Pakistan had case against scientist

WASHINGTON -- More than three years ago, Pakistani intelligence agents built a corruption case against Abdul Qadeer Khan, the country's most famous nuclear scientist, but officials under President Pervez Musharraf decided not to pursue it because Khan was a national hero, according to a former Pakistani official.

The former official, who was a case manager at the National Accountability Bureau, the country's leading anticorruption agency, said the dossier prepared by the intelligence officers spanned some 120 pages. It detailed how he reaped massive profits from kickbacks in the procurement of nuclear equipment and amassed seven houses in the wealthiest areas of Islamabad.

Last week, Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, confessed in a dramatic, televised statement to selling nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran, and Libya in one of the largest cases of nuclear proliferation in history. He was swiftly pardoned by Musharraf after telling the nation that he acted alone and that the government had no knowledge of his dealings over two decades.

Musharraf has said he suspected Khan had been sharing nuclear secrets for three years but did not have evidence.

But the former case manager said investigators in 2000 believed there was sufficient evidence to bring corruption charges against Khan, and there was additional evidence that Khan was making unauthorized deals in the international nuclear black market.

The decision not to bring charges allowed Khan to continue his alleged black-market activities for two and a half more years. Musharraf quietly forced Khan to retire in 2001, but did not curtail his international travel or make public the corruption file against him.

"We said that somehow he is a national hero, the National Accountability Bureau is new, [and] we cannot afford to take on someone of his stature," said the former official. He said he agreed with the determination that Khan was too popular to face national prosecution at that time and had recommended waiting a year.

In Pakistan's five-decade standoff with India, Khan played a vital role in building a nuclear weapon to match that of India. He is so revered in Pakistan that his picture appears in school textbooks along with the nation's founder. His fame extends beyond Pakistan to the rest of the Muslim world.

But the dossier prepared in 2000 told a different story, the official said. It reported Khan held $8 million in several bank accounts and had given a house to General Mirza Aslam Beg, the former commander of Pakistan's army, who supported sharing nuclear technology with other Muslim countries. Beg has told reporters he did not authorize Khan to give nuclear secrets to anyone.

The dossier showed that some in Pakistan's government were worried in 2000 about the lack of oversight over Khan's activities in the underground world of nuclear procurement, including clues that he was buying more materials than were necessary for Pakistan's program alone, the official said.

For example, it showed how Khan had acquired a high-tech wiring system at an extremely high price -- buying far more wire from Indonesia than the nuclear program could have used, according to the official -- "enough for 100 years."

The dossier also detailed Khan's close ties with Haji Abdul Razzak, a Dubai-based Pakistani businessman who is wanted on corruption charges in Pakistan, stating that Khan owned stock in one of Razzak's companies. The document indicated that Khan paid "stipends" to about a dozen journalists who wrote flattering articles about him and financed the Pakistan Observer, a newspaper headed by Zahid Malik, Khan's biographer, according to the official.

The dossier also said that Khan owned a hotel worth about $10 million in Timbuktu, Mali, named after his wife Hendrina and that a Pakistani Air Force C-130 aircraft was used to bring antique Pakistani furniture to the hotel, the official said.

On Monday, Musharraf told The New York Times that he had been suspicious of Khan for at least three years and believed him to be operating with "illegal contacts, maybe suspicions of contacts." Musharraf acknowledged that he was wary about pursuing Khan because of a fear of popular backlash.

Musharraf also said in that interview that he had not been given enough evidence about Khan's proliferation activities to move forward with a case until the fall of 2002.

For decades, specialists in international proliferation have warned that Pakistan's military was not only building a bomb, but assisting other countries to do so.

"They were clearly proliferating," said Larry Pressler, a former US senator who urged that sanctions be imposed on Pakistan in the early 1990s. "The generals were traveling. They were talking to everyone in the region."

According to a special report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based human rights organization, Khan secretly visited Busheir, Iran's nuclear facility, in 1986 and 1987 and was retained as a consultant by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to study whether the reactor there could produce plutonium.

In the 1992 report, the Wiesenthal Center, better known for its work hunting Nazi war criminals, said that Pakistan signed a secret nuclear cooperation agreement with Iran in 1987 that involved training Iranian nuclear scientists in Islamabad.

Libya is also believed to have signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Pakistan and funded part of their program, according to the Wiesenthal report and other nuclear nonproliferation specialists. In the early 1990s, Pakistan's government also bought missile designs from North Korea, but for cash, not in a nuclear barter, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto told the Globe this week.

But the dossier is evidence that beyond whatever trading Khan was authorized to do on behalf of Pakistan's nuclear program, he was also making deals on his own.

"There was no check on him," said the official. The dossier "said that Khan was the only guy who had links with the black market and there was no check" on his international nuclear trading.

The Khan file, which was prepared by an outside intelligence agency and handed to the National Accountability Bureau, was considered so sensitive that officials had to come to the office to read it, and could not make copies, he said. The official studied the file in 2000 and took notes, which he showed to a reporter.

Reached by telephone in Islamabad, the former head of the National Accountability Bureau, Lieutenant General Syed Mohammad Amjad, confirmed that the official was a longtime employee of the bureau and said he had a reputation for honesty.

But Amjad said he could not confirm the existence of a dossier on Khan because he left the bureau before the end of 2000.

Pakistan's secretary of information, Syed Anwar Mahmood, also said he had no personal knowledge of the dossier.

Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com.