unmarked. He’d forgotten all about it but it came back to him now. After the Kuta bombings, Mac had written a report on the pursuit of Hassan Ali’s gang and its terrible conclusion in northern Sumatra. He’d technically been seconded to BAIS under Operation Handmaiden so the debriefi ng to his controller, Joe Imbruglia, had been short and dense, and the bits and pieces he’d copied and kept in this yellow envelope were probably looked over quickly by Joe and just as quickly forgotten.
The cries from Canberra after Kuta had been deafening and Joe and Mac had moved on quickly into a series of more urgent operations assisting the Australian Federal Police and Indonesian National Police track down the local bombers, the ones that BAIS called ‘the patsies’.
In those days ASIS had so much egg on its face for missing the signs of an attack on a popular Australian holiday destination that they’d all worked like mules for the next six months, an era when some of ASIS’s best young talent walked away, unwilling to work around the clock for seven days a week.
Mac had fi led his report, stashed his mementos, and plunged into the fi eld to chase down tangos in the jungles of South-East Asia. He was part of the crew that nabbed one of bomber Amrozi’s associates. They knew from monitoring mobile phone traffi c between numbers in Amrozi’s phone that one of the bombers was hiding out in a village in central Java. There had been a bunch of Aussies and Indons in plainclothes but it wasn’t until they got there that they realised that no one had seen a picture of the bloke. So Mac had told one of the POLRI guys to pounce on the next bloke who answered his phone. They were in the main market square of the village when Mac dialled the number and a young Indon in a Pepsi-Cola T-shirt had answered his phone. Gotcha.
Mac zipped his pack and made for the back door of Saba’s. The bodyguard closed the locker and let him out into the back lane, and as Mac turned to say thanks the steel reinforced door shut in his face.
The mango was good and the coffee was great, but another twenty hours of sleep would have been even better. Mac took his time and tried to think through his day. Around him the energy of the Powering Asia conference had evaporated with the shootings of the previous arvo and only stragglers from think tanks and die-hards from the UN made up the numbers.
He tried to get straight what he was chasing and what he actually wanted to do about it. The Hassan crew seemed to have stepped into the old Dr A.Q. Khan networks and taken them on another tangent.
Did Mac want revenge on these people? Was it about his pride? Or was there a greater danger to Australia that presented itself out of the whole mess? Was there unfi nished business with these people? Could he claim to Davidson that he still hadn’t got to the bottom of NIME?
If Canberra really wanted to know the end-user of Bennelong’s enrichment codes, then Mac only had the shell of that answer. He believed he had enough to say that the end-user was the A.Q. Khan illegal nuclear network. Khan himself was out of commission – apparently – having been put under house arrest for a few days in
‘04 only to be pardoned. It seemed that making an estimated US$200 million from selling uranium-enrichment equipment to Libya, Iraq and North Korea was all a misunderstanding.
Khan had started back in the 1970s when, fresh out of university, he had joined an engineering fi rm in the Netherlands. He’d been tailed by Dutch intelligence after he had made too many inquiries at UCN, an engineering company that built high-speed centrifuges that enriched uranium.
Khan had suddenly left the Netherlands in 1975 and landed back in his home country with blueprints of the German P-1 centrifuge, stolen from UCN. The Pakistani government built the Engineering Research Laboratory for Khan, and by 1978 ERL had built a P-1 centrifuge and enriched its own uranium.
Pakistan became the Americans’ new best friend after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and so during the 1980s Khan’s ERL sold its centrifuges to Iran and Iraq, all the while developing a P-2 centrifuge that could enrich uranium in half the time of the P-1.
In the 1990s Khan changed his company to KRL – Khan Engineering Laboratory – after beating charges laid in the Netherlands for nuclear espionage. He entered a joint weapons-development program with North Korea in which Pakistan would get its own version of the No Dong Korean missile delivery systems and North Korea would get its own weapons-grade uranium facility. He also formed a partnership with several businessmen who would do the sales and shipping of Khan’s goods. One of them was B.A.S. Tahir, the Sri Lankan who by late 2000 was operating out of a British-owned Dubai company called Gulf Technical Industries. Indonesian intelligence believed that another Khan operative was Hassan Ali, whose main client in South-East Asia was Jemaah Islamiyah.
Australia’s interest in this development was compounded by Khan’s use of a Malaysian hi-tech engineering company called SCOPE to build the gas centrifuges, magnet baffl es, vacuum devices and centrifuge casings that were being shipped to Libya and Iraq as drilling parts for the oil and gas industries.
Khan’s network pursued enormous, brazen contracts during the 1990s. In one deal to supply more than ten thousand enrichment centrifuges to Libya, Indian intelligence – which had been onto Khan from day one – estimated the transaction to be worth in excess of US$100 million.
In the early 2000s, when Mac was largely posted in Indonesia and the Philippines, the attitude of spooks from Japan and India had hardened towards the Americans because of their protection of the Khan networks. It reached an all-time low in 2003, when the Indian government took their complaints to the US State Department and the Americans refused to pull the plug on Khan, citing ‘insuffi cient evidence’ of illegal nuclear transactions.
Mac looked around the large breakfast area and wondered how the Israelis and Indonesians had picked up on Hassan’s connection to Khan while the Aussies and Yanks had missed it. He thought back to those fi rst awful hours after the bombings in Kuta. Both Ari Scharansky and Freddi Gardjito had known there was a pro crew who’d done the Sari Club, and both Mossad and BAIS had the Hassan gang under surveillance at the Kuta Puri hotel. Hassan was to South-East Asia what Tahir was to the Middle East – Khan’s operations manager. Trouble was, after A.Q. Khan had confessed to his dealings live on Pakistani TV in 2004, Tahir was questioned and Gulf Technical Industries was exposed, none of that attention had fallen on Hassan Ali. He was still operating and in the business of building uranium-enrichment capacity for his clients, possibly Burma, Taiwan and Yemen. Maybe a disgruntled former Soviet republic in central Asia.
There was one fi nal problem that Mac was trying to get his fi nger on. In the early months of 2004, the Americans had told Khan to shut down his network. At the same time they’d got Khan’s biggest client – Libya – to swear off its nuclear weapons program in exchange for a massive injection of cash from the US taxpayer into Gaddafi ‘s conventional military. Those two events had crystallised in February
‘04, but in March a ship called China entered Tripoli. When the CIA and Atomic Energy Agency inspectors boarded the ship, they found only one container of centrifuges – which was very bad news for the world’s intelligence agencies, since Libya had paid for more than fi fty containers of the enrichment machines.
Mac’s breathing caught slightly. If you had forty-nine containers of centrifuges, they’d be useless without the algorithms and control systems that ran them. Mac breathed out. He wasn’t looking for a few shooters, he was looking for an illegal nuclear weapons program, and it seemed it was right on Australia’s doorstep.
CHAPTER 38
Mac fumed as he pocketed his phone. Davidson still wasn’t answering and, while it wasn’t totally unusual to have a controller off the air for a day, it was annoying. Davidson was in start-up mode for his new economic operation team and he might be touring the world, thought Mac, trying to get new assets in place and contracts organised. Mac had probably been the easy tasking, but other agents wouldn’t be so easy to bring back from civvie life.
Mac left another message on Davidson’s voicemail – no details, but a request to get back to him. Mac didn’t trust even the ‘secure’ voicemail used by ASIS. It was just a piece of digital code sitting on a server somewhere.
Next, Mac called Joe Imbruglia, now ASIS station chief in Kuala Lumpur and as cranky as always.
‘Yep,’ he answered.
‘It’s me,’ said Mac.
‘Shit, McQueen – how are you?’
‘Not bad for an old bloke.’
‘Not too old to be back in the fi eld.’
‘You heard?’ asked Mac.
