Frantz Douglas - The Nuclear Jihadist

Copyright 2007 by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Twelve

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First eBook Edition: December 2007

ISBN: 978-0-446-50689-2

Other Books by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins

Teachers: Talking Out of School

Celebration, USA: Living in Disneys Brave New Town

Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and
World War IIs Holocaust at Sea

Other Books by Douglas Frantz

Levine & Co.: Wall Streets Insider Trading Scandal

From the Ground Up: The Business of Building in the Age of Money

By Douglas Frantz and James Ring Adams

A Full Service Bank: How BCCI Stole Billions Around the World

By Douglas Frantz and David McKean

Friends in High Places: The Rise and Fall of Clark Clifford

The splitting of the atom has changed everything, save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patternsof undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.

JOHN HERSEY, Hiroshima

C ROSSING THE RINGSTRASSE near Viennas ornate State Opera House, a rumpled man with a shock of reddish hair tumbling across his forehead walked briskly past the cafs, where people lingered over their espressos and newspapers on the unseasonably warm day. He glanced anxiously at his watch as he tugged open the door on the Starbucks at the corner of Krntner Strasse and Walfischgasse, two of the citys busiest streets. Olli Heinonen was a senior official with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations organization charged with stopping the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. Stout and in his early fifties, Heinonen had spent more than twenty years rising methodically through the agencys labyrinthine bureaucracy, his ascension built as much on his stubborn intelligence as on his ample scientific skills. On this particular day in May 2004, as he picked up his coffee and mounted the stairs to the second floor of the Starbucks, Heinonens career was about to veer into the murky world of espionage and nuclear smuggling on an unprecedented and frightening scale. He would soon be playing a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek with an unseen man whose actions over the past thirty years had pushed the world closer to nuclear war than at any time in history.

Four months earlier, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian diplomat who was head of the IAEA, had put Heinonen in charge of the most significant and pressing investigation in the agencys fifty-year existence: the inquiry into the global black market in nuclear technology led by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist revered throughout the Muslim world as the father of the Islamic bomb. It was Khan who had exploded the myth that a developing country was too poor and too backward to join the nuclear powers. Heinonen soon found that Khans nuclear trail led far beyond the borders of Pakistan. The scientist and a network of associates and middlemen had sold nuclear technology to a rogues gallery of countries: Iran, North Korea, and Libya. If that were not bad enough, Khan had apparently provided nuclear secrets and possibly designs for an atomic weapon to customers still hidden behind the shroud of secrecy that had engulfed the scientist when, in late 2003, Pakistani authorities had arrested him but refused to turn him over to the IAEA for questioning. Pakistan was not alone in refusing to cooperate with the IAEA, as other foreign governments rebuffed queries, allowing members of Khans ring to disappear underground throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Heinonen and his team were frustrated and fearful that the trails would disappear before they could unravel Khans nuclear web.

Then a surprise telephone call offered Heinonen hope. A woman had contacted him at the IAEA headquarters, which rise high above the banks of the Danube in Vienna, requesting a meeting outside the agencys offices. She had refused to give her name, but she had promised that she could provide information that would be enormously helpful to his investigation of A.Q.Khan. Heinonen recognized the womans accent as American and suspected that she was from the Central Intelligence Agency, which maintained a huge operation in the Austrian capital and had occasionally and grudgingly shared information with the IAEA. He agreed to meet with her on the second floor at the Starbucks. When he asked how he would know her, the woman assured Heinonen that she would recognize him.

Olli Heinonen and other senior officials at the IAEA were well aware of the dangers posed by nuclear proliferation, and they were deeply worried in the spring of 2004 that the genie was out of the bottle and that the weapons technology was spreading like a virus among some of the worlds most unstable regimes. North Korea was on the brink of exploding its first nuclear device, to demonstrate its defiance of the United States and its allies. Iran was pushing ahead with a program that many experts at the agency were convinced was intended to lead to the capability of producing nuclear weapons, a threat that could destabilize the Middle East and lead to an all-out war. Libya had given up a clandestine nuclear-weapons program only after its exposure by British and American intelligence agencies. All three were customers of Khan and his network, but what Heinonen feared most was the possibility of other buyers.

WITHOUT any trumpets to herald the change, the world has entered a second nuclear age, and for the first time since the end of the Cold War the threat of nuclear annihilation is on the rise. Mohamed ElBaradei, whose Cassandra-like warnings won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, fears that more nations are hedging their bets by developing nuclear technologies that could be diverted quickly from civilian energy plants into weapons programs. He estimated that as of the fall of 2006 thirty or more countries have both the technical know-how and motivation to opt for nuclear weapons. Unfortunately the political environment is not a very secure one, ElBaradei cautioned. So its becoming very fashionable, if you like, for countries to look into the possibilities of protecting themselves through nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are no longer the sole province of a handful of the most powerful nations. Since the dawn of the nuclear age more than sixty years ago, the technology for the most destructive weapon in history has spread far and wide. The basic design for a crude atomic weapon was widely available and well understood even before the Internet made it accessible to anyone with a computer. But rather than the traditional nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia or even between India and Pakistan, the gravest threat of catastrophic attack today may well come from a terrorist organization like Osama bin Ladens Al Qaeda. There is no doubt that bin Laden or his successor is seeking to buy or build a nuclear weapon for use in his holy war. As early as 1998, the Al Qaeda leader proclaimed possession of a nuclear weapon to be a religious duty, later obtaining a dispensation from a Muslim cleric that justified its use against the West. A month before the September 11 attacks, bin Laden met with two Pakistani nuclear scientists to discuss acquiring nuclear-weapons technology. Later that year, following the American invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. troops found rudimentary designs for nuclear weapons inside an Al Qaeda safe house in Kabul. Intelligence agencies have tracked the groups efforts to obtain nuclear material across three continents.