The book “Pakistan army, wars within” by Shuja Nawaz has interviews from several generals that say that it was AQ Khan who was running the prolifiation network by himself.
"The book has ISI chief General Javed Nasir telling us, around 1992, how he tried, unsuccessfully, to bring the self-enrichment (as opposed to uranium enrichment!) of Dr AQ Khan — 23 properties in Islamabad by then — to the notice of prime minister Nawaz Sharif as Khan proceeded to gift Pakistan its nuclear bomb. An effort to prevent him from selling ‘documents’ abroad, probably during trips to Iran, Syria and Algeria, came to nothing when Dr Khan refused to deposit them at the GHQ (p.475).
Army chief General Waheed Kakar too put the tabs on Dr Khan: ‘ISI had gathered information about the Dubai activities of AQ Khan and his attempts at forming a network of agents. When confronted about these activities, Khan said he needed a clandestine network to bypass the US’s controls on access to nuclear technology’ (p.475). The book doesn’t explore the ‘Dubai opening’, where AQ Khan made his first sale to Iran, most likely because it could have spilled out if the scope of this large volume. Later disclosures in the West have dated the dangerous cleavage between pro-Arab General Zia and pro-Iran General Beg from this Dubai opening."
Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
Ejaz Haider has written an excellent article on the issue titled "A Q is playing politics.
Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
"There are two things here. One, why did Dr Khan choose to ignore the period of his activities pre-this incident in 2000 when Pakistan had set up a National Command Authority with SPD (Strategic Plans Division) as its secretariat?
Two, why has he chosen to distort the version given by Mr Musharraf in his book since he told the channels that he never said the army had supervised the shipment and that it was Mr Musharraf who actually talked about such a shipment?"
"What is most amusing is that Dr Khan, in trying to distort the issue with reference to Mr Musharraf’s book, ended up confessing on a programme on Dawn News that old P1 centrifuges *were *being shipped to North Korea from the laboratory of which *he *was in charge and that he knew about it. To the question whether he (Dr Khan) knew about such shipments, he said yes!
In a recent television programme, former DG ISI Hameed Gul also claimed that he had noticed suspicious activities in the AQ Khan set-up during his time at the agency.
It is also interesting that he has denied the contents of the AP story and gone on to say that since the army was supervising these shipments and since Mr Musharraf was the army chief, “it must have gone with his (Musharraf’s) consent”.
Is Dr Khan now prepared to make conjectures on such a sensitive issue to strike back at Mr Musharraf?"
