The Longest War (39 page)

Acquiring nuclear
and chemical weapons is a religious duty.

—Osama bin Laden in 1999

The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term, and long-term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon.

—President Barack Obama, April 2010

T
wo months after 9/11, Osama bin Laden for the first time claimed publicly to possess some kind of nuclear capability. On the morning of November 8, 2001, the Saudi militant was eating a hearty meal of meat and olives as Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist, interviewed him in a house in Kabul. Mir remembers that bin Laden was in a jocular frame of mind, although what he had to say was anything but a laughing matter. Mir asked bin Laden to comment on reports that he had tried to acquire nuclear and chemical weapons, to which the al-Qaeda leader replied: “
I wish to declare
that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as
deterrent.” Mir asked, “Where did you get these weapons from?” Bin Laden responded coyly: “Go to the next question.”

After the interview was finished, Mir followed up this exchange over tea with bin Laden’s deputy, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. “
I asked this question
to Dr. al-Zawahiri: that it is difficult to believe that you have nuclear weapons. So he said, ‘Mr. Hamid Mir, it is not difficult. If you have thirty million dollars, you can have these kind of nuclear suitcase bombs from the black market of Central Asia (in the former Soviet Union).’”

These claims by al-Qaeda’s leaders about the group’s nuclear weapons capabilities had come after a long quest by the terror organization to learn about atomic weapons and acquire nuclear materials. Sensing the inadequacy of his own knowledge about nuclear weapons, Abu Khabab al-Masri, the terror group’s in-house weapons of mass destruction researcher,
in a pre-9/11 memo
to his al-Qaeda bosses asked if it was possible to get more information about atomic weaponry “from our Pakistani friends who have great experience in this sphere.”

For that information
al-Qaeda’s leaders turned to
Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a recently retired senior Pakistani nuclear scientist in his early sixties whose bushy beard advertised his deep attachment to the Taliban. After studying nuclear engineering in Britain in the 1960s, Mahmood had spent nearly four decades working in the heart of Pakistan’s nuclear program and helped to develop the Kahuta facility near Islamabad that produced enriched uranium for nuclear devices, although he was never directly involved in the production of nuclear weaponry.

Despite his years working in Pakistan’s nuclear establishment, Mahmood was also something of a kook, entertaining decidedly eccentric ideas about the role that Islamic spirits known as
djinns
supposedly might have in helping to solve the energy crisis. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a leading Pakistani nuclear scientist with a Ph.D. from MIT, recalls Mahmood as “
a rather strange man
” who also wrote a book about the supposed role that sunspots had played in influencing significant historical events such as the French Revolution. Hoodbhoy says that when Mahmood’s book on sunspots was published, “We had a rather unpleasant exchange of letters since he claimed that it was based on physics.”

Tiring of his religiosity and eccentricity, in 1999 Pakistani authorities quietly relieved Mahmood of his job as the head of a facility that produced weapons-grade plutonium. Mahmood then
spent part of his retirement
in Afghanistan helping the Taliban with his charity Ummah Tameer-e-Nau
(UTN, “Islamic Reconstruction”). But UTN’s charitable cover masked more ambitious plans. The
charity aimed to establish
uranium-mining facilities in Afghanistan, part of a larger plan to establish some type of nuclear program in the country. And at UTN’s offices in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban,
reporters found
a drawing of a balloon designed to deliver weaponized anthrax and documents about anthrax disease, items suggesting that UTN was not a conventional charity.

Dr. Mahmood
failed polygraph tests
about his meetings with al-Qaeda’s leaders once those encounters became known to U.S. and Pakistani investigators. The nuclear scientist had met with bin Laden over the course of two meetings just weeks before the 9/11 attacks, during which
Mahmood had provided information
to the al-Qaeda leader about the infrastructure needed for an atomic weapons program.

Veteran CIA officer Charles “Sam” Faddis was dispatched to Islamabad to get to the bottom of what exactly had taken place between bin Laden and Mahmood. Faddis says there was a great deal of urgency surrounding the investigation of Mahmood in the weeks immediately following 9/11: “People were legitimately thinking in the context of that time—they already have an atomic bomb. What if they already have one? What if it’s already moving? What if that’s the next thing that’s happening?”

Faddis spent many hours debriefing Mahmood over the course of the three months that he spent in Pakistan investigating the case. Faddis says the nuclear scientist “tried to paint this as almost as if this is a very normal thing to be sitting around just having a conversation with Osama bin Laden and he asks you about a nuclear weapon,” adding, with a tinge of sarcasm, “I mean,
wouldn
’t you tell him about nuclear weapons if you were having tea with Osama bin Laden?”

Bin Laden had claimed to Mahmood that he possessed fissile material suitable for an atomic device that a Central Asian jihadist group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, had provided al-Qaeda and he asked Mahmood if he could recruit other scientists who knew how to build a nuclear weapon. Bin Laden showed the Pakistani nuclear scientist some of the “fissile material,” which Mahmood quickly recognized to be only some formerly radioactive materials from a medical facility that were now “dead.” Faddis says, “It was a real medical source, but like with so many of those radiological materials, their half life is such that they don’t last very long.”

After a painstaking investigation of Mahmood, Faddis concluded: “There
was no atomic bomb under construction; that we were nowhere close to anything remotely resembling that, but the real danger here was that we had this guy, with his influence and his connections and his cachet, sitting down talking about atomic bombs with Osama bin Laden, and if this thing hadn’t been squashed and had been allowed to just trundle along, and a few years had gone by, what we would have found was that in the interim, he would have brought in other people who knew very well how to build weapons.”

Following 9/11, additional worrisome evidence of al-Qaeda’s interest in mass casualty weaponry emerged. “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh
told his interrogators
that the second wave of al-Qaeda attacks on the United States would involve weapons of mass destruction (WMD), while several months later the operational manager of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, told Al Jazeera television that al-Qaeda had contemplated attacking American nuclear facilities. And the 9/11 hijackers had looked into purchasing
crop-dusting planes
in the States that they believed might be suitable for dispersing chemical or biological agents.

After the attacks on New York and Washington, al-Qaeda’s leaders also stepped up their rhetoric about their plans to use WMD. Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti who served as al-Qaeda’s official spokesman,
wrote an essay
on the organization’s website Al Neda (“The Call”) in June 2002 in which he laid out the case for al-Qaeda having the “right” to kill and maim millions of Americans using weapons of mass destruction. “The Americans have still not tasted from our hands what we have tasted from theirs. Those killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are but a tiny part of the exchange for those killed in Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, the Philippines, Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. We have not reached parity with them. We have the right to kill four million Americans—two million of them children.”

This statement was followed a year later by
the fatwa of a Saudi cleric
, Nasir bin Hamad al-Fahd, who gave religious sanction for the use of WMD to kill American civilians. In his May 2003 “Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels,” the cleric explained that large-scale slaughter of civilians was permissible because in the Prophet Mohammed’s time his commanders would employ “catapults and similar weapons that cause general destruction” when they were laying siege to cities. Never mind that seventh-century siege engines such as catapults generally killed a relatively small number of civilians while nuclear weapons can kill
hundreds of thousands; al-Qaeda had now been given the religious sanction to use nukes against American civilians.

Leonid Smirnov is the world’s
first known atomic thief
. For decades during the Cold War, the unassuming lab worker labored at the Luch nuclear laboratories near Moscow. In 1992, as the Russian economy went into free fall following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Smirnov cooked up a scheme to stage a spectacular act of nuclear theft. By then Smirnov was a foreman at the lab so it was relatively easy for him to get his hands on highly enriched uranium, the same material that was used in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The risk was small as there were few security checks at the facility and Smirnov only stole tiny amounts of uranium that would not attract notice. He recalled, “
I was the shift leader
, so it wasn’t hard for me. The main thing was not to take too much.”

At the end of each working day Smirnov would save the pieces of uranium he had stolen and store them in vials that he would then smuggle out of the facility. Eventually Smirnov stole around three pounds of the uranium, about one-fortieth of the amount needed for a simple atomic weapon. (The “gun-type” atomic bomb, the simplest nuclear device, dropped on Hiroshima used around 130 pounds of highly enriched uranium.)

Smirnov lived in a dingy block of apartments in the shadow of the nuclear facility where he worked. Like much of the former Soviet Union, it is a grim place whose inhabitants wear an air of defeat, not least Smirnov himself, who lived there in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with his wife and two well-fed cats. Years after his theft was discovered Smirnov explained that his motives for carrying out his nuclear heist were quite pedestrian: “Mainly because I just wanted a little bit of money, to get a few material things; a refrigerator; a gas stove; fix up the apartment.”

While the Smirnov case seemed more pathetic than a real threat to global security, it underlined the fact that the desperate circumstances of many Russians after the fall of the communist regime might unleash a nightmarish supply of materials for nuclear weapons that could fall into the hands of terrorists. But who might be interested in this material? Terrorist groups have generally avoided acquiring or deploying any kind of WMD because the use of such weapons would likely eliminate whatever popular support or legitimacy they might enjoy. And the few terrorist groups that have had an interest in developing such weapons have had scant success in their plans for
mass murder. Still, al-Qaeda members dreamed of superweapons that would eliminate the United States and their other enemies at one stroke. That dream launched the organization on an ultimately ill-fated quest for not only nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological devices.

What distinguished al-Qaeda from other terrorist groups was that its leaders made it clear publicly that they would deploy such weapons without hesitation, despite the fact that privately some al-Qaeda leaders were aware that their WMD program was
strictly an amateur affair
. This was the mirror image of the Cold War, where the Soviets had enough nuclear devices to end civilization, yet their intentions about what they might do with those weapons were so opaque that the art of Kremlinology sprang up to divine what their plans might be. The Soviets had the capability to wipe out the United States, but never really had the intention to do so, while al-Qaeda’s leaders have often said they intend to kill millions of Americans, but their ability to do so has been nonexistent.

Bin Laden’s first public pronouncement about WMDs was his reaction to the news of an Indian nuclear test on May 11, 1998, at a remote desert test site less than one hundred miles from the Pakistani border. Three days later bin Laden
issued a statement
calling for an “Islamic” bomb: “We call upon the Muslim nation in general, and Pakistan and its army in particular; to prepare for the Jihad imposed by Allah. … This should include a nuclear force.”

The Indian nuclear test helped to provoke a lively debate within al-Qaeda about whether the group should acquire and deploy such weapons. Abu Walid
al-Masri
, the Egyptian editor of the Arabic-language magazine of the Taliban, recalled that al-Qaeda hard-liners, like the military commander Mohammed Atef, pushed for acquiring nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons capabilities. Another wing of al-Qaeda assessed, correctly as it turned out, that these types of weapons would only bring small tactical benefits because the group was likely only to acquire or build weapons that were quite primitive.