who served as director of military operations and had been apprehended in Pakistan, told CIA and FBI interrogators that the terrorist group was working on developing a radiological dispersal device and that Al-Qaeda personnel “know how to do it.” He also claimed that the group might try to smuggle it into the United States. One U.S. official told the New York Times that the captured terrorist “is well positioned to know what Al Qaeda is up to and we have to take his information seriously.” It was also reported that British authorities claimed to have unearthed documents indicating that the group had constructed such a dirty bomb at an unidentified site in Afgahnistan.67
In February 2004, a pan-Arab newspaper claimed that Al-Qaeda had purchased tactical nuclear weapons from the Ukraine in 1998 and was holding them in secure places for possible use. A little over a year later, an intelligence source reported that Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, had obtained a nuclear device or was preparing to detonate a dirty bomb.68
In July 2005, the online publication World Net Daily made even more alarming claims—allegedly based on captured Al-Qaeda documents—that the group had obtained at least forty nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union, with the assistance of Chechen terrorists. According to an Arab magazine, about twenty of those warheads were obtained from the Chechens in exchange for $30 million in cash and two tons of opium. The weapons were reported to include nuclear mines, suitcase nukes, artillery shells, and even some missile warheads. That was not the end of the bad news, according to World Net Daily, which also claimed that several of the weapons had already been smuggled into the United States over the Mexican border with the help of the MS-13 street gang and were to be detonated as part of a plan designated “America’s Hiroshima.” Cities alleged to be on the target list include New York, Washington, Las Vegas, Boston, Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In addition, some former Russian special forces personnel were said to have been paid to help locate nuclear weapons that had been concealed in the United States during the Cold War.69*
Many of the claims concerning Al-Qaeda’s acquisition of nuclear weapons revolve around “suitcase nukes.” During the 1960s, the United States had developed Atomic Demolition Munitions. Potential uses included closing a mountain pass to prevent Soviet tanks from reaching Western Europe. One version, the Mk-54, was to be fired from a Davy Crockett recoilless rifle and employed a plutonium warhead, with a yield anywhere from ten tons to one kiloton. Another version of this warhead was the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), which was sixteen inches in diameter and twenty-four inches long, with a warhead weighing about fifty pounds (but with another hundred pounds of weight contributed by safety and arming devices).70
In May 1997, retired Russian general Alexander Lebed told a U.S. congressional delegation that since the demise of the Soviet Union, 84 of 132 suitcase-size nuclear weapons were missing. In September he suggested that 100 of 250 were missing. Lebed also specified they were designated RA-115 and RA-115-01 weapons, which weigh up to a hundred pounds and have up to one kiloton of explosive power. In addition, Lebed claimed that the weapons did not require special access codes to be transmitted by higher authority to be certain that any use was authorized.71
Lebed’s knowledge came, he claimed, from an investigation he ordered while serving as secretary of Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s security council, a position he had been fired from in October 1996 because of his “outspoken manner and open presidential aspirations.” Lebed, who had a reputation for exaggeration, also had a history of insubordination. A 1994 Defense Intelligence Agency biographic sketch described him as “the fiery and controversial commander of Russian forces in the Transdnestr region of Modolva” who “continues to retain his post despite a public stance that regularly tests his superiors’ tolerance for insubordination.” He was also described as having a “penchant for controversy.”72
Lebed’s comments certainly produced controversy. There was a dispute about whether such weapons existed, their exact characteristics if they did, and whether any had been lost. In response to Lebed’s charges, the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy (MINATOM) first stated that “no such weapons exist” and then “never existed, and do not exist.” The Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff (the GRU), whose special forces had been identified as one of the entities that might possess such devices, asserted that no suitcase nukes were ever produced. Similarly, a former head of the KGB, another suggested owner of such devices, claimed that the “KGB had no use for nuclear weapons,” while the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s successor, claimed it had no information on KGB possession of such nuclear devices. The Russian national security advisor asserted that there was “no record of such devices.” In early January 2002, the head of the 12th Department, Igor Valynkin, told a press briefing that “nuclear suitcases have never been produced and are not now being produced.”73
But Lebed’s accusations were not without support. In September 1997, Alexei Yablokov, Boris Yeltsin’s former environmental and health advisor, claimed that suitcase nukes were built for the KGB and that he had met the designers. In December 1997, the Russian minister of defense told Representative Curt Weldon, “Yes we did build them . . . they will be destroyed by 2000.” Maxim Shingarkin, a former major in the 12th Department, said the Soviet Union had built about a hundred suitcase bombs, and Russia had not added to the arsenal. The bombs, he claimed, were stored near Moscow, where about thirty to fifty members of the GRU were trained to transport them abroad and detonate them. In 2002, the Russian minister of atomic energy claimed that “all of these [miniature nuclear devices] are registered . . . it is technically impossible for them to find their way into the hands of terrorists.”74
Tangled up with, and not unrelated to, the controversy over their existence was the debate over the exact, or even approximate, characteristics of such weapons. In 1996, the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies was informed by a “senior advisor to Boris Yeltsin” (a description that would apply to Yablokov) that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the KGB had received small nuclear weapons weighing less than seventy-five pounds. In 2002, officials at the CIA believed that the Soviets might have developed small nuclear landmines, but not small enough to fit into a suitcase. “They were not that small,” according to one official. “It would require several people to move them.” But subsequent information led Center for Nonproliferation Studies staffer Nikolai Sokov to conclude that two versions of the devices were created for the Soviet special forces (Spetsnaz): the RA-155 for the army and RA-115-01 for the navy (for underwater use). One device weighed sixty-six pounds and could be armed by a lone operator in ten minutes. The weapons were referred to as “nuclear backpacks” and had a yield of between one-half and two kilotons.75
Most accounts asserted that they would not be viable weapons unless used within a short period of time after their acquisition. The weapons were designed in such a way that after six months some of their components would have to be replaced. Further, the plutonium in nuclear weapons has to be replaced every five to ten years, so any suitcase nukes acquired with or before the collapse of the Soviet Union, which employed plutonium, would not be able to produce a nuclear detonation.76
In any case, it appears that none of the small weapons escaped Soviet and Russian custody and all had electronic protection systems, at least according to Russian claims. One claim was that they were kept at two secret storage facilities and had never been distributed to troops. And according to retired Russian general Vladimir Dvorkin, former director of Research Institute No. 4, the research arm of the Strategic Rocket Forces, they were equipped with a variety of permissive action links (PALs), as well as being protected against attempts to forcibly remove their electronic locks. Such an attempt would automatically cause the device to switch into safety mode, and therefore it would not explode. Also providing reassurance was Vladimir Denisov, who in 2004 reported that the Lebed commission, after Lebed’s departure, was able to match records to actual weapons.77
In January 2002, a CIA report stated, “We have no credible reporting on terrorists successfully acquiring nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make them.” That conclusion was probably based in part on an analysis of suspect radioactive material seized in Afghanistan by U.S. intelligence officers and Special Forces personnel. “We didn’t find any type of serious radiological material,” a Pentagon official told the New York Times.78
That sentiment was echoed in September 2002, when the author of a Strategic Insight paper for the Center for Contemporary Conflict of the Naval Postgraduate School observed that “so far there is no evidence that [Al-Qaeda] acquired enough nuclear material to develop a nuclear weapon, nor does it appear that they were able to acquire whole nuclear weapon assemblies.” In 2006, the chief of research for the Intelligence Branch (AMAN) of the Israeli Defense Forces, Gen. Yossi Cooperwasser, said, “We’ve checked out the reports and don’t have any evidence to support concerns over lost, stolen, or misappropriated nuclear devices.”79
But bin Laden’s failure to acquire fissile material or nuclear weapons is not necessarily proof that it is impossible to do, or that the United States and its allies can afford to be complacent in their efforts to stop him or others.
*The seismic signals from a nuclear blast commence with a very distinct spike at the moment of the explosion. The highs and lows of the signals quickly taper down, and the signals then return to their preexplosion levels. In the case of an earthquake, the seismic signals build to their peak, as tectonic plates slip by each other, and then more gradually return to their preearthquake levels.
*MS-13 is mainly a Central American gang whose original members arrived in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., in the 1980s. “MS” stands for “Mara Salvatrucha.” The name is derived from the Spanish word for army ant, marabunta, and is the nickname Salvadorans use to refer to themselves. In February 2005, the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded that there was no grounds for believing there was a connection between MS-13 and Al-Qaeda or other Islamic extremist groups. See “FBI Targets MS-13 Street Gang,” www.pbs.org, October 5, 2005; Danna Harman, “U.S. Steps Up Battle against Salvadoran Gang MS-13,” USA Today, February 23, 2005, accessed from www.usatoday.com.