Deception secrets of Pakistan's A Q Khan

AQ Khan, the Pakistani scientist who created a secret global network of smugglers, was, perhaps, the mother of all arms merchants. In this fascinating book, Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz describe and analyse how Khan stole key blueprints from a Dutch research laboratory in the mid-1970s and, with American and British intelligence assistance, set up networks that sold nuclear "capabilities" to paying customers.

Written as an espionage novel, Collins and Frantz do even better than their previous and equally provocative book, The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets ... And How We Could Have Stopped Him (2007), by connecting missing dots.

Although nuclear proliferation concerns in Pakistan, North Korea, South Africa, Libya and Iran mobilised Western powers to sabotage sales, in reality Khan could not have created his clandestine global network to secretly obtain and sell nuclear weapon capabilities without specific assistance.

The authors painstakingly describe how Khan's initial focus was on making Pakistan a nuclear power.

Once that objective was secured, he apparently decided to branch out and make some money in the process, allegedly because he was both a greedy individual and, even more determined, because he was driven by acute hatred towards the United States.

Towards that end, Khan relied on Swiss acquaintances, Friedrich, Marco and Urs Tinner (father and his two sons) to supply him with key equipment directly from their metallurgy factories. Little did Khan know that the Tinners were recruited by the CIA and British intelligence, which orchestrated the eventual dismantlement of at least one of their networks.

Fallout thus delves on how the CIA recruited the Tinner family and broke the laws of Switzerland by burglarising their offices and homes to collect intelligence on these principal informants.

While details provided by the Tinners proved crucial, what Marco and Urs Tinner actually did — sabotaging computer programs and planting bugs in crucial calibration equipment — were far more valuable. Yet Western intelligence officers seldom trusted the Tinners, even if they would have failed to uncover Khan's global operations without them.

Collins and Frantz offer several details gathered from numerous interviews in fast-paced chapters that cover Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Washington, Paris, Vienna, Bern, Kuala Lumpur, Tripoli and Islamabad, among other stops. One of the best parts of the book is their description of how the Tinners sabotaged equipment destined for Khan's Libyan customers (pages 95-101, 111-117 and 128-141).

Even more fascinating is what the authors managed to extract from a CIA agent — code-named "Mad Dog" — who apparently recruited the Tinners, and thus penetrated Khan's inner circle. At the end of the interview, Mad Dog left Collins and Frantz a slip of paper on which was written a quote from Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Lacuna: "The most important part of the story is the piece of it you don't know" (page xiii).

Irrespective of what else might be in abeyance, Collins and Frantz devote a significant amount of space to the duplicity played by agents and political leaders who, more often than not, play games.

"If the Americans were truly determined to stop the spread of nuclear knowledge," they write in clear language, their operatives "would not have left [super sensitive data] on unprotected computers" (page 210).

The accusations of incompetence, or even a cover-up, are grave and made openly, despite the authors' admiration of what the CIA did to dismantle the Khan network.

For Collins and Frantz, Khan was able to steal secrets and peddle his black-market connections far longer than was necessary. Whether the CIA and MI6 needed the time to assemble a huge infrastructure before disrupting Khan's operations is debatable. Yet what is less so, they assert, is the deception involved in skirting in bringing criminals to justice.

The Tinners, Khan, several of his numerous assistants are free men today. Clearly, persuasive political reasons may exist to let them, although few can or ought to bargain over any nuclear black markets. Collins and Frantz believe that the US moved in the nick of time and not, as then CIA director George Tenet asserted, at the "optimal moment" (page 106) to stop the Libyan delivery. Given that by necessity many details are left out in a book such as this one, few can know what did, or might have, happened, if the transfer was not stopped.

In the event, what the CIA and MI6 could never be sure of was the potential existence of a fourth customer (other than Iran, North Korea and Libya), which received Khan's blueprints. Khan was always honest in his motives: He engaged in proliferation to "counter Israel's nuclear advantage" (page 256). This was his effort to slam dunk the ball.

Dr Joseph A. Kéchichian is the author of the forthcoming Legal and Political Reforms in Saudi Arabia (2011).