Re: Disgraced scientist in bad condition
“He started out on an anti India track,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physicist at Islamabad’s Quaid-e-Azam University and a longtime Khan critic. “Selling nuclear stuff came later, when he developed a compulsion to be rich and powerful.”
Khan was born in Bhopal, in British India, on April 27, 1936. As a boy of 11, he witnessed the communal violence generated by partition of the colony into India and Pakistan. He spoke later of seeing trains packed with the corpses of Muslims killed fighting Hindus.
In 1952, Khan’s father, a schoolteacher, decided it was time for the family to migrate to Pakistan. A minor incident would stay with the 16-year-old, helping create what a number of people who know him described as a sense of inferiority that fueled his future actions.
“I had been traveling with a pen that my brother gave me when I passed my exams, and just as I was crossing out of India, a border guard reached toward me and snatched it from my pocket,” Khan told a Pakistani interviewer years later. “It was something I’ll never forget.”
He earned a master’s degree at the Technological University of Delft in the Netherlands and a doctorate in 1972 from Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. His advisor at Leuven, who would later describe Khan as a fair student with a great knack for making friends, arranged his job in Amsterdam at FDO.
It was the start of a pattern: Khan would always be a better self-promoter than scientist, and he would progress by skillfully combining the two.
“Khan loved to be flattered,” said Hoodbhoy, the nuclear physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University. “Say a nice thing to him and he’d dip into his deep, deep pocket.”
Few seemed to begrudge Khan his money. They assumed that, like many other high-level bureaucrats, he was skimming from contracts and taking kickbacks. But it was thought to be only a small percentage of the money being spent on a project that was a source of great national pride.
Some of his wealth, however, was coming from elsewhere.
In 1987, Khan and two middlemen who had helped Pakistan build its bomb had sold centrifuge components and designs to Iran, which was embarking on its own secret nuclear program. The deal was finalized at a meeting in Dubai by two of Khan’s associates and three Iranians, one of whom was identified this week by an exile group as Mohammad Eslami, at the time a top official of the elite Revolutionary Guards. It is the first known transaction in what would mushroom into the world’s largest private proliferation network.
Investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog based in Vienna, have been unraveling the network’s trail since Khan’s confession in 2004. Earlier this year, they turned up the first evidence of the meeting in Dubai at which the 1987 deal was clinched, but uncertainties remain.
Mir, the journalist, met the defeated scientist at his government office a few days before he began his house arrest in February 2004. Khan railed that U.S. and Pakistani intelligence had caused his troubles, and he lashed out at Musharraf, predicting that he would do the Americans’ bidding again by turning over Osama bin Laden just before the U.S. elections in November of that year.
“He thought that nobody could touch him because he is a hero,” Mir said. “It was beyond his expectations that Musharraf could arrest him. That shock destroyed his mental health.”