The report by the Institute for Science and International Security explores the truly international character of this network and warns, "There is little confidence that other networks do not or will not exist or that elements of the Khan network will not reconstitute themselves in the future."

The joint study by the institute's president, David Albright, and its deputy director, Corey Hinderstein, describes the Khan network as "first and foremost, an elaborate and highly successful illicit procurement network."

The network was headed by Pakistan's chief nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan who in a televised confession in February last year admitted supplying nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

U.S. and other intelligence agencies had known about the activities of this gang for sometime but the Bush administration confronted Pakistan in early 2004 after collecting solid evidence of Khan's involvement in nuclear smuggling.

Khan is considered a national hero in Pakistan for enabling his country to test its nuclear devices in May 1998, less than a month after similar tests by archrival India.

Talking to reporters in December 2004, former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell recalled how he conveyed the message to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf: "We know so much about this that we're going to go public with it, and within a few weeks, okay? And you needed to deal with this before you have to deal with it publicly." According to Powell, "(T)he next thing we knew, A.Q. Khan had been put in custody."

The ISIS report, published in spring 2005 edition of the Washington Quarterly, says that Khan created this network in the 1970s to supply Pakistan's gas-centrifuge program, which has been used to produce weapons-grade uranium for Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

According to this report, Khan and his associates slowly expanded their import operation into "a transnational illegal network" that also exported gas centrifuges and production capabilities as well as designs for nuclear weapons to mostly Muslim countries to turn a profit and provide additional business for their international collaborators.

"In addition to money, Khan was also motivated by pan-Islamism and hostility to Western controls on nuclear technology," the report says quoting several articles Khan wrote for technical journals in the late 1980s.

By 2003, when the network was exposed to the public, it had become a truly trans-national organization. Although the key providers of the necessary technology and several of the network's leaders, including Khan, were located in Pakistan, other leaders were spread throughout the world, including in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, South Africa and Malaysia, the report points out.

The network also depended on unwitting manufacturing companies and suppliers in many countries. It sold what the Pakistanis have called the P1 and P2 centrifuges - the first two centrifuges that Pakistan deployed in large numbers.

The P1 centrifuge uses an aluminum rotor, and the P2 centrifuge uses a maraging steel rotor, which is stronger, spins faster, and therefore enriches more uranium per machine than the P1 centrifuge's aluminum rotor.

Initial exports of the P1 centrifuges to Iran in the mid-1990s included 500 machines retired from Pakistan's nuclear program or made under contract by the network, says the report. This quantity of P1 centrifuges would only be able to produce about one quarter of a bomb's worth of weapons-grade uranium in a year.

In the Libyan case, the network focused on producing P2 components outside of Pakistan. The Libyans have informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that they placed an order for 10,000 P2 machines.

Because each centrifuge has roughly 100 different components, this order translated into a total of about 1 million components - "a staggering number of parts given the sophistication of gas-centrifuge components."

"Thus, it is clear that Khan's network was assembling an impressive cast of technical experts, companies, suppliers, and workshops. The workshops contracted to manufacture components for the network typically imported the necessary items, such as metals, equipment or subcomponents."

After the facilities produced the item, they would send it to Dubai with a false end-user certificate, where it would be repackaged and sent to Libya.

Initial information found in Libya identified roughly a half-dozen key workshops spread across at least Africa, Asia and the Middle East that were making the centrifuge components.

The network selected a workshop based on the type of centrifuge component needed and the materials and equipment involved in making those particular components.

The most publicly known facility - Scomi Precision Engineering, or SCOPE, in Malaysia - made stationary aluminum components and was the source of 15 percent of the total number of components destined for Libya.

In October 2003, the dramatic seizure of uranium-enrichment gas-centrifuge components bound for Libya's secret nuclear weapons program was made aboard the German-owned ship BBC China. As the ship passed through the Suez Canal, it was stopped by German and Italian authorities.

Workshops in Turkey importing subcomponents from Europe and elsewhere assembled other key parts of the centrifuges, including centrifuge motors, power supplies and ring magnets.

Tradefin Engineering, a company in South Africa, produced the elaborate equipment needed to insert and withdraw the uranium hexafluoride gas that is enriched in centrifuges. Tradefin also attempted unsuccessfully to make the sensitive maraging steel rotors for the P2 centrifuges.

Libya also ordered from the network a sophisticated manufacturing center, code-named Workshop 1001, to produce centrifuge components.

The original plan called for this center to make additional centrifuges either to replace broken ones or add to the total number after the network delivered the first 10,000 machines, but if the network encountered problems in making a component for the original 10,000 machines, Libya's manufacturing center may have had to accomplish that task as well.

Most of the equipment for the center came from Europe, particularly from or through Spain and Italy, and was sent to Libya via Dubai. The network had also supplied detailed manufacturing information for many of the parts.

All rights reserved. � 2005 United Press International. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by United Press International. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of United Press International.

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