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By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 7, 1998; Page A07

A week after a Pakistani man made incendiary allegations of having witnessed top Pakistani government officials discussing a preemptive nuclear attack on India, U.S. government officials and academic experts who have talked to him have concluded he is a fraud.

Frank von Hippel, chairman of the research arm of the anti-nuclear weapon Federation of American Scientists, said he and several Princeton University associates reached their conclusion after interviewing Iftikhar Khan Chaudry for an hour by telephone yesterday about his supposed graduate education, work for the Pakistani nuclear agency and understanding of nuclear physics.

"Everything was wrong," said von Hippel, who also is a professor of public and international affairs at Princeton. "He doesn't know the most elementary facts about what a nuclear reactor is. Our guess is he doesn't have more than a high school education."

A senior Clinton administration official who has reviewed government agencies' reports about Khan's claims said he is "an absolute fraud." U.S. intelligence has concluded the nuclear facility where Khan said that he had worked had no centrifuges for refining weapons-grade uranium, as Khan had claimed, the official said. Instead, Pakistan's centrifuges are housed in facilities run by a competing nuclear agency.

Khan, 27, has been interviewed twice by the FBI in relation to his claims, but the bureau has not commented publicly on the case.

Asked yesterday about the skepticism regarding his account, Khan said that his mind has been a blur since May, when he said his wife was detained by Pakistani security agents and he slipped out of the country.

"I've been very tense," Khan said from his lawyer's office in Manhattan. "I don't remember all the basic definitions of physics that they asked me about. I learned these things over four years ago."

The interview with the experts from Princeton was conducted mostly in Khan's native Urdu by A.H. Nayyar, a physics professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, who is visiting Princeton for the summer; and by Zia Mian, a Pakistani physicist and research associate at Princeton. Both have publicly criticized Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

Khan told reporters that he had been present at a meeting at which top Pakistani officials discussed a preemptive nuclear strike on New Delhi. He said he protested the plans to superiors, and fled the country pursued by Pakistani security agents. He added that he would share details about his nuclear work with U.S. intelligence agencies in exchange for political asylum.

His claims, reported widely in India, contributed to the tension that has mounted on the subcontinent since early May, when India tested five nuclear weapons. Pakistan replied with six underground nuclear tests of its own later that month.

The Pakistani government strenuously denied his charges. Over the weekend, Pakistani officials asserted that Khan was not a nuclear physicist, but an accountant at a firm that manufactures bathroom tiles.

Several days ago representatives of the Federation of American Scientists approached Khan's attorney, Michael Wildes, to try to settle the controversy by allowing scientists with the proper technical background to interview Khan. The federation opposes the global proliferation in nuclear weapons, and publicizes the plight of nuclear "whistleblowers" who are punished by their governments.

Von Hippel, Mian and Nayyar all said Khan completely flunked their quiz, despite his claim that he received a master's degree in solid-state physics at Karachi University in 1995. One key moment came when they asked him to define a phonon -- they described it as "a quantum of sound."

"Every undergraduate in solid-state physics knows what a phonon is," said Mian. "He said he'd never heard of it."

"We asked him what a nuclear reactor is, and he said it's a place where a reaction takes place . . . a place you make energy," Nayyar said. He also couldn't identify the type of fuel -- natural uranium -- used in the Khushab nuclear plant, where he claimed to have worked.

Asked to describe the layout of Karachi University, where his two Pakistani questioners once studied, he misplaced the physics buildings and failed to recognize physics professors they mentioned.

Although English is the language of instruction at the graduate level, his English was inadequate, Mian and Nayyar said.

"He was concocting his stories," said Nayyar.

The Princeton group all but told Khan outright over the phone that they thought he was lying, but, von Hippel said, "he didn't back off in the slightest. It was very strange."