ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Dr. A. Q. Khan, Pakistan’s notorious nuclear scientist, is under threat of being kidnapped and bundled out of the country in a joint Israeli-American operation that could take the lid off Pakistan’s massive nuclear and strategic arsenal.
Pakistani security officials went on red alert in the last week of June 2008 after receiving information that Israel’s Mossad, possibly in a joint operation with some elements from CIA, is planning to kidnap Dr. Khan, who lives in a house in an Islamabad suburb, and take him out of the country. The officials are tightlipped about the source of the information.
This possibility is literally Pakistan’s worst nuclear nightmare. All Pakistani scientists, technicians and other special staffers, retired and serving, working on the strategic weapons programs, follow security procedures to avert this possibility. Dr. Khan is the only retired senior scientist who is currently trying to break out of these procedures, creating a risk both for himself and for Pakistan. Islamabad has done a lot to protect him from foreign hands.
Dr. Khan no longer holds official access to Pakistan’s strategic facilities but is considered to be a treasure trove of information on Pakistan’s missile and strategic weapons, especially the two areas that bear his fingerprints: uranium enrichment technology and the development of Pakistan’s long range, nuclear capable Ghauri missile series.
The threat to Dr. Khan is part of a larger dilemma facing Islamabad these days concerning how to deal with the retired scientist. The government wants to relax his security detail assigned to him since his 2004 confession to running a clandestine proliferation network and the subsequent presidential pardon. The government wants to do this in order to calm the Pakistani public opinion that continues to see Dr. Khan as a mistreated national hero.
But the other side of the coin is the fact that Dr. Khan is privy to critical and classified information. There is no known threat to his life but he faces a real possibility of being kidnapped and shipped out of Pakistan to be debriefed by foreign interrogators. One Pakistani official puts this dilemma facing the Pakistani government this way, ‘How can we take a chance with this kind of a personality?’
Making matters worse is Dr. Khan himself, who has intensified his campaign of blackmailing the government into withdrawing his security detail and set him free of any security. Pakistani officials say Dr. Khan is a free man but that assigning him a security detail is based on threat assessments done by professionals.
There is also fresh information now that shows that the Pakistani government may not exactly be the ‘bad guy’ that Dr. Khan has portrayed in his recent interviews, and that there is more to his story than meets the eye.
Recently, Dr. Khan exploited the relaxed security around him to give explosive interviews to the media to embarrass the Pakistani government and get back at the man who forced the scientist to admit his mistakes: President Musharraf.
The interviews further ruined the government’s image before ordinary Pakistanis and increased sympathy for Dr. Khan, who remains a national hero has an impeccable record of serving his nation the best he could.
Amazingly, Pakistani officials allowed Dr. Khan to vent his anger until Dr. Khan finally did something that sent shockwaves even among his sympathizers. He raised alarm bells domestically and eyebrows internationally by accusing Pakistan of supplying uranium enrichment equipment to North Korea in a shipment in 2000 that he said was approved by President Musharraf and the Pakistani military.
The information in the case cited by Dr. Khan was factually incorrect and Dr. Khan tried to retract and explain. But even if it was true, many Pakistanis who sympathized with him were shocked to see him come this far to settle score with President Musharraf, knowing that his statement could bring the kind of international pressure on Pakistan that Iran’s nuclear program is facing these days. ‘This is no less than a suicide attack against the State of Pakistan,’ according to Zaid Hamid, a Pakistani defense analyst.
The anticipated negative fallout from Dr. Khan’s reckless recent interviews is expected to fall within the following five broad categories:
1. There was some concern in Islamabad that Dr. Khan’s statement could prompt fresh American pressure to allow foreign access to Dr. Khan.
2. The statement also plays right into the hands of some lobbies in Washington that have been promoting the idea of destroying Pakistani nukes through a military strike.
3. The statements reinforce the propaganda of some American lobbies that Pakistan is a nation falling apart that cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons.
4. The biggest damage so far is that the A. Q. Khan story has come back from the dead. Islamabad’s successful handling of the proliferation issue in the past four years had ‘closed’ this chapter for good. The A. Q. Khan statements reopen the chapter and may create new problems for Pakistan when the country is beset by instability.
5. A weak and incapable government in Islamabad at this time means that there is no one in the country who can stand up to a renewed international pressure that could result from Dr. Khan’s statements.
It goes to President Musharraf’s credit that he resisted and delicately handled the crisis that erupted over Dr. Khan in 2004. He bluntly refused American demands to hand over Dr. Khan to international interrogators and pardoned him without any punishment. Some analysts believe that Musharraf’s non-cooperation on this count was one of the reasons that convinced Washington to weaken Musharraf and try to replace him with a more flexible Benazir Bhutto.
Pakistan has firmly told everyone that Dr. Khan’s case is ‘closed.’ But the worrying aspect is that with a strongly pro-American PPP government in Islamabad, whose ambassador in Washington is keen to promote U.S. views and whose party cochairman, Mr. Asif Zardari, has used his recent international tour to confirm the presence of terrorist camps inside Pakistan, there is no towering politician or statesman left in the Pakistani capital who can come forward now and boldly defend the Pakistani position.
Alarmingly, Dr. Khan has moved the Pakistani Supreme Court to force the government to remove all security detail assigned to him. This obviously crosses a red line.
That is why Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, the director of the Strategic Plans Division, which oversees the strategic weapons programs, came out on Saturday in Islamabad to say that Pakistan will protect its interest at any cost.
“There are international threats … [Dr. Khan] is being simplistic in his approach,” Gen. Kidwai told a group of Pakistani journalists during a special briefing over the weekend in Islamabad.
Although the days of the Cold War, with their intelligence intrigues, are behind us, the history of nuclear espionage and the stories of the kidnappings and mysterious disappearances of nuclear scientists are too serious and too fresh to be ignored.
Early last year, an Iranian scientist, Ardeshire Hassanpour, mysteriously died in Isfahan, Iran. He was connected to the Natanz nuclear facility which is under international spotlight. Reports suggested he was either killed by the Israeli Mossad or was eliminated by the Iranian government after he was found communicating with either American or Israeli agents. In either situation, this is a fresh and clear case that Pakistan’s immediate region is abuzz with covert activity targeting nuclear scientists and installations.
Interestingly, the credit for two of the best known cases of kidnapping a nuclear scientist and taking him to another country goes to Israel’s Mossad and Pakistan’s ISI. The Pakistani intelligence agency smuggled Dr. A. Q. Khan out from Europe to Pakistan, not to mention that it ran a clandestine operation for the purchase of prohibited equipment and recruitment of nuclear experts and technicians. So, it is safe to say that officials in Islamabad know what they are dealing with. And thus the threat perception [the chances of an A.Q. Khan kidnap] is not exaggerated.
On Sept. 30, 1986, Mossad drugged and smuggled out the rogue Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu while he was en route in a plane from London to Rome. Vanunu was a disgruntled former employee of the Israeli nuclear program. In revenge, he handed over pictures and sensitive information to a British newspaper.
For those who think the Pakistani government is not fair to Dr. Khan, they should see what the Israeli government did to Vanunu.
According to a U.S. Web report, ‘Mordechai Vanunu spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 years in solitary confinement. Vanunu was released from prison in 2004, subject to a broad array of restrictions on his speech and movement. Since then he has been briefly arrested several times for multiple violations of those restrictions, including giving various interviews to foreign journalists and attempting to leave Israel. In July 2007, Vanunu was sentenced to a further six months' imprisonment for speaking to foreigners and for traveling to Bethlehem.’
In comparison, Dr. Khan is not in detention. He is at his home with his family. He carries a cell phone, along with his family members. Recently, he has been allowed to take meals at restaurants, with some restrictions pertaining to timings in view of Dr. Khan’s security. The Pakistani authorities have been so generous with Dr. Khan that he recently have been free to give telephone and written interviews without any problem, which indicates that his telephone calls and written exchanges are not monitored or censored.
At no point did any Pakistani official misbehave with Dr. Khan. The reason for this generosity is that Dr. Khan might have wronged in the proliferation business and self-enrichment, but he remains a man who served his nation the best he could.
Lt. Gen. Kidwai of the Strategic Plans Division (SPD) and Gen. Ihsan-ul-Haq, the former head of the ISI, who questioned Dr. Khan in ten different ‘sittings’ back in 2004 always addressed Dr. Khan as ‘sir’ as a sign of respect.
The evidence of wrongdoing against the prominent scientist was so strong and damning that Dr. Khan changed his testimony from an initial denial to stopping at one point to say, ‘Enough is enough. Please ask the President to pardon me.’
Gen. Kidwai and the ISI chief conveyed to President Musharraf that Dr. Khan wanted to apologize and seek a pardon. ‘This is not personal,’ President Musharraf reportedly said, ‘He should apologize to the nation.’
This is where the idea for the famous television apology came up. The National Command Authority, the main federal agency in charge of the strategic assets and the parent organization of SPD, prepared an initial draft and handed a copy to Dr. Khan for his input. The process of finalizing the draft apology took at least three to four days as the draft of the apology letter ran back and forth between the officials and Dr. Khan, who made corrections to the draft with his own pen. This draft copy is available with the officials and contradicts Dr. Khan’s recent complaint that ‘a letter of apology was thrust in his hands at the President’s office and he was asked to read it on television.’
Now Islamabad is considering presenting the evidence against Dr. Khan before a limited group of neutral Pakistanis. The evidence cannot be made public due to the sensitivity of the information. But if Dr. Khan manages to convince the Pakistani court that he needs to be freed of all security around him, then the government will come forward with the evidence before a group of prominent Pakistanis in a closed door exercise. The purpose is to prove that Dr. Khan is not as innocent as he says he is, and, second, to ensure he retains the security detail provided to him in order to protect him from possible threats, including the reports of an Israeli-style kidnapping and smuggling our of the country.
Pakistani authorities have a legal document that Dr. Khan approved. The document indicates that the presidential pardon was conditional on Dr. Khan not jeopardizing national secrets and provided that no new information emerges on his proliferation activities beyond what he has already confessed.
As for the latest report on a possible plan to kidnap Dr. Khan and take him outside Pakistan, it is not clear where the information came from. Officials are tightlipped. Islamabad closely monitors Indian activities in the region and there is evidence that Indian intelligence operatives in the past have tried to volunteer information on Pakistani nuclear sites to Israel and to certain Pakistan-averse lobbies in the United States.
But Pakistan’s nuclear and strategic weapons programs remain on a strong footing. The image of instability is the result of a political failure on the part of the political class in the country.
The military resolve remains intact. In fact, voices are rising now that say that Pakistan should not be apologetic about its past cooperation with North Korea. Islamabad is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its cooperation with North Korea was within the parameters of Pakistan’s own legitimate security and defense considerations and did not break any international law.
Any past and future Pakistani cooperation with the United States or the IAEA remains confined to two red lines set by Islamabad: One, no one can question Pakistan about the origins its nuclear and strategic weapons programs, and, Two, Pakistan will not discuss at any level its nuclear cooperation with friends and allies. Iran and North Korea are the only exception because the two nations are already involved in multilateral talks about their programs.
Ahmed Quraishi is a Pakistani public affairs professional. He heads the Pakistan Task Force at FurmaanRealpolitik, an independent Pakistani think tank based in Islamabad. He also produces and hosts a weekly foreign policy show for PTV World.
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