The President of Switzerland stepped to a podium in May and acknowledged, that the Government had destroyed a huge trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of a family of Swiss engineers suspected of helping smuggle nuclear technology to Libya and Iran. The files were of interest to international atomic inspectors working to unwind the activities of A Q Khan, the Pakistani bomb pioneer-turned-nuclear black marketeer. The Swiss engineers — Friedrich Tinner and his two sons — were accused of having associations with Khan, acting as middlemen in his dealings with rogue nations seeking nuclear equipment and expertise.Swiss President Pascal Couchepin asserted that the files — which included an array of plans for nuclear arms and technologies, among them a highly sophisticated Pakistani bomb design — had been destroyed so that they would never fall into terrorist hands.The US had urged that the files be destroyed, according to interviews with five current and former Bush administration officials. The purpose, the officials said, was less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the CIA.Over four years, several of these officials said, operatives of the CIA paid the Tinners as much as $10 million. In return, the Tinners delivered a flow of secret information that helped end Libya’s bomb programme, reveal Iran’s atomic labours and, ultimately, undo Khan’s nuclear black market.In addition, US and European officials said, the Tinners played an important role in a clandestine US operation to funnel sabotaged nuclear equipment to Libya and Iran. The relationship with the Tinners “was very significant,” said Gary S Samore, who ran the National Security Council’s non-proliferation office when the operation began. “That’s where we got the first indications that Iran had acquired centrifuges,” which enrich uranium for nuclear fuel. Officials say the CIA feared that a trial would not just reveal the Tinners’ relationship with the US, but would also imperil efforts to recruit new spies at a time of grave concern over Iran’s nuclear programme. Destruction of the files, CIA officials reasoned, would undermine the case and likely set their informants free. But in Europe, there is much consternation. Analysts studying Khan’s network worry that by destroying the files to prevent their spread, the Swiss Government may have obscured the investigative trail. It is unclear who among Khan’s customers — a list that is known to include Iran, Libya and North Korea, but which may extend further — got the illicit material, much of it contained in easily transmitted electronic designs. The West’s most important questions about the Khan network have been consistently deflected by former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf refused to account for the bomb designs that got away or to let US investigators question Khan, perhaps the only man to know who else received the atomic blueprints. The Swiss judge in charge of the Tinner case, Andreas Mueller, said he had no warning of the planned destruction of the files, and he is now trying to determine what, if anything, remains of the case against Friedrich Tinner and his sons, Urs and Marco. Some details of the links between the Tinners and US intelligence have been revealed in news reports and in recent books, most notably The Nuclear Jihadist, a biography of Khan by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. But recent interviews in the US and Europe by The New York Times have provided a fuller portrait of the relationship — especially the involvement of all three Tinners, the large amounts of money they received and the CIA’s extensive efforts on their behalf.
