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During the reprocessing tussle, Pakistan pulled off its most audacious espionage coup. It came to light after a quiet scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, resigned in March 1976 from his post as a metallurgist at the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory, known as F.D.O., in Amsterdam. The firm was involved in research and development at one of Western Europe's most advanced atomic installations, the URENCO uranium-enrichment facility at Almelo, also in the Netherlands. The plant is today one of Western Europe's major sources of low-enriched uranium for nuclear reactors. High-speed gas centrifuges like those at URENCO -- thousands of devices lined up in rows like washing machines in a laundromat -- can also be used to produce the highly enriched uranium needed for atomic weapons.
During his three-year stint at F.D.O., Khan had copied the plans of the centrifuge process and sent them back to Pakistan. He had revealed to his countrymen the names of more than 100 European, Canadian and U.S. firms that could provide the necessary equipment for a plant. Using a network of phony businesses as cover, Pakistan began to acquire and transfer to Islamabad technology from Western Europe and North America. Items in the covert pipeline ranged from special steel tubing to precision measuring equipment to specialized electronics. In 1978, some 400 tons of uranium oxide, the basic feedstock in producing enriched uranium, was secretly obtained from Niger, with the connivance of Libya.
Pakistan reportedly received hundreds of millions of dollars for Project 706 from Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who in return was permitted to send his scientists to study Pakistan's enrichment advances. Nominally, the Libyan payments were made in return for Pakistani military assistance. Then, in 1977, after Zia came to power, Libya's connection with Project 706 was cut. Zia disliked and distrusted Gaddafi, and turned instead to Saudi Arabia for financial assistance. Saudi Arabia's payments were officially rendered in return for Pakistani military help.
Assembling the centrifuge equipment took years. Khan quietly resurfaced as head of the Kahuta operation in 1976. In November 1984, a Dutch court sentenced him in absentia to four years in prison for espionage, but the sentence was subsequently annulled on a legal technicality.
A further example of Khan's activities came to light last year in Canada, during the trial of three Pakistani-born naturalized Canadians on charges that they had tried to circumvent local export controls. Two officials of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission allegedly asked the trio in July 1980 to buy various components for a device that can be used to spin high-speed centrifuges. The equipment is manufactured by General Electric Co. at a plant in Hudson Falls, N.Y., and at U.S. factories of Westinghouse Electric Corp., RCA Corp. and Motorola Inc. The three Canadians made ten shipments to Pakistan. They were arrested while attempting to ship the eleventh. The trio later denied that they knew the ultimate purpose of the exports. One of them said that the equipment was for use in a textile plant and a food-processing factory. In the end, two of the men paid fines of $3,000 each on a minor charge: failing to obtain an export permit.