It was during a cricket match between India and Pakistan on February 22, 1987 that Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq, according to legend, leaned over to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi sitting next to him in the stands and made an unequivocal threat to his teeth. let escape: ‘If your troops our frontier so much as inch exceed, we will destroy your cities.’
Zia’s ability to intimidate his Indian counterpart, just as tensions between the two countries had soared over a military exercise involving hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers near the Pakistani border, had everything to do with the news that the mustachioed four-star general had recently been told by nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer. Khan: Pakistan was able to make a nuclear bomb at short notice. And that news, which would soon force Gandhi to withdraw his troops, had everything to do with Almelo, more than six thousand kilometers away, because of one of the strange twists in history sometimes runs.
During the autumn of 1974 Khan had walked around with a notebook for sixteen days at the office of the Almelo uranium enrichment factory Urenco. The German and Dutch-speaking metallurgist was seconded to Almelo by his employer, the Fysisch Dynamic Research Laboratory (FDO) in Amsterdam, to translate secret German plans for an ultracentrifuge into Dutch. Urenco, a British-German-Dutch consortium founded in 1970, continues to enrich uranium today by spinning its thousands of centrifuges so fast that they separate the non-fissile isotope uranium-238 from the lighter and more fissile uranium-235, similar to how a juicer can separate the pulp from the liquid.
Flags at half mast
Armed with the finest nuclear skills, Khan left in December 1975 with his two daughters and his Dutch wife Hennie for a holiday to Pakistan, never to return. While Khan kept peddling his colleagues at FDO on the pretext that he had contracted yellow fever and unfortunately could not return to Amsterdam as a result, the nuclear spy had started the advance that eventually led him to ‘the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb’.
On Sunday morning Abdul Qadeer Khan died in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, where the 85-year-old TU Delft alumnus had ended up in a hospital named after himself due to Covid-19. On the same day, Khan was given a state funeral at Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, showered with honorary degrees, gold crowns and other insignia. National flags were flown at half mast on Sunday under the authority of Pakistan’s interior minister.
The contrast with Khan’s former friend and later enemy Frits Veerman is great. The technical photographer called Urenco and FDO in the mid-seventies because he suspected that his colleague Abdul had been spying. During his visits to the Khan house, Veerman had noticed that Khan’s desk was full of secret Urenco documents. Khan later even tried to lure Veerman, with whom he liked to eat grilled chicken or admire the female beauty in Amsterdam in summer, to Pakistan under false pretenses. In early 1976 Khan also sent him an extensive shopping list from Islamabad with centrifuge parts that he needed for his ‘research program’ in Pakistan. However, Veerman’s warnings were mocked by his bosses, and he was even fired at the end of the 1970s. Last year, after an investigation by the House for Whistleblowers, Veerman finally received some recognition, just before the Housekeeper died on February 23 of this year at the age of 76.
hero status
Khan was born in 1936 to a Muslim family of seven in Bhopal, India. Shortly after his birth, his mother enthroned him to a soothsayer, who predicted that her offspring would perform “very important and useful work for his people.” At the age of 24 Khan became an inspector of weights and measures in Karachi, but his ambitions soon took the metallurgy student to Europe, where he ended up in college in Berlin, Delft and Leuven. During a holiday in The Hague in the early 1960s, he met his wife Hennie – he asked her about the price of a postage stamp for a postcard to Pakistan.
After his nuclear espionage, Khan came to be known in the West as a Dr. Strangelove-esque villain, as he achieved hero status in Pakistan as the leader of the nuclear weapons program. That status was shaken when he sold known nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea in 2004, secrets that again consisted largely of the designs he had once captured from Urenco.
“My beloved brothers and sisters, I have chosen to appear before you to offer my deepest regrets and unreserved apologies,” Khan said in a televised address. President Musharraf pardoned him, although Khan was placed under house arrest for five years. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan (no relation) praised the deceased as a “national icon” on Sunday: “He was loved by the people for his crucial contribution to making us a nuclear state.”
Three times Abdul Khan
Many schools, hospitals and institutions are named after Abdul Qadeer Khan, even a cricket team. In the Malian city of Timbuktu, the legendary West African city where Khan loved to stay, a small hotel is named after his wife, the ‘Hotel Hendrina Khan’, which Khan himself helped finance the construction.
After his departure to Western Europe in the 1960s, Khan was probably not immediately in the mood to run away with atomic secrets. A key moment in his metamorphosis into a spy was ‘Operation Smiling Buddha’ in the Thar Desert, India’s first successful nuclear test on May 18, 1974.
Initially, Pakistan wanted to build a nuclear bomb using plutonium, following the example of India. After his flight from the Netherlands, Khan convinced then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of the blessings of uranium. Within a few years, Khan was in charge of a 10,000 centrifuge nuclear weapons factory in Kahuta.
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