Source: http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/11/12/18850/fuel-nuclear-bomb-hands-unknown-black-marketeer-russia-us-officials-say
Three identical incidents
Western concerns are based on a simple trail of evidence that officials have until now kept secret: Three times since 1999, identically packaged containers of highly-enriched uranium have been seized by authorities outside of Russia — in Ruse, Bulgaria, in May 1999; in Paris in July 2001; and most recently here in Chisinau. In each case those holding the uranium said it was part of a larger cache, available to a buyer for the right price. That claim, while unproven, is considered credible by experts who have studied the three incidents.
Confidential forensic analysis by U.S. and French nuclear scientists — worthy of a “CSI” episode — has shown that these materials came from the same stockpile. Officials say they believe all were produced in the early 1990s at a sprawling Russian nuclear facility known as the Mayak Production Association, located in Ozersk, in the Ural mountains, roughly 900 miles (1,400 km) east of Moscow. The facility, which produced the fuel for Russia’s first nuclear warheads and for its naval nuclear reactors, is still one of the country’s “closed cities,” where access is tightly regulated.
The similarities between these three seizures make them the most worrisome unresolved instances of illicit trafficking in authentic, bomb-grade materials anywhere in the world, according to more than a dozen government officials and independent experts interviewed for this article, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic.
While seven of those involved in the smuggling have so far been prosecuted in Bulgaria, France and Moldova, officials say they are just low-level members of a shadowy international ring with Moldovan and Russian connections, all working for a person or persons whose identity remains cloaked.
Intelligence professionals — who say they put the issue of nuclear smuggling near the top of all their priorities — explain that this is a hard target to hit. Their principal ambition is to catch the thief and the buyer, but so far they have seen only middlemen.
But evidence collected from the probes of these three incidents indicates that a weapons-grade cache of nuclear material has been “in the wild since the mid-1990s,” a knowledgable U.S. intelligence official said. It’s widely thought to be no longer in Russia, and to possibly have passed through multiple hands, the official added, explaining that the 2011 Moldovan case is what helped solidify this assessment.
The basis for international worry, several officials explained, is the potential for all or part of this nuclear-materials cache to wind up in the hands of a terrorist buyer who could transform it into a viable weapon, using technical information about nuclear bomb designs that has leaked long ago into the public domain.
The FBI has privately discounted Moldovan claims that radioactive materials seized in more recent smuggling incidents here were being sought by the Islamic State terrorist group. Still, American worries about the 2011 Chisinau case were heightened by the presence in the Moldovan capital at the time of the deal of a potential buyer from Sudan, where Al Qaeda tried to obtain some uranium in the early 1990s and remains active, officials here and in Washington said.
With so many nuclear explosives held by governments around the world, US officials have long worried about the possibility of a terrorist-engineered nuclear or radiological blast within the United States. Multiple federal agencies have held almost 1,400 drills in cities around the country over the last decade to train local police and emergency personnel in how to behave after such a nightmare unfolds, according to a spokeswoman for the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Asked at a March 2014 nuclear security summit in the Netherlands whether he thought Russia’s assertive foreign policy was the number one threat to the United States, President Obama replied that “I continue to be much more concerned, when it comes to our security, with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”
According to a 2004 Department of Homeland Security guidebook to disaster response, even a relatively small nuclear detonation — comparable to 10,000 tons of TNT, or about half the force of the blast that levelled Nagasaki — would kill hundreds of thousands of people, contaminate 3,000 square miles (7,800 sq km), and cause billions of dollars in damages, while leaving an urban area a mile (1.6 km) in diameter a smoking wasteland.
The nuclear smuggling capital
Besides making the arrests in 2011, Moldovan police detained three people who they said were trying to smuggle depleted uranium in Aug. 2010, and last year the FBI helped investigate a group that tried to smuggle low-enriched uranium – neither of which can be used in a nuclear bomb. This year, further arrests were made in a case involving cesium, a radioactive, but not explosive, material.
Experts say Moldova’s repeated role in nuclear smuggling is unsurprising, since cross-border crime is much more prevalent in poorly governed or fractured states.
Roughly the size of Maryland with about two-thirds the population, it is one of the poorest former Soviet republics. Filled with rolling fields and tiny villages, the country is squeezed between Romania and Ukraine and brushed by the Danube River. The capital of Chisinau, a brash and dusty place, shows signs of fast economic growth that has benefited only a sliver of its citizens. BMWs and Lexus sedans share the streets with hordes of tiny taxis and Soviet-era streetcars, and pensioners line the sidewalks peddling soaps, samovars and women’s underwear.
Since 1992, its territory has been split into two ethnically separate regions, dominated one by Romanian and the other by Russian and Ukrainian speakers. Russian troops have been stationed for decades in the second of these regions, known as Transnistria, a sliver of land on the eastern bank of the Dniester River, over the opposition of the central government.
Like other fragments of the former Soviet empire occupied by Russian troops, Transnistria is a haven for smugglers, particularly of cigarettes, arms, and prostitutes. It has its own flag, displaying a hammer and sickle, but isn’t recognized as a country by any member of the United Nations, including Russia.
The Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol, is where Galina Agheenco — who picked up the blue bag containing the uranium from the former policeman and passed it to a friend — lived with her husband Alexander, 58, a mustachioed Russian former military colonel, according to officials here. An English-language slide presentation about the incident prepared by the Moldovan Ministry of Internal Affairs calls Alexander the “leader of the criminal group” involved in the nuclear smuggling incident.
His ambition, a Moldovan Supreme Court ruling in May 2014 said, was to sell a total of one kilogram of highly-enriched uranium for roughly $36 million, in a deal plotted on Skype, on mobile phones, and in emails — many of which turned out to be monitored by the government. The actual material offered prior to the police raid was one-hundredth of that amount.
But Col. Gheorghe Cavcaliuc, a soft-spoken, young Moldovan police official who heads the special operations division, said in an interview here that efforts by the police to learn more about Alexander’s activities and connections have been stymied. An arrest warrant for him is still unfulfilled, five years later, and officials here say they heard he fled from Transnistria to Russia. Attempts by the Center for Public Integrity to obtain his response to the allegations against him were unsuccessful.
“We sent several requests to the Russian Federation for information about him, but we didn’t get any answers,” Cavcaliuc said.
Washington hasn’t fared any better. The U.S. Embassy here “does not maintain liaison relationships or active, ongoing contacts with Transnistrian law enforcement and/or security service personnel,” a December 2009 State Department cable released by Wikileaks said.
Galina Agheenco, whose Lexus GS330 car had Transnistrian plates, was detained on the day of the incident and served three years in prison. But the former policeman who brought her the uranium, and was charged in the case, returned to Transnistria when he was released by a court pending trial, defying a judge’s order, according to the Moldovan police report. Chetrus, meanwhile, was freed from prison last December and is appealing his sentence.
The two other cases involving identical samples of nuclear explosives — in France and Bulgaria — also had Moldovan connections, according to investigators here.
Nuclear explosive materials in a van and a trunk
The 2001 Paris case arose from a tip given to the police there that a 36-year old Frenchman with a criminal record, Serge Salfati, was trying to find a buyer for 30 kilograms ( 66 pounds) of highly-enriched uranium – more than enough for a skilled bomb-maker to produce a nuclear explosion. He was using genuine samples weighing a total of 5 grams as a lure.
A special police squad checked for radiation in Salfati’s apartment and garage, but found nothing. Their detectors then got a hit from a van he used, and so they arrested him and seized a lead container containing the samples.
The plane carrying the uranium to Paris flew to Charles de Gaulle airport from Chisinau, said Ionel Balan, Deputy Director of Moldova’s National Agency for Regulation of Nuclear and Radiological Activities, in an interview here.
The Bulgarian case ,two years earlier, arose when a man driving over a bridge at a Danube River crossing to Romania aroused the suspicions of a border guard, who searched his vehicle. The guard found a receipt, written in Cyrillic, for the purchase of “uranium 235,” and then, after pulling apart an air compressor in the trunk, found a lead container inside with that label on it. The man, Urskan Hanifi, told police he bought the material in Moldova and was headed back there after failing to find a buyer for it in Turkey, according to media accounts and a U.S. government report.
Cavcaliuc said he is convinced that a single group stands behind each of the three smuggling cases, and that a larger cache of material could be hidden in Transnistria. “In all three cases, there was the same container, the same chemical components [of the uranium] and traffickers from the same country, Moldova,” he said.
A unmarked plane carrying FBI agents
But no one knew any of this immediately. When the lead canister seized in 2011 was initially brought to the Moldovan government’s rudimentary police laboratory, Balan, a biochemist, expected it to be a hoax and so he handled it without gloves or a smock. He found the inside wall had been coated with about an inch of paraffin wax, and inside it was a small glass ampoule shaped like a tiny harpoon, containing a blackish powder.
He used a snub-nosed radiation detector to take two readings, and then he consulted a dog-eared copy of a nuclear materials guide published by Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States and used worldwide as a reference manual: “And immediately, I understood this was not simple or natural uranium, it was enriched uranium.”
His readings also indicated some of it had decayed, “a clear indication that this sample was old and not fresh.”
Word of this result quickly reached Washington and, shortly afterward, an umarked private jet landed at the Chisinau airport, secretly carrying FBI agents. They scooped up the canister and its contents and flew them back to the United States.
The samples were taken to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where US nuclear weapons have been designed since the 1950s and a group known as the Forensic Science Division specializes in analyzing foreign materials, using a classified library of radioactive particles collected by US officials and intelligence sources all over the globe.
According to Moldovan authorities, a preliminary report by the division, entitled “Results for Moldovan HEU Sample,” concluded that the uranium was produced in Russia and eerily similar to the materials seized a decade earlier in France and Bulgaria.