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While at the gas centrifuge plant, Khan was asked to translate classified documents of a West German uranium enrichment project into Dutch. From these papers, according to a Dutch official, he compiled a complete list of the plant's subcontractors and suppliers and passed it along to Islamabad. Pakistani officials, in turn, put together a shopping list of the materials needed for a gas centrifuge system. They then used dummy companies and agents in Europe to make individual purchases from the list.
Khan might still be at Almelo today if he had not been caught reading secret documents he had not been assigned to translate. Plant officials quickly asked that he be moved back to the Amsterdam laboratory, where he was assigned to a department that had no dealings with Almelo. At the same time, the Dutch intelligence agency Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst began an investigation. They learned from Khan's neighbors that a black Mercedes with diplomatic license plates often visited his house. Before the inquiry progressed further, however, Abdul Qadar Khan left Holland in late 1975 to take up his new "job" with the Economic Affairs Ministry.
Last summer, a Labor Party M.P. asked British officials if they were aware that Pakistan was buying equipment suitable for building a gas centrifuge system. Eventually intelligence agents from several countries, including the U.S., pieced together the Pakistani buying spree and reached the conclusion that Islamabad was buying itself the bomb. Washington, which promptly cut off most of its aid to Pakistan, was caught by surprise: it had persuaded France last year not to sell a nuclear reprocessing plant to Pakistan for fear the country would use it to produce Plutonium for a bomb. It now turned out that Pakistan was already well on its way to making nuclear bombs not from plutonium but from another deadly substance—enriched uranium.
Who is paying for the gas centrifuge plant? Pakistan is a poor nation, and a plant like this one could cost at least $500 million. Many observers believe that Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who has long attempted to obtain an atomic bomb for his own country, is funding the Pakistani project. The Israelis suspect that Gaddafi may have struck some kind of deal with the Pakistanis, perhaps extracting a promise to sell Libya ground missiles fitted with nuclear warheads.
For its part, Pakistan denies that it is building a nuclear bomb or that Gaddafi paid for a gas centrifuge plant. Officials do acknowledge that research is being carried out on uranium enrichment, but they insist the fuel will be used only in nuclear reactors. The Pakistanis, however, appear to be getting a bit protective about the project: when the French Ambassador to Pakistan and his First Secretary visited the ruins of an ancient fort 25 miles south of Islamabad last week, they seemed to have wandered too close to where the gas centrifuge factory is being built. They were set upon by half a dozen unidentified men and beaten with clubs; the ambassador had a front tooth broken, and his aide suffered a concussion.
The Pakistanis also contend that there is no such person as Abdul Qadar Khan. Meanwhile, the Dutch government, which two weeks ago admitted the security slip at Almelo, is deeply embarrassed by the whole affair and is conducting an investigation—albeit four years late.