‘I’m going to kill…’: Ex-CIA officer reveals Musharraf’s angry response to AQ Khan selling Pakistan’s nuclear secrets
Lawler recalled in an interview with CIA Director George Tenet that he personally informed Musharraf that AQ Khan had “betrayed Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to at least the Libyans and perhaps others”, which led to an explosive response before Khan was placed under house arrest for years.
Expanding on this meeting, Lawler said Tenet directly told Musharraf that Khan was leaking nuclear secrets, which led Musharraf to react by saying, “I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.” He added that Musharraf ultimately chose to keep Khan under house arrest for several years, a decisive step in containing the network.
Detailing how the intelligence effort developed, Lawler said that in the mid-1990s he was assigned to conduct counter-proliferation operations in Europe before being given the authority to “infiltrate and sabotage” nuclear supply networks.
His teams set up front companies that posed as legitimate suppliers and used classic sting techniques to “get people to come,” enabling the CIA to gain insider access and map the Khan network.
Explaining the philosophy behind these operations, Lawler said he had worked on historic covert missions and concluded: “If you want to defeat nuclear proliferation and proliferators, you need to be a nuclear weapons manufacturer, creating entities that masquerade as sellers of sensitive equipment while doing the exact opposite.” He noted that “there will be no more than 10 people” at headquarters and that the work will be deliberately small and focused, with the support of brave officers serving overseas. As operations expanded, Lawler said intelligence agencies were initially slow to recognize the scale of AQ. Khan’s activities, he noted, turned him into an “outward-looking proliferator” selling nuclear technology abroad.
“I nicknamed Khan the ‘Merchant of Death,'” he said, pointing to Khan’s extensive networking skills and a three-decade trajectory that took him from sourcing technology for Pakistan to smuggling to other states.
He described the Libya case as a decisive moment for the efforts. When his team seized the BBC Chinese cargo ship, they removed containers “full of nuclear components” that later forced Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to admit to a secret nuclear program.
Lawler recalled the stunned silence of Libyan officials when confronted with the evidence and then said, “By God, you’re right. We had a nuclear program.”
Outlining the commercial methods used to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, Lawler said that the CIA, while collecting intelligence, also applied technical sabotage to disrupt centrifuge programs.
He described the approach as a deliberate attempt to “harm” the capabilities of proliferation cells and said it was based on tested, technical methods developed with national laboratories.
This was necessary, he said, because, in his words, the risk of not taking action “would be a risk.”
Discussing the broader proliferation landscape, Lawler said the initial focus was on Iran and then shifted entirely to the Khan network, while other parts of the U.S. intelligence community were interested in North Korea, where access was much more difficult.
He added that designs sourced from Urenco formed the basis of the first centrifuge models and the proliferating plans reached many countries.
Going forward, Lawler warned of the dangers posed by Iran’s potential nuclear weapon.
Predicting that other states seeking weapons and the increased risk of accidental or intentional nuclear use would create a chain reaction, he said, “My biggest concern is the nuclear epidemic this will start in the Middle East.” he said.
Speaking about his career, Lawler also explained the origin of his nickname “Mad Dog”, which came from a dog bite incident in France years before his work against nuclear proliferation.
He described his 25-year career at the CIA from 1980 to 2005 as a role he loved, saying he now writes spy novels and is proud of the mission he helped shape.
“Preventing countries from obtaining nuclear weapons, no one should argue with that.”
