Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf was forced to resign because he had been told he could face charges of complicity in agreeing to allow Pakistan to provide Iran with details of how to build nuclear bombs.
Musharraf had a direct phone link to President Bush in the Oval Office and had been regularly praised by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as “our most important ally in the region in the war on terrorism”.
He was also a close friend to Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist and “father” of its nuclear bomb.
On February 4, 2004, Khan had sat in a television studio in Islamabad and made one of the most astonishing confessions in the long history of treachery.
“I am solely responsible for operating Pakistan’s international black market in nuclear weapons”, Khan intoned.
Before a stunned world could adjust to the revelation, President Musharraf, dressed in commander fatigues – he’d been an army general – took Khan’s place before the camera to announce that though he was “shocked by these relevations”, he would nevertheless pardon Khan whom he called “my hero” because of his “service to Pakistan”.
What the world did not know until this week was the full extent of the president’s own connection with Khan.
Until shortly before he resigned, Musharraf had clung to the hope that his role in allowing Khan to sell blueprints to Iran would remain a closely guarded secret.
But for months before he dramatically quit office, MI6 has been piecing together how Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which has overall responsibility for the country’s nuclear programme, have set up a number of companies whose activities have been carefully concealed from the United Nations nuclear inspection teams.
The companies, based on the outskirts of Tehran, are working on constructing components for the advanced P2 gas centrifuge, which can enrich uranium to weapons grade capability at three times the speed of conventional P1 centrifuges.
Only last month, as his political opponents closed in on the embattled Musharraf, Iranian nuclear scientists secretly visited the country’s research laboratories in Pakistan, which Khan had set up. Since Khan’s astonishing confession that he was the mastermind behind Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation, the Tehran ayatollahs have consistently denied his help had been crucial.
But earlier this year, MI6 and other European intelligence services established that Iran had resumed work on even more sophisticated enrichment technology – based on Khan’s original blueprints.
Khan’s activities have continued to gain Pakistan immense influence in the Muslim world.
An MI6 report states: “His influence is demonstrated by the huge sums of money lodged in Khan’s bank accounts. He remains one of the wealthiest men in Pakistan”.
One estimate places his fortune at US$40 million – a vast amount in a nation where the average monthly family income is less than US$100. MI6 believe his money is held in banks in Dubai and Switzerland.
While Khan is officially still under house arrest, despite Musharraf’s pardon, Western intelligence sources say the two men have remained in contact.
It has also been established by MI6 that Khan is in touch with one Iranian company working with his blueprints. Sited in the residential quarter of Amir Abad in west Tehran, the Kalaye Electric Company is developing the latest component of the P2 centrifuge. The company insists it is only producing wristwatches.
“Abdul Qadeer Khan may reveal more in the coming weeks in return for his freedom. In that cast the disgraced President Musharraf will come to regret his friendship with the scientist he lauded as our equaliser in the nuclear world”, said one MI6 analyst.
“The former president will then also have to explain how much he really knows about Khan’s connections with North Korea and China while fawning in the praise of the Bush Administration”.
Gordon Thomas is the author of a new edition of Gideon’s Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service, The Mossad, by JR Books of London and available on Amazon Books.
