As the U.S. and Europe brace for a showdown with Iran over that country’s nuclear program, a former British Customs investigator is asserting that the West missed a golden opportunity to disrupt Tehran’s nuclear effort seven years ago.
Atif Amin says that as a U.K. Customs agent in 2000, he uncovered evidence that Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan was running a nuclear black market. But the United States and United Kingdom waited more than three years to take action to shut down the Khan network, which supplied Libya, North Korea and Iran with gas centrifuge technology to enrich uranium.
Had they moved against Khan sooner, Amin believes and some critics agree, Iran might not have as many as 3,000 centrifuges today and be threatening to become a nuclear power.
The previously undisclosed account of Amin’s thwarted investigation is included in a new book about A.Q. Khan titled “America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise” by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento of the National Security News Service. Amin recently sat down with NBC News and discussed details of his investigation, recounted in the book, including his frustration over the decision to limit his criminal probe.
U.S. intelligence officials who worked on the Khan case tell NBC News that Amin’s concerns are misguided. They say that premature action could have jeopardized secret operations under way at the time targeting Khan, his cohorts and his clients. The officials say that intelligence gained during that period enabled the U.S. to mount other clandestine operations that may still be active, including one aimed at slowing down Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Amin was tapped to work on what initially appeared to be an export control case involving a suspicious shipment of high-tensile aluminum that could be used to make centrifuge and missile parts. “It didn’t matter who the end user was,” Amin said. “It needed an export license.”
The shipper was a U.K.-based company run by Abu Bakr Siddiqui, a British businessman whose father was a friend of Khan. The stated destination: a company in Dubai, a port that intelligence sources say is notorious for a process in which a shipment is illicitly forwarded to another country.
Despite a warning from British Customs, Siddiqui shipped the aluminum in May 1999 without obtaining the required license, according to Amin. British Customs intercepted the shipment and searched Siddiqui’s office, home and his parents’ home, he said.
Amin, 30 at the time and a member of a special counterproliferation unit, was assigned to be the case agent. He had worked on several big weapons smuggling cases before, but this was the most daunting assignment of his career.
During the summer of 1999, he said, he and his team pieced together Siddiqui’s history of shipments and business ties.
A Sri Lankan 'ran the show'
According to Amin, the Dubai company to which the aluminum was supposed to be shipped was Sama Machinery and Equipment. Amin said he learned that Sama was controlled by one of Siddiqui’s business partners, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan operating out of Dubai and Malaysia. “From a practical point of view,” Amin said, Tahir “ran the show.”
Since Dubai did not have aerospace or nuclear industries that would require the specialized aluminum, Amin wanted to know where the aluminum was really going. “That was really the million dollar question,” he said.
The Dubai-Pakistan connection
Increasingly, he said, evidence pointed to Dubai as the hub of an illicit procurement operation run by Khan, funneling nuclear technology to Pakistan.
Authorities in Dubai, who Amin said typically weren’t cooperative on foreign investigations of nuclear proliferation matters, surprisingly allowed Amin to pursue his investigation there, as long as he worked with local police.
After arriving in April 2000, Amin said, he made slow progress until he followed up on a Dubai telephone number found in Siddiqui’s diary for someone with the initials “D.S.” Amin said “D.S.” stood for “Dr. Sahib,” a Pakistani term of respect, in this case for A.Q. Khan. According to Amin, Dubai officials told him the number was registered to Green Crest Industries (M.E.) Ltd.
Amin and a local police officer paid a visit to Green Crest, where, Amin said, he explained in English the focus of their inquiry. “This was an overt investigation, so I didn’t make it secret that I was there to investigate … the A.Q. Khan network,” he said.
The Green Crest manager said he had never heard of Khan, Amin recalled, but then another employee appeared to contradict him, interjecting in Urdu (a language Amin understands): “Oh, yeah, Khan, he comes here all the time.”
Green Crest Chairman S.M. Farooq later denied in an interview with the National Security News Service that Khan had ever visited Green Crest, though they seemed to have other ties. The news agency also reported that Farooq served on the boards of several organizations with Khan and was vice chairman of the A.Q. Khan Institute of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering; more significantly, for years, Farooq’s companies allegedly helped procure nuclear technology for Khan’s bomb program in Pakistan.
Amin said he believed that he was unraveling an illicit pipeline funneling nuclear technology from the West through Dubai to Pakistan until he made a shocking discovery: evidence that nuclear technology was being shipped to Libya.
A 'fidgety manager'
One entry in Siddiqui’s files led Amin to Deepsea Freight Services, where, he said, a “very nervous and very fidgety” manager handed over a binder of documents indicating that Siddiqui’s shipments were going to companies controlled by Tahir in Dubai, then being reshipped to companies in Pakistan. Among the companies was United Engineering and Trading Co. (UETC), which Amin described as a Khan Research Laboratories “front” long suspected of illicit procurement of nuclear technology for Pakistan.
Amin said he was startled to find records of shipments of nuclear components in the other direction — from UETC in Pakistan to Dubai. Among the parts were specialized equipment called ring magnets sent to Desert Electrical, which in turn, Amin said, was shipping them to Libya. Amin said the prospect of ring magnets going to Libya “rang alarm bells in my mind — because I know they're the kind of products or items that can be used in centrifuge technology.”
Deepsea Managing Director K. Hafeezuddin confirmed to NBC News that Amin visited his company in 2000. He said that the entire file was taken from his office and that he is “not in a position to comment” on its contents. He said Amin’s account “could be true. I don’t know,” he added, “We just clear cargo.”
Officials at Green Crest did not respond to requests for comment. Neither company has been accused of violating laws.
Amin said his visits to Green Crest and Deepsea drew the attention of Dubai police officials, who took the evidence he had collected and told him that all future investigative requests would need to be handled through them, essentially relegating him to the office and ending any meaningful inquiry.
Abiding by the new guidelines, he asked the police to provide him a copy of the Deepsea records, but when they brought him the file, he said, it was much thinner. All the key documents he had seen earlier were missing.
Though thwarted from carrying on his investigation, Amin said he reported his discovery of the Libya connection to the British Customs liaison and to the station chief for the British intelligence service MI6. The station chief, he said, “was particularly interested in the Libyan ring magnet issue.”
The MI6 officer sent a report to his headquarters, portions of which were shared with other Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, according to the National Security News Service.
Soon after, Amin said, he got an urgent phone call in the middle of the night telling him to meet the station chief and a Customs official in his hotel lobby. “The station chief cut to the chase,” Amin said. “He basically said to me … ‘Your life's in danger.’”
Back to London on the next plane
Amin said he did not believe the threat was that serious. The next evening, Amin said, his boss ordered him to return to London on the next plane. Amin returned to England dispirited late in April 2000, without evidence of the Libya connection and without an interview with suspect Buhary Syed Abu Tahir. In October 2001, the case ended with a whimper: Abu Bakr Siddiqui was convicted in a British court on three counts of export violations, but given a suspended sentence. The judge said he was satisfied that Siddiqui was unaware of the intended use of the exports. A family member told NBC News that Siddiqui was traveling and unavailable for comment.
In October 2003, authorities boarded the cargo ship BBC China in Italy and found thousands of centrifuge parts destined for Libya. That case, which led to a cascade of information about Khan’s operations, was widely considered an enormous intelligence success. In February 2004, then-CIA director George Tenet described the “unrelenting” investigation: “Working with our British colleagues we pieced together the picture of the network, revealing its subsidiaries, scientists, front companies, agents, finances, and manufacturing plants on three continents. Our spies penetrated the network through a series of daring operations over several years.”
Arrests were made in South Africa and Europe. In Malaysia, police detained Tahir, who admitted helping Khan send used centrifuge units to Iran in the mid-1990s, according to a police report. After more than two years in custody, Tahir reportedly was released and left Malaysia. NBC News has not been able to confirm his current whereabouts. Malaysian authorities did not reply to a request for comment.
Did spy agencies want to see more?
Atif Amin believes Khan’s network could have been disrupted much earlier had he been allowed to probe further in spring 2000. It appeared to him that the CIA and MI6 (through their Joint Intelligence Committee) had decided to let Khan continue operating in the interest of gathering more intelligence.
He acknowledged that intelligence interests do sometimes outweigh those of law enforcement, but gambling with such a threat, he believes, was a mistake. “It's a question of where do you stop it?” he said. “Do you stop it then? Do you stop it four years later? And if you stop it four years later, how much damage has been done?”
The government of Dubai and U.K. Customs did not respond to requests for comment.
U.S. officials involved in the Khan case acknowledge that from 2000 to 2003 Iran made significant strides thanks in part to know-how obtained via Khan.
One former senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity, described Amin as a “brave fellow” who was “right in his investigation” but wrong in his conviction that Khan’s network should have been shut down immediately after his discovery. A second former senior intelligence official agreed, telling NBC, “We felt it was necessary to gather enough intelligence so that when we ripped up the network, we got it root and branch, not just knocking off the head and having the rest of it regenerate.”
Persuading Pakistan to act against Khan also was a concern, according to this official. “It was hard enough to get the Pakistanis to act when we provided them all the detail we did. If we had asked a couple years beforehand, the answer would have almost certainly been no.”
In fact, efforts by the U.S. to disrupt Khan’s activities outside Pakistan date back to at least 1998. According to retired Pakistani Brig. Gen. Feroz Khan, then a senior military official, top U.S. diplomats asked Pakistan about Khan’s dealings with North Korea, and Pakistani officials in turn questioned him.
"In my presence, he completely denied he had any linkage on nuclear issues with North Korea,” the Pakistani general told NBC News.
He said Pakistani officials believed A.Q. Khan, in part because the scientist had made authorized trips to North Korea for a “non-clandestine” deal involving missile and conventional technology. Later, it was determined that Khan had provided Pyongyang with centrifuge technology.
As for Iran, the former Pakistani military official said the centrifuges that A.Q. Khan sent in the 1990s were "old" and "redundant." Iran’s big advances, he said, came in 2002 and 2003, and not necessarily because of A.Q. Khan. In February 2003, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei inspected Iran’s gas centrifuge plant at Natanz and reportedly was surprised at the progress Iran had made toward putting 1,000 centrifuges into operation.
Iran now claims 3,000 centrifuges
Last month, President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad said Iran had reached its long-stated goal of producing 3,000 centrifuges. If that claim is true — and some experts are skeptical — it would be enough to generate the amount of highly enriched uranium needed for at least one nuclear weapon within a year.
Today, the United States is still trying to recover from the impact of the Khan network, and doing what it can to thwart Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Tehran, which denies pursuing nuclear weapons, has claimed that the United States and other Western intelligence agencies have engaged in sabotage by inserting defective and even dangerous equipment into the supply pipeline for the Iranian centrifuge program. A former senior intelligence official confirms as much, telling NBC News: “I don't know how much is bad equipment and how much is sabotaged, but they're not fantasizing when they say the Great Satan is engaged in sabotage.”
A.Q. Khan remains under house arrest in Pakistan. U.S. authorities have never questioned him directly. Some of his partners have faced criminal charges elsewhere. Experts like former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright consider the response since then “tepid.” The nuclear black market, Albright told NBC News, “remains a lucrative business and the chance of getting caught and punished isn’t that great.”
