Part 1: the Khan Affair (1972-1979)

AQ Khan died on 10 October 2021 at the age of 85. Khan is an important figure in relation to proliferation and nonproliferation controls. This post does not seek to provide a biography or obituary to Khan. Instead, the post is the first of a series that will examine the role of AQ Khan drawing on primary source documents. This post provides a summary of a document obtained from the UK national archives, ‘URENCO and the AQ Khan affair’, which speaks to the Khan affair up to around October 1979. Images of this file  are published  alongside this piece. The file contains the recorded UK perspective on Khan’s employment at URENCO in the 1970s prior to his return to Pakistan in 1975.

The author would like to note that the details in this post do not conform with the understood history of AQ Khan’s actions in Europe, nor the author’s understanding of them. The author has previously used language similar to ‘AQ Khan stole technology from URENCO’, which it transpires is only one part of a larger picture. The author notes also that any analysis of the Khan affair should be driven by more than just this one archive document. It should certainly also take into account other primary source information. However, from the author’s perspective, this is not the purpose of this post. This post is intentionally limited to provide a summary and reading of the AQ Khan affair from the contemporary UK perspective as captured in this one document from the archives. Later posts in this series may thus challenge assertions in this post. They might likewise build upon the revised understanding of the affair contained in this post.

The post focuses in particular on Khan’s work with FDO and URENCO in the 1970s. URENCO is a trilateral uranium enrichment effort between the Netherlands, UK, and Germany based on gas centrifuge. Uranium enrichment, is a path to nuclear weapons and is thus a sensitive technology. Indeed, such is the transformative nature of gas centrifuge that the technology is among the most sensitive and closely guarded. The fact that a foreigner could almost accidently be given access to this technology, as this post shows, is almost beyond comprehension.

URENCO and the AQ Khan affair

• The incident was an embarrassing slip in security by the Netherlands. The US had insisted that the Netherlands and other countries classify centrifuge technology in the 1960s, in part, out of concern that a foreigner may gain access to the designs.^[1] Under the Treaty of Almelo, which established URENCO, the three countries would have had to agree to allow a non-national access to configure information under the Treaty of Almelo.
• Khan worked for a URENCO contractor, FDO from 1972-1975 initially without incident  (page 10) until concerns began to come to light in 1975 (page 7). There were no grounds to believe he was collecting information for Pakistan from 1972-1974.
• He was hired to work on documents classified up to secret. A misunderstanding resulted in him being asked to work on secret documents related to the URENCO project even though his clearances did not allow him to work above ‘restricted’ (page 8). His time at the plant included 16 days translating details of the German centrifuge machine to be produced at Almelo (page 192).
• Khan was cleared to secret and allowed to work on the URENCO project.  A security officer was forced into retirement for not informing the Joint Commission, which had to approve any third country nationals such as Khan, who were to work on the project.  (page 191)
• Khan also spent a number of days in the ‘brain box’ at the URENCO site in the Netherlands (page 24). Khan had access to the production facilities and was seen carrying a writing pad in that area (page 24).
• Khan was allowed to take documents home with him to translate, including by his wife (page 6, page 23). The archive materials notes that, contemporaneously, Khan denied having transferred these to Pakistan. (page 10).
• Security concerns ultimately came to light and resulted in Khan’s removal from the centrifuge project in 1975. It later came out that Khan had taken steps such as asking staff to photograph centrifuge drawings for him. Staff were also offered trips to Pakistan (page 26).
• In the mid-late 1970s Pakistan may not have been recognized as a proliferation risk. (page 184)
• Classification and nonproliferation guidance conflicted. (page 171) It was assumed that if someone held a security clearance they could have access to proliferation-relevant information. However, the purposes of the security vetting regime for access to classified information differed from schemes intended to prevent proliferation. As such, security clearance processes should not and could not have been relied on to manage proliferation risks.
• When in Pakistan from 1975, Khan communicated, including through proxies, with URENCO staff and contractors in order to solicit additional centrifuge information (page 27)
• Pakistan procured inverters and 6,200 steel tubes which were likely to be for the centrifuge program. (page 7/8) (N.B. These were among the first of many procurements from around the world. Future posts will examine these in more depth). Khan visited the factory of the tube producer and was able to continue to travel to the Netherlands after he left FDO as the gravity of his actions did not become known until 1979.

Broader significance

Almost accidently, Khan found himself surrounded by the details of the most sensitive technologies on earth. From these documents at least, there are no signs that Khan embarked on his time at URENCO in 1972 with the intention of stealing the technology or transferring it to Pakistan. (This factor should be assessed more fully based upon the complete information that has come to light about Khan and his intentions in the almost 50 years since his work at URENCO). At any rate, following India’s peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974, it is understandable that an individual who found himself with such privileged information would consider what to do with it and whether to pass it to his country. Khan did pass secret information to Pakistan so the conventional narrative that he stole information is at least in part accurate. However, it was information that he should not have had access to in the first place. 

Khan would later be convicted in absentia for his role in the Khan affair. The transfer of technology to Pakistan was evidently a grave concern from a nonproliferation and international security perspective. However, while Khan should rightly be judged based on his actions, the reality is that it was the Netherlands that allowed Khan to access this sensitive and classified technology. It was a failure of Netherlands security rules and culture that effectively required Khan to access information that he should not have had access to. These same rules allowed Khan and his wife to work to translate the documents at home in the evenings. And it was a failure of security that resulted in a lack of ongoing review to identify potential concerns with staff such as Khan’s potential change in mindset following the Indian peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974. The Netherlands was thus in good part responsible for the Khan affair. The failure of security was absolute, systematic, and consequential.