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Pakistan's Khan Research Laboratories, which was founded by nuclear scientist A Q Khan, had clandestinely supplied centrifuge components to a nuclear plant intended to be installed in Libya, a new book has claimed.
While the centrifuge components were first sent from Kahuta in Pakistan to Vanderbijl Park in South Africa before forwarding them to Tripoli, the Libyans showed their visitors canisters at the Al Fallah storage facility in Tripoli that contained 1.7 tonne of UF6 gas from Pakistan, a gift to get the Libyan enrichment factory up and running, the book Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy stated.
The 586-page book is authored by investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, who worked as staff writers and foreign correspondents for The Sunday Times before joining The Guardian.
An Anglo-American investigating team also discovered worrying evidence that some of what Pakistan had exported had gone missing en route from Dubai to Tripoli. Two shipping containers, one filled with centrifuge components and a ton of high-strength aluminium, the other containing precision tools and parts for two specialised lathes, had last been seen in Turkey and Malaysia shortly before the BBC China container seizure.
According to the book, in the early hours of December 12, 2003, as a Mi6-CIA team (British and American Intelligence team) walked out to their unmarked plane at Tripoli airport, Libyan officials rushed on to the tarmac.They handed over half a dozen brown envelopes. Inside one were blueprints for a nuclear bomb. Another contained instructions on how to manufacture and assemble a device. They were written in a mixture of English and Chinese.
"As the world learned that US special forces had dragged former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from his spider-hole beneath a farmhouse near his home town of Tikrit, the covert team in Tripoli finally got to the bottom of the real story of the Pakistan-Libyan trade in WMDs," the report said.
Four days later, the final pieces of the Libyan recanting were hammered out in London at an all-day meeting at government offices in Whitehall. On the British side were two Mi6 officers and, from the foreign office, William Ehrman, the director general for defence and intelligence, and David Landsman, the head of the counter-proliferation department.
Representing Washington was Robert Joseph of President George Bush's National Security Council, and two CIA officials including Stephen Kappes. Musa Kusa, Col Gadhafi's special representative, was present for Libya, sitting alongside Abdul Ati al-Obeidi, the Libyan ambassador to Rome, and Mohamed Azwai, Libyan ambassador to London.
"It was very much a 'nothing is agreed until everything is agreed' negotiation", one of those present recalled. On the table was the text of an announcement that Britain hoped Colonel Muammar Gaddifi would make surrendering
his WMD programme.
Eventually Gaddafi's foreign minister appeared on TV on December 19 and declared that Libya was renouncing its WMD programme. According to the authors, the then British prime minister Tony Blair who made a statement saying, "We must work now to create new partnerships, across geographical and cultural divides, backed by tough international rules and action" made no mention of Pakistan, which had been only too happy to raise another KRL (Khan Research Laboratories) in a far-off land even less secure than its own.
According to the authors, the evidence of Pakistan's "hand in nuclear proliferation" was everywhere.
"IAEA inspectors returned from a trip to Tehran in early January 2004 with a new set of admissions. Iranian negotiators had confessed to having received blueprints for the sophisticated P-2 centrifuges from Pakistan in 1994.
"Speculation mounted that the intermediary had been B S A Tahir, but he was lying low in Kuala Lumpur, his movements restricted by the authorities, with the Malaysian special branch inquiry having concluded that he had not broken any domestic laws."
The book observed that "Washington's absolving of the Khan network and its military controllers - and its shift of attention to Iran - had been made possible by a political cleansing of the US State Department which had seen seasoned diplomats and weapons experts exiled and replaced with neophytes allied to the Vulcan way".
"Having foundered for the first years of the Bush presidency, by the time the Khan inquiry was shut down in Pakistan, in the US non-proliferation policy was dead in the water," the book said.
In 2004, Khan had confessed to having been involved in a clandestine international network of nuclear weapons technology proliferation from Pakistan to Libya, Iran and North Korea.