Georgia and Post-Soviet Separatism

As much as I hate the NY times, I post this because it perfectly illustrates who to simply take into account one side of a story. Not that I doubt that much of the facts are true, but the continued demonization of the Russian Federation is pretty interesting. It's like Russia is the rogue that makes the US and the West feel less like rogues.

In any case, if it's nuclear, it's gotta be Russian, and if it's from Russia, we need to demonize it.

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January 25, 2007
Smuggler’s Plot Highlights Fear Over Uranium
By LAWRENCE SCOTT SHEETS and WILLIAM J. BROAD

TBILISI, Georgia, Jan. 24 — 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, and the deal a test: If all went smoothly, he had boasted, he would sell a far larger cache stored in his apartment back in Vladikavkaz, two two 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, confiscated his merchandise and eventually turned it over to American officials for analysis. After a secret trial, the smuggler was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.

The case of Mr. Khinsagov has alarmed Georgian and American officials because they had thought that an array of 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 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 America 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 the Russian government had 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 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 begun to decline 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 contract 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 cohorts entered Georgia in late January 2006, and on Feb. 1 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.”

Lawrence Scott Sheets reported from Tbilisi, and William J. Broad from New York.