To those who had worked at Kempton Park, a facility outside Johannesburg developing high-resolution camera systems for satellites; at Somerset West, in the bushland of Eastern Cape, where rocket motors had been designed; at the systems engineering facility at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, came attractive offers. No longer would they need to live in a country with the highest murder rate in the world and plagued with corruption scandals. In Israel they would earn salaries in a hard currency of their choice that far exceeded what they had previously earned. In no time they had begun to sell their homes near the missile test sites in Kwa/Zula/ Natal and in the former nature reserve near Cape Town, and had flown north on the regular El Al flight to Tel Aviv, joining others from the nuclear warheads manufacturing plant out on the veldt beyond the country’s capital, Pretoria. With all expenses paid and a substantial down payment in their bank accounts, they had settled into their new lives in the palm-fringed settlements that had been created for them in the Negev Desert. They found themselves working alongside a number of Russians who had also been headhunted after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The recruiters from Pakistan had also been busy. Working with even more discretion than the Israelis had shown, they had offered other disaffected scientists salaries at even higher levels than those from Dimona. With them came the promise of a lifestyle in Pakistan that would match those the scientists had enjoyed during the high days of apartheid: servants they had to let go after the collapse of South Africa’s space-age program would once more be plentiful in Pakistan, along with sundowners, the evening ritual of cocktails at sunset that had been an integral part of their South African life. They would live in homes even more lavish than those on the Cape; their children would be educated in private schools whose teachers came from the great universities of England, France, and the United States, and their private medical facilities would be staffed with the best doctors. Along with generous holidays, their income would be tax-free and deposited in any bank of their choice anywhere in the world. The offers were eagerly accepted and flights out of Johannesburg to Islamabad were filled with the scientists and their families.
Over the years, they helped to develop the skills of the six Pakistani nuclear scientists who had discretely slipped out of the country after they had been identified as being involved in what became known in Mossad, MI6, and the CIA as “America’s Hiroshima.” The intention was to smuggle into the United States a nuclear device that would be detonated in Washington. The bomb would be transported in one of the container ships that arrived at American East Coast ports every week. Few were subjected to a full search. Sleeper agents would collect the bomb, packed inside a container, take it to Washington, and detonate it, creating even more deaths and casualties than the September 11 attacks had achieved.
The operation had been devised by Osama bin Laden with an exactness that would have the same terrible synchronicity as the September 11 attacks. The intention was not only to terrorize and appall by the sheer number of victims, but at the same time provide an example of victory won by violence. Politically it was designed as a rallying call for global jihad, worldwide holy war. The leaders of Muslim nations who opposed it would be swept away in what bin Laden had likened to the creation of the new caliphate of which he had long dreamed. He envisaged how, barely a generation after many Muslim countries had won their independence, mostly from Britain, their world would enter a new religious era. Already the first phase was in place in Iran where the 1979 Khomeini revolution had aroused the deprived masses. Next to fall in the aftermath of America’s Hiroshima would be the Saudi royal family, who bin Laden had long accused of betraying their duties as custodians of the holy places of Mecca and Medina.
Details of the plan to detonate a nuclear device in America had emerged with the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden’s military operations chief, in an al-Qaeda safe house in Karachi on March 2, 2003. The arrest was made by Pakistani intelligence agents, allowing President Musharraf to offer further proof to Washington that he remained a staunch supporter of the war against terrorism. It continued to be less than the full truth. While Pakistan had indeed detained scores of al-Qaeda members, it still sponsored terrorist groups in the disputed state of Kashmir, funding, training, and arming them in their war of attrition against India. The Bush administration continued to regard Pakistan as its powerful ally in the war on terrorism espoused by bin Laden. “Kashmir is a side issue,” a State Department official told the author.
