AB Awan, an officer of the Indian Police before 1947 and now director general of the Pakistan Intelligence Bureau, stood on the porch of then Foreign Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s house on the mall in Rawalpindi, waiting for his car. He wondered if his cheeks stung more from the loo or from Bhutto’s bitter tongue. Awan had just attended two back-to-back meetings of the ‘Kashmir cell’ and the ‘Liberation Cell’, both chaired by Bhutto.
Awan was unhappy because he feared all of his hard work would go to waste. How would he be able to kick-start the insurgency without a promoter to catalyse it? Awan was an old-school officer, upright and loyal to his master President Ayub Khan. Would Ayub listen to him rather than to Bhutto? As Awan debated these questions, his Austin Cambridge car drew up and he instructed his driver to take him to the PIB safe house on Convoy Road. He had a meeting with a banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, who ran the United Bank Limited (UBL), Pakistan’s second-largest bank. Abedi was supposed to activate the hawala channels that Awan was going to use to fund the planned insurrection in the Valley.
Abedi was very obsequious before Awan and understood what was needed to expand the funding being provided by the PIB to the nascent Master Cell operation in the Valley since March 1964. Abedi was now part of Pakistan’s deep state and became the first banker to Pakistan’s jihad against India. The PIB already had accounts operating with UBL. Abedi set up what he called the ‘black network’ within UBL to handle each and every demand of the PIB. The black network of UBL was to further the bank’s interests and aims in Pakistan. In later years, when UBL was nationalised and Abedi had launched BCCI, he carried the black network across to his new institution. The black network was launched to provide the Pakistani government with every kind of service it needed and involved the single-minded pursuit of cultivating key individuals who were in power.
On 20 January 1972, within a month of Lt Gen. Niazi’s inglorious surrender, Bhutto called all the eminent physicists and scientists in Pakistan to convene in Multan under a shamiana, or multi-coloured tent, pitched in the lush gardens of the home of Nawab Sadiq Hussain Qureshi, a wealthy landlord and close friend of Bhutto. This meeting brought together Pakistan’s scientific elite to discuss how to make
a nuclear bomb.
During this period, an India-born Pakistani Muhajir called Abdul Qadir Khan, or AQ Khan, was writing letters to Bhutto, wishing to share his nuclear knowledge with the Pakistani government. In August 1974, after having him vetted by the ISI, Bhutto sent for Khan.
Khan’s back-of-the-envelope calculations showed Bhutto that each bomb typically required 15 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and that this would cost only $60,000 to manufacture. The icing on the cake was the discovery of a vein in the foothills of Pakistan’s Suleiman Mountains range in 1963; the country was found to have an enormous stockpile of uranium ore. Bhutto sent Khan back to Holland to collect all the data on the breakthroughs made in Germany on centrifuge design and simultaneously instructed Munir Khan to begin research on building a uranium enrichment plant.
Meanwhile, on 1 September 1976, a covert group called Safari Club was created at a meeting at the famous Mt Kenya Safari Club resort in Nanyuki, about 200 kilometres from Nairobi. This resort was then owned by the British conglomerate Lonrho. The participants in this top-secret meeting formed a syndicate. They consisted of the following key heads of intelligence in five countries: 1. France—Alexandre de Marenches, director of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage (SDECE), France’s external intelligence agency 2. Saudi Arabia—Kamal Adham, director of intelligence, Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah (Saudi Intelligence) 3. Egypt—Gen. Kamal Hassan Ali, director of intelligence, Mukhabarat (Egyptian Intelligence) 4. Morocco—Gen. Ahmed Dlimi, director of intelligence and commander of the Royal Moroccan Army 5. Iran—Gen. Nematollah Nassiri of SAVAK (Iranian Intelligence). The Safari Club played a secret role in political intrigues involving many countries, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, while being primarily funded through secret back-door deals, government banks and independent operations. One of the primary sources of funds for the club’s secret operations and tasks was the BCCI.
AQ Khan had calculated that he would need at least 10,000 centrifuges for a viable bomb programme. He had selected the CNOR-designed centrifuge prototype as it was simpler to build and, most importantly, had lost the race in favour of the G-2 centrifuge design adopted at URENCO. There were dozens of suppliers with vast stockpiles of thousands of components that they wanted to sell. However, despite the easy availability of components, the CNOR prototype had an unresolved design flaw. The attempt to resolve this was classified, and Khan was unable to access these papers. Khan had no choice but to work on removing this flaw, and he undertook several personal trips to Holland for this. All this while, Swaleh Naqvi and the BCCI branches across Europe wrote out all the cheques that Khan needed. Prime Minister Bhutto was chuffed with the progress Khan was making. He ordered several underground test tunnels to be constructed at two locations in Baluchistan—five in the Ras Koh range on the Baluchistan plateau and one 160 kilometres west of this range, beneath the sands of the Kharan Desert, also in Baluchistan. Each tunnel was capable of withstanding a 20-kiloton explosion, equivalent to the magnitude of the Nagasaki bomb.
By early 1977, Khan had a sophisticated clandestine procurement network running across Europe and operated by ISI field agents functioning under diplomatic cover. The man running the European programme was Sulfikar Ahmed Butt, who had been present at Bhutto’s Multan conference and was also at one time Khan’s case officer. Butt was posted in Brussels at the Pakistan embassy as head of the science and technology department. He was the one who routed all payments to Khan’s suppliers.
Days later, at 1.45 am on 4 April 1979, Lt Gen. Arif oversaw the execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto by hanging. That same month, material handwritten by Bhutto while he was on death row surfaced at a printing press in London. The manuscript was labelled ‘If I am Assassinated’. The Indian typesetter at the press found the manuscript intriguing and made copies, one of which landed in the hands of Gary Modwell, then Indian external intelligence agency RAW’s station chief in London. The manuscript, which was later published, revealed that Bhutto had signed a secret nuclear protocol with China in June 1976. This protocol enabled Pakistan to rely on China to fill in all the knowledge, process and technology gaps to weaponise its nuclear bomb after it was built and tested.
One-kilogram-sized bricks of hashish began appearing in the US uniquely stamped with a seal showing crossed AK 47 rifles encircled by the legend ‘Smoke the Soviets Out’. Between 1982 and 1992, the population of US heroin addicts increased from 500,000 to 750,000. Meanwhile, AQ Khan’s work was causing concern among the Israelis. In 1979, a senior intelligence source in Israel had been shown a classified US memo by RAW, India’s external spy agency. This memo was intercepted on its way from the US embassy in New Delhi to US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, confirming that the US privately believed that Pakistan would explode its first nuclear device by 1981.The deeply shocked Israelis started planning a pre-emptive strike on Kahuta but had to put it off under US pressure. Further, the lame-duck Charan Singh government, which lost a parliamentary vote of confidence after just 23 days of gaining power in New Delhi, was unwilling to provide logistical support to the Israelis.
The Herald of Pakistan in its September 1985 issue had reported that at least from 1982 onwards, the logistics of ferrying drugs from the heroin refineries in Baluchistan and NWFP was under the control and operation of the ISI. The trucks of the Pakistan Army’s National Logistics Cell (NLC) arrived in NWFP with arms from Karachi unloaded from ships chartered by the CIA and returned laden with heroin under ISI protection back to Karachi for global distribution. Legal cover for this activity was provided by the CIA, as a result of which this trade mushroomed to gigantic levels never before conceived. The BCCI was primus inter pares among the bankers to the jihad.
The only relationship that overshadowed this was the BCCI-Pakistan relationship. Gen. Zia was in charge of Pakistan during the boom years of BCCI, and he did the most for the bank. According to former BCCI executive Nazir Chinoy, every time Abedi visited Pakistan, he would make it a point to meet Gen. Zia, but only in the dead of the night. Abedi created the Pakistan BCCI Foundation in 1981 as a tax dodge, and his old friend Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who was then finance minister, awarded it tax-free status. In return, BCCI provided $10 million in 1985 for the establishment of the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology in NWFP. Dr AQ Khan was appointed director of this institute and carried on part of his nuclear research over here. In the same period, other BCCI officials were assisting agents of the ISI in purchasing nuclear technologies paid for by ISI front companies through BCCI Canada.
The Chinese were supplying technical expertise and uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to Pakistan and violating the NPT. Voluminous data on the Pakistani nuclear programme with the US Atomic Energy Commission enabled it to replicate the Pakistani bomb, which was the size of a soccer ball. This was kept in a vault in the Pentagon. Computer simulations of the warhead showed it worked perfectly. Intelligence reports also revealed that the Chinese had shipped enough weapons-grade enriched uranium to enable Pakistan to detonate a device whenever Gen. Zia would want to do so, unhindered by whether or not AQ Khan had generated enough uranium for such a test. Apparently, the Kahuta technicians had converted this uranium into a metal core which would fit into the Chinese design of the bomb that Kahuta had received. There were significant numbers of Chinese technicians at Kahuta working on triggering mechanisms, centrifuges, vacuum systems, etc. The Chinese also brought rocket propellants and super-hard metals like maraging steels.
A 1984 report by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) identified Pakistan as the source of 31 per cent of the heroin in the US markets. The US Congress was so alarmed that it dispatched a special delegation led by Senator Paul Hawkins to visit Pakistan in February 1984. Hawkins was the author of special legislation stipulating a drastic reduction of foreign aid to those nations allegedly supplying narcotics to the US and who would not wholeheartedly cooperate with the DEA. By 1985, drug trafficking was estimated to be a $100 billion industry, out of which the Pakistani mafia’s share was in the region of $30 billion. Senator Hawkins’s trip to Pakistan… was preceded by certain events that pointed to overt official complicity in Pakistan in its runaway boom in illegal and clandestine heroin exports to the US. During an official Pakistan tour in 1982, US Attorney General William French Smith and his aides discovered heroin being openly sold in a market near the Khyber Pass.
In addition to keeping back intelligence, the (US) State Department had been facilitating back-door procurement, issuing scores of approvals for the Pakistan embassy in Washington to export hi-tech equipment for its bomb. The commerce department had refused to licence such equipment for export for proliferation reasons. Barlow kept digging. His analysis of US cable traffic in and out of Pakistan revealed that sensitive details about the CIA or US customs operations were somehow always discovered by Pakistan before the trap was sprung. Matching incidents with the cables, Barlow discovered that the State Department had been sending detailed demarches, treacherously tipping off contacts in the Pakistan government.
Dr AQ Khan had pressed the right buttons and got Hamid Gul really worked up. In the spring of 1989, Hamid Gul, the ISI chief, began plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. He approached a mujahedeen fighter and financier based in Peshawar, who was as yet unknown in West or South Asia. This was Osama bin Laden, a Saudi dissident whose family had made their fortune in construction and had many prosperous and powerful political connections.
There was a huge war chest assembled, with Osama bin Laden raising $10 million, against which he set one precondition. Nawaz Sharif, who would take over as prime minister, was to transform Pakistan into
a strict Islamic state administered solely by Sharia law, an austere theocracy of the type that would shortly rise under the Taliban in Afghanistan. Sharif agreed. The money was already in Pakistan. When Benazir Bhutto found out about the plot to kill her, she first sent an old family friend, Gen. Iftikhar Gillani, to ascertain whether the Saudis were involved. Gillani sought an appointment with the king of Saudi Arabia, who confirmed that the Saudis were not involved in this plot and added that he considered Benazir to be like a daughter to him. This meant that the plot had the approval of Ishaq Khan and Gen. Beg, with Hamid Gul as the executioner.
After 10 years of untrammelled growth under Gen. Zia, Pakistan’s drug industry was too intricately woven into the fabric of its politics and economics for simple police action to be successful in eradicating it, let alone curbing it. Economists conservatively estimated that total annual earnings from the heroin trade were $10 billion, far larger than the government’s budget and equal to one-quarter of Pakistan’s then GDP. This money was also used to trade in legislators to destabilise legitimately elected governments.
This indifference received a severe jolt when the CIA discovered that the Chinese were going to test the first Pakistani bomb on behalf of Pakistan. Robert M Gates, George HW Bush’s then deputy NSA, flew to Pakistan on 18 May 1990 to dissuade the Pakistanis from going ahead with their plans via their Chinese proxy. Gates was unsuccessful, and the Chinese detonated the first Pakistani atomic bomb at Lop Nor in Xinjiang on 26 May 1990.
Excerpted from Iqbal Chand Malhotra’s The Bomb, The Bank, The Mullah and The Poppies: A Tale of Deception with permission from Bloomsbury.