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(page ix) Olli Heinonen was a senior official with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations organization charged with stopping the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. ... Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian diplomat who was head of the IAEA, had put Heinonen in charge of the most significant and pressing investigation in the agency's 50-year existence: the inquiry into the global black market in nuclear technology led by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist revered throughout the Muslim world as the father of the Islamic bomb.

(page xi) .. as of the fall of 2006, thirty or more countries have both the technical know-how and the motivation to opt for nuclear weapons.

(page xii) (On) October 11, 2001, ... Top-secret Nuclear Emergency Support Teams (NEST) were dispatched to New York City, ... more than a dozen teams of 6 members .. working from unmarked vans and concealing detection instruments in backpacks and briefcases ...

(page 01) (Abdul Qadeer Khan) .. 36 years old, just over 6 feet tall, with a broad forehead, fleshy face, and thick, close-cropped black hair ... spoke adequate Dutch and very good German ... Arriving at the Physics Dynamic Research Laboratory (FDO) on May 1, 1972, to begin a new job as a metallurgist ...

(page 02) FDO was the year-old in-house laboratory of Verenidge Machine Fabrieken, a major Dutch conglomerate, which worked closely with Urenco, a consortium formed by the governments of Britain, West Germany, and the Netherlands, in the design and manufacture of centrifuges. At the time, powerful companies such as Westinghouse and General Electric controlled the facilities that provided enriched uranium to civilian reactors throughout the Western world.

(page 04) Khan was born to a Muslim family on April 27, 1936, in Bhopal, British India. ... His father, Abdul Ghafoor Khan, had been a teacher in the central provinces of India. He retired the year before Khan's birth, devoting his energy to working with the All-India Muslim League, which began as a political party in British India to protect the rights of Muslims and later became the driving force in the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state. ... humility and politeness ... a reverence for life ... his mother Zulekha, visited a fortune teller ...

(He) was more disciplined when it came to religion ... favorite books were histories of the Muslim heroes who had crated the Mughal Empire, gaining control over South Asia by vanquishing infidels in the 16th century.

(page 05) On August 14, 1947, Pakistan was created as an Islamic nation and refuge for Muslims. ... The next day, India gained its independence and control over the remainder of its territory. The division of British India deteriorated rapidly into massive communal warfare, with tens of thousands of Muslims slaughtered in riots as they tried to leave for their newly created state. Khan was 11 years old. .. the violence was seared into his memory .... At 16, Khan bid his parents goodbye and set off for West Pakistan by train. ..

"I was alone," ... The attitude of the Indian police and the railway authorities towards these shattered families was extremely hostile, degrading and insulting. The mischievous behavior will always remain fresh in my memory. They snatched every valuable thing from these poor people." ... Khan carried little of value -- his beloved Mughal history books and a gold pen given to him by his brother on graduation ... a police officer spotted something shiny and reached a fat hand into the boy's shirt pocket, plucking out his treasured pen. Khan was helpless to resist, humiliated by his loss and his weakness. ... a transforming event .. "It was something I'll never forget," he said over and over.

(page 08) The Cold War was well under way and events in the 1950s led to Eisenhower's determination to increase the country's nuclear arsenal in preparation for a possible encounter with the Soviet Union. ...the public's fear of nuclear Armageddon was on the rise meant the escalation would have to be cast in terms that allowed the administration to conceal its true military plans -- thus the facade of creating a civilian nuclear sector to harness the atom for peaceful purposes. ... December 8, 1953, proposed to the UN General Assembly. ... International Atomic Energy Agency ... Atoms for Peace (concept).

(page 11) Enriching uranium cannot be done with just one centrifuge, however, but thousands of the slender cylinders linked by a series of pipes and specialized valves in arrays called cascades.

(page 18) On January 24, 1972, only 5 weeks after being installed by the military as Pakistan's leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ... The humiliating partition of Pakistan had disgraced the military and ushered Bhutto into power. ... his 1967 autobiography ... "All wars of our age have become total wars; all European strategy is based on the concept of total war; and it will have to be assumed that a war waged against Pakistan is becoming total war. It would be dangerous to plan for less and our plans should, therefore, include the nuclear deterrent."

(page 23) On May 18, 1974, about 100 miles from the Pakistani border, India detonated a nuclear device roughly equivalent in power to the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. (p24) .. President Nixon, and .. Henry Kissinger, refused to go along with new sanctions or even permit a harsh condemnation. ... Kissinger's decision was the first in a series of failures by American policymakers to take the significant steps required to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

(page 25) Though India's bomb was intended primarily as deterrence against China, the Pakistanis saw it as a direct threat, ...

(page 28) There are 2 paths to a nuclear device.
The bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima used enriched uranium as its core fissile material; the one that devastated Nagasaki .. was a plutonium device. .. Plutonium is generally regarded as less complicated, but (more easily detectable). ... Enriching uranium through centrifuges ... can be concealed (in) a small factory, even a school gymnasium, could hide the thousand or so centrifuges necessary ....

(page 33) In Europe, the 3 countries that formed Urenco consortium were competing with one another at the same time they were cooperating. Each wanted to boost its domestic nuclear industry by winning the right to develop the new centrifuges for the huge enrichment facility being built at Almelo (Brazil). For the Dutch scientists and engineers working for Urenco, the race translated into long hours of work and an atmosphere that encouraged the open exchange of information. Security concerns took a backseat. ... In the fall of 1974, Urenco decided that the Dutch centrifuges were to be augmented with an improved version developed by German scientists, called the G-2.

(page 40) Siddique Butt ... listed as a science and technology officer at the Pakistani embassy in Brussels.
... Butt's job was to buy the equipment and get it shipped to Pakistan, employing a network of other diplomats, covert agents, and front companies. ... turn a handful of the country's embassies into miniprocurement offices ... the grey market. The modus operandi was to develop a list of the required technology and equipment and assign each item a potential civilian use, which would be used to describe the item to prospective sellers and government export officials.

(page 42) What the Americans and the rest of the world did not yet understand was that Bhutto had set his country on a second, more secret path, which relied on the cleverness of his new volunteer, A.Q. Khan. ... The failure to recognize the significance of the threat was part of a pattern of underestimating the Pakistanis that contributed to their ultimate success.

(page 44) The discovery of Khan's duplicity occurred because of the need for the special metal foil that Khan had helped to develop at Urenco. In September 1975, Butt placed an order for a large quantity of the foil with its Dutch manufacturers.

(page 46) In November 1975, the CIA was an agency in turmoil.
... failures to anticipate the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the Arab-Israeli war in 1973. ... Better to watch and wait, said the CIA man to BVD a few days later, particularly given the criticism the agency was under for its recent intelligence failures.

(page 50) For (Max) Weiss, the destructive reality of the atomic bomb made the victory (of WWII) bleak. CBS Radio commentator Edward R. Murrow seemed to be speaking directly to young Weiss on August 12, 1945, when he said, "Seldom if ever has war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured."

(page 54) American intelligence had already concluded that Israel had used technology supplied by France in the mid-1950s to develop a nuclear arsenal.

(page 55) In 1957, four years after he was restored to the throne in an American-backed coup that ousted a democratically elected government, the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, signed a nuclear-cooperation agreement with the Eisenhower administration. In the years that followed, thousands of Iranian students and scientists were trained in nuclear physics at top universities in the United States and Europe. ... In 1960 .. the Americans agreed to provide Iran with a 5-megawatt research reactor. ...

In (1972) Nixon agreed to increase the number of American military advisers in Iran and to sell the shah billions of dollars' worth of advanced weaponry, ranging from F-16 fighter jets and 14,000 missiles to 4 destroyers and 3 submarines. With his foreign policy under pressure from the debacle in Vietnam, Nixon ended hi meeting with the shah by pleading, "Protect me."

(page 57) In April 1975, .. the United States dominated sales of nuclear technology to the world, accounting for 70% of the international market ... Competition (in Iran) with the Europeans was fierce, so the Ford administration sweetened the deal by reversing U.S. policy on the export of reprocessing technology. ... Kissinger said later that the administration was not concerned that Iran might build nuclear weapons because it was a friend.

(page 59) With the support of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, ford signed a directive authorizing the sale to Iran in January 1976 ... Although Carter promised to prohibit the sale of reprocessing technology, when he met with the shah at the end of 1977 he surprised his aides by assuring him that he could buy any nuclear technology he wanted from the United States, including reprocessing equipment. ... Westinghouse, which hoped to sell 6 billion dollars' worth of nuclear technology to Iran ... Both Westinghouse and General Electric used their influence in Washington to push for the sale.

(page 60) In 1956, the Israelis struck a secret agreement with France to build a plutonium reactor in a remote corner of the Negev desert, near the village of Dimona. ... an extensive underground complex that covered 14 square miles. Not long after work started, American u-2 spy planes spotted the construction, and the Eisenhower administration demanded to know what was happening, Israel initially claimed the site was for a textile factory, yet later described it as a metallurgical-research facility. By 1960, the CIA had identified the Dimona complex as a nuclear reactor and suspected that it was part of a weapons program. The Israelis ... claimed it was solely for civilian purposes.

(page 61) In fact, critical portions of the complex were hidden from (an American team of inspectors) and 6 other inspection teams that followed during the 1960s. The weapons work was conducted deep underground in laboratories accessible only through elevator banks that had been disguised.

(page 68) On July 31, 1976, (Pakistani President) Bhutto signed a secret order establishing the enrichment program, code-named Project 706.

(page 70) Finding a location for the main enrichment plant was critical. ... a hundred-acre site was selected about 20 miles southeast of Islamabad, outside an obscure village called Kahuta. ... To deter the curious, the plant would be given the innocuous name Engineering Research Laboratories. ... Ground was broken in late 1976.

(page 84) Near the end of 1977, a CIA officer in Islamabad was told by a source that construction had started on a huge installation near Kahuta. ... a production center for enriched uranium ...

In the spring of 1977, ... Bertrand Goldschmidt, one of the directors of the French nuclear agency and a physicist with a worldwide reputation. .. said the French had decided to stop the transaction .. had already sold Pakistan the blueprints for the plant. .. "We didn't give them critical pieces of equipment," ... The French had not yet provided Pakistan with a device known as a "chopper," which sliced highly radioactive spent fuel rods into pieces as part of producing plutonium.

(page 88) The Carter administration was at a critical juncture, if it had the will to stop the Pakistani march towards nuclear weapons. The intelligence agencies, led by the CIA and NSA, had provided undeniable evidence ... Congress was aware of the threat ... In mid-1978, a working group ... to develop an outline of the pros and cons of launching air strikes to level the construction under way at Kahuta.

(page 89) ... a special projects group known as Z Division. ... to provide the intelligence community and the State Department with the kinds of highly detailed technical assessments of foreign nuclear programs and weapons capabilities that could be made only by nuclear scientists. ... They were certain that the Pakistanis would never be up to the task because the country was too backward, no matter how much technology it smuggled in from Europe. There was arrogance in the assumption ...

(page 98) (In April, 1979, Bob Gallucci .. a division chief in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in the USA State Department) said that the complexity and extent of Pakistan's shopping list indicated that they were making good progress on centrifuges and that it was likely that Islamabad could soon be producing large quantities of weapons-grade uranium. This assessment was a dramatic turnaround from the recent days when the CIA and Livermore were downplaying ...

(page 101) The Indian nuclear explosion in 1974 was a direct challenge that demanded a response for purposes of national honor as much as actual deterrence of the Indians, whose conventional forces far outnumbered those of Pakistan.

(page 105) (USA President) Carter and his administration feared that challenging (Pakistani General) Zia would drive him deeper into the camp of the Islamic fundamentalists gaining power in Pakistan and across the Muslim world.

(page 106) ... the (USA) state Department's INR produced an analysis ... found that the Koran could be interpreted to justify the use of terror in a holy war and that Zia and other members of Pakistan's military elite regarded an atomic bomb as the ultimate weapon of terror. ..

... on Christmas Eve, (1979) when the first planeloads of Soviet troops landed at Kabul International Airport in Afghanistan ... an invasion was imminent ... Zbigniew Brzezinski, the (USA) president's national-security adviser, saw the invasion as an opportunity ... saw a chance for the United States to confront the Soviets through proxies. ... Because of Pakistan's proximity to Afghanistan, enlisting it was critical ... we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels, .. this will require a review of our policy towards Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy towards Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy."

... a historic decision ... on January 23, 1980 ... easing sanctions ... the American government had decided that short-term strategic considerations outweighed the future danger from Pakistan's nuclear ambitions, ...

(page 109) The message was reinforced in the spring of 1981 when (USA President) Reagan submitted a request to Congress for $3.2 billion in aid to Pakistan over the next 6 years, a dramatic escalation. The assistance was to be divided equally between economic and military assistance, including the option to buy 40 F-16s, which the Pakistani Air Force had been trying to buy since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

(page 114) The French nuclear industry had taken the lead in helping Iraq build its first nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha, a dusty outpost 10 miles southeast of Baghdad. The French called the reactor Osirak ....

Early on the morning of April 6, 1979, several Israeli (Mossad) demolition experts broke into a hanger operated by a French nuclear company at La Seyne-sur-Mer, near the port of Toulon, and destroyed reactor cores scheduled to be shipped to Iraq. ... Yahya el-Meshad, an Egyptian-born nuclear scientist trained in the Soviet Union, had been recruited by Iraq ... On June 14, 1980, Meshad was on a trip to France to inspect work being done for Osirak. ... bludgeoned to death (in his hotel room) ... accompanied to his room the night before by a prostitute .. Marie Claude Magal ... (who) a few days later ... had been hit by a car (driven by a Mossad agent) and killed.

(page 115) By the summer of 1981, the reactor was nearing completion, ... On June 7, six of Israel's American-built F-15 and 8 of its F-16 jet fighters left the runway at Etzion Air Force Base in the Negev desert, bound for Tuwaitha. The F-16s had been stripped of some of their fuel tanks so each could carry two 1-ton bombs, capable of destroying the huge concrete-and-steel reactor container. ... wiped out the Osirak reactor ..

(page 118) Abdul Aziz Khan had sent technical literature on nuclear-related subjects to Pakistan. ... The case illustrated the difficulty in prosecuting even someone caught red-handed, because of the dual civilian and military uses of the technology and the vagueness of export laws.

(page 119) .. the Pakistani pipeline ... an effective and widespread network for the procurement overseas of equipment, components, materials and services required ... the end users, and the destinations, of goods ... are usually disguised. Fifty-one companies, organizations, and fronts were being used as false destinations for nuclear-related goods ... University .. names like Northern Traders and Punjab Fertilizer Company.

... krytrons, which are inch-long cathode tubes developed as specialized high-speed switches for radar transmitters during World War II. The gas-filled devices turn extremely high voltages of electric current into a precise burst as short as one millionth of a second. The precision is essential to detonate a nuclear device, ...

(page 126) The CIA and the State Department delivered the truth about Pakistan to President Reagan and his advisers, who chose to ignore it in favor of routing the Soviets in Afghanistan.

(page 129) Richard Barlow .. wrote "In fact, Pakistan's success .. was a clear cut failure of policy perpetuated by the consumers of intelligence, not intelligence staff." ... the treacherous gap between those who collect intelligence and those who twist it to suit their own purposes.

(page 155) ... Gotthard Lerch, a quiet German who was living in the picturesque Swiss village of Grabs.
.. mechanical engineer .. (then) vacuum valves that were used in the manufacture of centrifuges. ... had mastered the complicated vacuum technology used in the conversion of uranium hexafluoride gas into enriched uranium. ...

Lerch developed a reputation as the man to see about all types of high-technology needs ... Iran ... Lerch took the train to Zurich in July and met 2 scientists from Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Masud Naraghi and Mohammed Allahdad, ... Iran seemed to having a growing appetite for nuclear weapons because in the final months of the war, when the larger Iranian forces appeared on the verge of winning, Saddam Hussein had launched a series of attacks with chemical weapons, killing thousands of Iranians. The attacks turned the tide in favor of Iraq. Iran protested at the United Nations ... their failure to take any action ... Iran had to develop its own deterrence ...

(page 159) Later Khan would rationalize his participation in the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran in a variety of ways. Chiefly, he would argue that providing an atomic weapon to another Muslim country was a way to shift some of the West's scrutiny away from Pakistan.

(page 173) Gerald Brubaker, the senior assistant for nonproliferation policy at the Pentagon, ... Barlow's sin was that he refused to go along with what he viewed as the manipulation of intelligence. ... In attempting to justify the dismissal, Brubaker started a campaign to discredit Barlow. ... Brubaker pressured security officers to dig into Barlow's personal life, his finances, and his marriage. ... The logic was circular: Barlow was told that he was not entitled to know the names of his accusers or the details of the investigation because they were classified, and he no longer held a security clearance. ... he faced more false accusations ... was cleared of any wrongdoing ... no information to support allegations ... based on false charges ..

But the man who spoke out about lies to Congress concerning Pakistan's nuclear arsenal never got his job back, despite appeals from senior Department of Defense security and personnel officials and prominent congressmen. He was damaged goods, someone whose determination that the record should reflect accurate intelligence assessments stained him. ... Len Weiss .. told Barlow .. "You should understand that although there is a law to protect whistleblowers, they always find a way to get to you"

(page 178) The military leaders of Pakistan had long seen the country's defense industry as a potentially valuable source of foreign exchange. Its conventional weapons, mostly small arms and ammunition, were marketed aggressively to developing countries. Even Khan had gotten into the act, using a Chinese design for shoulder-fired missiles to produce a version that his laboratories sold. Beg's ambitions for selling nuclear technology to Iran were even more outsized. He suggested to one government minister that the sales might bring in 12 billion dollars a year.

(page 180) By January, 1990, Khan exhibited all the trappings of success.
Prosperity in Pakistan is measured in the acquisition of two things: gold and real estate.
... a say in virtually every major land deal in Islamabad ... Khan owned several homes, businesses, schools, clubs, a hotel, and a Chinese restaurant called the Hot Spot. ...

Khan also exerted influence over Pakistan's press.
He secretly owned one newspaper, the Pakistan Observer, ... Khan kept a handful of reporters on his payroll, and he often invited the press on junkets abroad to cover his speeches and scientific conferences, with expenses paid by Khan's laboratory.

(page 183) ... tensions were escalating (between Pakistan and) India over the disputed territory of Kashmir ... Kashmir had remained a part of India after partition despite its Muslim majority. In early May 1990, ... Pakistan had enough enriched uranium to assemble 6 to 10 nuclear weapons in short order, and its existing fleet of F-16s was redeployed to bases throughout the country to protect against a preemptive strike by India.

(page 185) On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait and began massing his million-man army for what looked like a possible assault on Saudi Arabia, which would threaten the world's oil supplies. ... Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ... had been convinced that the Watergate scandal had weakened the presidency ...

(page 187) On January 16, 1991, allied forces began a withering bombing campaign against Iraq and its forces in Kuwait. The ground attack followed on February 23, and armored forces rolled through Kuwait and into Iraq. ...

(page 188) John Jennekens, the IAEA deputy director-general in charge of compliance with proliferation restrictions.
... Jennekens was dead wrong. For nearly a decade, Saddam had concealed an ambitious clandestine program that had moved Iraq closer to an atomic bomb than anyone outside the country could have imagined. At Tuwaitha, site of the Osirak reactor, he had built an entire parallel weapons program in the shadows of the civilian installations inspected regularly by the IAEA.

(page 189) .. American and British governments had failed to respond aggressively to those early reports because in those years Iraq was seen as a Western Ally because it was fighting Iran. ... bureaucratic inertia ... taking countries at their word ... we weren't looking.

(page 195) After Iraq, Blix had begun to encourage member countries to share intelligence about suspected diversion of nuclear materials and possible clandestine activities with the agency's staff. ... In April 1994, after months of wrangling, the North Koreans withdrew from the IAEA ... The United States regarded the prospect of a nuclear North Korea so seriously that President Bill Clinton's senior advisers considered military strikes against its nuclear facilities. ... On October 21, 1994, North Korea agreed to freeze its plutonium-production program in exchange for fuel oil, economic cooperation, and the construction of 2 light-water reactors, ...

.. Li Sang Gun, the director of the radiochemistry laboratory at Yongbyon ... memories of the Korean War were still sharp and painful, and he described the napalm attacks by the American aircraft and other privations during the war. ... their hatred of the United States.

(page 198) While a nation's motives are inevitably complex, the countries pursuing nuclear arsenals in the new age of proliferation faced enemies who might be deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation: India feared China, Pakistan feared India, and Israel was surrounded by hostile Arab countries. The Iraq decision was based more on its desire to dominate the Middle East, but its program drove Iran to developing a matching arsenal. North Korea's nuclear efforts were rooted in decades of fear of the United States; South Africa sought nuclear weapons after international sanctions left it isolated and vulnerable at a time when the Soviets were ramping up their influence in the neighborhood.

(page 214) In early May, 1995, Bill Clinton ... headed to Moscow ... Russian president Boris Yeltsin .. on the verge of becoming a major supplier to Iran's nuclear program, under the guise of civilian development. The primary vehicle for transferring technology was an 800-million-dollar contract announced in January 1995 that called for Russia to complete the reactor at Bushehr. ... Iran had tried to buy enriched uranium from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan ... The Clinton administration was still trying to persuade China not to sell nuclear reactors to Iran. ...

China officially opposed nuclear proliferation, but the reality was shaped by its self-perception as a nuclear outsider, never quite a member of the club led by the United States and the former Soviet Union. China developed its nuclear arsenal partly in response to the American threat to use nuclear devices on its troops in the Korean War and didn't test its first nuclear device until 1964. ... Even when the CIA had picked up signs of a shipment of centrifuge parts from Pakistan to Iran in 1994, ... the incident was regarded as random and minor.

(page 220) Khan ... was pretty savvy in the way he set up his network.
He used offices and faxes for a short amount of time and then moved on. He also did much of the negotiating himself.

(page 227) Clinton telephoned (Nawaz) Sharif (elected Pakistani prime minister in February 1997) 4 times in the days after the Indian tests to urge restraint and offer a package of incentives to stand down. Clinton promised to write off American loans, repeal the Pressler and Solarz (anti-proliferation) amendments, and seek congressional approval for new military assistance.

(page 230) On May 28, Pakistani and foreign dignitaries gathered in a bunker about 6 miles from the blast site.
... At 3:16 in the afternoon, calling out, "All praise be to Allah," (Muhammad Arshad, a young science officer) initiated the firing sequence. Five simultaneous explosions deep underground shook the mountain.

(page 235) When B.S.A. Tahir arrived at Khan's apartment in Dubai in late 1998, ... the first task facing Khan and Tahir that day was deciding where to locate the plant. ... he owned his luxury apartment and had ensconced a mistress in a second apartment a few blocks away. Tahir's computer business, already serving as a front for shipments to Irtan, offering access to large, anonymous warehouses in the free-trade zone, where the manufacturing operation could be set up. ... Dubai as a "perfect black hole" ... someone would have to be in Dubai on a full-time basis ...

(page 237) Urs Tinner ... village of Haag (in Switzerland) ... the younger of Friedrich's two sons ... was an accomplished technician with attention to quality and detail ... At 32, Urs Tinner had recently gone through a divorce from his Russian wife, ... required a separate freight business as an added layer of security. ...

.. British engineer Peter Griffin ... sold a wide range of industrial equipment there for factories, agriculture, and nuclear facilities. ... Gunes Cire and Selim Alguadis, who ran 2 Turkish electronics companies that had sold equipment to Pakistan and Iran, ... Heinz Mebus, the German engineer, had died, but Gotthard Lerch was brought on to find someone ... Gerhard Wisser, a German engineer, had immigrated to South Africa in the 1960s ... nuclear-weapons program .... When South Africa abandoned its program in the early 1990s, Wisser and a host of other suppliers and engineering firms faced bankruptcy. ... in the middle of an expensive and ugly divorce. ... Tahir had come to Johannesburg with his uncle, Mohammed Farooq .... he went to the offices of Tradefin, an engineering and manufacturing company that was run by a former colleague from the nuclear program, Johan Meyer (in Vanderbijlpark, 50 miles southeast of Johannesburg, ...

(page 252) In November 1999, Musharraf created the National Accountability Bureau to go after the endemic corruption plaguing the public and private sectors, and he underscored his commitment to that goal by appointing as its director Lieutenant General Syed Mohammad Amjad ... given the authority to arrest anyone suspected of corruption and detain them for up to 90 days merely on Majad's signature.

(page 260) On March 10, 2001, A.Q. Khan's career in Pakistan's nuclear industry came to an official end. ... Blaming Musharraf, Khan decided that he would challenge the little general by running for president against him. ... Banned from Kahuta and cut off the equipment he had been stealing from the lab, Khan now had to depend more heavily on the network. ...

(page 266) On the morning of September 12, General Musharraf ... Aligning himself with the Americans in what the former army commando suspected would be a hellish fight on his own border entailed high risks for Musharraf, whose Sunni-dominated government had long provided financial and political help to the Taliban in order to maintain a friendly regime as a buffer against its on-again, off-again relations with Iran's Shiites. ... Refusing to sign on with the Americans at this desperate hour, he realized, would expose him to the same kind of wrath they were about to rain down on Afghanistan.

(page 267) According to Ahmed, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age unless it cooperated in going after Al Qaeda and its allies.

(page 268) In October, (USA Secretary of State, Colin) Powell visited Islamabad, and the security of Pakistan's nukes was part of his agenda. He told Musharraf that the United States was willing to supply technical assistance to improve the security of the nuclear weapons, including transferring technology called "permissive action links" that would prevent warheads from being armed unless a number of people entered codes.

(page 272) In December 2001, Tahir struck a deal with a Scomi (Group .. Malaysian company) subsidiary, Scomi Precision Engineering ... to produce ... metal tubing ... Urs Tinner agreed to move to Kuala Lumpur to take charge of the factory. ... Tinner decided to substitute high-strength aluminum (in place of the difficult-to-obtain carbon fiber for the P-2 rotors) ... placed an order for 330 tons of the aluminum with the Singapore offices of a German company. ... to produce parts for at least 10,000 centrifuges.

(page 274) The payment for the uranium hexafluoride was a good example of how the system worked.
A Libyan bank wired $2 million to a Dubai account controlled by Khan. The payment, minus about $200,000 kept as a commission by Khan, was then transferred to a North Korean bank in Dubai. The third bank sent the money to yet another financial institution in Macao, a region in the South China Sea with a reputation as a haven for drug runners, spies, and arms dealers and long used by North Korea to launder money. In this case, the money arrived in an account belonging to New Hap Hieng Investment Company, a North Korean government entity long accused by the United States of selling technology for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

(page 278) Olli Heinonen lived on the outskirts of Vienna.
... had spent nearly 20 years at the IAEA. ... A typical Finn, he rarely showed emotion ...

(page 281) Heinonen had dealt with Iranians enough over the years to understand that every encounter carried the likelihood of extended negotiations, and this was to be no different. His initial contact started a back and forth that was to last for years and went like this: The IAEA would ask for access to a site and then wait days, weeks, and months for a response. While the Iranians stalled, they concealed any suspicious work and concocted cover stories. In this instance, simply getting permission for ElBaradei to go to Iran turned into a game of diplomatic chess, played purely according to the Iranian clock. On September 5, (2002) ElBaradei met with Salehi and a delegation of Iranian nuclear officials in Vienna. ElBaradei emphasized that the agency had to evaluate all of the evidence that came its way, regardless of the merits of the organization making the accusations, and he said he wanted to visit the sites. Salehi responded that he lacked the authority to permit access to the locations, but he promised to convey the request to Tehran. .... leaving Natanz, Arak, and Kalaye off-limits.

(page 283) It was not until February 20, 2003, six months after the disclosure in Washington, that the Iranian government permitted ElBaradei to visit the country ... restricted to two days ... would eventually be home to a massive uranium-enrichment plant capable of holding 50,000 or more centrifuges and producing enriched uranium to fuel a series of reactors around the country to generate electricity. ... The pattern was to become familiar: Iranian officials would deny an accusation until confronted with proof. and then they would try to explain away the lies and evasions, and pledge not to do it again.

(page 289) ... Iranian leaders were nervous about being wedged between 2 pro-American regimes in neighboring countries and, after seeing Saddam ousted, influential factions in Tehran were more determined than ever to protect their country with a nuclear weapon. ... helping its fellow Shiites in Iraq and protecting its own interests in Afghanistan.

(page 297) Israel's own arsenal of atomic weapons had been an open secret for years, and its weapons installations were closed to the IAEA. So Israel's Foreign Ministry and the Mossad came up with a strategy of careful and anonymous leaks, aimed at fueling worries about Iran's intentions.

(page 299) The Strait of Malacca is a narrow, perilous 500 mile-long waterway that forms the main passage between the Pacific and the Indian oceans. It borders Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. The thousands of oil tankers, freighters, and tugs that ply its waters carry more than 1/4 of the world's trade, and they are constantly on the lookout for pirates who hide among the thousands of tiny islands and inlets. ... in late August 2003, 45-foot-long wooden crates were loaded onto one of the anonymous ships ... had come from Scomi Precision Engineering and were marked "agricultural machinery," with a shipping invoice that said the cargo was bound for Aryash Trading Company in Dubai. ... roughly 25,000 casings, pumps, tubes, flanges, and other parts, all manufactured to precise tolerances from high-strength aluminum, bound for warehouses in Libya. ... the 4th and largest shipment to Libya since the plant had started operating in December 2002. ... its nearly 4,000-mile voyage to the Persian Gulf, the CIA monitored its progress with spy satellites.

(page 301) Meyer's contraption was one of the last pieces of the nuclear puzzle being assembled for Libya. By this time, the Khan network had sent dozens of shipments of nuclear technology to Tripoli. There were electronic regulators and power supplies from Turkey, sophisticated machine tools from Switzerland and South Korea, P-2 centrifuge prototypes from Pakistan, large quantities of high-strength aluminum and maraging steel from Singapore and Malaysia, uranium hexafluoride from China. Two form-flowing lathes from Spain had found their way to Libya after an odyssey from Dubai to South Africa; once in Tripoli, the machines were equipped with computerized controls that allowed them to operate at the precision levels required to produce centrifuge rotors. Dozens of Libyan technicians were completing training in Dubai, Spain, and other countries. ... resorting to taking digital photographs of the contents of each shipment to avoid later disputes.

(page 328) About 9:30 on the night of January 28, the C-17 lumbered to a halt on the runway outside Tripoli.
The nuclear equipment was waiting inside the hangers ... First aboard were the cylinders of uranium hexafluoride from Pakistan and North Korea. Next up were the P-2 rotors, the complete P-1 centrifuges, and the two Spanish lathes. The guidance sets for the long-range Scud missiles were also wheeled up ... the case containing the nuclear-warhead plans .... The Americans were finding that Libya had amassed far more nuclear technology than they had imagined previously, illustrating that even under the best of circumstances espionage rarely provides a complete picture. .... They had 10 times more stuff or 5 times more stuff than anyone had ever thought.

(page 333) On February 24, 2004, the IAEA staff produced a 13-page analysis of Iran's nuclear program ... The language was scrubbed for several days ... The result was a compromise report that praised the Iranians for limited cooperation while still accusing them of withholding critical information ... John Bolton (of the USA) was angered by the draft ... Kenneth Brill, the American ambassador to the IAEA ... arguing ... for economic sanctions ...

The consummate diplomat, ElBaradei was reluctant to pursue the path of confrontation laid out by the Americans, fearing that it would lead to a war like the one under way in Iraq, without hard evidence that Iran was engaged in a weapons program.

The IAEA director general found support among the nonaligned countries represented ... South Africa, Venezuela, Egypt, and Malaysia. These countries accepted ElBaradei's conclusion. They were motivated partly by solidarity with Iran, which was also a member of the nonaligned movement, but more significantly by fears that their own civilian nuclear programs might be jeopardized in the future if they ran afoul of the United States. Their anger was increased because the Bush administration had recently disclosed that it was conducting research on a new generation of precision atomic weapons even as it was arguing that Iran should be denied a nuclear program because of suspicions about its intentions.

"The United States follows a double standard that allows it to develop and threaten to use nuclear weapons while denying them to smaller countries," Hussein Haniff, Malaysia's ambassador to the IAEA, said ... "The Americans must reduce their nuclear arsenal, not expand it, and they must deal fairly and objectively with other countries."

(page 345) The investigation of the Khan Network was even larger and more complex than Olli Heinonen envisioned. From the outset, many of the companies, governments, and people involved refused to cooperate. The Pakistanis informed the IAEA that Khan was off-limits. Tahir's statement to the Malaysian police offered clues that could unravel much of the operation -- he had implicated a dozen and outlined their roles -- but attempts to interview him were rebuffed by Malaysian authorities, who did not want to embarrass their country ...Investigators in Germany, Switzerland, and South Africa were gathering their own evidence for criminal cases, so their cooperation was restricted. The Americans ... withholding the full scope of what they had learned ...

The best information came from the Libyan documents which enabled Miharu Yonemura to construct a giant matrix of suppliers and front men. More names were added by sifting through files at the IAEA and articles in the international press. ... The Iranians provided the names of 3 Germans they claimed were involved in the earliest deal to buy centrifuges. Even the Pakistanis offered grudging assistance, though they continued to deny any official involvement in Khan's activities. ... On another occasion, a visiting Pakistani nuclear specialist quietly handed Heinonen a piece of paper with the names of 15 Europeans suspected of helping Khan on the Libyan project. Heinonen assumed the Pakistanis wanted to divert attention from Khan's role by drawing attention to others. ... comparing invoices ... The scientist's caution had been replaced by an investigator's determination to get to the bottom of the case, regardless of the means.

(page 347) ... Heinonen .. met with Friedrich Tinner ... (who) introduced him to his two sons, Marco and Urs. ... The Tinners had grown rich and avoided trouble with the authorities by never trusting anyone. ... After Urs fled Malaysia in October 2003, Khan had telephoned and told him to go to Dubai. ... to make electronic copies of a particular set of drawings in a special locked filing cabinet inside Khan's apartment. ... he found what appeared to be complicated schematics and plans for what looked like a warhead. ... scanning the papers onto computer discs and mailing them in separate packages to Khan and Tahir. ... ? the same Chinese atomic warhead that Khan had delivered to Libya. ... Khan had made 41 trips to Dubai and traveled to 18 other countries in the 10 years before he was placed under house arrest.

(page 356) ElBaradei .. "People confuse knowledge, industrial capacity, and intention." .. "A lot of what you see about Iran right now is assessment of intentions."

... At 10:36 on the morning of October 9, (2006) the North Koreans announced that they had successfully tested a nuclear device. ... the small device was based on plutonium .... North Korea's nuclear test and Iran's continuing defiance reverberated beyond their own borders and increased the likelihood that other countries might seek parity through their own nuclear weapons.

(page 360) From his days working in Amsterdam until his downfall, Khan exploited weak export controls and lax enforcement. ... the easy availability of nuclear-related equipment and material on the gray market, as governments promoted high-tech exports. Globalization and the Internet offered even easier and faster methods of distributing sensitive information and technology. ... In 2005, Britain's MI5 revealed that more than 360 businesses and individuals worldwide were suspected of playing a role in the development of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

(page 361) What steps are required to restrain the ambitions of nuclear aspirants? ...
... restricting the supply of highly enriched uranium. ... replacing (the dozens of research reactors worldwide) with versions relying on ... low-enriched uranium. ... establish sanctions to impose on any country that withdraws from the (nonproliferation) treaty and tries to build weapons using fissile material and facilities ... make a commitment to further reductions in the (nuclear) arsenal and abandon the development of new weapons and the strategy of using them for tactical warfare. ... enforcing restrictions on sales of nuclear technology to allies as well as adversaries. ... strengthening existing international treaties and ... developing new methods of (respectful and honest) communication ... more power .. and more cooperation from member states to the IAEA ... improved intelligence sharing.