WHATEVER ANXIETY the Vela incident produced in America’s top national security officials represented only a fraction of the concern they would experience in response to the efforts of a trio of rogue states to acquire nuclear weapons. By 1980 North Korea, Libya, and Iraq were virtually personal possessions of Kim Il Sung, Muammar Qadhafi, and Saddam Hussein, respectively.1 Each was supported by a military and security apparatus that controlled, and often terrorized, his nation’s population. Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the leader of Pakistan, was not in the same class as Hussein, Qadhafi, and Kim, but his nuclear policies would still cause considerable anxiety.
KIM, NORTH KOREA’S “Great Leader,” was the ruler with the longest tenure. Born in 1912, by early 1934 he had become a member of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, a Communist guerilla force. In 1940, with Japanese forces in the midst of a crackdown on partisan activities, Kim fled across the border into the Soviet Union, where he was arrested by Soviet border guards. Along with other survivors of his group, he became a charter member of the 88th Special Independent Sniper Brigade in August 1942, a unit that reported to the Soviet Far East Command’s Reconnaissance Bureau. In September 1945, after Japan’s defeat in World War II, Kim returned to Korea as a captain in the Soviet army but gradually became the Soviets’ first choice to assume leadership of the new Communist Korean state. In the thirty-one-plus years from September 1948, when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was established, to 1980, Kim’s regime had managed to invade South Korea, seize a U.S. intelligence ship in international waters, shoot down a U.S. electronic reconnaissance aircraft, killing all aboard, and engage in assorted acts of terrorism and abduction. More bad behavior would follow in the 1980s.2
About two decades after Kim became head of the DPRK, a group of Libyan military officers, known as the Free Officers, ousted the pro-American King Idris, who was vacationing abroad. They then terminated U.S. use of Wheelus Air Base and set Libya on a new, revolutionary course, which included supporting and conducting acts of terrorism. It was not long after the September 1, 1969, coup that Capt. (and later Col.) Muammar Qadhafi, who claimed to be only twenty-seven years old, emerged as the key figure in the council. Like Kim, he would become the focus of a personality cult. Several volumes of his Green Book, an exposition of his “Third Universal Theory,” which not surprisingly denounced the concept of representative government, would be published in Libya so that his “wisdom” could be disseminated among the nation’s citizens. This wisdom saw Libya pursue a nuclear bomb, a major confrontation with the United States, and an act of terrorism that killed hundreds of air travelers in a single morning.3
In contrast to Qadhafi, Saddam Hussein’s path to power ran through a political organization rather than the military. In 1957, at the age of twenty, the future Iraqi dictator joined the socialist Baath Party. The next year, a military coup swept away Iraq’s monarchy. Ten years later Saddam played a major role in the coup that installed a Baathist regime, becoming deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and the second most powerful man in Iraq, behind President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. Long before July 1979, when he became Iraq’s president after al-Bakr resigned, ostensibly for health reasons, Saddam had become the most powerful. His formal ascent to the top position was followed by a bloody purge of the party and then, in 1980, war with Iran.4
General Zia ul-Haq was also not above using violence to eliminate political opponents, but he was far more selective. In July 1977 he ousted Pakistan’s civilian leader, the flamboyant Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In April 1979, despite the pleas of foreign leaders, including Jimmy Carter, Bhutto met death at the end of a rope in a Rawalpindi prison, having been convicted of assorted crimes, including murder. Zia would become an increasingly devout adherent of Islam until his death in a 1988 plane crash, which also took the life of U.S. ambassador Arnold Raphael. He was replaced by an elected prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, a product of Radcliffe and Oxford, and the daughter of the man whose execution he had engineered.5
SADDAM WAS the driving force behind Iraq’s attempt to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq’s nuclear program had modest origins, beginning with the creation of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in January 1959. In the mid-1960s the Soviet Union agreed to provide nuclear research facilities, including a small 2-megawatt research reactor. Reactor operations began in late 1967 or early 1968 at the new Nuclear Research Center at Tuwaitha, located about thirteen miles southeast of Baghdad.6
In December 1974 French prime minister Jacques Chirac arrived in Iraq, where he was hosted by Saddam. India’s detonation of its first atomic device earlier that year may have sparked an Iraqi desire to develop similar capabilities. The late 1974 meeting represented a first step toward the contract signed in Paris in late August 1976, a contract worth over one billion francs to France’s nuclear industry. In exchange, Iraq received two small reactors, including a 70-megawatt thermal “experimental” reactor, similar to the Osiris reactor at France’s nuclear research center at Saclay. The similarity led the French to call the reactor-to-be Osiraq, although Saddam renamed it Tammuz I—the smaller reactor became Tammuz II—to commemorate the Baathist revolution, which occurred in July (Tammuz in Arabic). Tammuz I would look like a large, open swimming pool with a reactor core at the center.7
A reprocessing capability would also be needed to extract the plutonium from the spent reactor fuel, a requirement satisfied by another contract, this one with an Italian firm. Iraq would be provided with five new laboratories. Four were “cold labs” that lacked the shielding needed to permit work with irradiated plutonium or other radioactive substances. However, the fifth lab was a radiochemistry lab, with three hot cells, that was expected to be operational before the end of 1981.8
While foreign firms could provide the hardware for Iraq’s nuclear program, Iraq itself had to provide the key personnel. In some cases their participation was the result of coercion, not choice. It was made clear to Khidir Hamza, who was teaching in a small Georgia college, after obtaining a master’s degree at MIT and a doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics at Florida State University, that he had to return to Iraq for his father’s sake. Hamza, who would eventually be appointed to head the weapons design segment of the Iraqi nuclear weapons effort, returned to Iraq in 1970. In 1975, along with another prominent Iraqi physicist, Mahdi Obeidi, he visited the Los Alamos laboratory to learn about new technologies for enriching uranium.9
In the latter half of 1981, thirty-eight-year-old Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, who had been appointed vice chairman of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission by 1979, became the head of his nation’s effort to join the nuclear club. Jaffar had returned to Iraq in April 1975, one of four thousand scientists recruited between 1974 and 1977 to work on Iraq’s nuclear program. British-trained, he had obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Birmingham and then moved on to the University of Manchester for his doctorate. In the early 1970s he had left his job at the commission to visit the European nuclear research center CERN, where he became familiar with cyclotron technology, and the British nuclear center at Harwell. In early 1975, shortly before his return to Iraq, he had applied for a professorship at Britain’s Imperial College, where he had previously worked as an assistant researcher, but was turned down.10
By that time he had become “an urbane Shiite bon vivant who loved ‘starred’ restaurants, excellent whiskey, bridge, squash, and tailor-made suits from Milan, his favorite city.” His return to Iraq may have been the result of his application being rejected or of as-yet-unknown coercion. But in 1980 coercion was one means of persuasion. In 1979 Hussein al-Sharistani, the commission’s chief of research and a friend, was arrested. A combination of the intensely religious Sharistini’s close ties with Shiite clergy, which included his uncle, the war with Shiite-ruled Iran, unfounded rumors of his complicity in attempts to sabotage Tammuz I, and Saddam’s paranoia resulted in his being tortured for twenty-two days at the Abu Ghraib military barracks.11
In February 1980, after attempts to get his friend released, Jaffar found himself under house arrest, a sentence that lasted twenty months. Both men were offered a choice: remain prisoners or resume work on Iraq’s nuclear program and receive extravagant benefits. Upon being told that the main objective was a nuclear weapon, Sharistani, according to his account, refused and continued to refuse. Jaffar took some convincing, which included a brief stay in prison, where he was forced to watch guards break the back of an elderly man, but eventually capitulated. He became the head of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program in September 1981.12
In other cases, such as that of Imad Khadduri, no coercion was needed. His six-year stay in the United States during the 1960s “heightened his appreciation of the richness and warmth of Arab culture” and led him to decide that he would only marry an Iraqi and that their children would be raised in the “warm and generous atmosphere of the deeply rich Iraqi culture.” He first joined the Tuwaitha center in 1968. After obtaining his doctorate from the University of Birmingham, he rejoined the Nuclear Research Center in January 1974, going to work in the reactor department. Later that year he proposed an expedition to locate uranium, which “struck it rich” near Al Qaim, in the vicinity of the Syrian border. In 1978 he would collaborate with Jaffar to produce The Possible Production of Pu239 from the IRT-5000 Reactor, a study of the possible use of the Soviet-provided reactor at Tuwaitha to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Eventually Khadduri would play a key role in Iraq’s overt and covert acquisition of science and technical information.13
Another willing participant was Egyptian physicist Yehya al-Meshad, who had studied nuclear engineering in the United States and the Soviet Union. After working for the Egyptian Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1968, he became a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Alexandria. He spent two years in the mid-1970s teaching at Baghdad’s University of Technology. During that time al-Meshad also assisted the Iraqi atomic energy effort, producing, in collaboration with Khadduri, a computer code that permitted the calculation of critical mass. Rather than seek employment in the United States or Europe, al-Meshad offered to stay in Iraq, telling Khadduri that he wanted to raise his children in a Moslem country, and was hired by the atomic energy commission in 1977.14
WHILE IRAQ’S nuclear efforts in the 1970s did not particularly concern U.S. or West European leaders, the same could not be said about Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and several of his key advisors. Saddam himself had provided the warning, when, in September 1975, he described the search for a reactor as part of “the first Arab attempt at nuclear arming.” That message was repeated in 1978 by Naim Hadad, a senior member of the Revolutionary Command Council, who declared, “If Israel owns the atom bomb, then the Arabs must get an atom bomb.” Iraq’s refusal to accept low-enriched uranium to fuel the Tammuz I reactor, rather than the originally promised highly enriched uranium, also concerned Israel, since the latter could be diverted for use in a weapon.15
Israel tried, in a variety of ways, to halt the project. Attempts were made to influence international opinion by providing information about the reactor to media outlets, including the London Daily Mail. Between 1975 and 1981, Israeli officials held discussions with French officials to convey their concern. In July 1977 the Israeli ambassador in Paris had requested that France substitute the low-enriched “caramel” that Iraq would refuse the following year. Covert action included the sending of multiple threatening letters to scientists and technicians involved in the project—letters signed by the fictitious “Committee to Safeguard the Islamic Revolution.”16
Israel also employed covert measures. On April 6, 1979, the storerooms of a French nuclear plant at La Seyne-sur-Mer, where the Tammuz I reactor core was under construction, received some uninvited visitors, who blew the core up just days before it was to be shipped to Iraq. The previously unknown, and never heard from again, “French Ecological Group” called to take responsibility—although the French security service, the DST, suspected the attack had been engineered by Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, better known as Mossad.17
While no one was killed in the April 1979 attack, the same could not be said of the suspected Mossad action in June 1980. On June 14 a chambermaid discovered Yehya al-Meshad’s body in his hotel room in Paris, where he had traveled to complete arrangements with the French for the supply of nuclear fuel to Iraq. The Egyptian physicist had been bludgeoned and left to die. While there was no proof of Israeli involvement, the Mossad—which had also used violence in the 1960s to “discourage” German scientists from working on the Egyptian missile program—was a logical candidate. At the same time, the nature of the attack and his being left alive did not appear to be consistent with a Mossad operation.18
The final strike against the Tammuz project came about a year later, from the air. This time there would be no doubt about who was responsible, nor any Israeli reticence in acknowledging its involvement, which brought the expected UN condemnation. Israel’s action might not have taken place had Iran’s aerial attack on the Tuwaitha site, in the early days of the Iran-Iraq war, been more successful. After it became apparent that the Iranian attack had inflicted only minor damage, Israeli officials began considering letting the Israeli air force finish the job. While a number of senior Israeli officials, including Mossad chief Yitzhak Hofi, deputy prime minister Yigal Yadin, and chief of military intelligence Gen. Yehoshua Saguy, opposed such an attack, a majority, most importantly Begin, favored a strike.19
Primary responsibility for developing plans that would allow Israeli pilots to evade Iraqi air defenses and destroy their target belonged to the Israeli air force’s operations chief, Aviem Sella, who would become better known in the 1980s for his role in the Jonathan Pollard spy case. The operation, developed under the code name Scorch Sword by Sella and his staff, was carried out on June 7, 1981, as Operation Babylon. Eight Israeli pilots, including Ilan Ramon—who later died in the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia in February 2003—flew their F-16s over Saudi Arabia and Jordan, evaded Iraqi antiaircraft defenses, and destroyed the reactor core and the buildings nearby.20
Imad Khadduri recalls that “the bombing occurred in late afternoon and after most of the staff had returned home. We heard the blasts and ran to the rooftops. We could see the cloud plumes even tens of kilometers away. We sadly watched the unchallenged Israeli warplanes streaking west in the setting sun.” Hamza remembers the Israeli jets sweeping over the rooftops “with a ground-shaking roar” and “an explosion, then another, then another.” The F-16s were “buzzing like hornets over the aluminum dome of the French reactor.”21
The next day, the Israeli government released a statement acknowledging the role of its air force in the attack. The release also explained that “for a long time we have been watching with growing concern the construction of the [Tammuz I] atomic reactor. . . . From sources whose reliability is beyond any doubt, we learn that this reactor, despite its camouflage, is designed to produce atomic bombs.” The timing of the attack, according to the Israeli statement, was determined by the plan to complete the reactor in July 1981 and begin operations in September. Since bombing the reactor after it had become operational would result in “radioactive lethal fallout over the city of Baghdad,” it was necessary to “act without further delay to ensure our people’s existence.”22
THE ISRAELI RAID led Iraq to review the future of its nuclear program, a review which concluded that while Baghdad should continue its project to acquire nuclear weapons, it should take a different path to reach its objective. Rather than developing a plutonium bomb, which required reactors such as Tammuz I, Iraq should covertly develop a uranium enrichment capability while appearing to remain in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. A key factor was the desire of the military and security services to avoid attention being drawn to the program, attention that could complicate procurement and development activities. The argument, according to Jaffar, was “let Israel believe it destroyed our nuclear capacity, accept the sympathy being offered for this aggression and proceed in secret with the program.”23
On September 3, 1981, the reeducated Jaffar Dhia Jaffar arrived at the Nuclear Research Center at Tuwaitha, with the covert mission of providing Saddam and his regime with atomic weapons. The center itself, under Khalid Said, was designated Department 6000 of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, while Jaffar’s unit, Research and Development, was known as Department 3000.24
Between 1982 and 1987, Jaffar and his associates established at least six secret weapons laboratories at Tuwaitha. The Nuclear Physics Building contained labs for the research and testing of calutrons (also referred to as “baghdatrons”) for electromagnetic separation. Centrifuges were the object of study in the Chemical Research Building, while a solvent extraction method developed by the French was the focus of the activities in the Polymer Chemistry Research Laboratory. Reprocessing was the responsibility of the Chemical and Radiochemical Analysis Laboratory.25
In the summer of 1987, Department 3000 was renamed, and purposely misnamed, Petrochemical-3—two 1980s refinery projects had been designated PC-1 and PC-2. The project was also reorganized into four key groups. Group 1, headed by Mahdi Obeidi, was assigned responsibility for developing a gas centrifuge process. Jaffar, in addition to his other duties, headed Group 2, which soon came to focus on electromagnetic isotope separation, a technology considered obsolete in the West. Administrative support, which included document acquisition and covert procurement as well as some manufacturing and engineering tasks, was the mission of Group 3, headed by Dhafir Selbi, who had joined the British-run Iraqi Petroleum Corporation after receiving an engineering degree from Baghdad University and moved on to the atomic energy commission in the late 1970s. Selbi played a key role in switching the focus of Group 2 to electromagnetic separation. Khidir Hamza was appointed as the head of Group 4, responsible for bomb design, but was soon replaced by Khalid Said after misappropriating several air conditioners for personal use.26
Reorganization was not the only key development in 1987 and 1988. In 1987 Iraq recruited a Yugoslav firm to build its first electromagnetic isotope separation production facility, in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. The facility was expected to produce thirty-three pounds of weapons-grade uranium per year, according to a September 1987 document titled “New Procedures for Setting Up and Operating the Third Phase of a Separation System.” Late that year Iraq decided to build a replica of Tarmiya at Ash Sharqat, about 130 miles northwest of Baghdad, in anticipation that it would become operational at about the same time as Tarmiya and be the second production facility.27
There were also significant developments in the gaseous diffusion program in the late 1980s. Possibly due to a conflict between Jaffar and Obeidi, who at that time headed the gaseous diffusion effort, the group charged with developing gaseous diffusion technologies was transferred from Tuwaitha to a new site near Rashdiya, on the northern edge of Baghdad, which was subsequently named Engineering Design Center. In 1987 or 1988 the Iraqi leadership concluded that the gaseous diffusion effort was not living up to expectations, and decided to deemphasize it in favor of centrifuges as a means of providing low-enriched uranium for the electromagnetic separation program.28
In late 1988 almost all of the nuclear weapons effort was placed under the direction of Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s powerful son-in-law, who had become the head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization when the ministry was established that May. Jaffar became deputy minister while the directors of the major programs were made ministry director-generals. Appointed to supervise the entire weapons of mass destruction effort—to be Iraq’s Leslie Groves for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons—was the senior deputy minister of the ministry, Gen. Amir Hammoudi al-Saadi, who had received a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Munich, and had overseen the development of the Al-Abbas missile, a variant of the Soviet Scud.29
By the end of 1988 the groundwork had been laid for a dramatic expansion of the Iraqi nuclear effort. But Iraq already had a number of facilities of its nuclear complex up and running. The Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center had been deprived of the Tammuz I reactor by the Israeli raid, but was still operating the Soviet IRT-5000 and the French Tammuz II reactors, although they could not provide the plutonium needed for a bomb. Also operational were a variety of administration and research facilities, including the radio-chemical building, an isotope production laboratory, Building 86 for the mechanical design teams, a building that housed the labs for the electronic department, and the power substation. There also was the Akashat phosphate mine and the Al Qaim facility for the production of uranium oxide, the direct result of Imad Khadduri’s search for uranium in 1974.30
IN JUNE 1981, the same month that Israel handed Iraq’s nuclear weapons program a major setback, Qadhafi told Time magazine that he and his nation were not interested in such weapons. “We put the production of nuclear weapons,” he proclaimed, “at the top of the list of terrorist activities. As long as the big powers continue to manufacture atomic weapons, it means that they are continuing to terrorize the world. . . . I have nothing but scorn for the notion of an Islamic bomb. . . . Any such weapon is a means of terrorizing humanity, and we are against the manufacture and acquisition of nuclear weapons.”31
Of course, he was lying. About a week after his Time interview and a few days after the Israeli raid on Tammuz I, the Libyan leader apparently held a secret meeting with five key advisers. He told them that he would employ “all Libya’s financial resources” to obtain a nuclear weapon from Pakistan or the technology to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium. But the meeting did not represent a sudden change of heart caused by the Israeli raid, for Libya’s quest for atomic weapons had started over a decade earlier.32
In 1970 Qadhafi had sent Abdul Jalloud, vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, to Cairo to ask for Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s help in obtaining nuclear weapons from China. Although Nasser told his visitor that such weapons were not for sale, Jalloud traveled to China incognito and on an Egyptian passport, by way of Pakistan and India. As Nasser predicted, China was not willing to sell Libya a weapon. Zhou Enlai exhibited “perfect Chinese courtesy,” but stressed the virtues of self-reliance and offered some general assistance in the area of nuclear research.33
In the face of China’s refusal to provide a ready-made bomb, Libya began a two-track program to enhance its nuclear capabilities. Covert operations were conducted to quickly acquire nuclear weapons or at least the crucial ingredients and equipment needed to build them. They reportedly included a standing offer of one million dollars in gold to anyone who would provide Libya with an atomic bomb.34 Overt activities were geared toward developing a nuclear research and energy program similar to the programs in other developing nations, as well as acquiring bomb-related material.
In 1973 Libyan representatives offered to purchase twenty large electromagnets from a French firm, Thompson-CSF, apparently for electromagnetic separation, but the French government vetoed the sale. That same year, Libya reportedly reached a secret agreement with Pakistani president Zulkifar Ali Bhutto. Libya would finance the Pakistani nuclear weapons program in exchange for “full access” to “the entire capability” to be developed. In addition, Libya requested that Pakistan provide training in hot-cell operations. It was also reported that Libya was willing to finance a large reprocessing plant that Pakistan was interested in buying from France, if Pakistan provided some of the plutonium produced.35
The following year, as part of its effort to develop an open, apparently benign nuclear program, Libya asked a U.S. manufacturer of research reactors used in developing nations if it would like to sell Libya a full reactor, along with some fuel. The firm was quite willing to say yes, but the White House, State Department, and Congress said no. That same year Argentina, which possessed one of the most advanced nuclear programs of developing countries, agreed to provide Qadhafi’s regime with general assistance as well as equipment and training related to uranium prospecting, extraction, and purification.36
In 1975 Qadhafi demanded that Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat undertake a clandestine project—he was to assemble a group of Arab scientists to build a bomb—a command, Arafat was afraid to tell Qadhafi, that was impossible to carry out due to a lack of qualified personnel. More overtly, that June the Soviet Union announced that it had agreed to build a small, 10-megawatt research reactor in Libya, along with an atomic research center. A year later another Libyan-Soviet nuclear agreement was reached in principle, this time for construction of a 440-megawatt nuclear power reactor. Both sales were made possible by Libya’s ratification of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, although the country would not reach a safeguards agreement with the inspection authority—the International Atomic Energy Agency—until 1980.37
Libya’s quest to obtain assistance in developing nuclear weapons continued in 1978, with approaches to both India and Pakistan. During a July visit to New Delhi for the signing of an agreement on peaceful nuclear cooperation, Jalloud, then the Libyan prime minister, reportedly pressed Indian officials to pledge that their government would help Libya to obtain “an independent nuclear capability.” India’s refusal over the next year to provide weapons-related assistance resulted in Libya’s termination of oil shipments to India, but no change in New Delhi’s refusal to help Libya gain entrance to the nuclear club.38
While Libya’s cutting off of oil exports was designed to coerce India to do something it had not promised to do, Libya’s purchase of several hundred tons of uranium concentrate from Niger between 1978 and 1980 was designed to induce Pakistan to fulfill a promise. The yellowcake was to be supplied to Pakistan’s clandestine uranium enrichment program to “remind” its recipient to provide the nuclear weapons technology promised in 1973.39
In late 1981 the small research reactor that the Soviets agreed to build for Libya in 1975 began operations. Its home was the Tajoura Research Center, outside Tripoli and near the Okbah ibn Nafi Air Base (formerly Wheelus Air Base). Primary responsibility for reactor operations had been entrusted to Dr. Fathi Noor and Dr. Fathi Skinji, who were also in charge of the nuclear engineering faculty at Tripoli’s Al Fatah University. Noor was trained at the University of California at Berkeley, while Skinji had studied in India and Britain.40
The following years involved a number of failed Libyan attempts to enhance its ability to develop nuclear weapons. In 1982 negotiations began with a Belgian firm that was willing to provide a plant for the production of uranium tetrafluoride. Two years later Belgian nuclear officials announced the imminent signing of a nuclear cooperation agreement with Libya, which would incorporate the sale of the tetrafluoride plant as well as provision of architectural-engineering services for the Soviet nuclear power plants that were still the subject of negotiations. The whole deal fell apart, however, when the United States objected and the Belgian government canceled the pending agreement. A year earlier Libya’s attempt to buy a research reactor from Argentina also met with failure.41
In late 1984 Brazilian-Libyan discussions began on the supply of uranium prospecting and development services. Then, early in 1986, negotiations with the Soviet Union over the 440-megawatt reactor collapsed, and then started again in May, although by the end of 1988 no agreement had been concluded.42 As the end of the decade approached, Libya’s path to an atomic bomb faced significant roadblocks.
PAKISTAN’S QUEST for nuclear weapons began a couple of years after Libya’s, but would be far more successful. Pakistan had first entered the nuclear arena in March 1956, with creation of the Atomic Energy Council, which consisted of a governing board and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). In 1960–1961 the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) was completed in Rawalpindi and in 1963 a 5-megawatt light-water research reactor was installed there. In May 1965 Canada agreed to provide a nuclear power plant to be located at Karachi, which would be designated the the Karachi Nuclear Power Project (KANUPP).43
But it was the country’s devastating defeat in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war—which resulted in the large, physically detached eastern portion of Pakistan becoming the independent nation of Bangladesh—that became “the turning point in the history of Pakistan’s nuclear program,” according to Indian defense analyst Matin Zuberi. Defeat led President Yahya Khan, in the face of military unrest, to turn power over to the eloquent, flamboyant, and arrogant Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto had headed the natural resources and foreign affairs ministries (from 1958 to 1962 and 1963 to 1966, respectively), established the Pakistani People’s Party in 1967, and joined Khan’s government in 1971. Bhutto became president and chief martial law administrator, and after the elections that followed, he became prime minister. From the mid-1960s on, in his speeches and his writings, Bhutto had suggested that Pakistan might need to join the nuclear club, and pledged that the Pakistani people would make the necessary sacrifices for a bomb, even if it meant that they had “to eat grass.”44
After assuming control of the government in December 1971, Bhutto placed the nuclear program under his direct control. Then, on January 20, 1972, he secretly met with a collection of the nation’s top scientists and nuclear aides in Multan, a city in the center of Pakistan that was the home to commerce and industry as well as mosques, shrines, and beggars. He told his audience that what he wanted from them was an atomic bomb. It was an announcement that left the scientists “absolutely dumfounded,” according to one participant who attended the meeting. After Bhutto’s announcement, discussion followed on how long it would take to make Pakistan a nuclear weapons state. Bhutto wanted a bomb in his hands in three years, but one scientist pointed out, “It isn’t like firecrackers you know. We don’t know how long it will take.” But Bhutto was told it was a mission that could be accomplished given sufficient resources and facilities, which he promised to provide.45
Former PAEC chairman Munir Ahmed Khan claims that India’s nuclear test spurred Pakistan to become more determined to obtain its own weapons. But it was in March 1973, more than a year before the first Indian test, that Pakistan and France’s Saint Gobain Nucléaire signed a contract for the basic design for a large reprocessing plant. A second contract would be signed in October 1974. The facility was to be located at Chashma (Hot Spring), about 120 miles southwest of Islamabad, in the north-central part of the country. Pakistan had several reactors that might eventually provide the material to be reprocessed into fissile material, despite their being under IAEA safeguards. One was the heavy-water, natural-uranium KANUPP reactor, completed in 1972. Another was a 500-megawatt reactor to be built near the planned Chashma reprocessing facility. There were also heavy-water reactors at Multan and Karachi, the later of the two becoming operational in 1976.46
That same year a team from the PAEC conducted a survey of the Chagai Hills region, a remote section of the Baluchistan desert near the Iranian border, and selected the mountain at Ras Koh for a test site. A geological survey of the area followed to verify that there was no ground water as well as to ensure that the 2,295-foot mountain could withstand a 20-kiloton test. Brig. Mohammad Sarfaraz was assigned to prepare an underground test site and created the Special Development Works, which would complete its first tunnel—3,325 feet long and 8 to 9 feet in diameter—in 1980.47
Also in 1976, U.S. anxiety over Pakistan’s possible use of the planned reprocessing facility to produce fissile material for bombs reached the point where President Gerald Ford sent his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to Paris in what proved to be a failed attempt to halt sale of the SGN reprocessing plant. But in August 1977, the month after Bhutto was ousted by his military, the French did suspend deliveries for the plant. The suspension was not a reaction to Bhutto’s fall from grace, but followed U.S. disclosure to French officials of intelligence concerning Pakistan’s actual nuclear plans. In June 1978, a few months after Pakistan refused to accept a form of reprocessing for the plant that would have prevented the production of weapons-grade plutonium, the French government’s Council on Foreign Nuclear Policy formally decided to terminate the SGN contract, although up to 95 percent of the blueprints for the facility may have already been provided to Pakistan.48
Whatever construction continued on the Chashma reprocessing plant throughout the 1980s did not bring it close to completion. During that decade Pakistan did establish two facilities with a reprocessing mission—an experimental unit at PINSTECH in Rawalpindi, and the nearby “New Labs” plutonium extraction plant, possibly capable of extracting twenty-two to forty-four pounds of plutonium each year, although it is not clear that it produced any weapons-grade material during the decade.49
In any case, by the time France backed out of the Chashma contract, Pakistan was also pursuing the uranium enrichment path to the bomb. In 1975 Pakistan began to acquire the hardware and technology needed for a facility containing high-speed centrifuges to separate U-235 from U-238. The key figure in that effort was Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, characterized by a British newspaper as “the most successful nuclear spy since Klaus Fuchs and Allan Nunn May took their secrets to the Kremlin.” Born in 1936 in Bhopal, part of British India at the time, Khan arrived in Europe in the early 1960s for graduate studies. His first stop was Germany, where he became fluent in German while studying at the Technische Universität in West Berlin. He then went to the Netherlands to study at the prestigious Technical University of Delft from 1963 to 1967, a stay that concluded when he received a degree in metallurgical engineering. He completed his studies in Belgium, whose Catholic University of Leuven awarded him a doctorate in 1972.50
Graduate work in Europe was followed by employment there, when Khan was hired by the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (FDO) in Amsterdam, a subsidiary of the Dutch firm Verenigde Machine-Fabrieken. The firm worked closely with the Uranium Enrichment Corporation (URENCO), a company established in 1970 to guarantee Britain, West Germany, and the Netherlands their own supply of enriched uranium to fuel their reactors.51
URENCO’s enrichment plant, located in Almelo, the Netherlands, relied on highly classified ultracentrifuge technology to separate U-235 from U-238, by spinning the two isotopes up to 100,000 revolutions per minute. Khans’s work at FDO and Almelo, where on occasion he would be assigned to translate technical documents, required a standard background investigation by the Dutch security service, the BVD, which did not turn up any reason to terminate his employment. As a result of his work at FDO and Almelo, Khan became familiar with the design plans for the enrichment facility as well as the companies that provided parts for the ultracentrifuges. In the fall of 1974, a few months after India detonated a nuclear device, he spent sixteen days in the Almelo facility’s most sensitive area, translating from German into Dutch a highly classified technical report on a dramatic advance in centrifuge technology.52
During his time at FDO, Khan made regular trips to Pakistan. At the end of 1974, during one those of visits, he contacted some influential Pakistanis, suggested that the nation should attempt to develop a uranium enrichment capability, and explained what type of facilities would be needed. In February 1975 Munir Khan submitted a proposal to Bhutto for an enrichment project whose components included a centrifuge plant, a uranium mine at Baghalchor in Dera Ghazi Khan, a plant to manufacture uranium hexafluoride, and a weapons design program. Research and development work on enrichment technology began under the cover of a fictitious Directorate of Industrial Liaison, located in the barracks at Chaklala airport.53
In October 1975 the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs requested that FDO assign Khan to work that would deprive him of access to information about the sensitive centrifuge technology. Two months later Khan left for Pakistan, with his wife and daughter, on what appeared to be just another of his regular trips home. But rather than return to FDO, Khan sent a letter of resignation in his place, effective March 1, 1976.54
Beyond the impending transfer, Khan may been motivated to resign by the request of Pakistani officials. After arriving in Pakistan that December, he reportedly was asked to evaluate how much progress had been made toward building a bomb since his last visit. His assessment that little had been accomplished, due to attempts at empire building, led to his being asked to quit his job at Almelo, return home, and play a key role in the nuclear program.55
Khan brought back more than accumulated expertise and the knowledge that was in his head. Through his translation work, he obtained key plans, technical documents, and listings of component suppliers for the Dutch centrifuge—all of significant value to a nation working to develop its own capability. Upon his return, and seeing no progress being made, Khan wrote to Bhutto, who responded by inviting him to a meeting. Khan suggested that the project be made autonomous, and in July 1976 it was detached from the PAEC and Khan was transformed from being a critic of the uranium enrichment effort, which was designated Project 706, to its director.56
He assumed command of the newly created Engineering Research Laboratory (which would be renamed the Dr. A.Q. Khan Research Laboratories on May 1, 1981), whose mission was to design centrifuges and determine what items needed to be acquired. Among his most important tasks was overseeing the ongoing search for a site for a full-scale uranium enrichment facility. Ultimately, Kahuta, just to the east of Islamabad, in the rugged Himalayan foothills, was selected because it was close enough to the capital to permit close contact with key officials while also being, in Khan’s words, “out of normal traffic,” which was an important security consideration.57
In July 1977, one year after Khan assumed responsibility for the program, the design of the Kahuta facility was finalized. Land was purchased and construction began under the direction of Brig. Gen. Anees Ali Sayeed, head of the military’s Special Works Organization. The following year a test of the uranium enrichment process was successful, which led to the search for a site for a pilot plant that could be in operation while construction of the much larger Kahuta plant was underway. Sihala, just to the southwest of Kahuta, was selected, and within a year the pilot plant was in operation. Kahuta would become operational in 1984. In December 1987 construction began on a second uranium enrichment plant, at a site in Golra, about six miles west of Islamabad.58
By the early 1980s a plant for transforming uranium powder into the uranium hexafluoride feedstock for the enrichment facilities had been established at Dera Ghazi Khan, about 225 miles southwest of Kahuta, near the Indus River. With help from the information Khan had brought back with him, Pakistan acquired and smuggled the plant, piece by piece, from West Germany between 1977 and 1980. Through the 1980s Khan oversaw an extensive procurement effort that yielded over six thousand tubes of maraging steel for centrifuges (from the Netherlands), precision equipment for a reprocessing plant (from Switzerland), electronic equipment for centrifuges (from a company in the United States, via Canada and Turkey), and a metal finishing plant (from the United Kingdom).59
By early 1984 Kahuta had produced enriched uranium, according to Khan. Subsequently, President Zia claimed that only low-enriched non-weapons-grade uranium had been produced. In March 1986 it was reported that Pakistan’s enrichment efforts had progressed to the point where Kahuta was producing uranium enriched to 30 percent U-235, still far from weapons grade but a significant step in that direction. That same year, cold tests of an implosion device were conducted at Chaghai Hills. In 1987 Pakistan purchased a West German purification and production facility, capable of producing between five and ten grams of tritium a day. Also in 1987, in an interview with Time magazine, Zia claimed that Pakistan had not yet enriched uranium to weapons-grade level and did not intend to manufacture nuclear weapons, but also asserted that “Pakistan is capable of building the Bomb whenever it wishes.”60
By the time of Zia’s interview, Pakistani scientists responsible for designing the bomb had been at work for about seven years somewhere within the Wah Cantonment Ordnance Complex. About thirty miles northwest of Islamabad, the complex was first established in 1947 as the home for the Pakistan Ordnance Factories, whose first weapons production effort involved rifles and ammunition.61
IN THE LATE 1980s A. Q. Khan and Pakistan had yet to provide aid to North Korea’s nuclear program, which had its origins in July 1955 when representatives of the North Korean Academy of Sciences attended a nuclear energy conference in Moscow. The next year, Kim Il Sung’s regime signed an agreement on nuclear research with its Soviet ally, and North Korean scientists began arriving at the Dubna Nuclear Research Institute for training. In 1959 a second agreement on nuclear cooperation was signed with the Soviet Union, while a first agreement was reached with the People’s Republic of China.62
In late 1964, after China’s successful detonation of an atomic bomb, Kim sent a delegation to China to make the same sort of request Qadhafi’s representative made over a decade later. Kim wanted China’s assistance in developing nuclear weapons, but Mao sent the Koreans away empty-handed. The next year, Moscow did sell North Korea a small 2- to 4-megawatt research reactor. The reactor was built near the Kuryung River, in the vicinity of Yongbyon, about sixty miles northeast of the capital city of Pyongyang, and placed under IAEA safeguards at Soviet insistence. Soviet and North Korean scientists also established a nuclear research center at the site.63
Reportedly, Kim made another effort to get China to provide aid to a North Korean nuclear weapons program in 1974, when South Korea was exploring development of similar weapons. Then in the late 1970s, according to one Russian intelligence official, Kim instructed the Ministry of Public Security to initiate a nuclear weapons program, which was to include a rapid expansion of the Yongbyon facilities.64
Heading the program was Lee Sung Ki, who had obtained a doctorate in engineering from Kyoto Imperial University in prewar Japan. He had served as dean of Seoul’s National University’s college of engineering, and achieved worldwide recognition for developing vinalon, a synthetic fiber made from coal. Although born in the South, during the Korean War he defected to the North, where he became a close friend of Kim’s as well as his primary scientific adviser. Other key members of the early North Korean nuclear weapons effort included Do Sang Rok and Han In Suk. Do was a quantum field theorist who first published papers on quantum mechanics in Japan and the United States as early as 1930. He built his own particle accelerator and conducted the North’s first experiment on nuclear reactions. Han, born in South Korea, studied physics in Japan and Germany, and taught physics briefly at the National University after World War II before defecting to North Korea. After the Korean War he studied physics at Moscow University, returning to Pyongyang in 1960 and publishing assorted papers on nuclear physics.65
In the early 1980s, in a major step toward developing nuclear weapons, North Korea began work on a 20- to 30-megawatt research reactor in the Yongbyon area, near the Soviet-supplied reactor. The graphite-moderated, gas-cooled reactor was similar to some older European models, and was well suited to the production of plutonium, requiring neither enriched uranium nor heavy water, which North Korea could not easily or cheaply acquire. By September 1982 construction had apparently begun on the new reactor’s nuclear core and the nuclear control building. By the end of 1984 the reactor’s cylindrical smokestack could be identified, and other buildings were near completion. In 1986 reactor operations began.66
NOT SURPRISINGLY, in the 1980s the nuclear activities of all four countries were of more than passing interest to U.S. intelligence analysts. One early task was to assess the impact of Israel’s air strike on the Tammuz I reactor. A technical assessment would have been conducted by the imagery interpreters at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center, who would have had a variety of satellite images available. A KH-8 Gambit satellite had been launched on the last day of February 1981 and remained in orbit until June 20. In addition, there were two KH-11s in orbit, able to return their imagery of the damaged facility within moments of passing overhead.67 The interpreters would have tried to determine the extent of the damage to different segments of the facility, and passed that information on to reactor experts at the CIA and national laboratories, who could then estimate the time it would take to make repairs.
There was also a need for political analysis. A July 1, 1981, interagency assessment was prepared by the CIA’s Office of Political Analysis and informally coordinated with analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Energy Department, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the military services. The authors reviewed Arab reactions, the immediate repercussions of the strike, and longer-term problems. With regard to the consequences for Iraq’s nuclear program, the authors wrote, “It will take Iraq several years to rebuild its nuclear facilities, even if Baghdad finds cooperative suppliers of nuclear technology.”68
That judgment was repeated about two years later in a Top Secret CIA study, The Iraqi Nuclear Program: Progress Despite Setbacks, apparently based on a combination of diplomatic reporting, human intelligence, and communications intelligence. The strike represented a “significant setback to the Iraqi nuclear program.” In addition to destroying the reactor containment vessel and control, Iraq’s short-term options for acquiring weapons-grade material, using Tammuz I to produce plutonium or diverting the reactor’s highly enriched uranium fuel, had also been set back. The strike did not, however, “change Iraq’s long-range nuclear ambitions,” which included a “significant . . . domestic nuclear capability” and “probably an eventual nuclear weapon capability.”69
The CIA’s analysts could not be more definitive because, as they reported, “we still see no identifiable nuclear weapon program in Iraq . . . nor of the existence of any Iraqi nuclear weapons design group.” They noted that Iraq had taken some steps in that direction. Should the country be able to obtain foreign assistance in key areas such as the manufacturing and testing of high explosives and the design, fabrication, and testing of a weapon, Iraq “possibly could have a viable design completed on paper within a few years.” However, in the absence of significant foreign assistance “the Iraqis will not be able to produce the material for a nuclear weapon before the 1990s.” Further, that necessary foreign assistance included “the foreign supply of a nuclear reactor—preferably a power reactor—of substantial size fairly soon.” To the analysts, construction of a reactor from which plutonium could be extracted—whether a production or power reactor—appeared to be the only feasible means of producing the fissile material needed for an Iraqi bomb in the late 1980s or early 1990s.70
The analysts were not willing to totally dismiss Iraq’s ability to acquire the necessary foreign assistance, given Iraq’s past success with foreign suppliers and its “potential oil leverage.” They noted that, according to State Department reporting, shortly before Israel’s attack on the Tammuz I reactor Iraqi officials had met with representatives of the Italian firm SNIA-Techint. The meeting was dedicated to working out the final details of a feasibility study for supply of a power reactor that would have given Iraq “access to significant quantities of plutonium . . . in nine or ten years.” Overall, Italy “probably will continue helping Iraq in numerous areas of nuclear technology, possibly even including reprocessing and plutonium chemistry.”71
Iraq also had nuclear relationships with Pakistan and Brazil. Contacts with Pakistan had taken place from time to time over the preceding few years, and possibly included some cooperation after the Israeli attack on Tammuz I. CIA knowledge about what transpired between Iraq and Pakistan was limited, requiring the analysts to admit, “We do not know the exact nature of the recent contacts, but they appear to have been related to purchases of uranium and nuclear equipment.” It was also noted that Iraqi-Brazilian contacts had increased since the two countries had signed a cooperation agreement, and Brazil might provide assistance if Iraq wanted to construct a 2- to 5-megawatt research reactor. In addition, Spain might be willing to provide assistance, and could build a reactor with a far higher power level than Brazil could provide, although it would be close to impossible to secretly divert plutonium from such a reactor. An overt diversion would require Iraq to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.72
Of course, France might be willing to rebuild Tammuz I, a project the CIA estimated would require three years. This time the French would probably insist on providing the lower-enriched fuel, such as the previously rejected caramel, which would eliminate the danger of Iraq diverting fresh highly enriched uranium for use in a bomb. Even with the lower-enriched fuel there were methods to produce plutonium—twenty two pounds per year if a blanket was built around the core. Such a technique would, the analysts believed, “be very difficult for Iraq to do without being detected by the IAEA or the French.”73
Iraq might attempt, the study noted, to avoid safeguards by secretly constructing a reactor. Such a project would be difficult to carry out because, the analysts believed, the reactor would have to be built with the help of Spain or Brazil, whose involvement would have to be concealed. A secret project of that size, with the number of personnel involved and the large amount of material required, was not likely to remain secret for long, the CIA concluded.74
Beyond reactors, the report noted a number of other Iraqi acquisition activities related to the development of nuclear weapons. Iraq had been “working hard” to obtain, largely from Italy, the fuel cycle needed to support a reactor and extract plutonium: uranium supply, fuel fabrication, reprocessing, and waste treatment. Not long before the CIA study was written, Iraq’s National Computer Center had expressed interest in acquiring advanced Japanese computers for Baghdad University, which the authors suspected were earmarked for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.75
Iraq had also shown, according to the top-secret analysis, an interest in capabilities related to a uranium bomb, including the acquisition of lasers and related equipment. Because the Iraqis had previously requested Italian assistance with laser isotope separation, the authors suspected that they were interested in developing an enrichment capability using that technique. Saddam’s regime had also expressed interest in acquiring a facility to convert uranium into metallic form.76
The CIA further noted that Iraq might make greater efforts to acquire fissile material in secret, and without approval of the seller’s government. It had already acquired some uranium through a clandestine purchase, and continued “to show a great interest in obtaining fissile material clandestinely—on the black market or elsewhere.” In 1979, according to the report, swindlers offered to sell high-grade uranium to Iraq. The CIA did not discover whether the uranium was natural, depleted, or highly enriched—although the proposed price suggested that it was of the highly enriched variety—but did not believe that any uranium acquired was usable in a weapon. However, Iraq was expected to keep trying: “dissatisfaction with what have probably been hoaxes so far will not be likely to deter Iraq from further attempts.” In addition, such attempts were expected to fail: “no other country, we believe, has been successful in acquiring nuclear materials covertly.”77
Despite the CIA’s skepticism in 1983 that Iraq would seek to construct a reactor in secret, and the belief that Spain or Brazil would have to build it, information obtained in 1986 by another U.S. government intelligence organization—the U.S. Army Operational Group (a component of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command)—indicated that China had completed a study in 1986 which evaluated the feasibility of building a reactor at one of four different sites in Iraq by 1990. The study team had been asked to take into account a variety of factors, including the availability of water and electricity, the ability to defend the facility from attacks, and the ability to camouflage the site so that it would not be detected by satellite reconnaissance. Site selection was to take place in 1987, construction to be completed in 1989 or 1990, and the facility was to be camouflaged.78
In 1988, in the aftermath of the war with Iran and after Iraq had committed itself to developing a nuclear weapon, a CIA study on Iraq’s national security goals expressed the view that “Iraq regards the development of nuclear weapons as essential to offset Iran’s geographic and demographic superiority.” In addition, Iraq probably believed that Iran would develop a chemical weapons capability within a year or two to neutralize Iraq’s advantage. Further, there was concern that Iran would develop or obtain nuclear weapons.79
EXAMPLES OF the U.S. intelligence community’s collection and analysis efforts directed at Colonel Qadhafi’s nuclear dreams in the 1980s are less numerous than those concerning Saddam Hussein’s aspirations. In 1975, the CIA had produced an intelligence memorandum titled Qadhafi’s Nuclear Weapons Aims. It noted that “the acquisition of nuclear weapons was a stated objective” of the Libyan dictator in 1974, and “so far he has chosen the path of developing an indigenous program to achieve his aim.” His negotiations with assorted Western firms for nearly simultaneous construction of the required nuclear facilities was interpreted as indicating that “Libya has opted for a crash nuclear program.” But, the memorandum continued, “it will probably take at least a decade for Libya to produce a nuclear weapon.”80
A decade later Libya did not have a nuclear weapon, but the CIA was still interested in its quest to obtain one, as demonstrated by the February 1985 top-secret study by the agency’s Office of Scientific and Weapons Research. The Libyan Nuclear Program: A Technical Perspective relied on intelligence obtained by satellite photography of Tajoura and other facilities, communications intercepts, human intelligence, and careful monitoring of foreign government announcements and the world’s media.
The twenty-one-page study provides an overview of key organizations and facilities. Two of those pages explore the origins of the Libyan Secretariat of Atomic Energy, its components and their missions, as well as key personnel. It identified Dr. Fathi Noor (spelled “Nuh” in the CIA study) as head of the secretariat’s Committee for Scientific Affairs, which included divisions for power, exploration and mining, fuel, and technical training and cooperation. Dr. Fathi Skinji (aka Abd al-Fatah Eskanji) is identified as the former director of the Atomic Energy Establishment, the secretariat’s predecessor, and the current head of a committee responsible for the technical review of the nuclear power plant contract with the Soviet Union. The structure and activities of the Tajoura Nuclear Research Center, which included basic research as well as research in three other areas—radiochemistry, fusion, and nuclear and material science—were also examined.81
A significant portion of the study evaluated Libyan efforts to acquire key technologies and material—including uranium, uranium conversion, uranium enrichment, and fuel fabrication—while another section focused on problems plaguing the Libyan program.* One was the lack of trained personnel, partly the result of restrictions imposed by some foreign nations on what subjects Libyan students were allowed to study in their countries, and partly because of the low educational standards at Al Fatah University, Libya’s main center for nuclear science. Other issues involved the stalled deal with the Soviet Union for the 440-megawatt reactor and assorted financial problems.82
The overall assessment of the program by the CIA analysts was a bleak one, which simultaneously made it good news to key U.S. national security officials, from President Ronald Reagan on down, who were worried about Libya’s quest to join the nuclear club. The Libyan program was “so rudimentary that it is not clear whether plutonium or uranium will be chosen as the basis for a weapon.” What was clear was that “the program has major problems, including poor leadership and lack of coherent planning, as well as political and financial obstacles to acquiring nuclear facilities.” As a result, the weapons analysts believed it “highly unlikely the Libyans will achieve a nuclear weapon capability within at least the next 10 years.”83
That assessment was echoed later that year when the National Intelligence Council, consisting of the nation’s top intelligence analysts and reporting to the director of central intelligence, produced a secret review on the dynamics of nuclear proliferation. Libya required attention, the review noted, not because the Libyan nuclear program had any prospect of producing a weapon within the next decade, but “because Qadhafi may once again attempt to buy or steal a weapon or its components.”84
PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM had also been of interest to the CIA and other elements of the U.S. intelligence community as far back as the 1970s. In September 1974 the intelligence community judged that Pakistan as well as Iran, Egypt, Brazil, and Spain would require at least a decade to develop nuclear weapons—unless they received significant foreign assistance or were able to purchase fissile material. Countries might be driven to acquire nuclear arms for reasons of prestige or in reaction to the nuclear efforts of antagonists, according to the community’s analysts, and Pakistan and Iran were the countries likely to feel the strongest impulse to do so.85
That judgment ensured that Pakistan’s nuclear efforts would continue to be watched with particular interest. More than two years later the CIA’s Weekly Surveyor carried an article on Pakistan’s desire to purchase uranium from Niger, which the agency’s analysts believed was “undoubtedly intended” to provide fuel for the Canadian-supplied KANUPP reactor. The interest in buying nuclear material from the African country was reportedly the result of a new Canadian policy that would have limited such sales to nations that had ratified the nonproliferation treaty or agreed to IAEA safeguards on their nuclear program—neither of which Pakistan had done.86
The uranium would first have to be fabricated into fuel rods to power the reactor—a task beyond the capabilities of Pakistan, but not China. The possibility that China would take the uranium Pakistan had purchased from Niger and turn it into nuclear fuel as well as provide the heavy water for the KANUPP reactor was discussed in a June 1977 Weekly Surveyor item, which noted the upcoming extended visit of a Chinese delegation.87
The following spring one or more CIA analysts completed a thirty-eight-page Top Secret Codeword report on the Pakistani nuclear program. The author(s) observed that Pakistan “is strongly motivated to develop at least a potential nuclear capability, in part for prestige purposes but more strongly because it genuinely believes its national security could ultimately be threatened by India.” A decision to develop a nuclear capability would be strongly supported by the military, according to the analysis. At the same time, there was “no visible sense of urgency about the matter and a decision to proceed may be postponed for many years.” One indication of that lack of urgency was that the Pakistani nuclear weapons design group “appears to be operating at a relatively low priority.”88
The bulk of the paper, at least in its declassified form, concerned the technical base of Pakistan’s nuclear program, the French reprocessing plant and alternative sources of plutonium, along with the bottom line—Pakistan’s potential to produce nuclear weapons. A section on the program’s technical base noted that PINSTECH was the center of Pakistani atomic energy research activities, and that the central element of the research center was a research reactor capable of producing a maximum of one hundred grams of plutonium per year. But the KANUPP reactor—its characteristics, history, problems, fuel requirements, and plutonium production capability—constituted the major focus of the section. According to the CIA analysis, if the reactor was operated in a manner optimized to produce weapons-grade plutonium, it could make between 132 and 264 pounds of reactor-grade plutonium, which could then be reprocessed into plutonium suitable for use in weapons.89
Almost six pages of the CIA analysis was devoted to possible sources of weapons-grade plutonium, either the reprocessing plant the French had agreed to provide in 1976 or alternative sources. The paper noted that “the odds appear to be sharply increasing that the plant will not be completed, at least according to original specifications, in the foreseeable future.” If the plant were to be built, it would be under international safeguards intended to prevent it from being used to provide weapons-grade material. The same analysis noted, however, that “short of round-the-clock physical inspection of a reprocessing plant it is questionable whether safeguarding such a facility is really effective,” given that the time between diversion of fuel and production of weapons could be very short.90
Even without the planned Chashma facility, Pakistan had other potential sources of plutonium, the CIA analysts reported. PINSTECH “probably had a laboratory-scale fuel reprocessing facility,” and modifications might allow it to produce enough plutonium for a single weapon sometime in the first half of the 1980s. Such a course, however, would leave Pakistan years away from developing the reprocessing capability that would permit it to stockpile weapons. Another option was for Islamabad to build a small, crude reprocessing plant on its own. Under the best of circumstances, such a facility could be built in a few months and produce several kilograms of plutonium each day—enough for several weapons—within an extremely brief period. According to the analysis, it would be at least five years before Pakistan would be capable of building such a plant.91
In assessing Pakistan’s potential to produce nuclear weapons, the CIA noted that a host of variables, including delivery systems, would influence production capability. Production of a low-yield bomb designed to be carried inside an aircraft would probably require two years from the time that a device was tested, but the bomb would be so large that the only means for getting it to its target would be Pakistan’s “relatively slow and vulnerable B-57s.” The number of weapons that could be produced by employing the KANUPP reactor would depend on whether the reactor was operated primarily to produce power or weapons-grade plutonium. In any case, the study estimated that Pakistan had already accumulated about two hundred or so kilograms of reactor-grade plutonium, enough for thirty to forty weapons.92
Such intelligence on the Pakistani program resulted in a direct expression of concern. In 1979 Robert Gallucci, a thirty-three-year-old member of the State Department’s policy-planning staff, spoke with the department’s undersecretary, David Newsom, about Pakistan’s nuclear activities. In addition to information, he also had a proposal: rather than try to get Zia to call a halt to the program, the United States should obtain Zia’s pledge that Pakistan would not enrich uranium beyond a low level and would agree to a monitoring system. Part of that strategy was to confront Zia with U.S. knowledge, including satellite images, of the Pakistani effort.93
Newsom was convinced, and obtained whatever approval was necessary from his superiors. He also told Gallucci that he wanted him to travel to Pakistan to help the U.S. ambassador deliver the message to Zia. When Gallucci noted that as a member of the policy-planning staff he didn’t normally take such trips, Newsom told him “you’ll take this one.” So he left Washington, he recalls, “with dirty pictures under my arm.” On the day he and Ambassador Arthur Hummel were to see Zia, illness kept him from the meeting.94
HUMMEL DID SEE ZIA, but with no great impact. Zia had his story and he was sticking to it. After Hummel briefed him on what the United States knew about Pakistan’s uranium enrichment program, Zia responded, “That’s absolutely ridiculous. Your information is incorrect. We have to clear this up. Tell me any place in Pakistan you want to send your experts and I will let them come and see.” But Zia was simply stalling, and no visits would ever take place.95
Gallucci’s trip was not wasted, as he was able to accomplish more than serving as a delivery boy for highly classified satellite photographs. A bit of subterfuge allowed him to bring back some ground-level photographs of Kahuta. He managed to persuade Hummel to let him take a drive near the facility. He had first raised the idea with the embassy’s political officer, who said he would go only if ordered by the ambassador. Gallucci then told Hummel that the political officer wanted to go, and Hummel gave the order. They took along an INR representative, who came equipped with a camera which was put to good use.96*
That September, Pakistan’s program was a subject of discussion at a September meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Charles Van Doren, acting director of ACDA’s non-proliferation bureau, expressed concern about Pakistan’s “building a conversion plant to convert the materials to [uranium hexafluoride] which is the feed for the enrichment plant,” which led the United States to tighten up “on the export control side.” He also reported that “there is increasing evidence of their preparing a test site, and we have some reliable, or fairly reliable seeming reports that this test may be ready in one of two locations that have been specified, by November or December of this year.” Van Doren described the situation as “a railroad train that is going down the track very fast, and I am not sure anything will turn it off.”97
That year, foreign sources had told the Carter administration that Pakistan had started construction of a nuclear test site and that it might detonate its first bomb by the end of the year. U.S. intelligence had detected unusual construction in the southern region of Pakistan but could not determine if the activity was actually connected to the country’s nuclear program. As a result, the intelligence community still believed that Pakistan was at least two years away from building and testing a bomb.98
By the fall of 1980 the U.S. intelligence community had gathered data that Pakistan was indeed constructing a reprocessing plant and possibly had begun work on a test site. Either the CIA’s spies, the NSA’s eavesdroppers, or the NRO’s imagery satellites, or some combination of the three, had provided evidence that a building just outside the PINSTECH fence was to be a small reprocessing facility, about one-tenth the size of the planned Chashma facility. Despite its size, it appeared, based on intelligence concerning the equipment it would contain, that it would be able to produce between twenty-two and forty-four pounds of plutonium each year beginning in 1981, which would be enough for between one and three weapons.99
Discovery of the possible test site was undoubtedly due to the U.S. reconnaissance satellites that had been in orbit. During most of the first eight months of 1980 there had been two Kennan (KH-11) spacecraft in orbit, which were joined in mid-June by a Hexagon (KH-9). They apparently detected the sporadic construction of a tunnel for which there appeared to be no other explanation, as well as photographing surrounding towers. “Work at the site appears to have stopped again for the moment,” a government official told the Washington Post in September 1980. But there was still reason for concern, for “if they do plan to stage a test there, it would not take them long to get it ready.”100
Over the next four years, Pakistan did not test a weapon and the U.S. intelligence community continued to gather information on its nuclear program. Not surprisingly, when Howard Hart arrived in May 1981 to take over as CIA chief of station in Islamabad, he came with instructions to emphasize intelligence collection to support the secret war in Afghanistan and to discover Pakistan’s nuclear secrets. When he left a little over three years later, the U.S. ambassador, Dean Hinton, wrote a classified evaluation letter in which he reported that Hart’s “collection efforts on the Pakistani effort to develop nuclear weapons is amazingly successful and disturbing.” He continued, “I would sleep better if he and his people did not find out so much about what is really going on in secret and contrary to President Zia’s assurances to us”—a statement he presumably meant as a compliment and not as a complaint.101
CIA intelligence gathering allowed various elements of the intelligence community to produce more informed assessments that spurred U.S. action. In 1981 INR, partly based on information that Kahuta had begun operations as well as the discovery of certain illegal export activities, observed that “we have strong reason to believe that Pakistan is seeking to develop a nuclear explosives capability” and “Pakistan is conducting a program for the development of a triggering package for nuclear explosive devices.” In 1983 U.S. intelligence reported that China had provided Pakistan with a complete design of a 20-kiloton nuclear weapon, which it had tested at Lop Nur. That same year, the Pentagon noted the “unambiguous evidence that Pakistan is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons development program.” The assessment also identified the Kahuta facility as key to the Pakistani weapons program, declaring that its “ultimate application . . . is clearly nuclear weapons.” Such intelligence led President Reagan, in August 1984, to draft a letter to President Zia, warning of “grave consequences” if Pakistan enriched uranium beyond 5 percent. Zia pledged not to do so, a pledge that high-level officials frequently repeated.102
Reagan also sent former deputy CIA director Gen. Vernon Walters to Pakistan several times during the mid-1980s to express U.S. concerns. During one visit, Walters showed Zia a blueprint of Pakistan’s bomb that had been passed to the CIA by a foreign intelligence service, which had stolen it from A. Q. Khan’s hotel room. The U.S. ambassador, Ronald Spiers, recalled the drawing as looking like something out of a science fiction magazine. When Walters showed Pakistan’s president a satellite photograph of Kahuta, he got much the same reaction as Hummel did several years earlier. Zia claimed that “this can’t be a nuclear installation. Maybe it is a goat shed.” According to atomic energy commission chairman Munir Ahmed Khan, the “show and tell” briefings had no impact on the nuclear program other than to give Pakistani officials an idea of what the United States knew.103
Despite those assessments and U.S. warnings, there was still uncertainty about details of the Pakistani program. The National Intelligence Council’s September 1985 review of the dynamics of nuclear proliferation used the adjective probably on three occasions in its discussion of Pakistan: Pakistan probably had a workable design for a nuclear weapon, while separated weapons-grade plutonium probably would not be available for several years after a pilot-scale reprocessing plant began operations. In addition, although the Pakistanis were theoretically capable of producing very small quantities of highly enriched uranium, they were probably at least a year or two from being able to produce enough for an atomic device.104
In late October of 1986 President Reagan certified that Pakistan “does not possess a nuclear explosive device,” which was consistent with the projections of the NIC from a year before. Legislation requiring such certification or a presidential waiver, which was necessary if Pakistan was to continue receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid, had been passed in 1985, and was a consequence of arrests in 1984 of three Pakistanis who were trying to illegally obtain fifty electronic triggering switches, krytrons, used for atomic bombs. Providing such aid to Pakistan was of particular importance to the Reagan administration, because Pakistan played a key role in supporting the U.S. effort to aid the Afghan guerrillas fighting the Soviet troops who had invaded their country six years earlier. But the president’s certification concealed some disconcerting intelligence.105
The DIA reported that sometime between September 18 and September 21, Pakistan detonated a high-explosive device as part of its effort to develop an implosion device—its second test of the year, and one of many that had been conducted over several years. In addition, intelligence reports stated that Pakistan had far surpassed the 5 percent enrichment level that Zia had promised Reagan would be Pakistan’s limit. According to the reports, Pakistani scientists had succeeded in producing, at Kahuta, uranium composed of 93.5 percent U-235.106
Other activities belying Pakistan’s claims that it was not developing nuclear weapons were described in a special national intelligence estimate completed earlier in 1986. The estimate probably included relevant information from a high-level spy in the Chinese nuclear program who had access to information on Chinese nuclear contacts with Pakistan. That asset reported, by the end of 1985, that Chinese technicians were providing assistance at a suspected Pakistani bomb development site (probably Wah), and that Chinese scientific delegations were also spending a substantial amount of time at Kahuta. The spy also revealed that Pakistani scientists from Wah had shown a nuclear weapon design to some Chinese physicists in late 1982 or early 1983 and sought their opinion as to whether the design would produce the desired nuclear blast. In addition, the CIA’s agent reported on the triggering mechanism for Pakistan’s bomb design, which appeared to be very similar to the one used by China in its fourth nuclear test. The estimate concluded that Pakistan would possess a small nuclear weapon at a future, but unspecified, date. According to U.S. officials who spoke to the Washington Post at the time, the unspecified date could come within two weeks or even less. Pakistan, according to one official, was only “two screwdriver turns” from having a fully assembled atomic bomb.107
Further evidence of Pakistan’s pursuit came the following year, as a result of escalating tensions between India and Pakistan. Pakistan feared that large-scale Indian military maneuvers, designated Operation Brasstacks, might be a prelude for an invasion. Very late in January, when the maneuvers were at their peak, A. Q. Khan was reported to have told a visiting foreign journalist that Pakistan had already achieved nuclear weapons capability. The following month Zia told Time magazine, “You can write today that Pakistan can build a bomb whenever it wishes.”108
Then in July the FBI arrested Arshad Z. Pervez, a Pakistani-born Canadian, for trying to purchase twenty-five tons of specially strengthened maraging steel from a Reading, Pennsylvania, company, steel that would have been shaped into extra-strong, ultrafast gas centrifuges for Kahuta. But the company tipped off U.S. law enforcement authorities, who were watching and listening when Pervez made his pitch to an undercover agent in a Toronto hotel room. Pervez also revealed to the agent his interest in beryllium, which is used as casing for the fissile material in an atomic bomb to increase the device’s yield. Two days later two Americans were arrested in Sacramento for illegally exporting to Pakistan advanced instruments and computer items used in developing nuclear weapons.109
Over the succeeding two years the United States built up a detailed dossier on the Pakistani program, through satellite images of PINSTECH, Kahuta, and continuing construction at Chashma and other facilities; communications intercepts of talkative Pakistani scientists and military officials; and probably a few well-placed human sources in Pakistan and China. Once again, the intelligence was used in an attempt to get Pakistan to halt its march toward becoming a nuclear weapons state—this time during an early 1989 visit to Washington by army chief of staff Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, who along with Zia’s successor, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, directed their country’s nuclear weapons program.110
Beg met with outgoing national security adviser Gen. Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, Powell’s designated successor. They conveyed the message that the United States considered Pakistan to be very close to crossing the line, which would prevent the president from issuing the certification required for aid. The meetings apparently had the desired effect, at least in the short term, because the U.S. intelligence community soon reported that Pakistan had halted the production of highly enriched uranium, the activity that produced the greatest anxiety in Washington.111
In May, George H. W. Bush’s director of central intelligence, William Webster, told the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs that “clearly, Pakistan is engaged in developing a nuclear capability.” Then in June Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto arrived in Washington for the first state visit during Bush’s administration. Her first stop was Blair House, where she was met by Webster, who gave Bhutto an unprecedented and rather unusual briefing. Never before had a DCI briefed a foreign leader on his or her country’s nuclear weapons program. The briefing took place despite concerns that the disclosure, even though sanitized to protect sources and methods, would lead Pakistan to tighten the security cloak around its program. And it sent the message that the United States was aware of exactly how close Pakistan was to joining the nuclear club. It also provided Bhutto with information on Pakistan’s nuclear efforts, including a mock-up of the bomb designed by her scientists, that had been kept from her by the military and program scientists.112
Further, Webster let Bhutto know that if Pakistan were to convert the highly enriched uranium gas produced at Kahuta into uranium metal, the United States would consider Pakistan to have acquired a bomb. Such a conclusion, Bhutto knew, would likely result in President Bush refusing to certify Pakistan’s nonnuclear status. Continuing aid to Pakistan would then require a presidential waiver, the probability of which dropped dramatically after the last Soviet soldier departed Afghanistan the year before. The next day, Bhutto addressed Congress and assured the attending senators and representatives that Pakistan neither possessed a nuclear device nor intended to obtain one. While her assurances may have been sincere, in the end they would mean little. In the meantime, they helped justify President Bush’s certification in October that “Pakistan does not now possess a nuclear explosive device.”113
That same month, an analysis appearing in Science and Weapons Review, a top-secret journal published by the CIA’s Office of Scientific and Weapons Research, asserted that “Islamabad is pressing forward with efforts to acquire and deploy advanced weapons in reaction to India’s growing military capability” and that “a relative decline in the deterrent value of Pakistan’s conventional forces is leading [it] to seek ballistic missiles and a rapidly deployable nuclear weapons capability.”114
By May 1990 the information available to U.S. nuclear intelligence analysts, probably largely from human intelligence and communications intercepts, led them to believe that Pakistan had started machining uranium metal into bomb cores. During a visit to Pakistan, deputy national security adviser Robert Gates discussed the matter with President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and General Beg, who claimed there was no change in Pakistan’s nuclear status. But Gates wasn’t convinced and told them that unless Pakistan melted down the bomb cores that had been produced, his president would be unable to certify Pakistan’s nonnuclear status in the fall.115
A few months later President Khan did take dramatic action, but not the action that Gates had in mind. He dismissed Benazir Bhutto, charging her with corruption and nepotism, dismissed the national assembly, and called for new elections. Meanwhile, America’s nuclear intelligence analysts—from the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, CIA, DIA, Z Division, and elsewhere—all informed President Bush that Pakistan “possessed” a nuclear device. Reluctantly, in the fall of 1990 Bush accepted the interagency recommendation that he refuse to certify Pakistan’s nonnuclear status. His decision certainly was made easier by the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1988, eliminating the need to placate Pakistan in order to ensure her support of the U.S. effort to arm the resistance.116
UNCOVERING DETAILS of what was going on inside North Korea’s nuclear program would be one of the U.S. intelligence community’s greatest challenges. Obstacles included the lack of an embassy, which could provide a home for a CIA station; the secrecy surrounding the North Korean program; and the oppressive secret police apparatus. But in the mid-1960s, when the CIA and other agencies began first taking notice of North Korean nuclear efforts, they did have one means of gathering intelligence that the North Koreans could not interfere with—the Corona spy satellite. Satellite overflights of Yongbyon, which began in 1961, had first spotted nothing more than a few small buildings at the site, but by 1965 the photographs showed construction activity. From 1966 to the end of the Corona program in May 1972, Yongbyon was photographed on thirty-six occasions by various versions of the KH-4 camera, which produced eighteen good-quality images.117
The analyses of North Korean nuclear activities in the 1980s also owed much to the NRO’s spy satellites—Corona’s successor, Hexagon, the high-resolution Gambit, and the real-time Kennan (which would be redesignated Crystal sometime in 1982)—although there was clearly some input from other sources. In 1980 one of those satellites obtained images of the Yongbyon area, which showed components of a nuclear reactor near a large hole, apparently dug for the reactor’s foundation. A July 1982 CIA report noted that a new nuclear research reactor was “being built at the southern edge of North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center” and that the facility was similar to the reactor the Soviet Union had supplied, and Corona had photographed under construction, in 1965.118
The report also mentioned the training provided to North Korea’s nuclear physicists by the Soviet Union, and that they possessed the theoretical and technical skill to build a small reactor. Whether their Soviet ally was providing assistance in building the new reactor, the CIA could not say—although it offered some reassurance, observing that even if the North Koreans were relying solely on their own resources, perhaps because they did not want to place the reactor under IAEA safeguards, it would not be completed for several years and, in any case, was not designed to produce the quantities of plutonium needed for a nuclear weapons program.119
In the spring of 1984 another CIA item, clearly relying to a significant extent on satellite photography, provided an update on the reactor’s status. The April 20 East Asia Brief noted that a cooling tower had been constructed, and speculated that the reactor would probably be graphite moderated and use natural uranium for fuel. Completion of the project was estimated to take another three years, during which time the North Koreans would need to develop advanced engineering skills to master the remote-control operations needed to handle highly radioactive materials.120
By January 1985 the reassurance that the new reactor could not provide fuel for nuclear weapons was missing from a State Department briefing paper, which apparently had been prepared for secretary of state George Shultz’s meeting with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko in Geneva. The paper noted that “overhead photography” had revealed the construction in North Korea of a nuclear reactor that could be used for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The paper also reported that the intelligence collected on North Korean nuclear activities had led the the United States to request its allies as well as China and the Soviet Union to deny Kim Il Sung’s regime sensitive nuclear materials—an appeal that produced positive reactions among the allies but less cooperation from the two major Communist powers.121
In 1986, a top-secret CIA assessment, North Korea: Potential for Nuclear Weapons Development, commented that until 1984 the North Korean nuclear program had not been viewed as a serious proliferation threat. Up to that time the “available evidence had painted a picture of a rudimentary program incapable of very advanced research.” The 1986 study was thus not only an assessment, but a reassessment based on information developed since 1984 as well as a reinterpretation of earlier intelligence.122
The specifics of that new information are absent from the declassified version of the study, although it may well have involved further satellite images showing a reactor larger than expected. In any case, the assessment also speculated on possible North Korean motives for developing nuclear weapons, including forcing political concessions from South Korea, hedging against South Korean development of a bomb, obtaining leverage for a free hand to conduct paramilitary operations without provoking a response, deterring a U.S. nuclear response to a North Korean attack, and a means for carrying out an all-out attack.123
In the next two years, on at least two occasions, the CIA addressed North Korea’s nuclear efforts. A secret April 1987 report, in addition to retracing the history of the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear activities, repeated the judgment that the new 30-megawatt reactor, which had been completed in 1986 but had not yet been acknowledged by North Korea, could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium. The CIA analysts also believed that Pyongyang had developed portions of the front end of the fuel cycle—uranium mining, milling, conversion, and fuel fabrication—to provide fuel for the reactor. North Korea’s accession to the nonproliferation treaty (NPT) in December 1985 was explained as a result of its need to obtain additional nuclear assistance, particularly from the Soviet Union.124
About a year later another CIA report characterized North Korea’s nuclear efforts as “expanding.” Readers of the “Secret Noforn” study were informed that the new 30-megawatt reactor had been completed the previous October, and that at least part of the rationale for the country’s nuclear program was the production of nuclear energy—pointing to the initiation of a major hydroelectric power project in the southwest and the construction of thermal power plants across the country. “Nonetheless,” the analysis stated, “the possibility that Pyongyang is developing a reprocessing capability and its footdragging on implementing NPT provisions, suggest close scrutiny of the North’s nuclear effort is in order.”125
BY OCTOBER 1, 1990, the deadline for President Bush to certify that Pakistan had not crossed the line to become a nuclear weapons state, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had crossed another type of line—the border with Kuwait. Just two months earlier, on August 2, Iraqi troops poured into Kuwait to claim the country as Iraq’s nineteenth province. The following January the U.S.-led effort to oust the Iraqi forces began with an aerial attack, and concluded successfully in February, just days after the ground campaign began. Fortunately, Iraq had not yet joined the nuclear club, but it had made significant progress toward it in the previous two years.
The Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center remained the intellectual center of the project, and the home to nuclear physics labs, five working baghdatrons, and facilities for centrifuge testing as well as uranium research and development. Building 80 appears to have been the site of a pilot electromagnetic isotope separation plant.126
The Tarmiya complex, about a half hour north of Baghdad by car, now consisted of almost four hundred buildings distributed over more than two square miles. Inside one massive building, 250 feet by 370 feet, designated Building 33, were the first operational baghdatrons, where the initial step of enriching uranium to weapons grade was to take place. By January 15, 1991, nine magnets had been installed in one section, and three of a planned seventeen in another. There was room for at least seventy more. A nearby building contained the equipment that could finish the job, raising the U-235 content to 93 percent. Close to Building 33 were two satellite facilities, whose 132 one-megawatt transformers provided the vast quantities of electricity needed to operate the baghdatrons. Meanwhile, Ash Sharqat, Tarmiya’s twin, still under construction, was 85 percent complete.127
Several facilities supported the EMIS effort. The Al Rabiyah Manufacturing Plant contained large mechanical workshops designed and constructed for the manufacture of large metal components for the electromagnetic effort. The Al Qaim facility produced uranium oxide as well as uranium tetrachloride. The Jesira plant, also known as the Mosul Production Facility, also produced uranium tetrachloride.128
South of Baghdad, in the vicinity of An Walid, was Al Furat, which was still under construction in early 1991. With assistance from Interatom, a subsidiary of the German company Siemens, Iraqi scientists and technicians had constructed a workshop for the design and fabrication of centrifuges. Mass production was to follow. While the baghdatrons alone could provide only enough fissile material each year for three bombs, cascades consisting of thousands of centrifuges could provide the nuclear fuel for twenty additional devices each year. To decrease the number of centrifuges required, uranium enriched to the 20 percent level at Tarmiya would be used as feed material. The centrifuges would finish the job.129
By 1991 the partially completed Al Atheer complex, located south of Baghdad and deceptively designated the “Al Atheer Materials Center,” consisted of almost one hundred buildings. Its actual function was weapons design and bomb assembly. Its buildings contained “computer-controlled drills and lathes and the presses, induction furnaces, and plasma coating machines that were necessary to shape and mold the uranium bomb cores.” The weapons design facility was equipped with IBM PS/2 personal computers, as well as a larger NEC-750, to test different bomb configurations. Also present was a firing bunker that permitted tests of the conventional explosives required to implode the bomb’s core. A subfacility, Al Hateen, included a variety of diagnostic tools, such as flash X-ray to study the blast waves produced by high explosives. There was also the Al Musayyib complex, which included a test range for shaped charged detonations, a nuclear weapons lab, production facilities, and a power plant.130
Led by Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, the Iraqi program had made significant progress beyond filling buildings with equipment. The Iraqi calutrons, the baghdatrons, may have been the most sophisticated electromagnetic isotope separators ever produced. According to one analysis of the program, “the Iraqis seemed to have mastered the technique and were well on the way to producing weapons quantities of highly enriched uranium.” The maximum level of enrichment was to 9.5 percent, almost halfway to the 20 percent target, at which point the baghdatrons would take over. The centrifuge enrichment program had also proved successful, with uranium hexafluoride being introduced into centrifuges at Al Furat during the first half of 1990 and the separation of uranium isotopes being achieved. In addition, large quantities of uranium hexafluoride and uranium tetrachloride had been produced in Buildings 15 and 85, respectively, at Tuwaitha. Weapon design had also been advancing. According to David Dorn, a weapons inspector with the UN Special Commission, Iraqi bomb designers “calculated at least five different designs for a nuclear weapon. While they were all primitive, each one was an improvement over its predecessors.”131
Iraqi progress had been achieved with more than a little help from friends—and during the 1980s Iraq had a wide variety of friends motivated by security interests, money, or both. Fear of the consequences of an Iranian victory in the war with Iraq that had started in 1980 led U.S. policymakers in the Reagan administration to tilt toward Iraq—with money, intelligence, and license approvals. Between 1984 and 1990 the administration approved high-speed computer exports to Iraq worth 96 million. During that same period the Commerce Department issued licenses authorizing the sale of nearly $1.5 billion of sensitive technology to Saddam’s regime, with much of the technology destined for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.132
Asian and European companies and governments also provided a helping hand. A Japanese firm sold Iraq a high-speed video system for observing implosion tests, while China provided lithium hydride, which could be used to produce tritium. The Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement handled construction of the entire Tarmiya complex, while another Yugoslav company provided the equipment. Other European suppliers included France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and West Germany. At least thirteen companies in the Federal Republic of Germany provided hardware, training, or materials to the Iraqi program, particularly to its centrifuge component.133
While individual governments knew about the specific Iraqi purchases they authorized, determining the actual progress Iraq had made toward becoming a member of the nuclear club would have required a substantial intelligence effort—and Iraq sought to increase the chances that any intelligence effort would produce misleading results.
With Israel’s attack on the Tammuz I reactor in mind, Jaffar, along with Iraq’s intelligence experts, developed a plan to minimize the chances of U.S. and other foreign intelligence services discovering Iraq’s nuclear secrets. They were aware how imagery interpreters worked—their search for “signatures” associated with particular activities. U.S. provision of satellite photographs, or information derived from satellite images, to Iraq during its war with Iran certainly did not hurt the Iraqis’ understanding. To undermine the effectiveness of such searches, the Iraqis designed buildings that were not suggestive of what was going on inside. Facilities were constructed to prevent emissions, radioactive or other kinds, from leaking out. The civilian capability of dual-use plants provided cover. In one case, a facility that produced baghdatrons also produced window frames. Buildings built to house similar activities often had very different designs.134
Hiding the mission of the Tarmiya facility involved several gambits. To convey the impression that what was going on inside was of limited importance, the entire complex was surrounded by a light fence rather than the normal security barriers used for a nuclear weapons facility. Knowing that U.S. and other imagery interpreters might well suspect a uranium enrichment facility if they saw large quantities of electricity being produced for, and transmitted to, a facility, the Iraqis engaged in some deception and some denial. They built the 100-megawatt plant that provided power for the facility’s transformers ten miles away, and then buried the cables carrying the power to Tarmiya underground.135
BY 1991 North Korea also had nuclear activities spread out across its territory. Uranium was being mined at two locations: Hungnam, in the southern half of the country and along the Sea of Japan, and Pyongsan in the far south. Pyongsan may also have been the home to a uranium enrichment facility. Apparently the sole site for uranium refining was Kusong, in the west, which reportedly had a daily capacity of 660 pounds of uranium ore. Nuclear research activities were conducted in three locations: Kimch’aek, also located on North Korea’s east coast, the capital of Pyongyang, and Yongbyon.136
Yongbyon, actually the Yong-dong territory to its west, about fifty-five miles north of Pyongyang, remained the center of North Korea’s nuclear research activities, with the 0.1-megawatt critical assembly, the Soviet-supplied research reactor that had been upgraded to 8 megawatts, and a 30-megawatt reactor. Construction was also underway on a 50- to 100-megawatt reactor, about a mile and a half south of Yong-dong and about 1.2 miles north of the 30-megawatt reactor. Its purpose appeared to be plutonium production, and a reprocessing facility also seemed to be under construction.137
THE LATE 1980S brought heightened concern about the Iraqi as well as the North Korean nuclear programs. One manifestation was the October 1988 special conference of intelligence analysts from Z Division, the Pacific Northwest Laboratory, and Savannah River Laboratory on Iraq and North Korea.138
Just two months before, the eight-year Iran-Iraq war had ended, but not before it cost Baghdad 375,000 casualties and half a trillion dollars. Saddam also piled up debts of $80 billion. To aid Iraq’s military effort, early in 1985 the United States started sending to Iraq, on a regular basis, satellite data, either photos or the information derived from the photos, particularly after Iraqi bombing raids. In August 1986 the CIA established a direct, top-secret link between Washington and Baghdad to provide Saddam’s military with better and more timely satellite intelligence. Data from satellite imagery would arrive “several hours” after a bombing raid to allow assessment of damage and aid in planning the next attack. By December 1986 the Iraqis were receiving selected portions of images obtained by KH-11 spacecraft and SR-71 spy planes.139
The attention devoted to developments on the battlefield meant that coverage of areas in the Persian Gulf, including the parts of Iraq that were home to nuclear facilities, was not as extensive as some might have liked. John A. Gentry served as senior analyst on the staff of the national intelligence officer for warning during 1987–1989. He recalled attending a joint CIA–National Intelligence Council meeting in 1988, as the representative of Charlie Allen and David Einsel, the national intelligence officers for warning and proliferation, respectively. The topic under discussion involved the priorities for employing “one technical collection asset” against nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons programs in the Persian Gulf region.140
The national intelligence officers and some components of the CIA, particularly the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research, wanted to devote more attention to the “NBC” targets. According to Gentry, they argued that they “were not receiving enough data to adequately monitor the programs, that there were windows of opportunity to best learn of the development of the programs that would close, and the issue would become more important to consumers in the future.” The CIA’s Office of Near East and South Asian Analysis (NESA) objected, arguing that its customers were primarily interested in developments on the Iran-Iraq battlefield. The NESA eventually lost, and collection priorities were shifted in favor of collection against weapons of mass destruction targets, but, according Gentry, “collection opportunities were lost during the period the collection resources were devoted to other targets.”141
Additional developments during the last half of 1988 augmented the general concern about the need to monitor regional nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs with a specific concern about nuclear developments in Iraq. William A. Emel, who headed the Proliferation Intelligence Program in the Energy Department’s Office of Foreign Intelligence at the time, recalled that during “the last half of 1988 information was being received that heightened concern about a possible Iraqi nuclear weapons program”—apparently information about covert Iraqi procurement activities. In February 1989 he attended what he has described as “a special intelligence conference overseas”—probably a reference to a conference involving British and possibly additional foreign intelligence representatives—“during which Iraq was identified as of significant concern.” And early in 1989 the Director of Central Intelligence’s Nuclear Proliferation Working Group identified Iraq as a key country on which to focus community resources.142
By early 1989 collection resources included three KH-11s (launched in December 1984, October 1987, and November 1988), one Onyx radar imagery satellite (capable of producing images at night or through cloud cover), at least two signals intelligence satellites (one member of the three-satellite Mercury constellation and one member of the two-satellite Orion constellation) whose footprints would cover Iraq, the SR-71 aircraft, NSA’s eavesdropping operations, including the joint CIA-NSA Special Collection Service unit at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the CIA’s intelligence officers and their agents.
Analytical resources were spread across the National Intelligence Council, the CIA and DIA, the Department of Energy headquarters and the department’s laboratories, including Livermore, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge, and the State Department’s intelligence and research bureau. One small manifestation of the increased focus on Iraq was the creation by the Energy Department’s intelligence office of an Iraq Task Force in April and May 1989, to be headed by experts at Oak Ridge. The new group was charged with producing weekly technical assessments of intelligence information concerning Iraq, particularly Iraqi procurement efforts, and maintaining close coordination with the CIA and NSA.143
But there was also resistance to the idea that Saddam was anywhere close to developing nuclear weapons. In 1991 Roger K. Heusser, the former deputy director of the Energy Department’s office of classification and technology policy, told a congressional committee that national experts he spoke to in early 1989 claimed it would take Iraq ten years to get an atomic bomb, and told him not to be concerned. But his review of data concerning Iraqi procurement efforts led him to believe the threat was more immediate. Those not considering the issue to be an urgent one included Robert Walsh, head of the Energy Department’s intelligence office, who vetoed suggestions that the secretary of energy, Adm. James Watkins, be briefed on the concerns of his subordinate intelligence experts. Such attitudes led A. Bryan Siebert, Heusser’s boss, to send a memo to John Rooney, responsible for export control matters. Siebert wrote, “I am very concerned that Intelligence seems unable to review the intelligence data through anything other than a ‘if you don’t see it, it ain’t there’ lens. I would bet my job that Iraq is moving toward a nuclear weapons program and the time to try and stop it is now.”144
In the months following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August, the U.S. intelligence community intensified its efforts to determine the extent of Iraqi nuclear progress. Satellite reconnaissance activity—which included a stealth imagery satellite, code-named Misty and launched in February 1990—increased. Monitoring of Iraqi communications was also stepped up. In addition, the flight of foreign workers that resulted from the crisis provided another source of intelligence, as did international businessmen with ties to Iraq. European governments began a crackdown on nuclear-related smuggling.145
Satellite reconnaissance offered the promise of detecting new construction activities and older facilities that might not have been noticed during the Iran-Iraq war. Imagery interpreters at NPIC might find evidence of the large plants required to produce highly enriched uranium. Since it would take about one thousand centrifuges to produce enough fissile material for between one and one and a half 15-kiloton bombs each year, and they needed to operate in concert as part of a cascade, any plant would be large and thus highly conspicuous. The probability of detection would be further enhanced because the facility would have to be near a railroad siding, access roads, and other accessories, including a major source of electrical power.146
The interpreters already knew of the installations at Erbil, Mosul, and Tuwaitha. By November 1990 the NRO’s spies in space had not detected any signs of construction at those sites, or elsewhere, indicative of a full-scale gas centrifuge plant. Reports, possibly based on satellite imagery, showed that Iraq had begun building an underground uranium-processing facility in a remote, mountainous section of the country.147
Intelligence assets were undoubtedly targeted against both internal Iraqi communication links—between Tuwaitha and Baghdad, for example—and communications with known and possible suppliers of nuclear-related material in Europe and Asia. Iraqi officials overheard in communications intercepts might reveal a number of details about the nuclear program. While foreign workers would not have information on Saddam’s decisions with regard to nuclear weapons, or on whatever progress his scientists had made in the production of fissile material or bomb design, they could report on construction activities—where facilities had been constructed and key characteristics of those facilities. Interviews with international businessmen revealed that Iraq had been receiving more weapons of mass destruction–related materials than previously believed. The crackdowns on nuclear-related smuggling provided new information on the type of equipment Iraq was seeking to acquire and, by implication, what it lacked.148
But the intensified collection and analysis effort still left the CIA and other interested agencies with significant intelligence gaps. According to a late November 1990 report in the New York Times, “credible information on Saddam Hussein’s tightly guarded bomb program is scarce, and American intelligence analysts have only recently begun to train attention on the subject. The Central Intelligence Agency began to devote substantial numbers of analysts and computer research to Middle East technical and scientific developments only in the last 18 months, when the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe freed qualified employees to tackle the subject.”149
And one government official noted that while “we have a good handle on how long it would take them [to build a bomb] with what we know they have . . . the question is what they have that we don’t know about.” Intelligence officials observed that Iraq’s weapons programs were among the most tightly held secrets in one of the world’s most regimented police states. “This is the hardest kind of collection problem,” one intelligence official remarked.150
Intelligence gaps meant that assumptions as well as facts played a key role in estimates on the status of the Iraqi quest for nuclear weapons. And alternative assumptions led to different, sometimes substantially different, estimates. As one government official remarked in November 1990, “If you put a dozen intelligence experts around a conference table and ask them to tell you when Iraq will have a bomb, you’ll get a dozen answers, from six months to 10 years.”151
One official who had examined the most recent CIA assessment noted that “while the hypothesis is possible—in other words that they could design a bomb—there are still questions about whether it would be sufficiently powerful to constitute a military capability.” Some of those who questioned Iraq’s near-term capability believed that Iraq’s nuclear scientists lacked the design and fabrication capability to make use of the small amount of highly enriched uranium that Iraq had received from France as fuel for the Tammuz I reactor, and that the complex production techniques required to produce a usable nuclear explosive were beyond Iraq’s capabilities.”152
Others took a more pessimistic view. One Department of Defense official found the CIA’s most recent assessment more alarming than others. “Within a year they could come up with a crude bomb. . . . It is a real threat,” he said, “certainly within the realm of possibility.” One intelligence official noted, “This man has a history of looking for the magic weapon in the Iran-Iraq war, the silver bullet that can solve all his problems. . . . We certainly expect him to accelerate any program, such as his nuclear program, that would give him that ‘silver bullet’ capability against U.S. forces.” That assessment was consistent with information obtained by an allied Arab government’s intelligence service, and apparently provided to the United States, that Saddam had pushed his nuclear scientists to obtain an atomic bomb within a year.153
That Iraq might be able to obtain a bomb far sooner than the optimists believed was a key element of President George Bush’s 1990 Thanksgiving Day address to U.S. troops stationed in the Persian Gulf. He told his audience that “those who would measure the timetable for Saddam’s atomic program in years may be seriously underestimating the reality of that situation and the gravity of the threat. Everyday that passes brings Saddam one step closer to realizing his goal of a nuclear weapons arsenal. And that’s why more and more, your mission is marked by a sense of urgency.”154
The president’s remarks were based on portions of the report that had been recently completed by the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, and which also appeared in a special national intelligence estimate. One scenario assumed that Iraq would undertake a crash program to build a bomb, that it would use only its known supply of uranium, and that Iraq possessed advanced bomb-making technology. The central conclusion as to when Iraq might have a bomb was not precise—within “six months to a year, and probably longer.” Further, the bomb would be of low yield and would be too bulky to deliver by missile or aircraft, and there would be a significant chance that it would not detonate.155
On November 29, a week after the president’s Thanksgiving Day address, the UN passed another resolution in response to Iraq’s failure to withdraw its troops from Kuwait. If the Iraqi dictator did not remove his troops by January 15, a U.S.-led coalition was authorized to remove him by force. On January 15, George Bush signed a national security directive authorizing the commencement of military operations, and the air campaign began in the predawn hours of January 17. After five weeks of aerial attack, the ground campaign began on February 24. Four days later, with coalition forces having driven Iraqi forces from Kuwait and having made significant inroads into Iraqi territory, the United States declared a cease-fire. On March 3, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf met with his Iraqi counterpart at a remote air base in Iraq to spell out the terms of the cease-fire.156
On April 2, a new UN Security Council resolution demanded that Iraq disclose all of its weapons of mass destruction activities—from research and development to weapons stockpiles—and submit to inspections of the sites it declared as well as additional sites chosen by the UN-authorized inspection agencies—the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) and the IAEA.157 The resolution opened the way for the UN and the U.S. intelligence community to determine the ground truth about suspected Iraqi nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons facilities, in some cases guided by intelligence obtained by the CIA and other U.S. and allied intelligence agencies.
THE YEAR 1991 ended with the hope that the nuclear weapons programs in two rogue states had been stopped. The upcoming inspections of sites associated with the Iraqi nuclear program, and the destruction or rendering harmless of the equipment at those sites, held out the promise that Saddam’s nuclear dreams would never be realized. Then on December 31, North and South Korea initialed a joint declaration banning nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula, as a step toward “peaceful unification of the homeland.”158
That agreement appeared to offer relief from the fears that had been generated by monitoring of North Korea’s nuclear behavior since 1989. In March of that year CIA analysts completed a special analysis, NORTH KOREA: Nuclear Program of Proliferation Concern. The study noted that “North Korea is rapidly expanding its nuclear-related activities” and that the new plants detected at Yongbyon might be part of a civilian power-generation program to alleviate the “chronic energy shortages” plaguing the Hermit Kingdom.159
But it was also reported that while North Korea had promised Soviet and IAEA officials that it would open formal safeguard negotiations that month, the “North has repeatedly missed target dates for such talks, and the IAEA is concerned that Pyongyang may find new pretexts to postpone any talks.” In addition, the analysts observed loopholes in the safeguards agreement. It would be up to North Korea to notify the IAEA as to when the agreement would go into force as well as to identify the facilities to be inspected, permitting the North Koreans to delay implementation indefinitely or to limit inspections to select facilities. North Korea, the CIA concluded, might “be willing to risk the international censure that a nuclear weapons program would bring in order to maintain a decided military advantage over the South.”160
The concern that was present in 1989 and beyond in the White House, Foggy Bottom, Langley, and other segments of the U.S. national security establishment responsible for worrying about Korea and proliferation was often fueled by the images from the various satellites operated by the NRO. That concern, in turn, stimulated consultation with allies and adversaries as well as negotiations with North Korea.
In Seoul, on June 30, a U.S. team briefed working-level officials from several South Korean agencies on new intelligence, derived from satellite imagery, that North Korea was stepping up its efforts to develop a nuclear weapons capability. The indications of North Korean nuclear activity had also been discussed with the Soviet Union and China, in hopes of gaining their cooperation in halting any North Korean movement toward nuclear weapons. What the imagery showed was a second facility, a long narrow factory-like building near the Yongbyon reactor that appeared to be a reprocessing plant. A reprocessing plant, once in full operation, would be able turn the spent fuel from the research reactor into enough fissile material each year for one or two bombs.161
Beyond briefing the South Korean government, U.S. officials initiated a diplomatic offensive to get North Korea to deliver on its promises to subject its nuclear facilities to international safeguards. The Americans also repeatedly sought Soviet help, with secretary of state James A. Baker raising the issue with Soviet foreign minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze when they met in Wyoming that September. Baker then went public with the issue in San Francisco in October, when he observed that “nuclear proliferation, notably North Korea’s reactor program, remains dangerous,” during a speech on arms control.162
Eighteen months later the issue had still not been resolved. Satellite photos showed the 30-megawatt reactor unattached to any electric power lines. Kim Il Sung refused to permit international inspection of his nation’s nuclear facilities until the United States removed all its nuclear weapons from South Korean territory. Kim’s refusal produced various threats. The Soviet Union warned that it would stop providing supplies for the nuclear program. South Korea’s defense minister threatened substantially more, stating that his country might decide to launch a commando attack against the suspected reprocessing facility. The remark, which North Korea characterized as “virtually a declaration of war,” was then disavowed by his government.163
The United States meanwhile continued to pursue diplomacy. There was disagreement as to exactly how much farther North Korea had to travel to arrive at the nuclear club’s front door—the DIA estimated three to five years, Z Division and other Energy Department experts believed it would take somewhat longer, while the State Department’s INR was somewhere in between. But there was no disagreement on the importance to act while there was still time. Thus, in late May undersecretary of state Reginald Bartholomew headed for Beijing to stress the need for a “broadly based, concerted international consensus” to get North Korea to comply with its obligations under the nonproliferation treaty.164
By November, a “steady trickle” of new intelligence had suggested that several new installations at Yongbyon were nearly complete, including the suspected reprocessing plant. Some intelligence also indicated that other nuclear installations, possibly some underground facilities, were being built elsewhere in North Korea. The intelligence was, however, as in the past, far from complete: satellite photos, some sketchy information from defectors, along with information and assumptions about the depth of North Korean technical skills and access to key technologies. James Lilley, who served as ambassador to South Korea in the late 1980s, told the New York Times, “As far as I know, you don’t have the wealth of defectors in Korea . . . to lay it all open.”165
But he also noted, “No one can afford to assume a country like North Korea is bluffing. . . . You end up with a lot of people dead in the sea that way.” As a result, the additional intelligence, however incomplete, along with Kim’s continued refusal to open the nuclear facilities for international inspection, further heightened fears in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. The South Korean Defense Ministry issued a white paper, not subsequently disavowed, stating that the project “must be stopped at any cost.”166
But it appeared that an agreement signed by North and South Korea on the final day of 1991, which followed a nonaggression agreement signed earlier that month, stopped North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, possibly just in the nick of time. Recent U.S. intelligence indicated that the reprocessing plant could be producing plutonium by mid-1992. In the “Joint Declaration for a Non-Nuclear Korean Peninsula,” both Koreas promised not to test, produce, receive, possess, or deploy or use nuclear weapons. They also promised not to maintain facilities for reprocessing or enriching uranium. In addition, the declaration called for inspections of each other’s facilities, but left the details to be determined by the South-North Joint Nuclear Control Committee. Further, the declaration would become effective on February 19, 1992.167
The agreement offered the possibility, with Iraq’s nuclear program already set back, if not ended, by the Gulf War, that two of the four nations whose quest to join the nuclear club had troubled U.S. policymakers through-out the 1980s would remain outside the club for the foreseeable future.
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* The study also reports (p. 1) two attempts to purchase a bomb from China: one in 1973 and one 1976.
* The Gallucci trip to Kahuta stimulated the French ambassador and the embassy first secretary to visit the area in June 1979. They were on a public road in an unrestricted area when the road was blocked by two vehicles. Six Pakistanis pulled the diplomats from their car and gave them a severe beating. One victim told the U.S. embassy that he assumed the Pakistanis organized the attack to scare people away from the facility. See Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000: Disenchanted Allies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 240.