Osama's Nuclear Quest

By Jeffrey Kluger

Nobody is certain what Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood has been up to in Afghanistan in the past three years--but nobody in the West much likes it either. Mahmood is one of Pakistan's leading nuclear engineers, a key part of the team that developed the country's small arsenal of atom bombs. According to a lot of people, he also may be a little flaky. The fact that since 1998, so loose a nuclear cannon has been traveling in and out of the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, where he has helped the Afghans construct a complex of buildings he describes as flour mills, has a lot of people worried.

It was for this and other reasons that Pakistan detained Mahmood and two of his colleagues to determine if the three scientists may have been passing nuclear expertise, raw materials or--worse--functioning weaponry on to the Taliban. So far, nothing Islamabad has learned has proved that the men have indeed been trafficking in secrets, and they have been released. But nothing has put all doubts to rest either.

The detention of the three scientists was just the latest in the so-far offstage effort to battle the most dreadful of the terror weapons Osama bin Laden would like to have in his arsenal: nuclear arms. Airborne anthrax and hijacked planes are little more than a murderous tease compared with the prospect of rogue nukes. Just what bin Laden has in his stockpiles, what he plans to do with it and what can be done to stop him are rapidly becoming the most pressing questions in the anti-terror wars. "The goal of terrorism is to spread panic," says Dr. Jerrold Post, a physician and professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, who believes that al-Qaeda would try a nuclear or radiological attack if it had the capacity. "Psychologically, there are no constraints."

It's been an open secret in the intelligence community that bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization have long lusted after nukes. The consensus in Washington is that the group does not have a true nuclear-fission device, though it may well have what is known as a radiological weapon or "dirty bomb"--a conventional explosive packed with radioactive debris. Whatever bin Laden's got, he has made any number of attempts to get more. As early as the mid-1990s, intelligence sources tell TIME, bin Laden's agents began cruising the black markets of Europe and Asia looking for pirated Russian warheads. Al-Qaeda also made it known that loose components such as enriched uranium would do too. Relatively new to the free-for-all thieving of the post-Soviet republics, bin Laden was fleeced at least twice, getting fooled by black marketeers who tried to sell him low-grade, radioactive rubbish--in one instance claiming it was "red mercury," a fictional Russian weapon.

But bin Laden has been a patient shopper, and if he hasn't made a good buy yet, he has come awfully close. Earlier this year, at the trial of the four men now convicted of planning the U.S. embassy bombings, al-Qaeda turncoat Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl described his role in helping to broker a 1993 deal in which bin Laden attempted to pay $1.5 million for a cylinder of South African uranium. Al-Fadl saw the cylinder, but he wasn't present to see when--or if--money and material changed hands. Last April a Bulgarian working as a middleman in a Dubai company providing Asian laborers to Middle East construction firms was briefly introduced to bin Laden in a safe house at an unknown location during a trip to Pakistan. The next day he was approached by a scientist who seemed to be part of bin Laden's organization, offering him a different kind of business proposition: a scheme to bring nuclear waste from Bulgaria through Moldova and Ukraine. The names al-Qaeda and bin Laden never came up during that meeting, but the wary Bulgarian backed out of the deal. "They pressured me," he told TIME. "They said, 'We're ready to give you this business.'"

That kind of al-Qaeda tenacity is part of what sparked the recent arrests in Pakistan. Mahmood, the best known of the detained engineers, has been a vocal supporter of the Taliban, calling its members "upholders of a...movement of renaissance of Islam." He has compared the journey of the soul from life through death and after to an electrical current passing through a wire, and has said the energy of the spirits known as jinns could be harnessed to solve the energy crisis. Such seemingly loose-screw ideas coming from a man with so much knowledge of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal always troubled Islamabad and Washington. In 1999, when Mahmood retired from the government and began traveling in and out of Afghanistan to establish what he said was a relief organization, antennae went up.

Once American military actions began, the commanders of the air campaign decided to direct a few bombs at Mahmood's flour mills. At about the same time, Pakistani officials brought Mahmood and the others in for questioning. President Pervez Musharraf's spokesman Major General Rashid Quereshi stresses that the U.S. did not request the arrests--something Washington confirms--dismissing as "absolutely baseless" rumors that the men were simply handed over to the FBI or the CIA. Secretary of State Colin Powell, however, has readily admitted that the Pakistani scientists are high on Washington's worry list. "I discussed this issue with President Musharraf," he said, "and I'm confident that he understands the importance of ensuring that elements of his nuclear program are safe."

For now, they appear to be. As long as Musharraf remains in charge, the weapons are well nailed down. If he should be toppled, however, and if power should fall into the hands of extremist factions, the situation could change fast. In hopes of preventing that, the U.S. has offered to help Pakistan improve its already tight bomb security.

But even if Islamabad's bombs stay buttoned up, the nuke risk remains high. That's because Russia and the former Soviet states are leaking like a sieve. The Soviet Union produced more than 140 tons of weapons-grade plutonium and a whopping 1,000 tons of highly enriched uranium during its nuclear peak. Russia's internal-security agencies admit that on hundreds of occasions they have had to seize fissionable materials or technical documents that had fallen into the wrong hands. The United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency reports 175 cases of trafficking in nuclear material since 1993. In the late 1990s, Afghan and Pakistani smugglers were sneaking so much nuclear material out of the former Soviet Union that they had to stockpile it in at least one warehouse in Peshawar, Pakistan. Robert Puffer, an American antiquities dealer familiar with Pakistan's black markets, claims to have been in the warehouse, where dozens of canisters of nuclear contraband were stored under the floor. "These Afghans didn't know anything about radioactivity," he told TIME. "They were walking around with stuff they said was 'yellow cake,' which they kept in a matchbox in their pocket." U.S. officials in the region at the time were less impressed by whatever the smugglers were selling, saying most of it was radioactive waste material scavenged from hospitals--certainly not weapons-grade stuff.

If nuclear material of whatever quality is trickling out of the former Soviet Union, nuclear engineers are too. In the early 1990s--well before Mahmood and his Pakistani colleagues may have got the itch to help out al-Qaeda--Russia intercepted a planeload of its missile scientists leaving the country to go work for North Korea. In the years since, out-of-work engineers have grown no less desperate, and Russian borders have grown no less porous--meaning that the brain drain may only grow worse.

But detonating a bomb won't take any technical assistance if bin Laden can get his hands on a few fully built--and widely feared--suitcase nukes. During the cold war, the Soviets built an unknown number of portable nuclear explosives, small enough to be carried in a case 8 in. by 16 in. by 24 in. After the East-West thaw, Russia claimed to have secured all the weapons, but plenty of people have doubts. In 1996, Russian General Alexander Lebed claimed that his government had lost track of 134 mini-nukes, and stories have circulated that bin Laden himself bought 20 of them from the Chechens for $30 million and two tons of opium.

Given the nature of post-Soviet record keeping--which often means no record keeping at all--the truth of the claims is impossible to determine. Colonel-General Igor Valynkin, a top official of the Russian Defense Ministry, dismisses the talk as "ravings," and even if there is more to the stories than that, there is reason to believe the danger is not as great as it seems. Though suitcase bombs may be out there, they may also be duds, since the tritium triggers needed to ignite them have probably decayed. "You need to recharge the tritium every six years," says Paul Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute. Of course, even partial detonation of a weapon could cause a lot of damage--and release a lot of radioactivity.

Simpler still is the so-called dirty bomb. Detonated in a crowded city, a dirty bomb would pack an explosive punch no greater than ordinary ordnance, but the radioactive debris it would scatter could sicken and kill unknown numbers of people and contaminate an unknown stretch of real estate. Because the bomb would require no special skill to build, it's perhaps the most feared of the terrorists' nuclear choices. "They don't kill as many people," says Morton Bremer Maerli, a nuclear-terror expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, "but as a weapon of terror, they may be just as effective."

If there's reason for anxious Americans to feel hopeful, it's that pulling off a nuclear attack, even a low-grade one, is an enormously complicated business, and anything at all--from technical problems to supply problems to the simple dangers of fooling with radioactive material--could trip it up. For bin Laden, everything would have to go exactly right, or a nuclear strike wouldn't work. For the American military and the global law-enforcement forces arrayed against him, the job is to see to it that at least one of those things goes wrong.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Joshua Kucera and Violeta Simeonova/Sofia, Tim McGirk/Quetta, Andrew Purvis/Vienna, Douglas Waller/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

With reporting by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Joshua Kucera and Violeta Simeonova/Sofia, Tim McGirk/Quetta, Andrew Purvis/Vienna, Douglas Waller/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow