Mossad knew there was another darker, and for Israel, far more dangerous side to Abdul Qadeer Khan. During one of his European jaunts, a Mossad agent had managed to gain entry to Khan’s hotel suite and accessed his briefcase. Using a matchbox-sized camera, the agent had photographed documents that provided the first concrete evidence that Khan had recently bought five thousand specialized magnets from a government company in Beijing. The magnets were to speed up the process of uranium enrichment. Other documents showed that Khan had also made contact with other aspirant nuclear states, notably North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. In his book-lined office was a report from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Khan liked to show visitors the passage he had highlighted: “A 10-kiloton bomb is smuggled into Manhattan and explodes at Grand Central. Some half-a-million people are killed and the United States suffers $1 trillion in direct economic damage.” Khan would snap shut the book and replace it without comment on its shelf, no doubt secure in the knowledge he had created for Pakistan the weapon to achieve such a horrific scenario. Khan was the flawed genius, not only motivated by personal greed but also driven by a religious fanaticism and a contempt for Western values. As the Khan Research Laboratories became a mecca to which the scientists of third world nations came to seek his services for helping them acquire skills in the black art of nuclear bomb making, he had become rich and powerful. He had also become a target for Mossad’s kidon. The unit had begun the slow, meticulous process of ascertaining all information its assassins needed when devising the most effective way of killing him.
Mossad had already dealt with one foreign scientist who had been identified as a threat, Gerald Bull. He had created, for Saddam Hussein, a supergun capable of launching nuclear warheads directly from Iraq into Israel. On March 20, 1990, three kidon had executed Bull on the doorstep of his luxury apartment in Brussels (see chapter 6, “Avengers,” pp. 119–21). However, assassinating Khan was more complex. He was a national hero and the repercussions would extend beyond any direct retaliation against Israel. While Washington had imposed sanctions on both Pakistan and India for conducting nuclear tests, the United States wanted to maintain its support against the steady expansion of China; it would condemn Israel for the assassination. Nevertheless, kidon were asked to prepare a number of “options”—the detailed research that would be the prelude to any killing of Khan. Ari Ben-Menashe, who had tasked kidon to prepare “options” during his time with Mossad, said (to the author): “What they were doing was essential to their kind of operation. Their baseline is getting to know their target, his or her habits and style. How he or she reacts to a situation, what pushes his or her buttons. Only then could they construct an operational plan.”
Footage of Khan’s appearances on television and on cinema newsreels had been studied along with his endless newspaper interviews and magazine profiles. The names of his close associates were noted—fellow scientists in the nuclear program, secretive background men who worked directly with him. His journeys around Pakistan, Asia, and to Europe were carefully charted; how he liked his favorite seat when flying with Pakistan Airways—3A in First Class—and that his accommodation choices in Europe’s capitals were usually presidential suites. It was there that he had met diplomats from China, Iran, and Iraq. Many of these hotel suites were already on kidon computers so that if it were required to bug them it would be possible to do so. Details of his sexual preferences were investigated. Did he have a liking for a particular kind of woman? Could any of the companions he had been seen with in public be open to blackmail?
The profile of Abdul Khan had been painstakingly built from a wide range of sources. Part of that planning included the recruiting of Horaj. He and Jamal had met again after that momentous day, February 4, 2004, when Khan had sat in a television studio in Islamabad, faced the camera and made one of the most astonishing confessions in the long history of treachery.
“I am solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear weapons material,” he intoned.
Before a stunned nation could adjust to the revelation, Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, dressed in commando fatigues—he had been an army general—took Khan’s place and announced that though “I was shocked by these revelations,” he would nevertheless pardon Khan, whom he called “my hero,” because of all his services to Pakistan. The excuse was less than the truth. Mossad knew that Musharraf could not afford to bring Khan to trial.
