Early career
Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in 1935 into a middle-class Pathan Muslim family in Bhopal, India, which migrated to Pakistan in 1952. He qualified as an engineer at the University of Karachi, Pakistan, and after graduation went to West Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium for further studies, earning a Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium in 1972.
That same year, he joined the staff of the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory, or FDO, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. FDO was a subcontractor for URENCO, the uranium enrichment facility at Almelo in the Netherlands, which had been established in 1970 by the United Kingdom, West Germany, and the Netherlands to assure a supply of enriched uranium for European nuclear reactors. The URENCO facility used Zippe-type centrifuge technology to separate the fissionable isotope uranium-235 out of uranium hexafluoride gas by spinning a mixture of the two isotopes at up to 100,000 revolutions a minute. The technical details of the centrifuge systems are regulated as secret information by export controls because they could be used for the purposes of nuclear proliferation.
In May 1974, India tested its first nuclear bomb (Smiling Buddha) to the great alarm of the government of Pakistan. Around this time, Dr. A.Q. Khan had privileged access to the most secret areas of the URENCO facility as well as to documentation on the gas centrifuge technology. A subsequent investigation by the Dutch authorities found that he had passed highly classified material to a network of Pakistani intelligence agents; however, they found no evidence that he was sent to the Netherlands as a spy nor were they able to determine whether he approached his government about espionage first or whether they had approached him. He left the Netherlands suddenly in December 1975 and was put in charge of Pakistan's nuclear weapons development programme with the support of the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
The former Dutch Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers, revealed in early August 2005 that the Netherlands knew of Dr. A.Q. Khan stealing nuclear secrets but let him go on two occasions after the CIA expressed their wish to continue monitoring his movements.[2]