The atomic bazaar by William Langewiesche

Author:William Langewiesche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2007-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

And Khan was a self-starter. Even before the go-ahead from Bhutto, he had gotten to work. For sixteen fruitful days in the fall of 1974 he had stayed in Almelo on a special assignment to Urenco, where he had helped with the translation of secret centrifuge plans from German into Dutch and had, in his spare time, strolled freely through the buildings, among the centrifuges and into offices, taking copious notes in Urdu. Some of the places he had visited were nominally off-limits to him, but not once had he been challenged. A few people had asked him what his notes were about, and he had answered, half-truthfully, that he was writing letters home.

After his conversation with Bhutto in Pakistan, Khan returned to Amsterdam to gather more information. It was early 1975. He was thirty-eight years old and much liked at FDO. As was his habit, he arrived at the lab with postcards, sweets, and other little presents for the staff. Despite the secrets held at FDO, the atmosphere there was even more open and relaxed than at Urenco, with no visible security and none of the culture of suspicion that governments might have wished to impose. One bin held discarded prototype centrifuge parts—components that were perhaps not quite within specifications. Employees were free to scavenge keepsakes from it to display on their desks. Khan now began not merely to scavenge the centrifuge parts, but to take them home. Presumably, some of those components made their way to Pakistan's embassy, which had received instructions from Islamabad to help.

Thirty years later I met Khan's office-mate of 1975, an FDO machinist named Frits Veerman, now sixty-two, who drove me to Almelo, on his first return to the Urenco centrifuge plant in all this

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