Amsterdam
In the 1970s and ’80s, the CIA prevented Dutch authorities from arresting the man who eventually became the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, Amsterdam’s Volkskrant reported this week. As a youth, Abdul Qadeer Khan studied physics in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, when he was working at a Dutch uranium enrichment plant, Dutch authorities suspected him of atomic espionage. But they did not arrest him, former prime minister Ruud Lubbers said in an interview this week, because the CIA said it wanted to keep him under surveillance. Khan later developed Pakistan’s bomb and eventually sold nuclear secrets to Libya, North Korea, and Iran.
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