July 24, 2025 • 40 mins
He’s been called the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and a real-life Bond villain and depending on where you’re from, he’s a national hero or was the world’s most dangerous arms dealer - who made a career of selling his knowledge of nuclear weapons.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, I'm welcome into the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
Should Know, Foreign Policy Edition.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
That's right, take it away.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Okay, So Chuck, we're talking today. Well let me start differently, Chuck. Yes,
have you ever met Aq Khan?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I had never heard of Aq Khn?
Speaker 2 (00:33):
What do you think of him? Now?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
You know, seems like a guy that made a lot
of money helping countries develop their nuclear program.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Sure, but I think that leaves out some very important stuff.
This was in flagrant violation of UN non proliferation treaties.
Who was generally illegal, and he was even doing it
on the side. He had an underground clandestine proliferation network,
which is I mean, that's very few people have ever
(01:06):
done that in the world. Over here in the West, Chuck,
he's viewed as a villain, and in other parts of
the world, especially Pakistan where he's from, he's hailed as
a hero. He's very complex, complicated, and at the end
of the day, he may essentially be generally a fall
guy for a much larger cabal of people who were
(01:28):
actually doing.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
This, Yeah, for sure. I guess we can go back
and talk a little bit about how he got there, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
He was born in India in nineteen thirty six and
in nineteen fifty two moved to West Pakistan and he
was into metallurgy and studied at a few different universities
in a few different countries. He eventually graduated initially in
nineteen sixty from the University of Karachi, but then got
a doctorate in metallurgical engineering in nineteen seventy two. In
(02:01):
that time, he got married, had a couple of daughters,
and then eventually he found his way with his family
in the early seventies and the Netherlands working for a
company called Physical Dynamic Research Laboratory which was doing uranium
enrichment for another company called Urinko, which was a consortium
(02:24):
of a few different countries Britain, Germany and the Netherlands,
and they were, you know, they were running ultracentrifuges and
he was pretty good at snooping around.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
It seems like, yeah, in ultracentrifuge r centrifugias in general
is used to enricheranium in your rich uranium to a
certain extent to use for nuclear power. But if you
keep going, you can use that enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. Right,
So I think that these companies were doing this for
power for power generation. But regardless, he wasn't a particular
(03:00):
like brilliant physicists or metal or just or anything like that.
He was just kind of a dude. He just had
a will that was unlike other people's typically. So when
he started out, he had a very low level security clearance,
but he very quickly like started making waves and catching
the attention of Dutch intelligence agencies for asking a lot
(03:22):
of questions that did not have much of anything to
do with the work he was supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, so they started monitoring him, and this is something
that kind of continued at at least as far as
Dutch intelligence, and then you know, eventually other countries would
start monitoring as well, because you know, like I said,
he got pretty good at snooping around. And in nineteen
seventy one there was a conflict between East and West
(03:49):
Pakistan and that led to a pretty brief war with India,
and just for our purposes, what that eventually meant was
a khan and a lot of Pakistan were kind of
humiliated at the whole thing, and we're like, we're still
under the thumb of India here, and kind of just
(04:09):
sort of got that I guess national Pakistani pride going,
as you know, wanting to get out from under that thumb.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah, I saw that that in that thirteen day war,
Pakistan lost half its navy, a quarter of its air force,
and a third of its army. So it was very
much a humiliating defeat. And yeah, I saw that. Up
to this point, aq Kan was just a generally average person,
but that seemed to have really started to get him going.
(04:39):
So he decided he was going to use what expertise
he had to help build a bomb for Pakistan. So
he wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan,
Zulfa kar Ali Bhutto, who was running the show at
the time, and said, Hey, I want to help build
a nuclear bomb for Pakistan. We clearly need one. And
if you said back and look at it, chuck like,
(05:01):
this is just some random dude that the Prime Minister
had never heard of who wrote him a letter and
said like, hey, let's build a bomb. And I heard
the first time he was ignored and the second time,
they were like, all right, let's see what this guy
has to say.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Yeah, because he was lobbying for uranium and that was
his expertise, was enriching uranium and at the time, Pakistan
was trying to enrich and produce plutonium. And he was like,
that's not the way. Uranium is the way to go.
And just a couple of months after that, Bhutto met
with him and over about the next eleven or twelve months,
(05:35):
con was like, all right, I'm going to make a
little grocery shopping list of what we need, the parts
that we need to get a nuclear program started here
in earnest and I'm going to make a list of
companies and suppliers and who can get us this stuff.
And he basically got all of this information while he
was working for that Dutch company, right, you know, making
(05:56):
copies of blueprints and sneaking them out and supply lists,
suppers lists and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yeah, he was very well known around the office or
be like making capies.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
So he well, I just dated myself. Can we just
do a little science minute off to the side.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
So you said that there was a course that Pakistan
was already on for making a bomb out of plutonium. Right.
Aq Con was all about enriching uranium. There are two
routes you can use to make a nuclear bomb, and
the background and training khan Head was in uranium enrichment,
and he loved to like talk trash about plutonium and
(06:35):
the people in Pakistan running the plutonium program. But just
the upshot of it is this, if you want to
get weapons grade uranium, you need about ninety percent pure
uranium in nature. The U two thirty five uranium that
you're looking for occurs about three quarters of a percent
(06:56):
of any natural lump of uranium. So there's two ways
to get that purified U two thirty five. One is enrichment,
where you spin it in centrifugias that go so fast
that it actually separates the different kinds of uranium isotopes
and then you just kind of siphon off the stuff
you want. Or with plutonium, you bombard it with neutron
so that uranium two thirty eight eventually turns into two
(07:19):
thirty nine, decays into neptunium and then plutonium. They're both
like great ways of creating nuclear material to blow up
the world with, but they're just two totally different tracks.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, so we did a whole episode on that. If
you're interested in like the finer details, seek that one out.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Was that the one that we did after Fukushima?
Speaker 1 (07:40):
I don't know, but we did a whole episode on
how to that whole process. I can't remember what it
was called, though.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Well I can't help but talk about it. I love
that for some reason, really like tickles me.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah. So in October of seventy five, the Dutch authorities
who had been watching him this whole time, noting all
this sort of suspicious stuff that he was doing at work,
all right, we're going to transfer you out of these
enrichment projects because we think you're, you know, you're clearly
some sort of a snoop or a thread or something.
(08:11):
And just a couple of months after that, and I
guess late nineteen seventy five, in December, he left the
company all together and had you know, basically under his
in his banker's box on the way out the door.
He had a bunch of sensitive documents, blueprints and those
supplier lists, and he said, don't bother looking in these
(08:32):
banker boxes. The lid is on, right.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
He just kind of vanished and showed back up in
Pakistan and he was very quickly put in charge of
the uranium project. And there was a guy named Manir
Ahmad Khan who was essentially his rival in the quest
to build Pakistan a bomb. The other Cohn was involved
in the plutonium wing of the whole thing. Khn eventually
(08:55):
got Bhutto and then the guy who overthrew Bhuto over
to his side in favor of uranium enrichment, but also
in favor of aq Con. From what I could tell,
he had a really big ego and he wanted to
be like the top dog in getting Pakistan the bomb,
and so he was working on the project called Project
(09:15):
seven oh six. It was the uranium Enrichment project, and
by nineteen eighty two, I think they managed to produce
the highly enriched uranium that you need to make a bomb,
very very small amount at first, you need several kilograms
to actually make a bomb, but they were successful at
doing it through that uranium enrichment program by nineteen eighty
(09:37):
two for the first time.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah, and as they're doing this, are also researching how
to get this thing into a missile. So you know,
as you'll see, I mean, if you just look back
at the history of enriching uranium or for nuclear energy.
It's usually a country is like, hey, you know, we
just want to have a nuclear energy company and we
want to get a to speed on that. But what
(10:01):
they're also trying to do is get a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
They're also making copies.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah, it kind of just happens over and over and
over where they're like, no, no, no, we just want nuclear
energy and don't worry about what's in that bunker over there.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Right and again I kind of I mentioned it at
the outset. The reason that countries have to do it
like that is because there's a huge treaty from the
sixties that said, Okay, the people who already have the bomb,
they're agreeing to disassemble it. People who don't have the bomb,
they're going to agree not to seek the bomb. And
it's still in effect and it's still enforced. So that's
(10:37):
why you have to do it right exactly. But it's
just been so just kind of nibble that and worn
down and just flagrantly ignored that. It doesn't really seem
to have that much teeth, but I guess it's enough
to make countries feel like they have to be subversive
when they're trying to create a nuclear weapons program.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah, exactly. So while he's doing all this, and you
mentioned at the beginning that he had a side gig,
you know, getting rich off of selling these secrets and
blueprints and helping other countries, you know, get in touch
with the right. As you'll see, he worked with a
lot of middlemen over the years and spoke a bunch
of different languages, so he was really kind of the
(11:19):
perfect dude to do this. And while he was doing this,
he developed that side gig as importing and exporting all
these components and plans that you know, some of which
he just outright stole.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, And he was able to do this in large
part because he had by this time garnered so much
respect in Pakistan among the leadership of Pakistan, emerging as
the guy who was giving the bomb or developing the
bomb for Pakistan that they just weren't. They were like,
just go, here's a blank check, do whatever you need
to do. So he started ordering doubles of the stuff yeah,
(11:54):
that he was he needed to set up Pakistan's uranium
enrichment program, and then he would take the stuff that
he didn't need and turn around and essentially reverse the
way that it got there. He would use Pakistani military
planes cargo planes to take those parts, the extra parts
back to middlemen, and then he'd tell the middlemen what
(12:15):
buyers to direct it to, and then he'd pocket the money.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, and it was very lucrative, as we'll see, he
ended up making a ton of money doing this. He
ended up having a few kind of major clients. No
one really knows how many countries he really dealt with,
because I think they found out he traveled to many
more countries than they officially sort of accused him of
dealing with. But the first country to step up and
(12:43):
say hey, I really want to do business with you
was Iran, and this was in nineteen eighty seven. He
helped them build up to fifty thousand centrifuges P one
types Pakistan won. There are a couple of different types,
Pakistan one and the P two, the Pakistan two. Those
(13:03):
the P twos are much faster. And the belief at
the time is that he was just kind of sending
the stuff that they didn't need anymore to Iran and
it was kind of outdated equipment that wasn't going to
help him that much.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yeah, for sure, that's how it started out. They were
they because Pakistan upgraded their setup from what I saw.
And the reason why you need fifty thousand centrifuges is
because when you spin that uranium to separate it and
you siphon off the stuff you want, you have to
do it again and again and again and again, and
it can take weeks and months and sometimes years depending
(13:38):
on what kind of centrifuges you're working with. But if
you have fifty thousand centrifuges like Iran supposedly got, you
can make a lot of highly enriched uranium fairly fast. Which,
let me know, wonder, Chuck, like, what is taking Iran
so long? If they still don't have a nuke and
they started in nineteen eighty seven, What's what's the deal there?
(14:00):
And the best answer I could come up with is
that back in the nineties, the Ayatola issued a fatois
like a ruling on Sharia law that basically said no nukes,
Iran's not going to have any nukes, and that it
wasn't until twenty twenty four that Iran said that they
were starting to rethink it. So I guess just because
the leadership said they weren't going to have nukes. That
(14:21):
is the reason Iran doesn't have a nuke right now.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Yeah, interesting, I thought so too. So he was dealing
with their government. Supposedly until nineteen ninety one there was
a final shipment of the p ones, but other people
have said no, no, no. That continued for at least
another four years through the mid nineties, and those P
two centerfuges started flowing in. Iran wanted this potential bomb
(14:48):
because they were at war with Iraq at the time
in the eighties, over the course of about eight years,
So Khan over the businessman, was like, hey, Iraq, I've
been helping Iran developed their You could probably use a
little with my help in stolen documents as well.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah, what's crazy is Iroq was like very suspicious of
this from the outset, and I guess they asked for
a sample and they couldn't find what sample they were given.
Just that con was like, don't taste this, that's not
that kind of sample.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Right, And I think you dab your pinky in it, Yeah, exactly,
put it on your tongue.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
It's like, don't do that. So I guess a rock
thought that this is some sort of maybe international un
sting operation. And then around the same time, the first
Gulf War broke out and they were like, we don't
have time for this, so they moved on. And I
guess he never managed to get a bomb or the
(15:45):
information a rock needed to a rock.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Yeah, but there were documents that said, hey, this little
you know, the paperwork was there. This will cost you
five million bucks and a ten percent commission on materials
right through my network, So I can you know, pay
people off basically. But yeah, like you said, it seems
like it never ended up happening, and Iraq was probably
wise to think that that was a sting operation even
(16:09):
though it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Well, what something I saw that was kind of funny
was Iran paid three million dollars for THEIRS and they
actually were like ten percent commission. That seems steep, So
they went and started calling up the list of suppliers
that aq Con had for him, rather than dealing with him,
because they were bargain shopping for their nuclear.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Pro Well apparently, well maybe that has something to do
with it too.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Their nuclear centrifuges were held together bubble gum and duct tape.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Should we take a break. Yeah's all right, we'll come
back and talk about a couple of more clients right
after this. All right, so we're back, and we promised
(17:17):
to talk about new clients. This is where North Korea
enters a picture. It's the mid nineties, and with a
deal with the United States, North Korea said, you know what,
we're going to stop building our nuclear reactors. We're going
to stop producing plutonium again. We're just trying to get
nuclear energy going. But all right, we'll stop doing that.
(17:39):
But what we're really going to do is very quietly
start looking to continue that process, just on the down load.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Right, But Kim Jung il had his fingers crossed behind
his back, so none of that counted.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
That's right. And so who do they turn to? Of
course they turned to Pakistan and aq Kan.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah, so this is where it really seems like Pakistan.
Pakistani officials were definitely involved in this, even though later on,
as we'll see, they're like, we had nothing to do
with this. But Pakistan conducted its first nuclear test in
nineteen ninety eight, which really surprised the world, and even
more dramatically, they did it in response to a test
(18:18):
that India had carried out two weeks before and during
this test. One of the groups that was there was
a delegation of North Koreans who were invited to watch
the whole thing. And the common wisdom among the intelligence
community is that this was a group of nuclear scientists
from North Korea's nuclear program who are basically being you know,
(18:41):
run through the motions of how this is working. I
don't know if we said or not. Also, a q
Khan was known to have gone to North Korea at
least thirteen times that were documented. Something really weird happened
during this nuclear test with the North Korean delegation though,
and that was that one of them, a woman who
was among this group died. Mys seriously. She was shot
(19:02):
and eventually sent back to North Korea. Her body was
but on the cargo plane were centrifuges and other things
for North Korea's nuclear program too.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Yeah, was that just like, Hey, we've got this plane going,
so why don't we just double dip and get some
stuff moved, maybe transporting this body.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Maybe Pakistan is the bargain shop as well.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
So, like you said, he went to North Korea at
least thirteen times that intelligence knows about. And while he
was helping North Korea sort of develop their enrichment program.
They were supplying Pakistan. It was a bit of a
quid pro quo. They're like, hey, we've got long distance
missile technology that you don't have, and so we're perfect
(19:50):
bedfellows here.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Yeah, and so they got the missiles from North Korea
through a guy named Kang. He was on paper the
dip the astor to Pakistan for North Korea. In reality,
he was the husband of the woman who was murdered.
She turned out to be murdered during the missile test
because she was spying for the US, but her husband
(20:11):
managed to hang in there and it turns out he
was an armstealer for North Korea. He was the one
who provided the missiles. So again, all this time, North
Korea is saying like, we don't have a nuclear program.
Pakistan's like, we don't even know what anybody's talking about.
This is all in retrospect, like this is not on
a lot of people's radar right now. And as a
matter of fact, Aq Khan was on the radar of
(20:34):
international intelligence communities again all the way back to the
with the seventies, when the Dutch started watching him but somehow,
some way, the global intelligence community missed the fact that
he was a rogue nuclear weapons technology salesman, which is
one of the weirdest things ever. But it turned out
(20:55):
that it was his next business venture in Libya that
led to his downfall.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, I mean there were you know, later on they
were they were like, yeah, we knew he was ordering
double the amount of everything, and we just couldn't figure
out why.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Right, it makes zero. There's a lot about this that
just really smells like a kind of a poorly constructed
cover up internationally, not just from Pakistan.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Yeah, for sure. So yeah, the next client step forward,
and that was Libya. And this was in the late nineties,
like nineteen ninety six, ninety seven. He started trading centrifuges
and the equipment and the components getting them over to Libya.
This there's a guy here named Peter Griffin. Not what
(21:42):
you're thinking from family guy is a real life human.
It was a British engineer who was involved in this
operation who was like, man, I've been I've been given
or not giving, but I've been selling material to Pakistan
for you know, twenty years or more like this has
been going on for a long time.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, and that was a huge thing that allowed this
to go on. Is like the international community would ban
parts for like centrifuges or breeder reactors that you made
plutonium with, and then people like Iq Khan would be like, well, fine,
we're going to start shipping the parts to make those
parts and then assemble the parts at the at the end.
So they were legitimately allowed to do this stuff. It
(22:22):
was just they still had to fake what the overall
purpose was. So yeah, guys like Peter Griffin were like,
I actually wasn't breaking any laws. It was more like
an international more that was broken where he knew he
was helping states that should not have nuclear bombs get
nuclear bombs essentially.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, for sure. So Peter Griffin, Peter Griffin.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
There's just no way that couldn't do something.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
I guess that was. Uh, oh, what's the guy's name.
I haven't watched Family Gun so long? Cleveland, Peter Cleveland. Yeah,
that's right. So Peter Griffin was a partner and a
company from Dubai, and in two thousand and one they
placed a bunch of orders for these parts that they
needed with a Malaysian company, and that company spun off
(23:11):
a subsidiary and they hired workers and brought in, you know,
all this equipment and brought in a bunch of new
tools to start sort of you know, turning this into
a real program. And Con was like for my part,
you know, I've got all these blueprints to show you
how to put this you know, big lego machine together.
And he sent at least one engineer, so like active involvement,
(23:33):
sending engineers to Dubai to like make sure they were
doing everything correctly, so like deep involvement at this point.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Yeah. Huge. So he had like middlemen from Europe, He
had designers from Switzerland. He had companies that were set
up to build the parts that were being shipped from Turkey,
from Malaysia to Turkey to Dubai where they were repackaged
and sent on to Libya. It was a huge network. Also,
I forgot to say earlier. By this time, the CON
(24:01):
network had their own sales bruchures that they used to
hand out at ARM sales fares, which apparently they have
ARM sales fares, but they had brochures by this point.
That's that's how set up they were, I guess how established.
That's what I was going for so it was a huge,
huge network. But it was one of these shipments that
somehow got intercepted and I think two thousand and three
(24:24):
aboard the a ship called the BBC China, which as
far as I noticed, I have anything to do with
the BBC, And that was the thing that brought the
whole thing down. Eventually, Chuck I proposed that since I
remembered the word established, that kind of says we.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Should take a break, all right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
So the whole thing came down with that Libya thing.
Remember they had this amazing network going, all these amazing
all this amazing subtrifuge going somehow, I don't know how,
but a particular shipment aboard a ship called the BBC
China was captured in I think, leaving Dubai en route
(25:37):
to Libya. And at this point aq Con had basically
been under great suspicion. I think he was being investigated
by CIA and MI six at the same time. But
there wasn't a lot you could do about this if
you were the US, because you needed Pakistan at the time,
as we'll talk about in a second. But when this
shipment was found, it was a massive shipment of centrifuge
(26:01):
is going to Libya. It was just all out in
the open now, there was just no denying it. Even
Pakistan couldn't protect aq Kan anymore.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, for sure. And like you said, it was pretty complicated.
I mean, it's always been fairly complicated, with US and
Pakistan as being like sometimes bedfellows because they were necessary
for the US until they weren't, and then you know,
that's when the US could take action. But in the eighties,
you know, we were supplying military aid to Pakistan to
(26:29):
help support the fight against Soviets in Afghanistan, so we
couldn't really, you know, even though we intelligence services knew
that they had a nuclear program going and even where
that technology was coming from, there wasn't a lot we
could do at the time. In the mid eighties they
caught Congress threatened to cut off that military aid unless
(26:50):
Reagan could promise that they didn't they weren't producing nuclear weapons.
And so for five years from eighty five to ninety,
I guess Reagan and George H. W. Bush would certify
that Pakistan didn't have a nuclear weapons program. And then
in nineteen ninety, once the Soviets were out of Afghanistan. Coincidentally,
(27:10):
not really, Bush said, you know what, I'm not going
to sign that certification anymore, and we're going to stop
the flow of a to Pakistan.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, which is I mean, talk about a screwjob. But apparently, Chuck,
we were so in bed with Pakistan during the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan that we were flying YouTube bomber flights
to surveil Russia out of Pakistan. We had an NSA
listening station there, like we needed them big time. But
(27:37):
once we didn't anymore, we could start to press them
on Aq Khan and that was when this whole thing
started to kind of fall apart. But again, it wasn't
until two thousand and three that the BBC China was
intercepted and the whole thing was on the table. But
by this time the pressure that the US had been
(27:57):
putting on Pakistan was enough that the president at the time,
Proves Mushariff, who was the president of Pakistan around the
time of nine to eleven and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan,
he essentially was like, Okay, I've got to do something,
So he dismissed Khan from the research laboratories that by
(28:20):
this time bore his own name. They were called the
Doctor aq Khan Research Laboratories, the National Nuclear Research Laboratories
in Pakistan, and they were like, you're not the director
of those anymore, but we're still friends, so you can
be a government advisor.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yeah, I mean that's I don't know, I don't know
enough about it, but that seemed to be very much
just sort of like, hey, look what we're doing. We're
saying he doesn't have that job anymore. Didn't that what
was going on?
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah? And the US had to put up with it
because by this time we were in Afghanistan and we
needed Pakistan him in just as much as we did
when the Soviets were in Afghanistan. Because no one learns
from history.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
That's right. So after that two thousand and three cargo
ship exposure, I guess in December of that year, that's
when Gaddafi of Libya said, all right, you know what,
I'm going to shut down our nuclear program.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
I'm really sorry.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
United States didn't mean it and really sold con down
the river and said this is the guy. He's been
supplying us with materials and we're friends, right.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah, Apparently Kadafi was really really worried after the US
invaded Iraq that he was going to be next, and
he was right, but it was eight years down the road. Yeah,
but I guess he He went so far as to
show them like centrifuge labs that were described or disguised
as chicken farms, and the whole time he's like, it
(29:50):
was CON. It was CON. It was CON. And he
gave I six and the CIA documents on how to
build a nuclear warhead that he said CON had given him.
So he really sold them down the river. And by
this point, the CIA chief at the time, George Tennant,
had enough to go to pervezmer Sharff and was like,
it's not enough to fire this guy from his job,
(30:10):
like he's an international nuclear proliferation dealer and you need
to do something much more pronounced. And Mouchharff said, Okay,
I got it, I got it. We're going to make
him apologize and we're going to put him under house
arrests and then four days after that, I'm going to
pardon him. What do you think?
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah, they put him on TV. He did confess, he
did apologize, he did all that stuff, said he was
he took the fall. He said, you know, I wasn't
acting on the direction of my government. I was doing
this on my own. And you know, I think everyone
even at the time, kind of saw through that he
(30:52):
would pardon him. I mean, the initial arrest was like
a real arrest, but then he pardoned him and put
him under house arrests. And that whole time though, Pakistan
was still like, no, CIA, you can't like same with
the International Atomic Energy Agency, you can't come in here
and ask him questions directly, like we're still shielding him
from you.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yeah, And they continued to even after they let him
out of house arrest. I also saw one other little note.
He had a jasmine shrub trimmed in the shape of
a topiary mushroom cloud outside of his house.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
Did he really is that a joke?
Speaker 2 (31:27):
No? Well, at least as far as I think Time
magazine reported back in two thousand and five he did.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
That's the one time I thought you were actually thought
you were pulling my leg, and it was the truth.
So I don't even know what to think of.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
I like to mix it up and keep you guessing, buddy,
he got to keep you on your toes. Uh.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Yeah. People from Walt Disney World actually came and did
that Is that true? The best No, So in two
thousand and eight, the Pakistani government said, you know, this
is internally of course, they were like, hey, we should
let's just get him out of house too, because this
is all just for show anyway, right, And the US
(32:04):
was trying to work with Pakistan at the time to
fight against al Qaeda. So again we were in a
position as the US to we couldn't publicly come out
and say like, you can't like let this guy out
of house arrest because once again we needed Pakistan.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
We did. And Seymour Hirsh, the very very very famous
investigative reporter who broke the Mili massacre and that Osama
bin Laden have been assassinated and so on, he reported
back in two thousand and five that the US went
along with it because Pakistan agreed to hand over all
of the information they had on the nuclear program they
had helped Iran start to build. And so the US
(32:43):
was like, okay, that's a deal. Well, we'll take your
Iranian secrets and then we'll just kind of look the
other way. And the slap on the wrist that you
guys are giving a q Khan.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yeah, it's so interesting, like with the recent stuff with
the US and Iran, Like when people try to argue
about what's going on and they say, no, it's because
of this thing that happened under Biden or Obama, or
no it's Trump's fault. It's like, this stuff goes back
decades and decades. If you really want to trace back
(33:13):
to like the origins of all these issues, you know,
it's like you can't just look. You can't look. Yeah,
you can't look back at one previous administration if you
really want to investigate the true roots of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
It's interesting because you had Carter getting in bed with
Pakistan because the Russians invaded Afghanistan under his watch. You
had Reagan and then hw Bush certifying every year lying
that Pakistan didn't have a program, and so on and
so forth. And yeah, that's actually a really important point.
One of the reasons a Q Khan was allowed to
(33:45):
continue proliferating nuclear programs to countries the US don't want
to have nuclear programs is because the US looked the
other way on it. That's a huge factor in his success.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Yeah. Absolutely. Eventually he was fully released in two thousand
and nine, and they still said Hey, you can't, like
you said, you can't interview him even now that he's
that he's out, you know, United States or you know,
international nuclear commissions, like just stay away from them. And
there are a lot of Pakistanis that think he's a hero.
(34:21):
Like he came out later on, and even though he
took the fall, he came out later and was basically like,
you know, like why should they have all the nukes?
Why why should those original five countries have all this power?
He had a quote that said, are these bastards God
appointed guardians of the world to stockpile hundreds of thousands
(34:41):
of nuclear warheads? And have they God given authority to
carry out explosions every month? So this was in an
op ed in Derschpiegel magazine, a German magazine. So he's
very much a hero to a lot of people in
Pakistan still for sort of saying, hey, Muslim countries need
to have the same weapons that you have.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Yeah, and like we talked about all the way back
in the seventies, patriotism certainly seems to have motivated him.
For sure.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
He also had money.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Yeah, he also made a lot of money. I saw
an estimate that at his PQ is worth about four
hundred million dollars. Yeah, and bear in mind he's on
paper still just a civil servant, a scientist, a highly
respected scientist, but he works for the government, and now
he's worth four hundred million dollars. He died and a
hotel he did in Molly and I looked it up
(35:29):
and only as like two point six out of five
stars on trip Advisor. Doesn't look that nice, but yeah,
it's in Timbuck two. And I guess it's in competition
to the Biospherians hotel. They had one in Timbuk two, right,
that's right.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah, I thought of that immediately. I guess that's the
place to open a hotel if you want to, you know,
fill out the hotel here for hotel yah waters.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Do you want to get your feet wet? For sure?
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Yeah, exactly. He eventually passed away. Aq Con died in
October twenty twenty one, apparently died of COVID nineteen. And
he got a full military funeral, even though he was,
you know, not a part of their military.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
No, but that really goes to show what a national
hero he was considered then and now this is twenty
twenty one. I think, to me, the biggest the biggest
shock of all this is that he managed to live
to be an old man and die of COVID. Like
the fact that he wasn't assassinated during his career when
(36:33):
he was putting out brochures for his services, and the
fact that he wasn't assassinated by the Pakistani military because
they were worried he was going to start pointing fingers
like it's nuts. This guy managed to stay alive. But
he did. And he was a public figure too. He
used to write op eds in the newspaper once in
a while. He was like a public intellectual in Pakistan.
(36:54):
He was a big deal throughout his life. It's not
like he went into hiding. He did the oppoice.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Yeah, you know, very interesting.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
And then one thing I saw, though, the irony of
all this is that supposedly his technology didn't work all
that well. North Korea ended up abandoning the centrifuge program
in favor of plutonium, and I think even Pakistan's arsenal
is largely based on plutonium now rather than highly enriched uranium.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Yeah. I wonder if that was any kind of ruse
on his part, But it seemed like he really did
believe in uranium.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah, and it does work. I think, who knows. Maybe
it's just harder to do when you have to keep
it secret. I don't know. But one other thing I
want to shout out. There's a Adam Curtis documentary. Remember
he's the one who did the Century of the Self
that we talked a lot about in the PR episode.
He did one called Hypernormalization and it covers a lot
(37:51):
of Cutaffi and Libya throughout the years and his relationship
with the US and basically makes the has the theory
that Kadafi was essentially an international punching bag for the
US for show that the the US beat up on
kind of with his Agreement tests agreement because the US
(38:14):
wasn't able or didn't think it was able to take
on the real issue in the Middle East, which was Syria,
the real strong man in the Middle East. So they
made Kaddafi look like a strong man that he wasn't
so that they could pummel him in the public sphere
and look like they were doing something about Middle East
problems at the time.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
I'll say one thing about Kadafi is he could he
could rock those aviators.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Oh yeah, and that that perm.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yeah, two looks that I've never been able to pull off.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
I would pay good money to see you try, though,
I have a feeling as a photoshop in the future.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
I'm looking at him right now. He kind of looked
a little bit like Carlos Santana.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Yeah, for sure, he got he got mistaken for that
all the time. He thought that was like, yeah, and
Santana too, but it was not as good for Santana
to be mistaken as Kadafi. Yeah, yeah, you got anything
else about aq Kahn?
Speaker 1 (39:09):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
I don't either, which means, of course, everybody, it's time
for a listener mail.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
This is a not a correction, just a little bit
of added info. Hey guys, we've heard from a few
people by the way from Canada, specifically about Phil Hartman.
Love the show, guys, my favorite podcast for years now.
As a huge comedy and huge SNL fan. I really
appreciated your recent Phil Hartman podcast. You said in your
(39:38):
show that you surmised he was probably the second most
famous person from Branford after Wayne Gretzky, but also qualified
there were probably someone else that you might be missing
that was more famous. Just wanted to pass along that
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Branford and this is
arguably the most famous person born in Branford, Ontario, ahead
of Gretzky and then Hartman. I think I agree with
(40:01):
that Jay. That is Jay Hammer from Hamilton, Ontario.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Thanks Jay, It was a short and sweet email and
we love those kind and yeah, I would agree to
Alexander Graham Bell is probably more famous even than Wayne Gretzky.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Oh hooy.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
If you want to be like Jay and get in
touch with us and set us straight about something, we
love that kind of thing, you can send it via
email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, I'm welcome into the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
Should Know, Foreign Policy Edition.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
That's right, take it away.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Okay, So Chuck, we're talking today. Well let me start differently, Chuck. Yes,
have you ever met Aq Khan?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I had never heard of Aq Khn?
Speaker 2 (00:33):
What do you think of him? Now?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
You know, seems like a guy that made a lot
of money helping countries develop their nuclear program.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Sure, but I think that leaves out some very important stuff.
This was in flagrant violation of UN non proliferation treaties.
Who was generally illegal, and he was even doing it
on the side. He had an underground clandestine proliferation network,
which is I mean, that's very few people have ever
(01:06):
done that in the world. Over here in the West, Chuck,
he's viewed as a villain, and in other parts of
the world, especially Pakistan where he's from, he's hailed as
a hero. He's very complex, complicated, and at the end
of the day, he may essentially be generally a fall
guy for a much larger cabal of people who were
(01:28):
actually doing.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
This, Yeah, for sure. I guess we can go back
and talk a little bit about how he got there, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
He was born in India in nineteen thirty six and
in nineteen fifty two moved to West Pakistan and he
was into metallurgy and studied at a few different universities
in a few different countries. He eventually graduated initially in
nineteen sixty from the University of Karachi, but then got
a doctorate in metallurgical engineering in nineteen seventy two. In
(02:01):
that time, he got married, had a couple of daughters,
and then eventually he found his way with his family
in the early seventies and the Netherlands working for a
company called Physical Dynamic Research Laboratory which was doing uranium
enrichment for another company called Urinko, which was a consortium
(02:24):
of a few different countries Britain, Germany and the Netherlands,
and they were, you know, they were running ultracentrifuges and
he was pretty good at snooping around.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
It seems like, yeah, in ultracentrifuge r centrifugias in general
is used to enricheranium in your rich uranium to a
certain extent to use for nuclear power. But if you
keep going, you can use that enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. Right,
So I think that these companies were doing this for
power for power generation. But regardless, he wasn't a particular
(03:00):
like brilliant physicists or metal or just or anything like that.
He was just kind of a dude. He just had
a will that was unlike other people's typically. So when
he started out, he had a very low level security clearance,
but he very quickly like started making waves and catching
the attention of Dutch intelligence agencies for asking a lot
(03:22):
of questions that did not have much of anything to
do with the work he was supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, so they started monitoring him, and this is something
that kind of continued at at least as far as
Dutch intelligence, and then you know, eventually other countries would
start monitoring as well, because you know, like I said,
he got pretty good at snooping around. And in nineteen
seventy one there was a conflict between East and West
(03:49):
Pakistan and that led to a pretty brief war with India,
and just for our purposes, what that eventually meant was
a khan and a lot of Pakistan were kind of
humiliated at the whole thing, and we're like, we're still
under the thumb of India here, and kind of just
(04:09):
sort of got that I guess national Pakistani pride going,
as you know, wanting to get out from under that thumb.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah, I saw that that in that thirteen day war,
Pakistan lost half its navy, a quarter of its air force,
and a third of its army. So it was very
much a humiliating defeat. And yeah, I saw that. Up
to this point, aq Kan was just a generally average person,
but that seemed to have really started to get him going.
(04:39):
So he decided he was going to use what expertise
he had to help build a bomb for Pakistan. So
he wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan,
Zulfa kar Ali Bhutto, who was running the show at
the time, and said, Hey, I want to help build
a nuclear bomb for Pakistan. We clearly need one. And
if you said back and look at it, chuck like,
(05:01):
this is just some random dude that the Prime Minister
had never heard of who wrote him a letter and
said like, hey, let's build a bomb. And I heard
the first time he was ignored and the second time,
they were like, all right, let's see what this guy
has to say.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Yeah, because he was lobbying for uranium and that was
his expertise, was enriching uranium and at the time, Pakistan
was trying to enrich and produce plutonium. And he was like,
that's not the way. Uranium is the way to go.
And just a couple of months after that, Bhutto met
with him and over about the next eleven or twelve months,
(05:35):
con was like, all right, I'm going to make a
little grocery shopping list of what we need, the parts
that we need to get a nuclear program started here
in earnest and I'm going to make a list of
companies and suppliers and who can get us this stuff.
And he basically got all of this information while he
was working for that Dutch company, right, you know, making
(05:56):
copies of blueprints and sneaking them out and supply lists,
suppers lists and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yeah, he was very well known around the office or
be like making capies.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
So he well, I just dated myself. Can we just
do a little science minute off to the side.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
So you said that there was a course that Pakistan
was already on for making a bomb out of plutonium. Right.
Aq Con was all about enriching uranium. There are two
routes you can use to make a nuclear bomb, and
the background and training khan Head was in uranium enrichment,
and he loved to like talk trash about plutonium and
(06:35):
the people in Pakistan running the plutonium program. But just
the upshot of it is this, if you want to
get weapons grade uranium, you need about ninety percent pure
uranium in nature. The U two thirty five uranium that
you're looking for occurs about three quarters of a percent
(06:56):
of any natural lump of uranium. So there's two ways
to get that purified U two thirty five. One is enrichment,
where you spin it in centrifugias that go so fast
that it actually separates the different kinds of uranium isotopes
and then you just kind of siphon off the stuff
you want. Or with plutonium, you bombard it with neutron
so that uranium two thirty eight eventually turns into two
(07:19):
thirty nine, decays into neptunium and then plutonium. They're both
like great ways of creating nuclear material to blow up
the world with, but they're just two totally different tracks.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, so we did a whole episode on that. If
you're interested in like the finer details, seek that one out.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Was that the one that we did after Fukushima?
Speaker 1 (07:40):
I don't know, but we did a whole episode on
how to that whole process. I can't remember what it
was called, though.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Well I can't help but talk about it. I love
that for some reason, really like tickles me.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah. So in October of seventy five, the Dutch authorities
who had been watching him this whole time, noting all
this sort of suspicious stuff that he was doing at work,
all right, we're going to transfer you out of these
enrichment projects because we think you're, you know, you're clearly
some sort of a snoop or a thread or something.
(08:11):
And just a couple of months after that, and I
guess late nineteen seventy five, in December, he left the
company all together and had you know, basically under his
in his banker's box on the way out the door.
He had a bunch of sensitive documents, blueprints and those
supplier lists, and he said, don't bother looking in these
(08:32):
banker boxes. The lid is on, right.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
He just kind of vanished and showed back up in
Pakistan and he was very quickly put in charge of
the uranium project. And there was a guy named Manir
Ahmad Khan who was essentially his rival in the quest
to build Pakistan a bomb. The other Cohn was involved
in the plutonium wing of the whole thing. Khn eventually
(08:55):
got Bhutto and then the guy who overthrew Bhuto over
to his side in favor of uranium enrichment, but also
in favor of aq Con. From what I could tell,
he had a really big ego and he wanted to
be like the top dog in getting Pakistan the bomb,
and so he was working on the project called Project
(09:15):
seven oh six. It was the uranium Enrichment project, and
by nineteen eighty two, I think they managed to produce
the highly enriched uranium that you need to make a bomb,
very very small amount at first, you need several kilograms
to actually make a bomb, but they were successful at
doing it through that uranium enrichment program by nineteen eighty
(09:37):
two for the first time.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah, and as they're doing this, are also researching how
to get this thing into a missile. So you know,
as you'll see, I mean, if you just look back
at the history of enriching uranium or for nuclear energy.
It's usually a country is like, hey, you know, we
just want to have a nuclear energy company and we
want to get a to speed on that. But what
(10:01):
they're also trying to do is get a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
They're also making copies.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah, it kind of just happens over and over and
over where they're like, no, no, no, we just want nuclear
energy and don't worry about what's in that bunker over there.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Right and again I kind of I mentioned it at
the outset. The reason that countries have to do it
like that is because there's a huge treaty from the
sixties that said, Okay, the people who already have the bomb,
they're agreeing to disassemble it. People who don't have the bomb,
they're going to agree not to seek the bomb. And
it's still in effect and it's still enforced. So that's
(10:37):
why you have to do it right exactly. But it's
just been so just kind of nibble that and worn
down and just flagrantly ignored that. It doesn't really seem
to have that much teeth, but I guess it's enough
to make countries feel like they have to be subversive
when they're trying to create a nuclear weapons program.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah, exactly. So while he's doing all this, and you
mentioned at the beginning that he had a side gig,
you know, getting rich off of selling these secrets and
blueprints and helping other countries, you know, get in touch
with the right. As you'll see, he worked with a
lot of middlemen over the years and spoke a bunch
of different languages, so he was really kind of the
(11:19):
perfect dude to do this. And while he was doing this,
he developed that side gig as importing and exporting all
these components and plans that you know, some of which
he just outright stole.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, And he was able to do this in large
part because he had by this time garnered so much
respect in Pakistan among the leadership of Pakistan, emerging as
the guy who was giving the bomb or developing the
bomb for Pakistan that they just weren't. They were like,
just go, here's a blank check, do whatever you need
to do. So he started ordering doubles of the stuff yeah,
(11:54):
that he was he needed to set up Pakistan's uranium
enrichment program, and then he would take the stuff that
he didn't need and turn around and essentially reverse the
way that it got there. He would use Pakistani military
planes cargo planes to take those parts, the extra parts
back to middlemen, and then he'd tell the middlemen what
(12:15):
buyers to direct it to, and then he'd pocket the money.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, and it was very lucrative, as we'll see, he
ended up making a ton of money doing this. He
ended up having a few kind of major clients. No
one really knows how many countries he really dealt with,
because I think they found out he traveled to many
more countries than they officially sort of accused him of
dealing with. But the first country to step up and
(12:43):
say hey, I really want to do business with you
was Iran, and this was in nineteen eighty seven. He
helped them build up to fifty thousand centrifuges P one
types Pakistan won. There are a couple of different types,
Pakistan one and the P two, the Pakistan two. Those
(13:03):
the P twos are much faster. And the belief at
the time is that he was just kind of sending
the stuff that they didn't need anymore to Iran and
it was kind of outdated equipment that wasn't going to
help him that much.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yeah, for sure, that's how it started out. They were
they because Pakistan upgraded their setup from what I saw.
And the reason why you need fifty thousand centrifuges is
because when you spin that uranium to separate it and
you siphon off the stuff you want, you have to
do it again and again and again and again, and
it can take weeks and months and sometimes years depending
(13:38):
on what kind of centrifuges you're working with. But if
you have fifty thousand centrifuges like Iran supposedly got, you
can make a lot of highly enriched uranium fairly fast. Which,
let me know, wonder, Chuck, like, what is taking Iran
so long? If they still don't have a nuke and
they started in nineteen eighty seven, What's what's the deal there?
(14:00):
And the best answer I could come up with is
that back in the nineties, the Ayatola issued a fatois
like a ruling on Sharia law that basically said no nukes,
Iran's not going to have any nukes, and that it
wasn't until twenty twenty four that Iran said that they
were starting to rethink it. So I guess just because
the leadership said they weren't going to have nukes. That
(14:21):
is the reason Iran doesn't have a nuke right now.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Yeah, interesting, I thought so too. So he was dealing
with their government. Supposedly until nineteen ninety one there was
a final shipment of the p ones, but other people
have said no, no, no. That continued for at least
another four years through the mid nineties, and those P
two centerfuges started flowing in. Iran wanted this potential bomb
(14:48):
because they were at war with Iraq at the time
in the eighties, over the course of about eight years,
So Khan over the businessman, was like, hey, Iraq, I've
been helping Iran developed their You could probably use a
little with my help in stolen documents as well.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah, what's crazy is Iroq was like very suspicious of
this from the outset, and I guess they asked for
a sample and they couldn't find what sample they were given.
Just that con was like, don't taste this, that's not
that kind of sample.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Right, And I think you dab your pinky in it, Yeah, exactly,
put it on your tongue.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
It's like, don't do that. So I guess a rock
thought that this is some sort of maybe international un
sting operation. And then around the same time, the first
Gulf War broke out and they were like, we don't
have time for this, so they moved on. And I
guess he never managed to get a bomb or the
(15:45):
information a rock needed to a rock.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Yeah, but there were documents that said, hey, this little
you know, the paperwork was there. This will cost you
five million bucks and a ten percent commission on materials
right through my network, So I can you know, pay
people off basically. But yeah, like you said, it seems
like it never ended up happening, and Iraq was probably
wise to think that that was a sting operation even
(16:09):
though it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Well, what something I saw that was kind of funny
was Iran paid three million dollars for THEIRS and they
actually were like ten percent commission. That seems steep, So
they went and started calling up the list of suppliers
that aq Con had for him, rather than dealing with him,
because they were bargain shopping for their nuclear.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Pro Well apparently, well maybe that has something to do
with it too.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Their nuclear centrifuges were held together bubble gum and duct tape.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Should we take a break. Yeah's all right, we'll come
back and talk about a couple of more clients right
after this. All right, so we're back, and we promised
(17:17):
to talk about new clients. This is where North Korea
enters a picture. It's the mid nineties, and with a
deal with the United States, North Korea said, you know what,
we're going to stop building our nuclear reactors. We're going
to stop producing plutonium again. We're just trying to get
nuclear energy going. But all right, we'll stop doing that.
(17:39):
But what we're really going to do is very quietly
start looking to continue that process, just on the down load.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Right, But Kim Jung il had his fingers crossed behind
his back, so none of that counted.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
That's right. And so who do they turn to? Of
course they turned to Pakistan and aq Kan.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah, so this is where it really seems like Pakistan.
Pakistani officials were definitely involved in this, even though later on,
as we'll see, they're like, we had nothing to do
with this. But Pakistan conducted its first nuclear test in
nineteen ninety eight, which really surprised the world, and even
more dramatically, they did it in response to a test
(18:18):
that India had carried out two weeks before and during
this test. One of the groups that was there was
a delegation of North Koreans who were invited to watch
the whole thing. And the common wisdom among the intelligence
community is that this was a group of nuclear scientists
from North Korea's nuclear program who are basically being you know,
(18:41):
run through the motions of how this is working. I
don't know if we said or not. Also, a q
Khan was known to have gone to North Korea at
least thirteen times that were documented. Something really weird happened
during this nuclear test with the North Korean delegation though,
and that was that one of them, a woman who
was among this group died. Mys seriously. She was shot
(19:02):
and eventually sent back to North Korea. Her body was
but on the cargo plane were centrifuges and other things
for North Korea's nuclear program too.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Yeah, was that just like, Hey, we've got this plane going,
so why don't we just double dip and get some
stuff moved, maybe transporting this body.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Maybe Pakistan is the bargain shop as well.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
So, like you said, he went to North Korea at
least thirteen times that intelligence knows about. And while he
was helping North Korea sort of develop their enrichment program.
They were supplying Pakistan. It was a bit of a
quid pro quo. They're like, hey, we've got long distance
missile technology that you don't have, and so we're perfect
(19:50):
bedfellows here.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Yeah, and so they got the missiles from North Korea
through a guy named Kang. He was on paper the
dip the astor to Pakistan for North Korea. In reality,
he was the husband of the woman who was murdered.
She turned out to be murdered during the missile test
because she was spying for the US, but her husband
(20:11):
managed to hang in there and it turns out he
was an armstealer for North Korea. He was the one
who provided the missiles. So again, all this time, North
Korea is saying like, we don't have a nuclear program.
Pakistan's like, we don't even know what anybody's talking about.
This is all in retrospect, like this is not on
a lot of people's radar right now. And as a
matter of fact, Aq Khan was on the radar of
(20:34):
international intelligence communities again all the way back to the
with the seventies, when the Dutch started watching him but somehow,
some way, the global intelligence community missed the fact that
he was a rogue nuclear weapons technology salesman, which is
one of the weirdest things ever. But it turned out
(20:55):
that it was his next business venture in Libya that
led to his downfall.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, I mean there were you know, later on they
were they were like, yeah, we knew he was ordering
double the amount of everything, and we just couldn't figure
out why.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Right, it makes zero. There's a lot about this that
just really smells like a kind of a poorly constructed
cover up internationally, not just from Pakistan.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Yeah, for sure. So yeah, the next client step forward,
and that was Libya. And this was in the late nineties,
like nineteen ninety six, ninety seven. He started trading centrifuges
and the equipment and the components getting them over to Libya.
This there's a guy here named Peter Griffin. Not what
(21:42):
you're thinking from family guy is a real life human.
It was a British engineer who was involved in this
operation who was like, man, I've been I've been given
or not giving, but I've been selling material to Pakistan
for you know, twenty years or more like this has
been going on for a long time.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, and that was a huge thing that allowed this
to go on. Is like the international community would ban
parts for like centrifuges or breeder reactors that you made
plutonium with, and then people like Iq Khan would be like, well, fine,
we're going to start shipping the parts to make those
parts and then assemble the parts at the at the end.
So they were legitimately allowed to do this stuff. It
(22:22):
was just they still had to fake what the overall
purpose was. So yeah, guys like Peter Griffin were like,
I actually wasn't breaking any laws. It was more like
an international more that was broken where he knew he
was helping states that should not have nuclear bombs get
nuclear bombs essentially.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, for sure. So Peter Griffin, Peter Griffin.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
There's just no way that couldn't do something.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
I guess that was. Uh, oh, what's the guy's name.
I haven't watched Family Gun so long? Cleveland, Peter Cleveland. Yeah,
that's right. So Peter Griffin was a partner and a
company from Dubai, and in two thousand and one they
placed a bunch of orders for these parts that they
needed with a Malaysian company, and that company spun off
(23:11):
a subsidiary and they hired workers and brought in, you know,
all this equipment and brought in a bunch of new
tools to start sort of you know, turning this into
a real program. And Con was like for my part,
you know, I've got all these blueprints to show you
how to put this you know, big lego machine together.
And he sent at least one engineer, so like active involvement,
(23:33):
sending engineers to Dubai to like make sure they were
doing everything correctly, so like deep involvement at this point.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Yeah. Huge. So he had like middlemen from Europe, He
had designers from Switzerland. He had companies that were set
up to build the parts that were being shipped from Turkey,
from Malaysia to Turkey to Dubai where they were repackaged
and sent on to Libya. It was a huge network. Also,
I forgot to say earlier. By this time, the CON
(24:01):
network had their own sales bruchures that they used to
hand out at ARM sales fares, which apparently they have
ARM sales fares, but they had brochures by this point.
That's that's how set up they were, I guess how established.
That's what I was going for so it was a huge,
huge network. But it was one of these shipments that
somehow got intercepted and I think two thousand and three
(24:24):
aboard the a ship called the BBC China, which as
far as I noticed, I have anything to do with
the BBC, And that was the thing that brought the
whole thing down. Eventually, Chuck I proposed that since I
remembered the word established, that kind of says we.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Should take a break, all right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
So the whole thing came down with that Libya thing.
Remember they had this amazing network going, all these amazing
all this amazing subtrifuge going somehow, I don't know how,
but a particular shipment aboard a ship called the BBC
China was captured in I think, leaving Dubai en route
(25:37):
to Libya. And at this point aq Con had basically
been under great suspicion. I think he was being investigated
by CIA and MI six at the same time. But
there wasn't a lot you could do about this if
you were the US, because you needed Pakistan at the time,
as we'll talk about in a second. But when this
shipment was found, it was a massive shipment of centrifuge
(26:01):
is going to Libya. It was just all out in
the open now, there was just no denying it. Even
Pakistan couldn't protect aq Kan anymore.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, for sure. And like you said, it was pretty complicated.
I mean, it's always been fairly complicated, with US and
Pakistan as being like sometimes bedfellows because they were necessary
for the US until they weren't, and then you know,
that's when the US could take action. But in the eighties,
you know, we were supplying military aid to Pakistan to
(26:29):
help support the fight against Soviets in Afghanistan, so we
couldn't really, you know, even though we intelligence services knew
that they had a nuclear program going and even where
that technology was coming from, there wasn't a lot we
could do at the time. In the mid eighties they
caught Congress threatened to cut off that military aid unless
(26:50):
Reagan could promise that they didn't they weren't producing nuclear weapons.
And so for five years from eighty five to ninety,
I guess Reagan and George H. W. Bush would certify
that Pakistan didn't have a nuclear weapons program. And then
in nineteen ninety, once the Soviets were out of Afghanistan. Coincidentally,
(27:10):
not really, Bush said, you know what, I'm not going
to sign that certification anymore, and we're going to stop
the flow of a to Pakistan.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, which is I mean, talk about a screwjob. But apparently, Chuck,
we were so in bed with Pakistan during the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan that we were flying YouTube bomber flights
to surveil Russia out of Pakistan. We had an NSA
listening station there, like we needed them big time. But
(27:37):
once we didn't anymore, we could start to press them
on Aq Khan and that was when this whole thing
started to kind of fall apart. But again, it wasn't
until two thousand and three that the BBC China was
intercepted and the whole thing was on the table. But
by this time the pressure that the US had been
(27:57):
putting on Pakistan was enough that the president at the time,
Proves Mushariff, who was the president of Pakistan around the
time of nine to eleven and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan,
he essentially was like, Okay, I've got to do something,
So he dismissed Khan from the research laboratories that by
(28:20):
this time bore his own name. They were called the
Doctor aq Khan Research Laboratories, the National Nuclear Research Laboratories
in Pakistan, and they were like, you're not the director
of those anymore, but we're still friends, so you can
be a government advisor.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yeah, I mean that's I don't know, I don't know
enough about it, but that seemed to be very much
just sort of like, hey, look what we're doing. We're
saying he doesn't have that job anymore. Didn't that what
was going on?
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah? And the US had to put up with it
because by this time we were in Afghanistan and we
needed Pakistan him in just as much as we did
when the Soviets were in Afghanistan. Because no one learns
from history.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
That's right. So after that two thousand and three cargo
ship exposure, I guess in December of that year, that's
when Gaddafi of Libya said, all right, you know what,
I'm going to shut down our nuclear program.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
I'm really sorry.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
United States didn't mean it and really sold con down
the river and said this is the guy. He's been
supplying us with materials and we're friends, right.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah, Apparently Kadafi was really really worried after the US
invaded Iraq that he was going to be next, and
he was right, but it was eight years down the road. Yeah,
but I guess he He went so far as to
show them like centrifuge labs that were described or disguised
as chicken farms, and the whole time he's like, it
(29:50):
was CON. It was CON. It was CON. And he
gave I six and the CIA documents on how to
build a nuclear warhead that he said CON had given him.
So he really sold them down the river. And by
this point, the CIA chief at the time, George Tennant,
had enough to go to pervezmer Sharff and was like,
it's not enough to fire this guy from his job,
(30:10):
like he's an international nuclear proliferation dealer and you need
to do something much more pronounced. And Mouchharff said, Okay,
I got it, I got it. We're going to make
him apologize and we're going to put him under house
arrests and then four days after that, I'm going to
pardon him. What do you think?
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah, they put him on TV. He did confess, he
did apologize, he did all that stuff, said he was
he took the fall. He said, you know, I wasn't
acting on the direction of my government. I was doing
this on my own. And you know, I think everyone
even at the time, kind of saw through that he
(30:52):
would pardon him. I mean, the initial arrest was like
a real arrest, but then he pardoned him and put
him under house arrests. And that whole time though, Pakistan
was still like, no, CIA, you can't like same with
the International Atomic Energy Agency, you can't come in here
and ask him questions directly, like we're still shielding him
from you.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yeah, And they continued to even after they let him
out of house arrest. I also saw one other little note.
He had a jasmine shrub trimmed in the shape of
a topiary mushroom cloud outside of his house.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
Did he really is that a joke?
Speaker 2 (31:27):
No? Well, at least as far as I think Time
magazine reported back in two thousand and five he did.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
That's the one time I thought you were actually thought
you were pulling my leg, and it was the truth.
So I don't even know what to think of.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
I like to mix it up and keep you guessing, buddy,
he got to keep you on your toes. Uh.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Yeah. People from Walt Disney World actually came and did
that Is that true? The best No, So in two
thousand and eight, the Pakistani government said, you know, this
is internally of course, they were like, hey, we should
let's just get him out of house too, because this
is all just for show anyway, right, And the US
(32:04):
was trying to work with Pakistan at the time to
fight against al Qaeda. So again we were in a
position as the US to we couldn't publicly come out
and say like, you can't like let this guy out
of house arrest because once again we needed Pakistan.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
We did. And Seymour Hirsh, the very very very famous
investigative reporter who broke the Mili massacre and that Osama
bin Laden have been assassinated and so on, he reported
back in two thousand and five that the US went
along with it because Pakistan agreed to hand over all
of the information they had on the nuclear program they
had helped Iran start to build. And so the US
(32:43):
was like, okay, that's a deal. Well, we'll take your
Iranian secrets and then we'll just kind of look the
other way. And the slap on the wrist that you
guys are giving a q Khan.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yeah, it's so interesting, like with the recent stuff with
the US and Iran, Like when people try to argue
about what's going on and they say, no, it's because
of this thing that happened under Biden or Obama, or
no it's Trump's fault. It's like, this stuff goes back
decades and decades. If you really want to trace back
(33:13):
to like the origins of all these issues, you know,
it's like you can't just look. You can't look. Yeah,
you can't look back at one previous administration if you
really want to investigate the true roots of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
It's interesting because you had Carter getting in bed with
Pakistan because the Russians invaded Afghanistan under his watch. You
had Reagan and then hw Bush certifying every year lying
that Pakistan didn't have a program, and so on and
so forth. And yeah, that's actually a really important point.
One of the reasons a Q Khan was allowed to
(33:45):
continue proliferating nuclear programs to countries the US don't want
to have nuclear programs is because the US looked the
other way on it. That's a huge factor in his success.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Yeah. Absolutely. Eventually he was fully released in two thousand
and nine, and they still said Hey, you can't, like
you said, you can't interview him even now that he's
that he's out, you know, United States or you know,
international nuclear commissions, like just stay away from them. And
there are a lot of Pakistanis that think he's a hero.
(34:21):
Like he came out later on, and even though he
took the fall, he came out later and was basically like,
you know, like why should they have all the nukes?
Why why should those original five countries have all this power?
He had a quote that said, are these bastards God
appointed guardians of the world to stockpile hundreds of thousands
(34:41):
of nuclear warheads? And have they God given authority to
carry out explosions every month? So this was in an
op ed in Derschpiegel magazine, a German magazine. So he's
very much a hero to a lot of people in
Pakistan still for sort of saying, hey, Muslim countries need
to have the same weapons that you have.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Yeah, and like we talked about all the way back
in the seventies, patriotism certainly seems to have motivated him.
For sure.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
He also had money.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Yeah, he also made a lot of money. I saw
an estimate that at his PQ is worth about four
hundred million dollars. Yeah, and bear in mind he's on
paper still just a civil servant, a scientist, a highly
respected scientist, but he works for the government, and now
he's worth four hundred million dollars. He died and a
hotel he did in Molly and I looked it up
(35:29):
and only as like two point six out of five
stars on trip Advisor. Doesn't look that nice, but yeah,
it's in Timbuck two. And I guess it's in competition
to the Biospherians hotel. They had one in Timbuk two, right,
that's right.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah, I thought of that immediately. I guess that's the
place to open a hotel if you want to, you know,
fill out the hotel here for hotel yah waters.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Do you want to get your feet wet? For sure?
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Yeah, exactly. He eventually passed away. Aq Con died in
October twenty twenty one, apparently died of COVID nineteen. And
he got a full military funeral, even though he was,
you know, not a part of their military.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
No, but that really goes to show what a national
hero he was considered then and now this is twenty
twenty one. I think, to me, the biggest the biggest
shock of all this is that he managed to live
to be an old man and die of COVID. Like
the fact that he wasn't assassinated during his career when
(36:33):
he was putting out brochures for his services, and the
fact that he wasn't assassinated by the Pakistani military because
they were worried he was going to start pointing fingers
like it's nuts. This guy managed to stay alive. But
he did. And he was a public figure too. He
used to write op eds in the newspaper once in
a while. He was like a public intellectual in Pakistan.
(36:54):
He was a big deal throughout his life. It's not
like he went into hiding. He did the oppoice.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Yeah, you know, very interesting.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
And then one thing I saw, though, the irony of
all this is that supposedly his technology didn't work all
that well. North Korea ended up abandoning the centrifuge program
in favor of plutonium, and I think even Pakistan's arsenal
is largely based on plutonium now rather than highly enriched uranium.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Yeah. I wonder if that was any kind of ruse
on his part, But it seemed like he really did
believe in uranium.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah, and it does work. I think, who knows. Maybe
it's just harder to do when you have to keep
it secret. I don't know. But one other thing I
want to shout out. There's a Adam Curtis documentary. Remember
he's the one who did the Century of the Self
that we talked a lot about in the PR episode.
He did one called Hypernormalization and it covers a lot
(37:51):
of Cutaffi and Libya throughout the years and his relationship
with the US and basically makes the has the theory
that Kadafi was essentially an international punching bag for the
US for show that the the US beat up on
kind of with his Agreement tests agreement because the US
(38:14):
wasn't able or didn't think it was able to take
on the real issue in the Middle East, which was Syria,
the real strong man in the Middle East. So they
made Kaddafi look like a strong man that he wasn't
so that they could pummel him in the public sphere
and look like they were doing something about Middle East
problems at the time.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
I'll say one thing about Kadafi is he could he
could rock those aviators.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Oh yeah, and that that perm.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yeah, two looks that I've never been able to pull off.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
I would pay good money to see you try, though,
I have a feeling as a photoshop in the future.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
I'm looking at him right now. He kind of looked
a little bit like Carlos Santana.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Yeah, for sure, he got he got mistaken for that
all the time. He thought that was like, yeah, and
Santana too, but it was not as good for Santana
to be mistaken as Kadafi. Yeah, yeah, you got anything
else about aq Kahn?
Speaker 1 (39:09):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
I don't either, which means, of course, everybody, it's time
for a listener mail.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
This is a not a correction, just a little bit
of added info. Hey guys, we've heard from a few
people by the way from Canada, specifically about Phil Hartman.
Love the show, guys, my favorite podcast for years now.
As a huge comedy and huge SNL fan. I really
appreciated your recent Phil Hartman podcast. You said in your
(39:38):
show that you surmised he was probably the second most
famous person from Branford after Wayne Gretzky, but also qualified
there were probably someone else that you might be missing
that was more famous. Just wanted to pass along that
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Branford and this is
arguably the most famous person born in Branford, Ontario, ahead
of Gretzky and then Hartman. I think I agree with
(40:01):
that Jay. That is Jay Hammer from Hamilton, Ontario.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Thanks Jay, It was a short and sweet email and
we love those kind and yeah, I would agree to
Alexander Graham Bell is probably more famous even than Wayne Gretzky.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Oh hooy.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
If you want to be like Jay and get in
touch with us and set us straight about something, we
love that kind of thing, you can send it via
email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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