To support his case, Armstrong cites a memorandum from former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski sent to President Jimmy Carter on the eve of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In his memo, Brzezinski encourages Carter to support the Afghan resistance and to use Pakistan as a conduit. In order to do this, he adds, US policy should not be dictated by non-proliferation concerns.

But Armstrong and Trento’s work also raises the intriguing possibility that after the US and British authorities discovered Khan was making money selling nuclear technology, they used his network to monitor clandestine nuclear purchases by other countries.

Two out of three countries contacted by the Khan network, North Korea and Libya, have since renounced their nuclear weapons programmes. Iran, which is also identified as a recipient of nuclear transfers from the Khan network, denies it is seeking nuclear weapons capability.

Circumstantial evidence that the Khan network subsequently acted as a cat’s paw for Western intelligence can be deduced from what later happened to some of Khan’s closest business associates. One of them is a Pakistani businessman, formerly based in Dubai, who used his company to help equip the KRL complex outside Islamabad with high quality equipment for uranium centrifuges.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has recently been granted US citizenship and has set up a multi-million dollar finance company operating out of Florida. The US authorities have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect the man’s identity, even to the extent of issuing him with a false social security number that actually belongs to a convicted drugs smuggler.

... contd.