Smuggler’s Plot Highlights
Fear Over Uranium
New York Times by Lawrence Scott Sheets and William Broad
January 25, 2007
(For personal use only)
Last January, a Russian man with sunken cheeks and a wispy
mustache crossed into Georgia and traveled to Tbilisi by car along a high
mountain road. In two plastic bags in his leather jacket, Georgian authorities
say, he carried 100 grams of uranium so refined that it could help fuel an atom
bomb.
The Russian, Oleg Khinsagov, had come to meet a buyer who he believed would pay
him $1 million and deliver the material to a Muslim man from “a serious
organization,” the authorities say.
The uranium was a sample, just under four ounces, and the deal a test: If all
went smoothly, he boasted, he would sell a far larger cache stored in his
apartment back in Vladikavkaz, two to three kilograms of the rare material, four
and a half to six and a half pounds, which in expert hands is enough to make a
small bomb.
The buyer, it turned out, was a Georgian agent. Alerted to Mr. Khinsagov’s
ambitions by spies in South Ossetia, Georgian officials arrested him and
confiscated his merchandise. After a secret trial, the smuggler was sentenced to
eight and a half years in prison.
The case has alarmed officials because they had thought that new security
precautions had tamped down the nuclear black market that developed in the
1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Until now, all but the vague outlines of the case have remained secret. But an
examination of the episode, and a similar one in 2003, suggests that the
region’s political instability and culture of rampant corruption continue to
provide a fertile breeding ground for illicit commerce in atomic materials.
Interviews with Georgian and American officials, along with a review of
confidential government documents, provide a glimpse into a world of smugglers
who slip across poorly policed borders and the agents who try to stop them.
The illicit trade — not just in atomic goods but also in everything from stolen
cars to furs to counterfeit $100 bills — thrives especially in Georgia, where
tiny separatist regions have broken away to become lawless criminal havens.
This latest uranium seizure, said the American ambassador here, John F. Tefft,
“highlights how smuggling and loose border control, associated with Georgia’s
separatist conflicts,” pose a threat “not just to Georgia but to all the
international community.”
What is most worrisome about the two most recent case, nuclear experts say, is
the material itself: in large enough quantities, it could provide a terrorist
with an instant solution to the biggest challenge in making a nuclear weapon,
obtaining the fuel.
The uranium seized in both 2003 and 2006 had been enriched to nearly 90 percent
U-235, according to Russian and American government analyses obtained by The New
York Times. Though the quantities were too small to make a bomb, that level of
purity is ideal for doing so.
Both cases appear to fit a broader profile: virtually all of the nuclear
materials seized since the Soviet breakup are believed to be Russian in origin,
according to American government reports.
In these two episodes, the individuals arrested testified that they had obtained
the uranium through a web of Russian contacts and middlemen of various
nationalities.
An American government laboratory’s analysis of the 2006 material — which, among
other things, disclosed traces of two rare forms of uranium, U-234 and U-236 —
provides “a strong case” that it indeed came from Russia, said Thomas B.
Cochran, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense
Council, a private group that monitors atomic arsenals.
However, a confidential memorandum from the Russian intelligence service, the
F.S.B., to the Georgian government said a detailed analysis had been unable to
pinpoint the material’s origins, though it did not rule out Russian provenance.
It also estimated that the uranium had been processed more than a decade ago.
Officials in Georgia, locked in a cold war with Moscow, say the cases underscore
their concerns over borders, security and the fate of the breakaway regions.
Georgia’s chief nuclear investigator, Archil Pavlenishvili, said that while
Russia cooperated in the early stages of the 2003 investigation, in 2006 it had
hardly helped at all, beyond taking a sample of the seized material for
analysis. He said the Georgians had informed the Russian Embassy here in Tbilisi
of Mr. Khinsagov’s detention, and had offered to let diplomats speak to him. But
the Russians, he said, never responded.
The Georgian interior minister, Ivane Merabishvili, said the cases illustrated
the grave risk posed by nuclear trafficking, especially in an age of terrorism.
The biggest danger, he said, were the people “in Russia and Georgia and
everywhere else, even in America, who will sell this radioactive material” for
millions of dollars.
The Russian Interior Ministry and the intelligence service did not respond to
requests for comment.
Murat Dzhoyev, the foreign minister of South Ossetia, one of the separatist
regions in Georgia, denied that any nuclear smuggling had taken place in his
region.
“As concerns their claims that contraband, or moreover, the laughable claim that
nuclear materials are going through South Ossetia, that’s just funny,” he said
in an interview. “I hope not a single serious person in the world takes this
seriously.”
On Friday the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna is
expected to make the first official announcement with details about the 2006
case.
The old Soviet empire had a vast network of nuclear facilities. After its
breakup, as managers abandoned plants and security fell apart, the West grew
alarmed as many cases of atomic smuggling came to light.
In 1994 alone, two seizures involved more than five kilos — 11 pounds — of
highly enriched uranium. The I.A.E.A. listed more than a dozen cases of illicit
trade in highly enriched uranium, along with dozens of seizures of highly
radioactive material.
Since 2000, however, the amounts and purity of the seized material has declined
as former Soviet republics set up new security precautions, often financed by
the United States.
For instance, Washington provided thousands of hand-held devices meant to detect
radiation, and planned to spend a total of $570 million to install small and
large radiation detectors, according to recent government reports. In short, the
threat seemed to recede.
“People said, ‘Hey, the situation’s improved,’ ” said William C. Potter, a
leading authority on nuclear smuggling at the Monterey Institute of
International Studies in California. The seizures in Georgia, he said, suggest
something else: that the trade may simply “have gone under the radar.”
The smuggler in the first case, an Armenian named Garik Dadayan, was arrested on
June 26, 2003, at Sadakhlo, a muddy village where Georgia meets Armenia and
Azerbaijan. With Armenia and Azerbaijan at war over territory, the village had
become neutral ground for the trading of tea and cognac, illicit caviar, cheap
light bulbs and smuggled gasoline.
When apprehended, Mr. Dadayan, who described himself simply as a businessman,
was carrying a tea box that held 170 grams, about seven ounces, of highly
enriched uranium. According to the Georgian officials, he said the uranium had
come from Novosibirsk, in Siberia, the site of a major Russian nuclear complex
that processes vast quantities of highly enriched uranium.
Mr. Pavlenishvili, the Georgian investigator, said the Russian intelligence
agency confirmed that before his trip into Georgia, Mr. Dadayan had twice
traveled by railroad from Moscow to Novosibirsk.
The smuggler told the authorities that he intended to sell the material to a
Turkish middleman named Teimur Sadik; its ultimate destination, he said Mr.
Sadik had told him, was “a Muslim man.”
Mr. Dadayan was handed over to the Armenian government, tried and sentenced to
two and a half years in prison. Mr. Sadik, Georgian authorities say, is now in
custody of the Turkish secret services.
Since that episode, the United States has spent millions of dollars to help the
Georgians strengthen nuclear security, especially along the borders.
Two years later, Georgian authorities learned that highly enriched uranium was
again being offered for sale, this time in South Ossetia, a rugged and beautiful
land no bigger than Long Island, with few border controls on either the Russian
or Georgian side. People and contraband move freely through its fields and along
its mountain roads. The United States says it has discovered counterfeit $100
bills traceable to South Ossetia circulating in at least four American cities.
The man trying to sell the uranium, Georgian officials say, was Oleg Khinsagov,
a shabbily dressed 50-year-old trader who specialized in fish and sausages.
Eventually he came into contact with four Georgians who were already under
government surveillance. The four men went to North Ossetia, a neighboring
region within Russia, and arranged to smuggle the uranium into Georgia. It was
at that point that the Georgian authorities set their trap.
They arranged for a Georgian operative who speaks fluent Turkish to meet with
the middlemen and tell them he represented a Muslim man from “a serious
organization.” Mr. Khinsagov and several of his cohort entered Georgia in late
January 2006, and on Feb. 1 they were arrested in a two-room apartment on the
eighth floor of a crumbling Soviet-style building in a lower-class district of
Tbilisi.
“We got that 100 grams and put it into a box and were very afraid,” said Mr.
Merabishvili, the interior minister. Where the smuggler got the uranium and
whether he actually had more remains unclear.
The Georgians called for help from American diplomats, who sent in experts from
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Energy, American
officials say. Mr. Merabishvili said the Americans shocked them by taking the
uranium and simply putting it “in their pocket.” Uranium in that form emits
little radiation and presents little or no danger to its handlers.
When it was analyzed at the Energy Department’s laboratory in the Pacific
Northwest, it was found to have a U-235 purity of 89.451 percent, “suitable for
certain types of research reactors, as a source material for medical isotope
production, and for military purposes including nuclear weapons.”
