15 July, 1998
Curtain falls on the Iftikhar Khan drama
By Zia Mian and A. H. Nayyar
IT IS not often that a Pakistani makes the front page in every major newspaper in the western world. There are many who have tried, but none has succeeded like Iftikhar Khan Chaudhry.
For the last week or so, the international media has been riveted by his picture and his story. It was some story. He claimed to have participated in a secret meeting where top Pakistani nuclear weapon scientists and military officers planned a surprise nuclear attack on India.
Like everyone else, we had been following the news coverage of Iftikhar Khan with growing amazement. It was a circus. Every day brought a new and more bizarre twist to an incredible story, if not from Khan then from Pakistani officials - who first claimed Khan was a civil engineer, and then that he was an accountant in a tile factory.
It was on July 3 that we were lucky enough to stop simply being part of the audience to Khan's grand performance. We were asked to become part of the action by Dr Jeremy Stone, president of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), whom we knew. He asked for our help in communicating with Iftikhar Khan Chaudhry because Khan claimed his english was very poor and, to put it simply, FAS needed someone with a technical background to speak with Khan in Urdu.
If anyone else had asked, we would likely have refused to become part of the Khan circus. But the FAS is different. Originally the Federation of Atomic Scientists, it was started by the physicists who had been members of the Manhattan project and built the first atom bomb. FAS was their attempt to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons. It is perhaps the oldest organization specifically created to fight these weapons, and it fights them everywhere. The board of sponsors of FAS includes over 50 Nobel prize winners.
So it was that a six-way telephone conference took place in the afternoon of Monday, July 6. There was Khan and his lawyer sitting somewhere in New York. There was Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton University who is a senior member of FAS. There was David Albright, a physicist and expert on arms control issues at the Institute for Science and International Security, Washington DC. And then the two of us in our office at Princeton University, with half the department listening in.
The lawyer opened the discussion by introducing his client Iftikhar Khan Chaudhry as Dr Khan. He then described Dr Khan's academic credentials. He had, we were told, done his Higher Secondary School Certificate in pre-engineering from Karachi in 1988. He went on to Rawalpindi Medical College and graduated from there with an MBBS in 1993. He was then supposed to have studied solid state physics at Karachi University, receiving an MSc degree in 1995, and at the same time been employed as a research scientist at the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant. This was the first shock. The famous Dr Khan we had been reading about claimed to be a medical doctor not a scientist with a PhD.
But, PhD or not, to have a degree in medicine and another in physics was an impressive academic record. The only problem is that this is not possible in Pakistan. The first question was obvious: how had he got into medical college without doing a pre-medical FSc. Simple. He had taken an additional course in biology. This was fair enough. Then we asked how he got into Karachi University without a BSc in physics and mathematics. There was a stunned silence. His only answer was that he had a degree in medicine, which is science. For Dr Khan, one science was like any other, perhaps they were all the same.
This led naturally to questions about his science education. Since he claimed to have studied physics, was he in the department of physics or the department of applied physics at Karachi University? There was a pause. It seemed Dr Khan had not expected this question. At first he indicated it was the department of physics. Was he sure? He decided that he had actually been in the department of applied physics.
Putting aside our doubts about a student being unsure which department he had been in only three years ago, we pressed on. We asked him to tell us where the two physics departments were in relation to each other on the Karachi campus. More confusion. He could not decide if they were in the same building, or next to each other or in neighbouring buildings. Rather than go round and round with vague words like "near" or "close-by", it was better to ask a simple question: how long did it take to walk from one to the other? The time he came up with was five or six times longer than it actually is.
Two years a student and Dr Khan did not know how long it must have taken him to walk from one building to another on his campus. But to be fair, some people are just not very good at judging times and distances.
So the questions moved to people. Given the relationship between the teachers and students in Pakistan, it is hard to imagine a student not remembering the names of his teachers. He was, therefore, asked to name some of his teachers at Karachi University. At first, he said he could not remember. This was unbelievable.
So the question was asked repeatedly, give a name, any name, just one name. Dr Khan eventually came up with a few names: Dr Salahuddin, Dr Abdul Wahab, Dr Imran Ali and Dr Hasnain Ali. Since one of us has been a member of the physics community of Pakistan for over 25 years, and has good friends among physicists at Karachi University, it was obvious that these were concocted names. To cap it all, he could not remember the name of the head of the department.
But one should not rush to judgment. Just as some people are bad at distances, others do not remember names. It seemed Iftikhar Khan could neither accurately remember places nor names. Perhaps he was such a conscientious student that he paid no attention to such things. It was time to ask him about the things he claimed to have studied.
It came as no great surprise that he could not remember the courses he had taken. With difficulty he took three names: solid state physics, atomic power, and nuclear energy. This was amazing. Out of the more than a dozen courses he would have taken if he had actually studied physics, he could think only of three, and two of them - atomic power and nuclear energy - are different names for the same thing.
If he could not remember the courses, did he recall what textbooks he had used at Karachi University? Of course he could not recall. But he vaguely remembered a book, translated into Urdu, called Physics in Solid State. No such MSc level physics book in Urdu exists. But Dr Khan insisted that he was taught not only physics but also medicine in Urdu. This was, no doubt, meant to explain his inability to understand technical questions put to him in English. We promptly told all the participants in the conversation that the medium of instruction in every university, at least in science subjects, is English.
English or Urdu, the science is the same and it was about time that we tested his knowledge of physics and nuclear energy. We asked him the simplest possible question we could think of. We asked him what a reactor was. This was actually a trick question; we already suspected that he did not know the answer. His answer to the question "what is a reactor?" was worth waiting for. He said: "It is where a reaction takes place."
This was a breathtakingly simple answer. Absolutely correct and yet absolutely ludicrous coming from somebody who claimed to have worked in a nuclear facility as a scientist and had studied courses in atomic power and nuclear energy.
There was only one way to proceed. We asked him how the reactor generated power. His reply was: "By burning gas, oil or coal." That was that for a "senior nuclear scientist from Pakistan". If he knew no nuclear science did he know any solid state physics? Dr Khan was asked to explain a phonon - a phenomenon well known to solid state physics students. He had no idea. At this point we all decided that there was no reason to go any further. Professor von Hippel explained to Khan's lawyer that his client could not have been a physicist or a nuclear scientist.
It was not very difficult, as we discovered, to check that Khan knew nothing about nuclear science. This in itself is sufficient to prove that his whole story was completely baseless. So why did the international media not bother to ask such elementary questions? It may be that journalists, like many others, know as little about science as Dr Khan did.
With the fun and games over, there are serious questions that must be asked about the way the international media has handled the whole Khan affair. Coming in the wake of nuclear tests in India and Pakistan and serious tensions between the two countries, any reporting or comment on the situation demanded great care about the consequences. But with shocking irresponsibility newspaper after newspaper, especially in America and India, carried the wild allegations of Iftikhar Khan Chaudhry day after day. It seems the urge to make a splash, to be first with the news, overwhelmed any sense of journalistic ethics.
The story is now over; the media has moved on to create the next sensation that will sell newspapers and make careers for journalists. What will now happen to Iftikhar Khan Chaudhry? He will most likely be refused asylum and deported back to Pakistan. Once there, he may be severely punished. But what has he done that deserves punishment? His only real crime was to try to sell a secret that he did not have. He was a poor man with ambitions but no scruples trying to secure a future for himself in the United States. If he had been rich or well educated, there would have been no problem. Lacking such traditional assets, Iftikhar Khan tried to sell a commodity for which there was a market in the West. But trying to sell something you don't have only makes you a swindler not a traitor.