Pakistan: The father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb this week admitted doing what Saddam Hussein never did: he sold nuclear secrets. Rahul Bedi reports on the life and corrupt times of Dr A Q Khan
Pakistan's top atomic scientist, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, may have received a presidential pardon for giving his country's nuclear weapons secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea for money, but he could spend the rest of his days a near captive.
The 69-year-old metallurgist, who confessed on public television earlier this week to having provided these aspiring nuclear weapons states with hardware and blueprints to build weapons of mass destruction, is likely to remain under tight security in his luxurious villa in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.
Reports from Islamabad indicated that the tall, graying, greedy scientist would also be prevented pursuing his flamboyant life style, sustained by moneys earned from successfully working the global nuclear "supermarket".
This includes a fleet of vintage cars, luxury homes in Pakistan, real estate in London and the Henrieta Khan Hotel in distant Timbuktu that Khan bought and named after his Dutch wife.
Khan admitted to shipping centrifuges to enrich uranium for atomic bombs to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He used chartered aircraft from Pakistan and ships to go by sea from Dubai. Together with the centrifuges, he dispatched related nuclear information for over 11 years until the mid-1990s.
Khan was disliked by his colleagues, especially younger scientists who, resentful of his harsh and abusive language and apparently limitless greed, leaked stories about him to the media and the Opposition as investigations against him began last November. These followed Iran's disclosures of Pakistani help for its clandestine nuclear weapons programme.
The son of a retired schoolmaster in central India and the youngest of five siblings, Khan had a humble start in life, but developed delusions of grandeur as his successes mounted.
Boosted by decades of public adulation for building Pakistan's nuclear bomb, he claimed to be descended from Shahabuddin Ghauri, founder of the Slave dynasty that ruled India for most of the 13th century. As part of perpetuating this myth, Khan spent a fortune refurbishing Ghauri's tome in Jhelum in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province, near Islamabad.
Khan's ego was also boundless.
Never satiated with the many state honours conferred upon him, he even suggested to former Pakistan president, Gen Zia-ul Haq, that a major city be named Qadeerabad (home of Qadeer) after him. Instead, an embarrassed Gen Zia renamed the Kahuta Research Laboratories after Khan.
A national hero for building Pakistan's "Islamic bomb" to deter nuclear rival India, Khan told millions of Pakistanis in his carefully scripted televised address on Wednesday that whilst selling Pakistan's nuclear secrets he had, in reality, "acted in good faith".
But the contrite Khan absolved the Pakistani military that has controlled the country's atomic programme since its inception in the mid-1970s of all involvement in spreading nuclear secrets through the international nuclear black market and begged forgiveness.
A day later, President Pervez Musharraf obliged with a pardon - to no one's surprise.
Also predictably, Gen Musharraf who doubles as Pakistan's army chief, declared the scandal over, sticking to his claim that Khan had acted on his own and not with the military's co-operation, as is widely suspected.
Gen Musharraf told reporters in Islamabad that he would not hand over any documents about the scandal to UN inspectors or allow inspections of Pakistan's nuclear facilities.
In a fit of braggadocio, the President declared that Pakistan would test a new missile with a 2,000 km range, nearly three times the striking power of its current missile capability.
He reiterated that Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme would neither be frozen nor rolled back in a move aimed at appeasing Opposition and Islamic parties who have accused Gen Musharraf of acting under Washington's orders and are demanding a parliamentary inquiry into the scandal. The Islamists oppose Khan's humiliation, claiming that Gen Musharaff had made the scientist a scapegoat for the army's misdeeds.
Reports from Islamabad and Washington had claimed that nuclear secrets continued to be provided to North Korea long after Gen Musharraf seized power from an elected government in a bloodless coup in 1999. Pakistan's military have dismissed these allegations as "rubbish" and have closed ranks around their chief as part of a defensive strategy.
And though Khan's pardon has, for the moment, put the lid on the alarming issue that has rocked Pakistan, diplomats and security officials said the "nuclear proliferation shadow" would continue to loom over the world.
The pardon has also elicited no criticism from the US, despite its professed concern over the spread of weapons of mass destruction to rogue states - its reason for the Iraq war.
Analysts said Washington was chary of indicting or publicly criticising Gen Musharraf, an important ally in its hunt for al-Qaeda suspects, particularly Osama bin Laden, along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. In a US election year, bin Laden's capture would badly damage the Democrats.
In security circles, however, it is an open secret that the US connived in Pakistan's nuclear programme through the 1980s, when it needed Islamabad's co-operation in fighting the Soviet Union, then occupying Afghanistan with the CIA sponsoring the Mujahideen.
Meanwhile, Mohammad ElBaradei, the head of UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, said Khan's confession was merely the "tip of the iceberg." A lot of other people were involved. Items were made in one country, assembled in others and shipped onwards on false papers, he added.
"This is an area where we cannot act alone. We need the co-operation of intelligence agencies and governments. I expect everybody to chip in," Mr ElBaradei declared.
Despite Khan's confession of being at the centre of the operation, few diplomats believe the lucrative nuclear black market will end. But it will lie low for a while till the brouhaha around Khan subsides.
Reports from the US said there were "suspicions" that Syria or Saudi Arabia had also been clients of Khan's network and that Iran appeared to have bought more technology than it had declared to UN inspectors.
The nuclear black market operation spanned a network across several countries such as Dubai, Malaysia, South Africa, Germany, Holland and at least two other European countries.
Components ostensibly meant for industrial purposes were acquired in small quantities to deflect suspicion and were assembled to make gas centrifuges to enrich uranium for atomic bombs and other equipment such as nuclear triggers to detonate the bombs.
Khan's underground network sold blueprints for nuclear warheads to Libya for over $50 million. These warhead designs - according to US experts privy to documents retrieved from Tripoli last month - are believed to resemble those provided to Pakistan by its military and nuclear ally, China. The alarming records were handed over to Washington after Libya decided last year to close down its nuclear weapons programme and opened itself up to international scrutiny.
US and other Western security agencies assume that other countries aspiring for nuclear weapons were in all probability sold similar blueprint copies. They are working to establish whether the same underground network was also able to obtain enriched uranium or plutonium essential to build an atomic bomb for rogue states and terrorist groups.
Dubai was the centre of Khan's proliferation activities where centrifuges secretly built in Malaysia in an ostensibly civilian industrial factory were brought and then passed on to end users. Dr Mohammad Farooq, another detained Pakistani nuclear scientist, one of Khan's colleagues and amongst the first to be brought in for questioning after the inquiry began last year, was at the centre of the proliferationnetwork which also included South Africans, Germans and Sri Lankans.
"During the last 48 months, Khan made as many as 44 overseas trips to Dubai, Malaysia, Libya and Iran," a government official who declined to be identified told a news agency in Islamabad . "When he was in Malaysia last year we summoned him back for fear that he might be picked up by some foreign agency," he added.
The Pakistani establishment's anxiety to prevent Khan from being questioned by the US or any other Western country is understandable. "It wanted to put the lid on the matter by stopping it at Khan and by preventing him from revealing details about the military's involvement in the proliferation scandal," a security officer said.
As an insurance policy against prosecution, Khan is believed to have sent out of Pakistan a video recording with his daughter in which he reportedly claims to have been acting under "orders from above", a euphemism for the military authorities. Two former Pakistani army chiefs were questioned but absolved of blame.
Khan used his experience working with a European nuclear agency in the 1970s to enable Pakistan to build centrifuges to enrich uranium and build a nuclear bomb.
After completing an M.Sc in metallurgy at the Delft Technological University in Holland and a doctorate in Belgium, Khan joined FDO Engineering in Holland. That was perhaps the luckiest thing that could have happened to Pakistan's future nuclear programme.
The FDO Engineering Company was closely associated with Urenco, the biggest European research organisation, jointly sponsored by the US, Germany and the Netherlands, and was involved with research on the enrichment of uranium through the centrifuge system.
But it had hit several ticklish problems regarding metal behaviour which Khan as an able and diligent metallurgist resolved. Along the way, he learnt in detail about the workings of the centrifuge system, a facet that stood him in good stead in developing Pakistan's nuclear programme.
Khan is a Pakistani nationalist who carved out a life for himself in Europe but was inspired by events back home to return.
While in the Netherlands, he met his South African-born Dutch wife Henrieta. Around 1965 they were married at the Pakistani embassy in Holland.
Khan was in Belgium during the third India-Pakistan war in 1971 which led to East Pakistan, one half of his country, breaking away to become Bangladesh. The surrender of thousands of Pakistani soldiers to the Indian army greatly upset him.
India's first nuclear explosion followed in 1974. Khan's response to India's nuclear test was that in order to survive as an independent nation, Pakistan had to go nuclear. He declared as much in a letter to Pakistan's then prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (later overthrown by the military and executed) who invited Khan to return home in 1974 and to take charge of the country's nuclear programme. Khan came back but with stolen Urenco centrifuge blueprints for which he was tried, found guilty but later exonerated.
What followed is a story of determination, endeavour and success for Khan and for Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme. Despite the uncertainties of Pakistani politics, successive heads of government - and the military that has directly ruled Pakistan for over 30 of its 56 years after independence and indirectly for the remainder - provided total support to the programme.
Khan soon realised that it would be impossible to achieve any success through the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.
At Bhutto's instance the Eastern Research Laboratory was established for Khan at Kahuta, near the garrison town of Rawalpindi adjoining Islamabad in 1976, to develop the Islamic bomb. Later this was renamed after Dr Khan, as the "Dr A Q Khan Research Laboratory".
Khan began tapping the global nuclear black market to build Pakistan's atomic capability in an operation that Gen Musharraf recently admitted was flush with money, secretive and with little or no accountability. Its offshoot was Khan's profitable proliferation racket whose apocalyptic ramifications remain unknown.