THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15 2001
Deadly secrets left by fleeing Taleban
FROM ANTHONY LOYD IN KABUL
THE al-Qaeda men had left in a hurry on Monday night. They took with them their weapons and explosives but there was not time to load all the documents on their vehicles and in their haste they allowed the tops of the bundled sheets to spill across the corridor floors.
Someone had tried to burn this residue but the flames were weak and left the job unfinished.
Another unknown person scattered anti-personnel mines across the ground near the house, either by accident or intent. Then they fled.
When looking through the documents they left behind, it becomes apparent that most are no more than the bomb-making literature one would expect a terrorist organisation to possess. It is only when the neat, handwritten notes of a mathematician or scientist turn their focus to the detailed studies of mach speeds, conical areas, liquid rocket fuel and plutonium — atomic number 94 — that the hair begins to crawl on the back of your neck.
For whatever other dark business may have occurred in the al-Qaeda safe houses in Kabul, a lot of time and effort had been devoted within them to researching the creation of an atomic device.
There is an intelligence vacuum in the city at present. A few “spooks”, American and British, have moved into the capital and are doubtless going about their work, but none had so far visited the four al-Qaeda houses I saw yesterday. Each had been ransacked by Afghan civilians and Mujahidin in the wake of the Arabs’ fast departure on Monday night, but looters were interested only in the stocks of medicine and clothes left behind. The Afghans have more immediate appetites than carrying away literature and documents written in the alien languages of Arabic, German, Urdu and English.
I was taken to the first house, a two-storey building in the Karta Parwan quarter of the city, by a British cameraman familar with Kabul after years of experience in the country. It lay opposite an induction centre for Pakistani and Arab recruits coming to Afghanistan to learn their trade.
“Two years ago the Talebs moved some Arabs, Egyptians and Pakistanis to the house after the induction centre became too full,” Wakil, 46, a former policeman who lived next door, said.
“There were about 60 or 70 of them who lived here. At any one time there would be up to 20 while the others rotated through the front lines. They kept to themselves and were not friendly but I knew their watchman, an Afghan named Baten Shah. He used to tell me a bit about them.”
The documents lay strewn around the top floor, along with copies of aircraft magazines advertising flying instruction manuals, navigation instruments and flight charts.
There was a lot of propaganda and religious material embossed with symbols, including Islamic flags smashing through the Union Flag and Stars and Stripes, and the blackened claws of Israel, America, Britain, France and the United Nations ripping at a map of Saudi Arabia.
Lying among Canadian passport applications, journals, letters and English language courses, the majority of the al-Qaeda documents were simple guerrilla instructions on the use of infantry weapons and manufacture of bombs, as well as studies of American special forces, the SAS and Western hostage-rescue techniques.
The majority of the bomb-making instructions were easy to understand and used domestic items, including Alka Seltzer tubes, condoms, wax, mousetraps and cigarettes as contact switches to initiate charges.
These sound innocuous enough, but the notes included details on how to put the items to use so that a victim opening a book or turning a door handle would be blown to pieces.
There was an abundance of material related to bridge and road blowing, and some sinister notes examining the air-conditioning systems of apartment buildings.
The handful of local Afghans and street children who were idly looting the first house were so oblivious of its significance that when I asked if they knew any other houses where Arab fighters had lived they were happy to show me. Of the four buildings I explored, two in Karte Parwan and two further east, one had been lived in by Chechens, one by Yemenis (allegedly including family members of Osama bin Laden), and two by a mixture of Arabs and Pakistanis.
Even the diagrams of “E” cell microcoulometer and electrochemical delay switches seemed banal beside the physics and chemistry manuals devoted to molecular matter, the thermal expansion of gases and fluid pressures.
Yet it was the studies of rocket fuel, thrust capabilities and concept models of a missile with radar stealth ability and load capacity to a speed of mach 2.4 that were most unnerving for the layman. Some were written on headed paper from the Hotel Grand in Peshawar, others from the Pearl Continental in Karachi; most on blank paper or in log books. They were extensive, precise, extremely detailed: the work of a man or men with highly advanced scientific and design understanding.
The vernacular quickly spun out of my comprehension but there were phrases through the mass of chemical symbols and physics jargon that anyone could understand, including notes on how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium into a critical mass producing a nuclear chain reaction and eventually a thermo-nuclear reaction.
This was only what was left behind by frightened men escaping the advance of the Mujahidin. The sensitive material is still with them.
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15 2001
Experts doubt nuclear ability of terrorist cell
BY MARK HENDERSON, SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT
THE notes left in an al-Qaeda base in Kabul suggest that Osama bin Laden may be working on a fission bomb similar to that dropped on Nagasaki, though experts said it was unlikely that he had the capacity to build one.
Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, was a plutonium implosion device, in which TNT is used to compress a radioactive core to the point at which it turns critical and produces a thermo-nuclear reaction. The al-Qaeda notes describe the construction of such a device.
The principles involved are neither complicated nor secret but it remains extremely difficult to use them to construct a viable warhead.
Al-Qaeda would first have to acquire at least eight kilogrammes of plutonium, and would also need scientists with more expertise than is found in the notes. Construction of a bomb requires very sophisticated facilities, including precision machine tools of a sort that they are unlikely to have access to in Afghanistan.
Most nuclear experts believe that construction of such a bomb is impossible without state support, and even Saddam Hussein, who had scientists with the know-how, plutonium and machine tools supplied by Matrix Churchill, failed to construct one.
John Large, a nuclear consultant, said the plans clearly pointed to an implosion bomb. “This is the Fat Man model, in which a piece of plutonium the size of an orange is surrounded by a beryllium sphere and wrapped in conventional explosive,” he said. “The whole thing is the size of a football.
“The TNT explosion is directed by lenses to coalesce and compress the core to the size of a pea, turning it critical. The basic mechanics are simple and well known, but the key to successful nuclear weapons technology is precision of timing and assembly.
“You need to synchronise the explosives incredibly finely, and the design of the lenses must be very precise indeed.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog, believes the risk of a terrorist group building a nuclear device is slim. “While we cannot exclude the possibility that terrorists could get hold of some nuclear material, it is highly unlikely they could use it to manufacture and detonate a nuclear bomb,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, its Director General. “Still, no scenario is impossible.”
Dr Large said the discovery was still worrying. “Even if they can’t build a nuclear bomb, they are toying with the idea of using radioactive material, and this might suggest they are also considering a radiological dispersion device or ‘dirty bomb’,” he said. In a dirty bomb, nuclear waste is wrapped around conventional explosives. It could kill dozens of people, contaminate a large area and trigger panic.
Sure, we spend all that money on kryton (sp?) switches 'cause they are cool.
By accident? Don't think so.