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Gabrielle Cusumano on Friday, July 25, 2008 12:41:40 PM
TROUBLE IN TACKLING KHAN NETWORK
Intelligence Agencies Undermine Nuclear Smuggling Trial
By Juergen Dahlkamp, John Goetz and Holger Stark
An engineer is on trial in Germany for allegedly attempting to help Libya develop a nuclear bomb. But the network the man was allegedly part of was under surveillance by intelligency agencies, with the CIA getting involved early on. The Swiss government has even gone so far as to eliminate evidence by secretly shredding thousands of documents.
The story should really begin in Stuttgart, the southern Germany city where the case has now been on trial for the past two weeks, where defendant Gotthard Lerch, 65, can be seen on Thursdays and Fridays in Courtroom 18, and where an international smuggling ring, which sought to sell the makings of a nuclear bomb to Libya between 1997 and 2003, is acquiring a face. It's the wrong face if you go by Lerch's defense lawyers, but the right one, according to the federal prosecutors. The face of the defendant, at any rate, is that of an elegant older man with grey hair and an occasional smirk. He stands accused of having been part of a ring of which US President George W. Bush once said he would capture and eliminate, "each and every one."
But as large as Courtroom 18 is, it is unlikely the whole truth will ever be told here. What role, for example, did the intelligence services play after they managed to infiltrate the nuclear weapons mafia? It is possible to reconstruct what actually happened, but not in this court. The facts, twisted and concealed in other countries -- for reasons of state security -- are unlikely to be cleared up in Stuttgart. And in Courtroom 18, no one is likely to discover the exact content of a group of files found in the possession of a Swiss co-defendant.
In November, the Swiss government quietly decided to shred 30,000 documents. They claim the decision was made to preserve world peace, not because they had anything to hide.
It is because of this lack of evidence that the truth will likely elude the participants in the Lerch case in the coming weeks, while Lerch himself will probably walk away a free man. The real story begins in the southwestern German city of Karlsruhe, on a cold winter day in late December 2004.
The smuggling ring had been cracked more than a year earlier, and a witness was being heard by the investigating judge on Germany's Federal Court of Justice. The witness, who had come all the way from Malaysia, was a foreman in a factory that had supplied parts for a plant in which Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi had planned to enrich uranium. The proceedings began with the clerk of the court recording the personal details of the participants, but then Lerch's defense attorney, Gottfried Reims, pointed out that there was one man in the room who wasn't on the list.
According to a source familiar with the case, Reims wanted to know the identity of the Malaysian man standing next to the foreman. The witness's Malaysian attorney, he was told. Oh, but that's unacceptable, Lerch's attorney insisted, because a witness's attorney must be licensed to practice law in a German court. Besides, he added, who is to say that the man isn't a Malaysian intelligence agent? As if someone would actually admit to being an agent, even if it were true, the judge snapped. But Reims, undeterred, asked the man point-blank: "Are you with the intelligence agency?" The mysterious Malaysian answered, proudly: "Yes."
A foreign intelligence agent appearing incognito at a witness hearing in one of Germany's highest courts -- now that says more about the cause than the case being made in Stuttgart. Something that would be unthinkable in any other trial is par for the course here: The intelligence agencies seem to have their fingers in every pie, raising the same dilemma that forced a court in the southwestern German city of Mannheim to throw out the first case against Lerch in 2006. In those proceedings, the investigators repeatedly withheld documents, claiming reasons of national security, while in fact the real reason had more to do with the paranoia of intelligence agencies.
The current case, in Stuttgart, is also groaning under a discrepancy that couldn't be greater. On the one hand, you have the constitutional state with its criminal code, and the other you have the American and British intelligence agencies, which have only one objective in a matter like this: a success.
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Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan developed this black market of horror. In the 1970s, Khan stole plans for uranium enrichment from Urenco, a company headquartered in the Dutch city of Almelo, and used them to elevate Pakistan to the status of a nuclear power and turn himself into a national hero. But Khan wanted more. He wanted to see others -- Iran, Libya, any Islamic "rogue nation" with the necessary cash -- get their hands on the bomb, a tool that could be used both as a deterrent and to instill fear in their enemies. In the mid-1990s, Khan provided the government in Tehran with the construction plans for a modern centrifuge system. He even did business with the North Korean regime in Pyongyang. This black market, organized with what Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), calls "fantastic cleverness," flourished for about 20 years.
Given the complexity of a technology in which thousands of perfectly synchronized centrifuges are needed to constantly enrich uranium to an ever-higher level, drawings alone were not enough to guarantee his customers a bomb. To overcome this hurdle, Khan offered a more comprehensive service: the delivery of a complete system with training included.
Khan assembled a team of old confidants and assigned a specific task to each of them so that Gadhafi's components could be produced around the world. At the top of the hierarchy was a confidant of Khan's, Sri Lankan businessman Buhary Seyed Abu Tahir, who acted as a business manager of sorts, responsible for payments and contracts. He also appointed several division managers, who may not even have known of each other's existence. They were comprised of the Swiss Tinner family of engineers, including Friedrich Tinner and his sons Urs and Marco, who were apparently responsible for centrifuge parts; Briton Peter Griffin, a specialist in the procurement of tool-making machines; and Lerch, whose job, as the prosecution claims, was to obtain the pipes that connect the centrifuges. Lerch's source for the pipes was Gerhard Wisser, a German national living in South Africa, with whom he had been doing business for decades.
The names on the roster of the global plot included Khan, Tahir, Tinner, Griffin, Lerch and Wisser. The only problem was that not everyone plotted on the same side. The Tinner family, in particular, played both sides, collecting payments from Khan and from the CIA.
The first piece of solid evidence that the Tinners, a family based in the Swiss town of Haag, had switched sides and were keeping the Americans apprised of their steps, stems from early 2003. In December 2002, Friedrich Tinner, the father, contacted the IAEA and then the United States Embassy in Vienna, telling them he wanted to speak with a nuclear scientist. Tinner, a specialist in vacuum technology suspected of engaging in unscrupulous business dealings for decades, waited a few weeks until he was eventually contacted by a man named Jim Kinsman, who claimed to be the representative of an American specialized company in Washington. This was correct, in a sense, because Kinsman's employer is a specialized business of sorts: the CIA. Given his association with the CIA, it comes as little surprise that Kinsman didn't even have a US Social Security number until 2003. Neither did his colleague, a man named Sean Mahaffey, who introduced himself as the company's "general counsel."
According to the Swiss government, the seized Tinner files, which have since been shredded in Switzerland, contained plans for building nuclear weapons, gas centrifuges and guided weapons systems as well as a contract Tinner's son Marco had signed with the alleged US company. Under the contract, the Tinners agreed to supply the Washington-based company with "technical know-how" in the "field of vacuum technology and valve design, as well as design specifications for vacuum plants." In other words, everything a Libyan dictator would need to fuel his megalomaniacal ambitions. The Americans showed a willingness to pay a respectable sum for the information the small Swiss family owned company planned to deliver through the five-year contract. The first payments came in 2003. At first the Tinners' bills were for amounts as modest as 2,000 Swiss francs ($1,917), but by May 2004, Marco Tinner was sending the family's new friends in Washington a bill for $2 million (€1.3 million). Could the money have been a reward for information that enabled the CIA to crack the ring in 2003? (To continue reading go from this excerpt to page 2)
Excerpted from length 2 page article from Speigel Online International at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,560131,00.html
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