The investigation of Amin is a deliberate distraction. By targeting him, the CIA and MI6 hope to stop Parliament and Congress from delving into the issue of why the United States and Britain allowed the Khan network to proliferate for three extra years. Amin had uncovered evidence in Dubai in April 2000 of the Khan network supplying nuclear technology to Libya. When he did, British and American spies, according to top-level CIA officials, feared he was endangering what one described “as our own penetration of the Khan network.” The infiltration, according to those sources, was intended to allow the the CIA to feed faulty bomb designs to Khan’s customers and thereby slow down their nuclear programs. The CIA even started using some of the Khan network’s front companies for its own purposes. But Amin’s investigation threatened all this. As a result, it was shut down—and Khan’s nuclear smuggling was allowed to continue.
The story of Amin’s short-circuited investigation appeared in our book just as the CIA and its sister intelligence agencies were preparing their new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program. Suddenly the intelligence community had a big problem. The book focused attention on the three-year gap between the time Amin first uncovered evidence of Khan’s nuclear peddling and the time the United States and Britain finally moved against the network. While the new NIE would try to cast a positive light on the fact that Iran had ostensibly shuttered its warhead design program in the fall of 2003, it would be silent the issue of how far that program had progressed at the time of the shutdown. Had Khan provided Iran with copies of tested Chinese warhead designs, as he had done for Libya? Had Iranian engineers fixed the flaws deliberately embedded in top-secret bomb designs passed to them in 2000 as part of a botched CIA scheme to sabotage their program? In short, had Iran halted the warhead design work because it was already finished—needing nothing more than the enriched uranium fuel, which it is now busy spinning out with the help of technology obtained from the Khan network, to have a complete nuclear bomb? The NIE does not say. And leaving the story of Amin’s investigation unchallenged could bring unwelcome attention to such questions.
Having covered the intelligence community for four decades, it is clear to me that the attack on Atif Amin has nothing to do with protecting state secrets. Rather, it’s about avoiding state embarrassment. The goal was not to defend the Realm but to destroy the credibility of a dogged investigator whose work in Dubai categorically demonstrates that the CIA and MI6 allowed the Khan network to operate for an extra three years. In light of the new NIE, it’s clear that what happened in Dubai between 2000 and 2003 is the biggest CIA embarrassment since WMD in Iraq.
From what we have been able to determine, the main reason British investigators went after Amin is because he was seen in an interview on the MSNBC website and a bizarrely written account of the case by reporters Rich Greenburg and Robert Windrem that deliberately and inaccurately made it seem as if Amin was complaining about what the intelligence community had done. In fact, all Amin did in the interview was describe public information concerning his actions in Dubai in the spring of 2000. Despite it being made crystal clear to Greenburg and his associate Jim Popkin in a meeting before the interview that Amin was only the subject of our book, the resulting MSNBC article made it sound as if he was our source. The posted piece also unfairly pitted Amin against his own government and the intelligence community. Not only did MSNBC make Amin seem like a source they went further: They quoted unnamed intelligence officials offering a counter to Amin’s alleged views. There was only one problem – Amin never attacked his government or Washington as the written piece repeatedly implied. What Greenburg and his MSNBC colleagues did was give MI6 and the CIA the basis on which to lodge a complaint that could destroy Atif Amin’s career. In the process, by focusing on Amin and not the role of the U.S. government in allowing the Kahn network to keep going, they committed the cardinal sin of journalism – they completely missed the bigger story.
