AQ Khan being kept in total isolation

AQ Khan being kept in total isolation, claims US magazine

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, claims a15,000-word article in a forthcoming issue of the US magazine Atlantic Monthly, is living in isolation with his European wife, surrounded by guards and security agents, cut off from contact with the outside world, not allowed to read the newspapers or watch television, let alone to use the telephone or the Internet, and held beyond the reach of even the intelligence services of the United States.

The article, the first of two by writer William Langewiesche, which is entitled ‘The Wrath of Khan’, states that Dr Khan is seen as the nation’s saviour and it is “necessary to recognise that his largesse (to others) was not merely a matter of self-aggrandisement. He has been portrayed in the West as a twisted character, an evil scientist, a purveyor of death. He had certainly lost perspective on himself. But the truth is that he was a good husband and father and friend, and he gave large gifts because in essence he was an openhearted and charitable man.”

The article calls Dr Khan “an enigma”. He is said to have “aged considerably, and has lost weight and sickened, but apparently he is not being poisoned.” He has high blood pressure and is also “deeply despondent,” convinced that he served his nation honourably, and that even as he transferred its nuclear secrets to other countries, “he was acting on behalf of Pakistan, and with the complicity of its military rulers.” He sleeps poorly at night. Last spring he managed to slip a note out to one of his former lieutenants. It was a scribbled lament in which he asked about General Musharraf, “Why is this boy doing this to me?”

The writer says that journalist Zahid Malik, “who for years praised Khan in public, and published an adoring biography of him in 1992,” told him recently that Khan’s arrest was necessary. Malik also emphasised his loyalty to the military regime. He said, “After 9/11 Pakistan has emerged as a trusted and responsible ally of the West. Pakistan has adopted a principled position, you see, of working against terrorism, extremism, Al-Qaeda, and all that. When Pakistan came to know of certain complaints, Pakistan reacted, you see, and very forcefully. Because as President Musharraf has been saying, and rightly so, whatever Dr Khan did was his personal act.”

Asked what he knew about the formal basis for Khan’s continuing detention, he replied, “The government says it is because of his security. His own safety.” When asked if he agreed, Malik replied “almost eagerly,” “I think so, I think so.” The writer adds sardonically, “It pays in Pakistan to be politically realistic.” The article chronicles Dr Khan’s boyhood and early life, his migration to Pakistan, his education in Karachi and his travel to Europe for higher education. The 1971 defeat of Pakistan traumatised Dr Khan and after the Indian nuclear explosion in 1974, he wrote to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto presenting his credentials and volunteering to help. Bhutto responded through the embassy in The Hague. When he travelled to Karachi in December 1974, he was received by Bhutto and at their meeting, Khan argued for a Pakistani effort to enrich uranium - a route to the bomb that, he assured Bhutto, would be faster than Munir Ahmed Khan’s pursuit of plutonium reprocessing, then under way. “Even before the go-ahead from Bhutto, he had gotten to work. For 16 fruitful days in the fall of 1974 he had stayed in Almelo on a special assignment to URENCO, where he had helped with the translation of secret centrifuge plans from German into Dutch, and in his spare time had walked freely through the buildings, taking copious notes - in Urdu. Some of the places he had visited were nominally off limits to him, but not once had he been challenged. A few people had asked him what his notes were about, and he had answered, half truthfully, that he was writing letters home.”

The article details how Dr Khan managed to enrich uranium that finally made Pakistan the bomb it wanted. While American controls were hard to beat, Dr Khan obtained what Pakistan needed through an intricate network in Europe. As early as 1978, Dr Khan may have had a prototype centrifuge running. Three years later, in 1981, the production plant at Kahuta was ready to start up. There were difficulties with balancing the centrifuges, but by 1982 the plant achieved the first weapons-grade uranium, enriched to 90 percent or more. By 1984 it was producing enough fissionable material to build several bombs a year. “Nor had Khan neglected the need for a warhead: his was an implosion device, based on a simple Chinese design, with an enriched-uranium core the size of a soccer ball surrounded by a symmetrical array of high explosives wired to a high-voltage switch to be triggered all at once. Soon he was going to work on a missile, too.”

By 1986 Pakistan had “crossed the threshold” and was able to fabricate several nuclear devices.

The magazine reports that in the face of increasing export controls in the 1990s, Khan expanded his global procurement network and took it largely underground. At Kahuta, he continued to improve the centrifuge plant, to tweak the laboratory’s warhead designs, and to develop an alternative ballistic missile to one being built by the PAEC. He also led the laboratory into the design and manufacture of a variety of conventional weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank weapons, multi-barrel rocket launchers, laser range-finders, laser sights, reactive armour, minesweeping charges, and armour-piercing tank rounds. On the civilian side, Kahuta launched into the manufacture of electronic circuits, industrial switches and power supplies, and compressors for window-mounted air-conditioners. In 1992 it even established a Biomedical and Genetic-Engineering Division.

After the Indian nuclear test of 1998, Pakistan found itself in a bind because it was being warned of the consequences it would suffer if it followed the Indian example. But because of public pressure and Indian threats, such as a statement from Advani and sarcastic comments in the Indian media, prime minister Nawaz Sharif wanted to go ahead. After the explosion, Dr Khan Began to face serious trouble because of old rivalries with the scientists of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. It was the Commission that had been given the control of the Chagai test.

The article concludes, “Pakistan had its bomb, and it was a good thing, but the utility of Khan was almost over. He was a genuine patriot, much to be admired, but too strong for anyone’s good anymore. If he had become a monster, as some said, then some in the government and the army were implicated too. Was he out of control? For the moment he just needed to be reined in, and reminded that he was just one among a number of important men. Khan’s activities were if anything about to expand. But it was only 1998, and there was no thought yet that he would have to be destroyed.”