In December 1975, nuclear physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan, a senior member of the British-German-Dutch uranium enrichment consortium Urenco, said goodbye to his colleagues in his Amsterdam office. He was going on his annual vacation to his homeland of Pakistan, promising to return with small gifts for everyone, as he had done in previous years. But this time he did not return.
Instead, Khan took with him “gifts” — copies of secret blueprints for the most advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges from Urenco and other documents. In Pakistan, he joined the local nuclear program and later headed it. In 1998, Khan successfully tested a nuclear bomb and became a national hero.
And he also went down in history as the founder of the global black market for nuclear smuggling. It was thanks to Khan that Iran and North Korea received technology and materials for their nuclear programs. And the Libyan and Iraqi dictators — Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein — stopped literally one step away from acquiring nuclear weapons. And these are just a few of the clients who were identified.
Western intelligence agencies ranked Khan on the same list of most dangerous criminals as Osama bin Laden. They had been following Khan for decades, but they had never been able to establish the exact extent of his shadowy network.
A young Pakistani boy looks at a kite decorated with an image of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistanʼs nuclear bomb, 2006.
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From promising scientist to nuclear spy
Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in 1936 to a Muslim family in what was then British India. In 1947, the British colony became two independent states, India and Pakistan. Religious differences and territorial disputes led to a long-standing conflict between the states, which continues to this day.
Khanʼs family first ended up in India and soon moved to Pakistan. Here the guy received a bachelorʼs degree in physics. And later received a scholarship to study in West Germany. In Europe, Khan learned several languages and wrote his doctoral dissertation in the early 1970s in German.
In 1972, he was invited to the Urenco company, where he quickly went from a laboratory assistant to one of the leading specialists who improved centrifuges for enriching uranium for nuclear power plants.
Urenco uranium enrichment equipment, 1980s.
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Khan did not break ties with his homeland and periodically went there on vacation. Meanwhile, things in Pakistan were completely bad. In 1971, he suffered a crushing defeat in the war with India and lost his eastern province — with Indian support, the state of Bangladesh appeared there. As Khan himself later said, the successful tests of nuclear weapons in India in May 1974 were the last straw for him. He wrote several letters to Pakistani government officials with offers of assistance in developing the nuclear program.
But even without receiving a response, he began to collect secret information about nuclear technology at his own risk and peril. In August 1974, Khanʼs letters finally reached Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He ordered to establish contact with Khan through the Pakistani embassy in the Netherlands. And already in the fall, Khan began to transmit data on nuclear developments.
Indian soldiers celebrate their victory over Pakistan. One of them holds a photo of political leader and future president of Bangladesh Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, 1971. Captured Pakistani soldiers, 1971. A crater at the site of the test explosion of Indiaʼs first nuclear bomb, 1974.
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Khan acted swiftly and very boldly. Sometimes, almost without hiding, he took secret documents home to copy them. At first, colleagues simply made delicate remarks to him, but in 1975, the Dutch secret services began to take an interest in Khan. So, going on vacation in December of that year, Khan decided not to return.
Creator of Islamic nuclear weapons
There are two ways to obtain the basis for nuclear weapons. Use plutonium, which is formed during the operation of a nuclear reactor, or enrich uranium using high-speed centrifuges. The first is faster, but requires more massive equipment. The second is longer, but uses fairly compact centrifuges, which are simply easier to hide from prying eyes than a large nuclear reactor.
After the defeat in the 1971 war, Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto set a goal of creating its own nuclear weapons at all costs in order to keep up with India. “We will eat grass, even starve, but we will have our own nuclear bomb,” he said. Local scientists initially followed the plutonium path. But they lacked experience and technology, so they did not achieve significant progress.
Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, during a speech at the UN General Assembly, compares his countryʼs defeat to the humiliating Treaty of Versailles for Germany after World War I, December 1971.
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After returning to Pakistan, Khan took a second path — uranium. At first, he was allocated a separate laboratory, where he conducted parallel research. But soon all nuclear developments were united under his leadership. Khan constantly improved the design of centrifuges stolen in the Netherlands and at the same time worked on the design of the nuclear device itself.
In the early 1980s, Khan managed to obtain drawings of a Chinese nuclear bomb, which was successfully tested in 1966. They would become the basis for the future Pakistani nuclear device. Already in the spring of 1983, Pakistan conducted its first cold nuclear test. By the mid-1990s, there were more than 20 such tests.
Abdul Qadeer Khan (far left) at a meeting of Pakistanʼs military committee on the nuclear program, 1990s.
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The West, and especially the United States, least of all wanted another addition to the ranks of the nuclear club. So they tried in every way to stop Pakistanʼs nuclear progress. In April 1979, Washington imposed economic sanctions against Islamabad. The White House administration made efforts to freeze loans to Pakistan from the World Bank. And put pressure on various countries not to sell nuclear technology to Pakistan.
But Khan returned home not only with the stolen blueprints, but also with a list of suppliers who sold their equipment to Urenco. With some of them, he managed to agree on supplies for Pakistan. Khan quickly created an international network of private suppliers and intermediaries who could obtain the necessary nuclear technologies for him. The traditional fraudulent schemes were used — shell companies, forged documents, bribery, money laundering, hidden payments, loopholes in the export control legislation of various countries, etc.
Abdul Qadeer Khan (left) talks to a senior official at the closing ceremony of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit in Islamabad, early 2000s.
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In addition, Khan learned to circumvent the ban on the sale of dual-use technologies that could be used to create nuclear weapons quite easily. He simply bought everything he needed in small parts and then assembled it on site. For example, no one was suspicious of buying components for vacuum valves, because they were used in many technologies. Khan, using complex systems of pipes and pumps, attached them to his centrifuges to enrich uranium to a higher level so that it could be used for nuclear weapons.
As for the American sanctions, the USSR unexpectedly helped, in December 1979, when it invaded Afghanistan. Pakistanʼs geographical location made it a convenient hub for supplying American weapons to the Afghan mujahideen fighting against the Soviets. So, to get Pakistanʼs consent, the White House lifted the sanctions and provided $400 million in economic and military aid.
Mujahideen in one of the training camps in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, 1980. Mujahideen with an American Stinger man-portable anti-aircraft missile system, 1988.
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But most importantly, the US turned a blind eye to Pakistanʼs nuclear program, which culminated in a successful weapons test in May 1998. And Khan became a national hero in Pakistan and was nicknamed the "father of the Islamic nuclear bomb".
How the black market for nuclear technology emerged
Khanʼs underground network began with a few companies in Switzerland and Germany. It later expanded to the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. It soon became global. With factories producing various components in Malaysia, Japan, and South Africa, suppliers in the United States and Canada, and a shipping hub in Dubai. And this is only a small part of his network that was exposed.
Things were going so well that in the 1980s, Khan had a surplus of materials. He decided to reorient his network from import to export, offering potential buyers turnkey nuclear technology with delivery. And they did not hesitate.
The first known customer was Iran, which, amid the war with Iraq, was just beginning to revive its nuclear program and reorient it towards the creation of nuclear weapons. By the mid-1990s, the Iranians had received tens of thousands of components for uranium enrichment centrifuges and equipment for the construction of a secret plant. In addition, Khan organized a kind of advanced training courses for Iranian nuclear engineers.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad among uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz plant, which was once built with supplies from the Khan black market, 2008.
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Han was also a real savior for North Koreaʼs nuclear program. At first, the DPRK, like Pakistan at one time, went the plutonium route. However, in 1994 it had to agree to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for oil and food from the United States. But Hanʼs centrifuges provided North Korea with an alternative path to nuclear weapons. Unlike a massive nuclear reactor, which was under the supervision of international inspectors, centrifuges could be easily hidden underground or in the mountains.
Until the early 2000s, Pyongyang regularly received supplies from the nuclear black market. Han himself flew to North Korea more than a dozen times with cargo. In 2010, it became known about the North Korean complex of 2000 centrifuges. On paper, they are designed for low-level enrichment of uranium for energy needs. But according to experts, they can easily be converted for military needs.
Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was ready to launch a full-cycle nuclear production facility that Khan had assembled for him on a turnkey basis. He stopped at the last minute, under pressure from Europe and the United States. In the early 1990s, Khan offered his services to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but he refused. It was rumored that the suspicious Saddam perceived the offer as an attempt to subvert the CIA. It was suspected that Khanʼs clients included several other countries, including Saudi Arabia and Syria.
After his exposure and confession in the early 2000s, Khan said that he launched his black market to undermine the Westʼs nuclear monopoly. He said why they have the right to possess nuclear weapons and others donʼt.
"I want to question the bloody holier-than-thou attitudes of the Americans and the British. Are these bastards God-appointed guardians of the world to stockpile hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads?" he said in one interview.
Abdul Qadeer Khan speaks to the press outside his residence in Islamabad, 2009.
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According to researchers, Khanʼs main motive was money. Profitable deals brought him tens of millions of dollars. Khan owned hotels and other real estate in various countries. And he could afford to use a military transport plane to deliver custom-made carved furniture to his hotel in Mali Hendrina Khan, named after his wife. And after the publication of the Panama Papers in 2016, it became clear that Khanʼs relatives owned an offshore company in the Bahamas.
Western intelligence agencies and governments consistently underestimated Khan
For Khan, it could have been over in the fall of 1975. At that time, the Dutch security service took him on and had already developed a detailed plan for his arrest. But they were stopped by high-ranking Dutch officials. They were worried that exposing a spy in the local unit of the government company Urenco would alarm foreign partners and harm business development.
Then the Dutch intelligence services passed information about Khan to their colleagues in the CIA. And they decided to wait and see how Khan would extract technologies for the development of Pakistanʼs nuclear program. The agency was sure that Pakistan was too backward in technological terms, and Khan had no chance of changing anything. The same opinion was held by American officials when they lifted sanctions and turned a blind eye to the Pakistani nuclear program.
Abdul Qadeer Khan delivers a speech after the inauguration of a model of Pakistanʼs nuclear-capable Ghauri-II missile, 1999.
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Researchers suggest that the CIA missed the moment when Khan reoriented his network to export nuclear technology. And they came to their senses when he was already fully trading nuclear secrets with Iran. But even then, the CIA decided to wait to collect more evidence, to trace all the chains, in order to cover the entire black market together.
They recruited people from the network to find out its scale. In the late 1990s, almost $10 million was spent on bribing Swiss businessman Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, who collaborated with Khan. But they were never able to find out either the real scope of Khanʼs underground nuclear market, or the full list of his clients.
After Khanʼs activities were exposed in the 2000s, Tinner and his sons appeared in a Swiss court. The White House then pressured the Swiss to destroy a whole bunch of documents and digital data in the case to hide the CIAʼs involvement.
Khanʼs exposure, confession and very formal condemnation
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Western intelligence agencies finally sounded the alarm. After all, nuclear technology from Khan’s black market could fall into the hands of any terrorist. But Pakistan rejected all requests for information about Khan, demanding proof.
Finally, in October 2003, the CIA, together with British colleagues from MI6, intercepted a ship carrying centrifuges and other nuclear equipment from one of Khan’s factories to Libya. This gave the White House crucial leverage to force Pakistan to take action against Khan.
A shipment of uranium centrifuges for Libya, intercepted by Western intelligence agencies, 2003.
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In early 2004, then-President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf dismissed Khan from his position as his advisor on science and technology. On February 4, Khan appeared publicly on television and admitted that he had run a nuclear technology trafficking ring, naming three of his clients: Iran, North Korea, and Libya. However, the next day, the president pardoned him and placed him under house arrest, which was lifted five years later.
Islamabad rejected all requests to question Khan from foreign intelligence services and international organizations, and forbade him from leaving the country. First of all, fearing that former and current Pakistani high-ranking officials would be exposed for involvement in Khanʼs network.
After all, according to researchers, he would hardly have been able to act alone, without the governmentʼs knowledge. The then White House administration did not put much pressure on Islamabad in this regard — it counted on Pakistan as a potential ally against the backdrop of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Khan lived out the rest of his life in respect, honor, and the status of a national hero. Institutions were named after him, and he was awarded many of the highest state awards. In 2012, Khan even created his own political party, but dissolved it a year later. In 2021, Khan died of complications from Covid, finally burying any hopes of ever revealing all the secrets of his global underground nuclear network.
Abdul Qadeer Khan received the first of two "Orders of Excellence" in 1999, Pakistanʼs highest civilian award. He remains the only person to have received the order twice. Pakistani leaders pay tribute to Abdul Qadeer Khan at his grave, May 2025.
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