"One crucial question is how Khan was able to transfer centrifuges on military planes. The planes were chartered through official channels in the defense procurement agency in Pakistan's defense ministry. The rationale was that, as well as cooperation over the Ghauri, KRL was involved in major conventional arms deals with NK, which at one point was Pakistan's major supplier of weaponry. This gave Khan the freedom to go back and forth and it is not clear that pilots or other officials linked with transport would necessarily recognize a centrifuge as distinct from say, a missile part. There was never any accountability or records over the movement of weapons and material in and out of Pakistan, a product of fighting covert wars in the 1980's in Afghanistan and in the late 1990's in Kashmir as well as well as running a clandestine procurement program. Covert activity had become an integral part of the Pakistani state and meant the Khan could go about his business with minimal oversight, whether acting on his own or not.
KRL was subject to tight security but Pakistani officials that this does not mean they knew what Khan was up to. The security was oriented towards shielding the lab and its scientitsts from external threats rather than keeping check on their activities. From the beginning, the whole rationale of security was to protect the program from the web of international non-proliferation controls, to ensure that external procurement networks went undetected by foreign intelligence agencies and that knowledge of them was restricted to those who needed to know. "The idea was to protect the national laboratories and national strategic organizations from all external threats, " says Feroz Khan who was involved in that security. "The key purpose was to provide them the space they needed to work rather than control them. They were not in anybody's oversight ... They were not seeing what packages were going and what was inside the packages." The same was true of the budgetary and financial aspects of KRL's work - their aim was to facilitate, not to check up on Khan's activity. Military officials were assigned to run his security detail amid fears that he might be kidnapped by a foreign intelligence agency to reveal Pakistan's secrets. But the security officers at KRL were actually paid by Khan himself not by the government. They were often retired officers or officers approaching the end of their career whose loyalty could be pliable. Military figures inevitably have claimed that this autonomy explains why Khan could have sold material without any state knowledge. "The Pakistan army, if they deputized a person to be responsible at the site about the security of the project or program, they were made responsible to the boss, that is Khan," argues General Beg. "They were not responsible to the Army chief - not before me, not after me, or to another army chief. They reported directly to the KRL and its directer, Khan. And it has come out that they were getting paid by him. So the army as such was involved in decision making policy - but not directly responsible for all that was happening within the Kahuta lab." The head of security at KRL Brigade General Mohammed Iqbal Tajwar was amongst Khan's closest confidants, traveling with him on his shopping and selling trips. Tajwar was one of those detained in late 2003 when Pakistan finally acted against Khan. he told interrogators that he had no idea what was going on.