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Former IAEA inspector David Albright: Pakistan nuclear 'hero' AQ Khan peddled Pakistan's own nuclear design. NYT: Khan nuclear smuggling ring had advanced design-- Pakistan's:
Tinners may have given information to the CIA, the NYT reports. More from the Post:It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material — orders for equipment, names and places where the Khan network operated, even old love letters. In all, they found several terabytes of data, a huge amount to sift through.
“There was stuff about dealing with Iranians in 2003, about how to avoid intelligence agents,” said one official who had reviewed it. But the most important document was a digitized design for a nuclear bomb, one that investigators quickly recognized as Pakistani. “It was plain where this came from,” one senior official of the I.A.E.A. said. “But the Pakistanis want to argue that the Khan case is closed, and so they have said very little.”
US/IAEA pushback on Pakistan/Khan -- and Khan's image in Pakistan as nuclear hero, as AQ Khan makes campaign to be released from house arrest by new Pakistani leadership? Contact says timing of these stories may have had more to do with a bunch of Tinner stories in the works.An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by a former top U.N. arms inspector that suggests the plans could have been shared secretly with any number of countries or rogue groups.
The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states. [...]
The computers that contained the drawings were owned by three members of the Tinner family -- brothers Marco and Urs and their father, Friedrich -- all Swiss businessmen who have been identified by U.S. and IAEA officials as key participants in Khan's nuclear black market. The smuggling ring operated from the mid-1980s until 2003, when it was exposed after a years-long probe by the U.S. and British intelligence agencies. [...]
Albright, citing information provided by IAEA investigators, said the designs were similar to that of a nuclear device built by Pakistan. He contends in the report that IAEA officials confronted Pakistan's government shortly after the discovery, adding that the private reaction of government officials was astonishment. The Pakistanis "were genuinely shocked; Khan may have transferred his own country's most secret and dangerous information to foreign smugglers so that they could sell it for a profit," Albright said, relating a description of the encounter given to him by IAEA officials.
More from the AP: "The [senior IAEA] diplomat [in Vienna] referred a reporter to a transcript of a panel discussion on Nov. 7, 2005, where ElBaradei spoke of at least one weapons design being copied by the Khan network onto a CD-ROM 'that went somewhere that we haven't seen' and added, 'That gives you an indication of ... how much the technology had (been) disseminated.'"