AQ Khan: How to Live Dangerously

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 Hey, and welcome to 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 2 That's right. Take it away.

Speaker 3 Okay, so Chuck, we're talking today. Well, let me start differently.
Chuck. Yes.
Have you ever met AQ Khan?

Speaker 2 I had never heard of AQ Khan.

Speaker 3 What do you think of him now?

Speaker 2 You know, seems like a guy that

Speaker 2 made a lot of money helping countries develop their nuclear program.

Speaker 3 Sure. But I think that leaves out some very important stuff.
This is in flagrant violation of UN non-proliferation treaties. It was generally illegal.
And he was even even doing it on the side.

Speaker 3 He had an underground clandestine proliferation network, which is, I mean, that's very few people have ever done that in the world. And over here in the West, Chuck, he's viewed as a villain.

Speaker 3 And in other parts of the world, especially Pakistan, where he's from, he's hailed as a hero. He's very complex, complicated.

Speaker 3 And at the end of the day, he may essentially be generally a fall guy for a much larger cabal of people who are actually doing this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 I guess we can go back and talk a little bit about

Speaker 2 how he got there, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 2 He was born in India in 1936 and in 1952 moved to West Pakistan.

Speaker 2 He was into metallurgy and studied at a few different universities in a few different countries.

Speaker 2 He eventually graduated initially in 1960 from the University of Karachi, but then got a doctorate in metallurgical engineering in 1972.

Speaker 2 In that time, he got married, had a couple of daughters,

Speaker 2 and then eventually found his way with his family in the early 70s in the Netherlands, working for a company called Physical Dynamic Research Laboratory, which was doing uranium enrichment.

Speaker 2 for another company called Urinco, which was a consortium of a few different countries, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Speaker 2 And they were, you know, they were running ultra-centrifuges, and he was pretty good at snooping around, it seems like.

Speaker 3 Yeah, an ultra-centrifuge or centrifuges in general is used to enrich uranium. And you enrich uranium to a certain extent

Speaker 3 to use for nuclear power. But if you keep going, you can use that enriched uranium for nuclear bombs, right?

Speaker 3 So I think that these companies were doing this for power, for power generation. But regardless, he wasn't a particularly like brilliant physicist or metallurgist or anything like that.

Speaker 3 He was just kind of a dude. He just had

Speaker 3 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 started.

Speaker 3 making waves and catching the attention of the Dutch intelligence agencies for asking a lot of questions that did not have much of anything to do with the work he was supposed to be doing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so they started monitoring him.

Speaker 2 And this is something that kind of continued,

Speaker 2 at least as far as Dutch intelligence. And then, you know, eventually other countries would start monitoring as well.
Because,

Speaker 2 you know, like I said, he got pretty good at snooping around.

Speaker 2 And in 1971, there was a conflict between East and West Pakistan. And that led to a pretty brief war with India.
And just for our purposes, what that eventually meant was

Speaker 2 Khan and a lot of Pakistan were kind of humiliated at the whole thing and were like, we're still under the thumb of India here. And kind of just sort of got that,

Speaker 2 I guess, national

Speaker 2 Pakistani pride going,

Speaker 2 you know, wanting to get out from under that thumb.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I saw that in that 13-day war,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And yeah, I saw that up to this point, AQ Khan was just a generally average person, but that seemed to have really started to get him going.

Speaker 3 So he decided he was going to use what expertise he had to help build a bomb for Pakistan.

Speaker 3 So he wrote a letter to the prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar 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.

Speaker 3 And if you step back and look at it, Chuck, like, 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 the bomb.

Speaker 3 And I heard the first time he was ignored. And the second time they're like, all right, let's see what this guy has to say.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because he was lobbying for uranium. I mean, that was his expertise was enriching uranium.
And at the time, Pakistan was trying to enrich and produce plutonium.

Speaker 2 And he was like, that's not the way. Uranium is the way to go.
And just a couple of months after that, Buto met with him. And

Speaker 2 over about the next 11 or 12 months, Khan 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 while he was working for that Dutch company, like, you know, making copies of blueprints and sneaking them out and supply lists, suppliers lists and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he was very well known around the office for being like, making copies. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So he, um,

Speaker 3 wow, I just dated myself. Um, can we just do a little science minute off to the side? Sure.

Speaker 3 So you said that, um, that there was a course that Pakistan was already on for making a bomb out of plutonium, right? HU Khan was all about enriching uranium.

Speaker 3 Those are two routes you can use to make a nuclear bomb. And the background and training Khan had was in uranium enrichment.

Speaker 3 And he loved to like talk trash about plutonium and the people in Pakistan running the plutonium program. But just the upshot of it is this.

Speaker 3 If you want to get weapons-grade uranium, you need about 90% pure uranium. In nature,

Speaker 3 the U-235

Speaker 3 uranium that you're looking for occurs about three-quarters of a percent of any natural lump of uranium. So, there's two ways to get that purified U-235.

Speaker 3 One is enrichment, where you spin it in centrifuges 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.

Speaker 3 Or with plutonium, you bombard it with neutrons so that uranium-238 eventually turns into 239, decays into neptunium, and then plutonium.

Speaker 3 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 2 Yeah, so we did a whole episode on that. If you're interested in like the finer details, seek that one out.

Speaker 3 Was that the one that we did after Fukushima?

Speaker 2 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 3 Well, I can't help but talk about it. I love that for some reason.
It really like tickles me.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So in October of 75, the Dutch authorities who had been watching him this whole time, noting all this sort of suspicious stuff that he was doing at work, said,

Speaker 2 all right, we're going to transfer you out of these enrichment projects because we think you're,

Speaker 2 you know, you're clearly some sort of a snoop or a threat or something. And just a couple of months after that, and I guess late 1975 in December,

Speaker 2 he left the company altogether 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.

Speaker 2 And he said, don't bother looking in these banker boxes. The lid is on.

Speaker 3 Right. He just kind of vanished and showed back up in Pakistan.
And he was very quickly put in charge of the uranium project.

Speaker 3 And there was a guy named Munir Ahmad Khan, who was essentially his rival in the quest to build Pakistan a bomb. The other Khan was involved in the plutonium wing of the whole thing.

Speaker 3 Khan eventually got Bhutto and then the guy who overthrew Bhutto over to his side in favor of uranium enrichment, but also in favor of AQ Khan.

Speaker 3 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 706.

Speaker 3 It was the uranium enrichment project. And by 1982, I think, they managed to produce the highly enriched uranium that you need to make a bomb.
Very, very small amounts at first.

Speaker 3 You need several kilograms to actually make a bomb, but they were successful at doing it through that uranium enrichment program by 1982 for the first time.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And as they're doing this, they're also researching how to get this thing into a missile.
So, you know, as you'll see,

Speaker 2 I mean, if you just look back at the history of

Speaker 2 enriching uranium or

Speaker 2 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 up to speed on that.

Speaker 2 But what they're also trying to do is get a nuclear bomb.

Speaker 3 They're also making copies.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It kind of just happens over and over and over where they're like, no, no, no, we just want nuclear energy

Speaker 2 and don't worry about what's in that bunker over there.

Speaker 3 Right. And again, I kind of, I mentioned it at the outset.

Speaker 3 The reason that countries have to do it like that is because there's a huge treaty from the 60s that said, okay, the people who already have the bomb, they're agreeing to disassemble it.

Speaker 3 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 why you have to do it. Right, exactly.
But it's just been so

Speaker 3 just kind of nibbled at and worn down and just flagrantly ignored that it doesn't really seem to have that much teeth.

Speaker 3 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 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 So while he's doing all this, and you mentioned at the beginning that he had a side gig,

Speaker 2 you know, getting rich off of selling these secrets and blueprints and helping other countries, you know, get in touch with the right.

Speaker 2 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 perfect dude to do this.

Speaker 2 And while he was doing this, he developed

Speaker 2 that side gig as importing and exporting all these components and plans that, you know, some of which he just outright stole.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So he started ordering doubles of the stuff

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He would use Pakistani military planes, cargo planes to take those parts, the extra parts back to middlemen.

Speaker 3 And then he'd tell the middlemen what buyers to direct it to, and then he'd pocket the money.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it was very lucrative, as we'll see. He ended up making a ton of money doing this.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 many more countries than

Speaker 2 they officially sort of accused him of dealing with.

Speaker 2 But the first country to step up and say, hey, I really want to do business with you was Iran. And this was in 1987.
He helped them build up to 50,000 centrifuges,

Speaker 2 P1 types, Pakistan 1.

Speaker 2 There are a couple of different types, the Pakistan 1 and the P2, the Pakistan 2.

Speaker 2 Those, the P2s 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.

Speaker 2 And it was kind of outdated equipment that wasn't going to help him that much.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. That's how it started out.

Speaker 3 Because Pakistan upgraded their setup from what I saw.

Speaker 3 And the reason why you would need 50,000 centrifuges

Speaker 3 is because

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And it can take weeks and months and sometimes years, depending on what kind of centrifuges you're working with. But if you have 50,000 centrifuges like Iran supposedly got,

Speaker 3 you can make a lot of highly enriched uranium fairly fast. Which led me to wonder, Chuck, like what

Speaker 3 is taking Iran so long if they still don't have a nuke and they started in 1987,

Speaker 3 what's the deal there? And the best answer I could come up with is that back in the 90s, the Ayatollah issued a fatwa, like a ruling on Sharia law that basically said no nukes.

Speaker 3 Iran's not going to have any nukes. And that it wasn't until 2024 that Iran said that they were starting to rethink it.
So I guess...

Speaker 3 just because the leadership said they weren't going to have nukes that is the reason iran doesn't have a nuke right now yeah interesting i thought so too

Speaker 2 So he was dealing with their government. Supposedly, until 1991, there was a final shipment of the P1s, but other people have said, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 That continued for at least another four years through the mid-90s, and those P2 centrifuges started flowing in.

Speaker 2 Iran wanted this potential bomb because they were at war with Iraq at the time in the 80s over the course of about eight years.

Speaker 2 So Khan, ever the businessman, was like, hey, Iraq, I've been helping Iran develop their program.

Speaker 2 You could probably use a little of my help in stolen documents as well.

Speaker 3 Yeah, what's crazy is Iraq was like very suspicious of this from the outset.

Speaker 3 And I guess they asked for a sample, and they couldn't find what sample they were given. Just that Khan was like, don't taste this.
That's not that kind of sample. Right.
And

Speaker 2 dab your pinky in it. Yeah, exactly.
Put it on your tongue.

Speaker 3 He's like, don't do that.

Speaker 3 So I guess Iraq thought that this was 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.

Speaker 3 So they moved on. And I guess he never managed to get a bomb or the information Iraq needed to Iraq.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but there were documents that said, hey, this will, you know, the paperwork was there.

Speaker 2 This will cost you 5 million bucks and a 10% commission on materials through my network so I can, you know, pay people off basically.

Speaker 2 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 though it wasn't.

Speaker 3 Something I saw that was kind of funny was Iran paid $3 million for theirs and they actually were like, 10% commission, that seems steep.

Speaker 3 So they went and started calling up the list of suppliers that AQ Khan had for them rather than dealing with him him because they were bargain shopping for their nuclear proto-apparently.

Speaker 2 Well, maybe that has something to do with it, too.

Speaker 3 It could be.

Speaker 3 Their nuclear centrifuges were held together with bubblegum and duct tape.

Speaker 2 Should we take a break?

Speaker 3 Yeah, let's.

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Speaker 2 This is where North Korea enters the picture. It's the mid-90s and

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Again, we're just trying to get nuclear energy going, but all right, we'll stop doing that.

Speaker 2 But what we're really going to do is very quietly start looking to continue that process just on the down low. Right.

Speaker 3 But Kim Jong-il had his fingers crossed behind his back, so none of that counted.

Speaker 2 That's right. And so who do they turn to, of course? They turned to Pakistan and AQCon.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So,

Speaker 3 and this is where it really seems like

Speaker 3 Pakistani officials officials were definitely involved in this, even though later on, as we'll see, they're like, we had nothing to do with this.

Speaker 3 But the but Pakistan conducted its first nuclear test in 1998, which really surprised the world.

Speaker 3 And even more dramatically, they did it in response to a test that India had carried out two weeks before.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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, run through the motions of how this is working.

Speaker 3 I don't know if we said it or not. Also, AQ Khan was known to have gone to North Korea at least 13 times that were documented.

Speaker 3 Something really weird happened during this nuclear test with the North Korean delegation, though. And that was that one of them, a woman who is among this group, died mysteriously.

Speaker 3 She was was shot 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 2 Yeah, was that just like,

Speaker 2 hey, we've got this plane going, so why don't we just double dip and get some stuff moved while we're transporting this body?

Speaker 3 Maybe Pakistan is the bargain shop as well.

Speaker 2 So, like you said, he went to North Korea at least 13 times that intelligence knows about.

Speaker 2 And while he was helping North Korea sort of develop their enrichment program, they were supplying Pakistan. It was, you know, a bit of a quid pro quo.

Speaker 2 They were like, hey, we've got long-distance missile technology that you don't have. And so we're perfect bedfellows here.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And so they got the missiles from North Korea through a guy named Kang.
He was on paper the diploma, the ambassador to Pakistan for North Korea.

Speaker 3 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 U.S., but her husband managed to hang in there.

Speaker 3 And it turns out he was an arms dealer 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And as a matter of fact, AQ Khan was on the radar of international intelligence communities, again, all the way back to the

Speaker 3 70s when the Dutch started watching him. But somehow, some way,

Speaker 3 the global intelligence community missed the fact that he was a rogue nuclear weapons technology salesman, which is one of the weirdest things ever.

Speaker 3 But it turned out that it was his next business venture in Libya that led to his downfall.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 3 and we just couldn't figure out why. 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 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, the next client stepped forward, and that was Libya. And this was in the late 90s, like 1996, 97.

Speaker 2 He started trading centrifuges and the equipment and the components,

Speaker 2 getting them over to Libya.

Speaker 2 There's a guy here named Peter Griffin, not what you're thinking, from Family Guy. This is a real-life human.
It was a British engineer who was involved in this operation. He was like, man,

Speaker 2 I've been giving or not giving, but I've been selling material to Pakistan for you know, 20 years or more. Like this has been going on for a long time.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and that was a huge thing that allowed this to go on: the international community would ban parts for like centrifuges or breeder reactors that you made plutonium with.

Speaker 3 And then people like EQ 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 end.

Speaker 3 So they were legitimately allowed to do this stuff. It 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.

Speaker 3 It was more like an international more that was broken where he knew he was helping

Speaker 3 states that should not have nuclear bombs get nuclear bombs, essentially.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. So Peter Griffin, Peter Griffin, there's just no way that he couldn't do something.

Speaker 2 I guess that was,

Speaker 2 oh, what's the guy's name? I haven't watched Family Gun in so long. Cleveland?

Speaker 3 Peter. Cleveland.
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 So Peter Griffin was a partner in a company from Dubai. And in 2001, they placed a bunch of orders for these parts that they needed with a Malaysian company.
And that company spun off a subsidiary.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And Khan 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.

Speaker 2 And he sent at least one one engineer. So, like, active involvement, sending engineers to Dubai to make sure they were doing everything correctly.
So, like, deep involvement at this point.

Speaker 3 Yeah, huge. So, he had like middlemen from Europe.
He had designers from Switzerland.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Also, I forgot to say earlier, by this time, the Con Network had their own sales brochures that they used to hand out at arm sales fairs, which apparently they have arm sales fairs.

Speaker 3 But they had brochures by this point.

Speaker 3 That's how

Speaker 3 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 in, I think, 2003 aboard the

Speaker 3 ship called the BBC China, which as far as I know, doesn't have anything to do with the BBC.

Speaker 3 And that was the thing that brought the whole thing down eventually.

Speaker 3 Chuck, I propose that since I remembered the word established, that kind of says we should take a break. All right, we'll be right back.

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Speaker 3 so um the whole thing came down with that libya thing remember they had this amazing network going all these amazing um

Speaker 3 all this amazing subterfuge going and somehow i don't know how um but a particular shipment aboard a ship called the bbc china was captured in, I think, leaving Dubai en route to Libya.

Speaker 3 And at this point, AQCon had basically been under great suspicion. I think he was being investigated by CIA and MI6 at the same time.
But there wasn't a lot you could do about this.

Speaker 3 If you were the U.S., because you needed Pakistan at the time, as we'll talk about in a second. But when this shipment was found, and it was a massive shipment of centrifuges going to to Libya.

Speaker 3 It was just all out in the open. Now, there's just no denying it.
Even Pakistan couldn't protect AQCon anymore.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. And like you said, it was pretty complicated.
I mean, it's always been fairly complicated with the U.S. and Pakistan as being like sometimes bedfellows

Speaker 2 because they were necessary for the U.S. until they weren't.
And then, you know, that's when the U.S. could take action.

Speaker 2 But in the 80s, you know, we were supplying military aid to Pakistan to help support the fight against Soviets in Afghanistan. So we couldn't really, you know, even though we,

Speaker 2 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-80s,

Speaker 2 Congress threatened to cut off that military aid unless Reagan could promise that

Speaker 2 they weren't producing nuclear weapons. And so for five years, from 85 to 90, I guess, Reagan and George H.W.
Bush would certify that Pakistan didn't have a nuclear weapons program. And then in 1990,

Speaker 2 once the Soviets were out of Afghanistan, coincidentally, 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 aid to Pakistan.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Which is, I mean, talk about a screw job, but

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 We had an NSA listening station there. Like we needed them big time.

Speaker 3 But once we didn't anymore, we could start to press them on AQCon.

Speaker 3 And that was when this whole thing started to kind of fall apart. But again, it wasn't until 2003 that the BBC China was intercepted and the whole thing was on the table.

Speaker 3 But by this time, the pressure that the U.S. had been putting on Pakistan was enough that the president at the time, Prevez Musharraf,

Speaker 3 who was the president of Pakistan around the time of 9-11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan,

Speaker 3 he essentially was like, okay, I've got to do something. So he dismissed Khan

Speaker 3 from the research laboratories that by this time bore his own name. They were called the Dr.
H.U. Khan Research Laboratories, the National Nuclear Research Laboratories in Pakistan.

Speaker 3 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 2 Yeah, I mean, that's, I don't know.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 A hundred percent. Right.

Speaker 3 Isn't that what was going on? Yeah. And the U.S.
had to put up with it because by this time we were in Afghanistan and we needed Pakistan

Speaker 3 just as much as we did when the Soviets were in Afghanistan because no one learns from history.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 2 So after that 2003

Speaker 2 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 I'm really sorry United States didn't mean it.

Speaker 2 And really sold Khan down the river and said, this is the guy. He's been supplying us with materials.

Speaker 2 And we're friends, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah. Apparently, Gaddafi was really, really worried after the U.S.
invaded Iraq that he was going to be next. And he was right, but it was eight years down the road.

Speaker 3 But I guess he went so far as to show them

Speaker 3 like centrifuge labs that were described or disguised as chicken farms. And the whole time he's like, it was Khan.
It was Khan. It was Khan.

Speaker 3 And he gave MI6 and the CIA documents on how to build a nuclear warhead that he said Khan had given him. So he really sold them down the river.

Speaker 3 And by this point, the CIA chief at the time, George Tenet, had enough to go to Perves Musharraf and was like, it's not enough to fire this guy from his job.

Speaker 3 Like he's an international nuclear proliferation dealer, and you need to do something much more pronounced. And Musharraf said, okay, I got it.
I got it.

Speaker 3 We're going to make him apologize and we're going to put him under house arrest. And then four days after that, I'm going to pardon him.
What do you think?

Speaker 2 Yeah, they put him on TV. He did confess.
He did apologize. He did all that stuff.
Said he was,

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 you know, I think everyone even at the time kind of saw through that.

Speaker 2 He would pardon him. I mean, the initial arrest was like a real arrest, but then he pardoned him and put him under house arrest.

Speaker 2 And during that whole time, though, Pakistan was still like, no, CIA, you can't like,

Speaker 2 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 3 Yeah, and they continued to even after they let him out of house arrest.

Speaker 3 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.
Did he really? Or is that a joke? No.

Speaker 3 Well, at least as far as I think Time magazine reported back in 2005, he did.

Speaker 2 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 about.

Speaker 3 I like to mix it up and keep you guessing, buddy. Got to keep you on your toes.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 2 people from Walt Disney World actually came and did that.

Speaker 3 Is that true? They're the best.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 So in 2008, 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 arrest too, because this is all just for show anyway, right?

Speaker 2 And the U.S. was trying to work with Pakistan at the time to fight against al-Qaeda.
So again, we were in a position as the U.S.

Speaker 2 to, we couldn't publicly come out and say, oh, like, you can't like let this guy out of house arrest because once again, we needed Pakistan.

Speaker 3 We did.

Speaker 3 And Seymour Hirsch, the very, very, very famous investigative reporter who broke the Mylai massacre and that Osama bin Laden had been assassinated and so on, he reported back in 2005 that the U.S.

Speaker 3 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 U.S.
was like, okay, that's a deal.

Speaker 3 We'll take your Iranian secrets and then we'll just kind of look the other way and to slap on the wrist that you guys are giving AQCon.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's so interesting, like with the recent stuff with the U.S. and Iran,

Speaker 2 like when 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.

Speaker 2 It's like this stuff goes back decades and decades if you really want to trace back to like the origins of all these issues, you know?

Speaker 3 Back to the

Speaker 2 investigate the true roots of this stuff. It's interesting.

Speaker 3 Because you had Carter getting in bed with Pakistan because

Speaker 3 the Russians invaded Afghanistan under his watch. You had Reagan and then H.W.
Bush certifying every year, lying that Pakistan didn't have a program, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 3 And yeah, that's actually a really important point. One of the reasons AQ Khan was allowed to continue proliferating nuclear programs to countries the U.S.

Speaker 3 don't want to have nuclear programs is because the U.S. looked the other way on it.
That's a huge factor in his success.

Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 Eventually, he was fully released in 2009.

Speaker 2 And they still said, hey, you can't, like you said, you can't interview him even now that he's out, you know, United States or, you know, international nuclear commissions, like just stay away from him.

Speaker 2 And there are a lot of Pakistanis that think he's a hero.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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 of nuclear warheads?

Speaker 2 And have they God-given authority to carry out explosions every month? So this was in an op-ed in Der Spiegel magazine, a German magazine.

Speaker 2 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 guys have.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And like we talked about all the way back in the 70s, patriotism certainly seems to have motivated him for sure.
He also made a lot of money. Yeah, he also made a lot of money.

Speaker 3 I saw an estimate that at his peak, he was worth about $400 million.

Speaker 3 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 $400 million.

Speaker 3 He died. He owned a hotel.
He did in Mali, and I looked it up and it only has like 2.6 out of five stars on TripAdvisor. Doesn't look that nice.
Um, but yeah, it's in Timbuktu.

Speaker 3 And I guess it's in competition to the uh Biosphereans hotel, they had one in Timbuktu, right? That's right.

Speaker 2 Yep, I thought of that immediately. I guess that's the place to open a hotel if you want to, you know, feel out the hotelier

Speaker 2 waters.

Speaker 3 If you want to get your feet wet, for sure, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Uh, he eventually passed away. Uh, AQ Khan died in October 2021, uh, Apparently died of COVID-19.

Speaker 2 And he got a full military funeral, even though he was, you know, not a part of their military.

Speaker 3 No, but that really goes to show what a national hero he was considered then and now.

Speaker 3 This is 2021.

Speaker 3 I think to me, the biggest...

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 career when 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He was a... He was a big deal throughout his life.
It's not like he went into hiding. He did the opposite.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 You know? Very interesting.

Speaker 3 And then one thing I saw, though, the irony of all this is that supposedly his technology didn't work all that well.

Speaker 3 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 2 Yeah, I wonder if that was

Speaker 2 any kind of ruse on his part, but it seemed like he really did believe in uranium.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But one other thing I want to shout out: there's an 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.

Speaker 3 He did one called Hyper Normalization, and it covers a lot of Qaddafi in Libya throughout the years and his relationship with the U.S. and basically makes the

Speaker 3 has the theory that Qaddafi was essentially a international punching bag for the U.S. for show that the U.S.
beat up on, kind of with his agreement, TASA agreement,

Speaker 3 because the U.S. 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 strongman in the Middle East.

Speaker 3 So they made Qaddafi look like a strongman 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 2 I'll say one thing about Gaddafi is he could rock those aviators. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 And that

Speaker 3 perm.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Two looks that I've never been able to pull off.

Speaker 3 I would pay good money to see you try, though.

Speaker 3 I have a feeling there's a Photoshop in the future.

Speaker 2 I'm looking at him right now. He kind of looked a little bit like

Speaker 3 Carlos Santana. Yeah.
For sure.

Speaker 3 He got mistaken for that all the time. He thought that was hilarious.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And Santana, too, but it was not as good for Santana to be mistaken as Qaddafi.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 You got anything else about AQCon?

Speaker 2 I got nothing else.

Speaker 3 I don't either. Which means, of course, everybody, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 2 This is a,

Speaker 2 not a correction, just a little bit of added info. Hey, guys, we've heard from a few people, by the way, from

Speaker 2 From Canada specifically about Phil Hartman. Okay.
Love the show, guys. My favorite podcast podcast for years now.

Speaker 2 As a huge comedy and huge SNL fan, I really appreciated your recent Phil Hartman podcast.

Speaker 2 You said in your show that you surmised he was probably the second most famous person from Brantford after Wayne Gretzky, but also qualified there were probably someone else that you might be missing that was more famous.

Speaker 2 Just wanted to pass along that Alexander Graham Bell was born in Brantford and is arguably the most famous person born in Brantford, Ontario, ahead of Gretzky and then Hartman.

Speaker 2 I think I agree with that. Jay, that is Jay Hamer from Hamilton, Ontario.

Speaker 3 Thanks, Jay. That was a short and sweet email, and we love those kind.

Speaker 3 And yeah, I would agree too. Alexander Graham Bell's probably more famous even than Wayne Gretzky.

Speaker 2 Ahoy.

Speaker 3 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 stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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