“We are still grappling with the clandestine network we dis-covered a few years back,” IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said last week, referring to the web created by AQ Khan of Pakistan. “When we know now that on a CD-ROM you have designs for centrifuges [capable of enriching uranium to weapons-grade] and possibly even weapons designs, that makes you very worried.” So does the record of even the most successful investigations so far.
Follow the trail of the Tinner family. The area around Haag, Switzerland, near the Liechtenstein border, holds a nest of precision-engineering firms known among investigators as Vacuum Tube Valley. Friedrich Tinner, owner or player in several of these companies and a longtime Khan acquaintance, denies ever intentionally helping produce components for clandestine nuclear programs. But one of his sons, Urs Tinner, allegedly had a pivotal role: first making vital parts for Libya’s secret nuclear program, then, as a CIA informant, helping to expose it.
Urs Tinner’s story began in the 1990s, according to U.S. and European officials who worked closely with the CIA’s efforts to penetrate these operations. Those sources (asking not to be named because of the sensitive subject) say U.S. intelligence gained potential leverage over the Tinners in the 1990s, when Urs ran afoul of French authorities. One of the French security services tipped off the Americans.
In 2002, Urs went to work for Scomi Precision Engineering (SCOPE), a company set up in Malaysia by Khan associates to produce high-tech components, ostensibly for use in the oil industry. Urs supervised production of pieces for centrifuges, according to a detailed report issued by the Malaysian police in 2004. The components were loaded on the BBC China, a Libya-bound ship–which was intercepted in October 2003 by a team of U.S. and other agents. Within weeks, Libyan leader Muammar Kaddafi, his operations now exposed, ended his nuclear program and gave up a trove of intelligence about his suppliers. The incident remains the biggest counterproliferation coup on record.
The CIA kept its eye on Urs, along with his brother Marco and their father, the intelligence officials say. But a few months after the BBC China bust, German border police arrested and jailed Urs, apparently unaware of his CIA ties, and then extradited him to Switzerland, where Marco and Friedrich were later picked up. The old man was freed, but his sons remain in detention, pending possible charges under a Swiss law banning traffic in nuclear tech from Swiss soil.
Before the arrests, the brothers denied any wrongdoing. A family spokesman said Urs had worked for SCOPE but had no idea that parts were going to Libya. The CIA declines to comment on the case. What’s clear is that the Tinners are now useless, either as moles or as surveillance targets, to investigators trying to discover where AQ Khan’s seeds of destruction might still be sprouting.
