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Iran-Krise

William Langewiesch setzt in der Januar/Februar-Ausgabe der Atlantic seine Recherchen zu Dr. Abdul Quadeer Khan, dem Kopf eines Netzwerks, das illegal nukleares Material und Pläne an interessierte Staaten verkaufte, fort.

Langewiesch erzählt seine Geschichte um Mark Gibbs herum. Gibbs, der in Bonn wohnt, arbeitet für Nucleonics Week und für Nuclear Fuel, zwei Branchenblätter mit geringer Auflage, aber einer sehr aufmerksamen Leserschaft.

Hibbs hat in seinen Artikel schon sehr früh Einzelteile eines Puzzle zusammengetragen, das später dann zur Aufdeckung des Khan Netzwerkes führte.

Offensichtlich wussten europäische und die amerikanischen Dienste nicht erst seit Libyen im Dezember 2003 seine Einkäufe bei Khan offengelegt hat, dass „Pakistans Vater der Atombombe” auch Geschäfte mit dem Iran betrieben hat.

In May of 1991 Mark Hibbs reported in Nucleonics Week on the possibility that Iran had launched a secret uranium-enrichment program in pursuit of nuclear weapons and that over the previous three years A. Q. Khan had made several visits there. Soon after the article was published, Hibbs received a phone call from an American diplomat named Richard Kennedy, who at the time was the U.S. ambassador for non-proliferation, and the chief American representative to the IAEA.

According to Hibbs, Kennedy said, “I’ve read your last article.”

Hibbs said, “Yeah?”

Kennedy said, “You know that thing about A. Q. Khan-that maybe he went to Iran? Can you tell me who told you that?”

Hibbs answered, “No.”

“Can I assume it’s a European intelligence source?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me which government it is?”

“No,” Hibbs said. “Does it strike your interest?”

Kennedy admitted that it did.

Diese Unterhaltung ist kein Beleg dafür, dass Mr. Kennedy die genauen Einzelheiten der Transaktionen zwischen Khan und dem Iran kannte, aber spätestens mit diesem Anruf sollte der Verdacht geweckt sein.

Langewiesch hat noch mehr.

In 1991, however, Pakistan’s army chief, General Aslam Beg, returned from a trip to Tehran openly advocating the export of nuclear-weapons technology to Iran, and pointing to the several billion dollars’ worth of state revenue that might be in the offing. … Beg is an anti-American with sympathies for Iran, and he says that he is the target of a Jewish conspiracy of lies. Be that as it may, he was told to keep quiet in the early 1990s, presumably because the transfer of blueprints and centrifuges was already under way.

Hibbs was onto it fast. In November of 1991, having previously written about the unconfirmed visits of A. Q. Khan, he described an unnamed Western government’s suspicion that Iran had possibly obtained uranium-enrichment technology from Pakistan, and that this technology appeared to be that of URENCO, the consortium from which Khan had stolen designs. The official reaction in Europe and the United States was “no comment.” …

Unbeknownst to him, the CIA had concluded that the Pakistan-Iran connection had cooled, in part because the centrifuges that Pakistan had sold were castoffs, prone to vibration and inefficient compared with more modern designs. As a result U.S. interest in Khan diminished, and to some extent the trail was allowed to go cold.

Im Jahr 2002 (also immer noch ein gutes Jahr bevor Lybien seine Geschäfte mit Khan offen legte) erhielt Hibbs einen Hinweis von einer Vertrauensperson bei der IAEA, dass der Iran im Begriff sei, eine Anreicherungsanlage zu bauen. Die IAEA Quelle glaubte allerdings, dass die dafür notwendigen Anlagen und Teile von den Iranern selbst gefertigt wurden. Hibbs hatte daran Zweifel.

He went back to his notes of a decade before, and read all his old files, and finally concluded that it had to be a URENCO design, and was probably from A. Q. Khan. But Hibbs needed some sort of confirmation. With the evidence in hand he went to see another confidential source at a U.S. agency in Washington. … He said, “Does the U.S. government know where the technology came from?”

His source did not answer right away. … The man paused for a long while. Finally he said,

“Yeah.”

Hibbs said, “Where did Iran get it from?”

Again the man paused. “Well, it’s the same .” He stopped himself. Earlier that year the United States had leaked word that North Korea had received centrifuge designs and possibly prototypes from Pakistan in return for missile technology, in a state-to-state swap. The leak was directed not against Pakistan but against North Korea, which soon restarted its plutonium-reprocessing facilities and expelled IAEA inspectors. In any case, Hibbs’s contact decided to go ahead. He said, “There’s only one country that’s exporting centrifuge technology.”

“Do you mean Pakistan?”

“Yeah.”

Aber laut Hibbs, weitererzählt von Langewiesch, wusste auch die IAEA weit mehr als sie öffentlich zugab.

Hibbs veröffentlichte im Januar 2003 einen Artikel für Nuclear Fuel unter der Überschrift “Pakistan Believed Design Data Source For Centrifuges To Be Built By Iran.”

Hibbs via Langewiesch:

“There was no comment from the IAEA. I continued to interact with the sources of that story. Throughout 2003 they kept telling me, ‘You’re not only warm and hot but the IAEA is very angry that you are not letting them control the flow of information. They’re onto Pakistan. They know that individuals in Pakistan were deeply implicated in this program. But they can’t use the “P” word. No one will say “Pakistan.” It’s all being discreetly negotiated between the IAEA, the United States, and other countries .’” The problem for the United States was that Pakistan was again now a trusted ally, this time in the effort to destroy al-Qaeda.

I said, “So they wanted you to pipe down.”

Hibbs said, “Anyway, we kept working on Pakistan, and more and more bits of the story got confirmed. I kept fingering Pakistan, fingering Pakistan, and pissing off the IAEA and the U.S. government, because at that time they were saying, ‘We want to make a deal with these people. We want to make sure it doesn’t get out of control.’”

I said, “The story or the activity?”

“The story. They wanted to control it.”