E-mail a friendDouglas Frantz
airdate January 22, 2008
A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of several honors for investigative reporting, Douglas Frantz is a senior writer at Condé Nast Portfolio. He was previously managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and also worked for The New York Times and The Albuquerque Tribune. His ninth book, The Nuclear Jihadist (co-authored with his wife, Catherine Collins), is a biography of A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program. Frantz holds an M.A. in journalism from Columbia University.
Douglas Frantz
Tavis: Douglas Frantz is a senior writer at "Portfolio" magazine and a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He's also a former managing editor at the "L.A. Times" and a reporter for "The New York Times." His acclaimed new book is called "The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets and How We Could Have Stopped Him," co-authored by Catherine Collins. Doug Frantz, nice to have you on the program.
Douglas Frantz: Thanks, Tavis. Great to be here.
Tavis: Wonderful accolades I read about your work, but the most important thing is that you're from Indiana.
Frantz: That's right. (Laughter) That's right, I'm proud to be a Hoosier.
Tavis: And proud to be a Hoosier, as am I. So we got two Hoosiers talking here tonight. Iran and Libya and the other countries talk about this book a long way from Indiana.
Frantz: Yes, yes, Catherine and I went to 15 countries on four continents; 200 interviews over four years to do this book. A lot of work.
Tavis: What drove you to do all of that?
Frantz: What drove us is that we think this is the single most important issue facing the world today. It's not just an American issue, it's not just an Iranian issue, but it's a global issue that requires global solutions and we use this book to try and use A. Q. Khan's life to dramatize the problems of nuclear proliferation, the dangers of nuclear proliferation, and some of the solutions that are available to prevent a terrorist attack with a nuclear device or nuclear war between Pakistan and India.
Tavis: So who is A. Q. Khan?
Frantz: A. Q. Khan is, to our way of thinking, the most dangerous criminal in the history of the world because he stole technology, he stole designs from a Dutch lab in the mid-1970's. He took that back to his home country of Pakistan; he helped them develop a nuclear arsenal there. And then he turned around and reversed his own theft and began selling it to the highest bidders.
We know he sold it to three troublesome countries: Iran, Libya, and North Korea. We believe that this book makes a compelling case that there's a fourth unidentified customer out there. And in a sense, that's the most terrifying aspect of this whole A. Q. Khan problem.
Tavis: You know what's amazing to me, when you said the worst. I leaned back in my chair just a bit when you said "the worst," because I'm thinking about people like Hitler. That's pretty bad there. And the difference - there are many differences, of course, but one of the differences that comes to mind immediately is here's one guy, A. Q. Khan. Hitler had a whole army behind him, but here's one guy who was able to wreak this much havoc, which begs the obvious question. How does one guy get to do all of that?
Frantz: Well, it required a lot of complicity on the part of Pakistani officials, senior military officials, senior intelligence officials, and successive American administrations. From 1975 forward, the United States knew what A. Q. Khan was up to, they knew about Pakistan's attempts to develop a nuclear weapon. But for short-term strategic reasons, they turned a blind eye to it.
They allowed this to happen in very important ways, and one of the points we're trying to drive home in the book is that this is a blowback that will be worse than anything we've ever imagined. It'll be worse than September 11th if somebody detonates a nuclear device somewhere in any city in the world. And when they do, it's likely that it will be traced back to A. Q. Khan and to Pakistan.
Tavis: We'll come to in a moment, Doug, what the U.S. knew and when they knew it and what they did or did not do about what they knew when they knew it. Before we get to that, though, these countries that were complicit, they got out of that what? What did they get out of turning a blind eye?
Frantz: Well, the United States got Pakistan's assistance in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979 until the end of 1989, when the Soviets left. In exchange for that devil's bargain, the Pakistanis agreed to provide arms and money to the Afghan mujahedin, who were fighting the Soviets. And in exchange the Americans made a concerted policy decision to ignore the proliferation concerns raised by Pakistan.
The Carter administration knew that Pakistan was developing a nuclear weapon. They knew that A. Q. Khan was a central figure in that development program. And for 11 years, first the Carter administration, then the Reagan administration, and then the first year of George H. W. Bush's administration, they turned a blind eye because they thought they needed Pakistan more to help fight the Soviets and drive them out of Afghanistan than they needed to worry about the spread of nuclear weapons.
Tavis: And the price right now? You mentioned earlier the price that we may pay down the road. But as we sit here tonight in this conversation, the price we pay now, the U.S. that is, for turning that blind eye is what?
Frantz: Well, the price is Iran would not be where it is in terms of its own nuclear program without A. Q. Khan. He was instrumental in providing them with the technology and the knowledge to enrich uranium and the Iranians have finally mastered that. Within a year, 18 months at the outside, they're going to have the ability to enrich uranium at an industrial level.
And the step from enriching as a civilian concentration, which is what they say they're going to do for a nuclear reactor, and going that next step to highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon, is a very short step indeed. They could accomplish that in a matter of a month or six weeks, just to adjust the machinery and have it enrich a little bit longer. And then all of the hard work will be done for a nuclear weapon.
Tavis: I find myself, as I get older, certainly - I always have been this way, but as I get older, more this way - that is to say being intrigued and interested and fascinated by the mind and how the mind works. I'm particularly fascinated by persons who have been gifted, blessed with, I think, extreme amounts of intellect. And on top of that intellect they get education and they put those things together and they can do some pretty remarkable things. But I'm further turned on, interested by, interested in, rather, how somebody ends up having the gift of intellect and using it for evil purposes. What makes that person act that way? And I raise, obviously, to get to this point, which is I want to know more about Mr. Khan. I know what he did. Tell me about him.
Frantz: Yeah, he's a fascinating character. At one level, this book is really a biography of A. Q. Khan.
Tavis: Exactly.
Frantz: And what we see there is someone who was a gifted, but necessarily brilliant student. But he was born in India and he grew up at a time of partition between India and Pakistan. And so he grew up with a great distrust, almost an abiding hatred, really of India. And he was in Europe, working in a lab in Amsterdam, just minding his own business, basically, as a metallurgist when in 1974, India tested its first nuclear device.
And that reawakened in him these flames of anti-Indian feelings and his patriotism, and so he stole this technology from the Dutch lab where he worked and took it back home. So he began, then, as a patriot. And I think he tried to harness his knowledge and his intellect for the good of Pakistan. I really believe that's how he started out. But then that changed and things went really awry in the later years in that we see it in the late '80s and throughout the '90s where he became very religious.
He became very strongly anti-American and anti-Israeli, and that was part of a motivator. And also, he became larger than life in his own mind. He became the public face of the Pakistani nuclear program and he thought of running for president.
Tavis: And he was celebrated in Pakistan.
Frantz: Oh, he was revered. He was, after Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, he was the most revered figure in Pakistan's history. He couldn't walk into a restaurant without people coming up to kiss his hand and buy his meals. He put journalists on his payroll so they would write even more laudatory stories about him.
And he hubristic and he became greedy, and he thought that he was above all the laws. And so I think that's where he really went drastically wrong and where all of us may one day pay the price for the way he became sort of the real-life Dr. No.
Tavis: Greedy for power, greedy for fame, greedy for money, greedy for what?
Frantz: All of the above.
Tavis: Adulation?
Frantz: All of the above. And even money. This network that he set up, he started selling nuclear technology to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 1997. Before they were shut down at the end of 2003, the network received between $80 million and $100 million, and that was spread among maybe 15, 20 different people, and A. Q. Khan got the lion's share of that.
And he's still a wealthy man, even though he's under house arrest and in Pakistan now and can't really enjoy all of that wealth.
Tavis: I was about to go to that point. He is under house arrest in Pakistan now for what reason?
Frantz: Well at the end of 2003, the United States finally came up with enough evidence that they took it to Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, and said, "Here's the proof." They laid it on the table and they said, "You've got to do something about A. Q. Khan." This was after the Libyans had abandoned their program and fingered A. Q. Khan as their main supplier.
So Musharraf cut a deal with him. He said, "If you go on national television and confess to selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, I'll give you a pardon and keep you under house arrest." And that's where he's been since February 2004: sitting on a pile of secrets. He's a guy that the United States and the rest of the world really needs to interrogate, and I don't mean waterboarding or anything like that, but we need to have a serious conversation with this man.
Tavis: And given our relationship with Musharraf and given the fact he's under house arrest and given the fact that he was, at one point, certainly a celebrated hero in his country, how unlikely is that to happen?
Frantz: Well, it hasn't happened, and in fact he's such a hero, still -
Tavis: Still now.
Frantz: Still in Pakistan. He's far more popular than Musharraf. And so Musharraf would have had a very difficult time turning him over to the Americans. A better compromise would have been to allow inspectors from the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to go in and question Khan directly but they refuse to do that.
Tavis: Any reason to believe that he would cooperate with that, honestly, earnestly?
Frantz: Well I don't know, but you never know until you ask. And the fact that we've allowed him to sit there uninterrogated, unquestioned by anybody except the Pakistanis, who have their own agenda here, the fact that we've let him sit there raises serious concerns. You don't know what he'll say until you go in and ask him.
Tavis: He has achieved what age now?
Frantz: He's 71 years old now.
Tavis: Seventy-one now. Finally, how does the U.S., with a straight face, go to Musharraf, make our case, lay it out on the table, putting our finger on this guy, when, if you are right, we turned a blind eye when this guy was doing his dirty deeds?
Frantz: Well, we say that we made a mistake. (Laughter) You've got to admit that. And look, we've given Pakistan $10 billion since 2001. That should buy us access to A. Q. Khan, if nothing else.
Tavis: The lesson of his life. I know the legacy, for those, of course, who think he's a hero in Pakistan. You and I don't think that, obviously. But what's the lesson of his life?
Frantz: I think the lesson of his life and the large lesson here is that by looking for short-term goals, successive American administrations ignored the long-term dangers of what A. Q. Khan was doing, and that was to spread nuclear technology to very unstable places and possibly sell it to a terrorist group, as yet unidentified.
Tavis: Fascinating read, to say the least. Co-authored by Douglas Frantz along with Catherine Collins. The new book is "The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets and How We Could Have Stopped Him." Douglas, nice to have you on the program.
Frantz: Thank you very much; it's great to be here.
Tavis: Thanks for your work.
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