For a brief time, Abdul Qadeer Khan became a cartoonish villain for Americans, with Jon Stewart yelling “Khhaaaaaaaaan!” when his face popped up on the screen.
But husband-and-wife team Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins go beyond the James Bond cliches, to tell us the chilling, three-decades long story of how the dangerous scientist spread nuclear research and development and changed the world forever.
It’s a tale of intrigue, international competition, terrorism and rogue state leaders who operate far beyond the light of open media and the oversight of international intelligence organizations and regulatory agencies. In this shadowy world, an informal, Pakistani-based international group of scientists and engineers – the infamous AQ Khan network – operated a black-market storefront of nuclear secrets for any client with sufficient cash. For example, “Khan received millions of dollars from the Libyans,” for just one relatively small shipment of nuclear raw material. Of the “millions of dollars,” Khan was paid, “the proceeds were laundered through a series of bank accounts in Europe and the Middle East.”
A rogue’s gallery of states and movements bought from the AQ Khan network, including North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Iran’s mullocracy, Moammar Gadhafi, and Osama bin Laden. All these, and other, bad actors paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the secrets of Khan’s research. As Frantz and Collins note, “Khan had done more to destabilize the world’s delicate nuclear balance than anyone in history.”
The authors unconvincingly try to make the case that certain international players were unaware of the Khan network. Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is presented as a government official who was duped. They assert that during Bhutto’s visit to Washington in June 1989 she learned more from President George H.W. Bush than from her own officials about Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programs. But this hypothesis flies in the face of Bhutto’s own admission that she personally transported computer disks containing data on nuclear research and missile production to and from Pyongyang in her meetings with North Korea’s dictator.
Despite recounting story after story of decades of unsuccessful investigations and institutional impotence, the authors place an extraordinary degree of faith in Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s ability to have a positive impact on non-proliferation. The authors are right that some of the IAEA’s impotence is due to American and British intelligence services’ reluctance to share classified data. [The CIA] “shared intelligence with the IAEA when it suited their purpose and withheld information when they chose to do so,” write Franz and Collins. And they explain the IAEA’s recurring ineffectuality and its almost willful blindness to emerging programs. The IAEA leadership is portrayed as naively accepting lies they are told by rogue state leaders, with numerous examples of the IAEA agreeing to inspections restrictions, accepting bogus reports and being totally deceived by would-be nuclear powers.
While the book reads smoothly, alert readers will easily detect that the authors’ left-wing bias colors their narrative and conclusions, particularly in regard to the present administration. Vice President Cheney is cited almost more than President Bill Clinton, though much of Khan’s work was accomplished during the latter’s administration. Irrelevancies such as Cheney’s Congressional vote on Martin Luther King Day (opposed) and a superfluous recounting of the Scooter Libby affair hurt the book’s impact. Further the authors seem to justify Iran’s lust for atomic weapons as a normal response to “threats” by Bush administration officials, conveniently ignoring the fact that according to their own narrative, the Iranians have pursued such weaponry since 1979.
The authors do successfully illustrate the almost inevitable march by rogue states toward nuclear capability. Frantz and Collins show that because of the relative scientific and engineering simplicity of atomic weaponry and the inability of American intelligence agencies to discover hidden networks (in large part due to an irrational dependence on technology rather than human intelligence sources) such a progression was – despite the book’s subtitle – unstoppable. “Few believe [proliferation] can be stopped without more radical action, such as the abolition of all nuclear weapons.” The reader comes to the inescapable conclusion that to avoid catastrophe there must be drastic reform at the CIA and other intelligence organizations.
Throughout the authors refer to the Doomsday Clock and “waking with a pounding heart” while contemplating nuclear annihilation. From such fear apparently arises their quixotic conclusion that the only way to “avoid Armageddon” is to abolish use of nuclear power – most particularly peaceful use of nuclear energy. But in an increasingly energy-starved world such a Luddite option is clearly impossible and to pretend otherwise seems fatuous. Also, their recommendation that despite its disappointing history the IAEA is humankind’s best hope for nuclear weapons control makes it difficult to take the authors seriously.
Nevertheless this is an important work. Read and appreciate “Nuclear Jihadist” for the detailed exposure of the AQ Khan network and a fuller awareness of the spread of nuclear weapons and the ultimate danger this poses for America and the free world.
Gordon Cucullu is a former Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel and author.
The Nuclear Jihadist
The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World’s Most Dangerous Secrets . . . and How We Could Have Stopped Him
by Douglas Frantz & Catherine Collins
Twelve
