AQ Khan had Pakistani generals 'on his payroll', was a merchant of death: Ex-CIA spy's big claim

AQ Khan (L)

Former CIA officer James Lawler, who is credited with helping dismantle AQ Khan’s global nuclear smuggling network, has claimed that the Pakistani scientist maintained financial links with “certain Pakistani generals and leaders".

Lawler, who headed the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division, told news agency ANI that the US agency had monitored Khan’s role in Pakistan’s nuclear programme for years before realising the extent of his outward trafficking. “We were very slow. We thought it was serious that he was supplying Pakistan, but we did not imagine he was going to turn around and become an outward proliferator,” he said.

AQ Khan was a Pakistani nuclear scientist who built the country's nuclear weapons programme and later ran a global proliferation network that India long viewed as a major security threat.

Calling Khan the “Merchant of Death,” Lawler asserted that the scientist’s network eventually supplied multiple foreign programmes. Addressing alleged Pakistani involvement, Lawler said, “AQ Khan had certain Pakistani generals and leaders on his payroll,” while adding that individual complicity did not equate to formal state policy.

Lawler outlined how the CIA infiltrated global proliferation circuits by posing as suppliers of nuclear-related components. “If I want to defeat proliferation and proliferators, I need to become a proliferator,” he said, describing sting operations built around covert overseas entities.

He recounted how the network expanded over time from procurement to trafficking. “Instead of being a consumer of this technology, they became a purveyor of the technology,” he noted.

The former officer also highlighted post-9/11 fears about nuclear material reaching terror groups. He recalled the CIA’s interception of the BBC China freighter, which he said carried “hundreds of thousands of nuclear components.” The revelation stunned Libyan officials when US negotiators confronted them. “You could have heard a pin drop,” he said.

Lawler described Iran’s programme as dependent on stolen URENCO designs and centrifuge models linked to Khan. He warned that an Iranian bomb could set off a “nuclear pandemic” in the region, prompting neighbours to seek deterrents of their own.

He also said CIA leadership closely monitored Pakistan’s arsenal after 9/11. Director George Tenet personally confronted then-President Pervez Musharraf with evidence of Khan’s proliferation activities.

Explaining CIA sabotage efforts, Lawler said illicit facilities received deliberately compromised equipment so that “things would constantly break and not work.”

During the interview, Lawler also called for stronger India-US cooperation, warning that a nuclear confrontation in South Asia would leave “only losers” and cause global devastation.