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| The tale of son-in-law and seer | | How controversial 'father' of Islamic bomb was fleeced | | EARLY TIMES DELHI BUREAU
NEW DELHI, AUG. 5: Pakistan's 'national hero', Dr AQ Khan, is supersititious. And his son-in-law exploited his supersititious nature to get the nuclear scientist to finance "a lot of business" for him.
Peter Griffin, a businessman who supplied various components to Pakistan for its nuclear needs and now lives in Bordeaux, told the New Yorker that Dr Khan's son-in-law found a fortune-teller called 'The Professor', on whom Dr Khan relied, and "put him on his payroll".
He told the "seer" to advise Dr Khan that if he did not give his son-in-law "a lot of business with high profit margins", he would "fall under a bus or something like that". He said that Dr AQ Khan was "a patriot whose sole ambition was to see his country develop". Dr Khan's "aspirations and ambitions were tremendous".
Griffin, a Briton, recalls asking the Pakistani scientist once if he wanted to be President of his country one day, to which Dr Khan replied, "No way, I just want to help my country develop." The Briton called Dr Khan "very patriotic". Dr Khan had told Griffin: "If it's good for Pakistan, I'd buy it from the devil." Coll's article - 'The Atomic Emporium' - said that Dr Khan, who set up and supervised the secret network that enabled Pakistan in the 1980s to purchase sensitive equipment from Europe and the US required for the production of a nuclear weapon, rejected the view that such acquisitions amounted to smuggling, as once suggested by one of his contacts, Egmont Koch.
Dr Khan admonished him: "I mean, why do you paint a picture - smugglers, smuggling, and sneaking … If you want to buy a thing, you place the order directly and you'll get it. It is no problem … You are not willing to sell it to me, but you are willing to sell it to Tom. So Tom buys from you, he takes 10 or 15 percent and sells it to me. This is a purely business deal."
Coll writes that under Dr Khan, the Khan Research Laboratory grew into a "nuclear city state brimming with contented employees". Griffin was once intercepted by British customs and one of the officers "started introducing the moral attitude" about whether Griffin really knew what he was doing. Griffin told him: "I know what I'm doing is what Pakistan should do, and what every nation has the right to do." When told that it was nuclear, Griffin replied testily, "So what? You know, the thing in the sky that gives us warmth and heat every day is nuclear as well." He told Coll, "Every country will need to have access to nuclear technology, ultimately. I think anybody - if they want nuclear weapons, they are going to have nuclear weapons." |
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