The end was breathtaking. For four decades, the world lived under the threat of nuclear holocaust. Then the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union came next. Suddenly, superpower missiles were no longer targeted at cities. The prospect of Armageddon dimmed.
Nuclear nightmares do not die, however; they change. From the chilling cold war doctrine f mutually assured destruction comes a new nuclear paradox. Instead of a hostile Soviet superpower, with nuclear weapons under tight totalitarian control, the world now confronts a new, more benign Russia. Yet the new Russia is, in some ways, more dangerous than the old. It is a place where chaos is a constant, where old safeguards are eroding or already have fallen away, where nuclear know-how and materials are suddenly for sale.
If there is an abiding irony in Russia today, it is this: that the new order impoverishes the old nuclear gatekeepers while offering quick riches to those who can pass them by. It is capitalism, Wild East style. The desperate physicist, the scheming janitor, the corrupt security guard -- these are worrisome enough. But the real nightmare scenario involves Russia's ruthless organized-crime syndicates and corrupt government officials working in league to create new markets for nuclear materials, a bazaar with some of the world's most dangerous weapons on offer, a place where savvy buyers will know to come calling. "Any organized, sophisticated criminal group that has the networks of international distribution, which can get access to these materials and connect them with the right buyer," says FBI Director Louis Freeh, "is a grave and immediate threat."
The danger is here. As a result of Freeh's initiative, the FBI has been working with Russian police in an undercover operation targeting Russian organized-crime groups trying to sell nuclear materials. The challenge is big, the stakes could not be higher -- as this story makes clear.
When it came in, the tip was not altogether surprising. The time was May 1993, the place Vilnius, the sleepy capital of Lithuania. For months, there had been whispered hints that a strange shipment, a consignment of great value, was moving around the picturesque Baltic nation. The hints had been followed by violence. A mob war had swept like brush fire through the streets of Klaipeda, Lithuania's busiest port, its gateway to the world. At the time, Joseph Rimkevicius (pronounced Rim-KEV-i-chuss), the chief of the organized-crime section of the Lithuanian police, couldn't figure it out. After conversations with several informants, however, the burly detective understood things more clearly: A Lithuanian crime group had tried to extort a cut of some big-money smuggling action. But they had erred badly. They had tried to muscle a tougher crime syndicate, one unprepared to roll over and make payoffs. After the shootings and bombings were over in Klaipeda, 10 men were dead. Rimkevicius was wary. Something other than the usual cigarette-and-vodka scam was afoot. The anonymous tip might explain what that something was. The caller suggested that detectives might want to take a look in the basement storage rooms of the capital's largest bank, the Lithuanian Joint-Stock Innovation Bank. A man of action, Rimkevicius was eager to do just that.
Within days, using a bomb threat as a pretext, a team of Rimkevicius's detectives descended on the bank. Backed by heavily armed Lithuanian special-forces troops, the detectives began rooting through the building's hushed vaults. Rimkevicius left no corner unexplored. In the deepest recesses of the bank's basement, the squad hit pay dirt: 27 wooden crates, each stenciled with peculiar Russian markings.
Eagerly, the detectives pried open the crates. Inside, they discovered thousands of oddly shaped parts, machined from an unfamiliar gunmetal-gray substance. Shipping papers said the weird-looking ingots were beryllium, and that there were 4.4 tons of the stuff stashed in the Vilnius bank and one other bank located in Kaunas, another Lithuanian city.
In Vilnius, then abroad, alarm bells rang. Strong and light, beryllium is a valuable commodity. On the open market, sold legally, it goes for more than $ 600 a kilo. It is used in missile-guidance systems, high-performance aircraft and precision optical components. It is nuclear scientists and weapons designers who really prize the stuff. Beryllium is a great neutron reflector. That makes it a critical material for building a more efficient nuclear warhead or a smaller nuclear reactor (box, Page 61).
What the beryllium in the bank vault was to be used for and who put it there were questions for which Rimkevicius had no answers. But one of his investigators, Romas Rinkevicius, soon knew the police were in for a wild ride. Forensic scientists had been called in to examine the beryllium as it sat in the vault. Suddenly their Geiger counters began chattering like crickets. The stuff, it seemed, was radioactive. Not so radioactive that Rinkevicius feared for his safety -- "I'm bald already," he joked -- but radioactive nevertheless.
The beryllium seizure was significant. For the past three years, as evidence of nuclear-related smuggling out of the former Soviet Union has mounted, authorities in Russia and the United States have argued that it is largely an amateurs' game, playedby plant workers and other small fry haphazardly pocketing materials in hopes of making some easy cash. Maj. Gen. Andrei Terekhov, the head of the Russian Interior Ministry directorate responsible for guarding nuclear facilities, reaffirmed that view at a Moscow news conference earlier this month. "It is impossible," General Terekhov said, "to speak of the existence of mafiya groups specializing in the theft of radioactive materials."
The impossible has happened. A five-month investigation by U.S. News and CBS's "60 Minutes" provides irrefutable proof that Russian organized crime was behind the mysterious shipment of beryllium seized by police in Lithuania. It is the first hard evidence that Russian crime syndicates have attempted to smuggle nuclear-related materials from the former Soviet Union. The trail of the smuggled beryllium wound from Moscow to Yekaterinburg in Russia's Sverdlovsk region, through Vilnius and ultimately to Switzerland, where a mystery buyer was prepared to pay $ 24 million for the shipment -- about 10 times the legitimate market rate. Relying on interviews in six countries and shipping documents and business contracts in Russia and Lithuania, the investigation found that:
The export of the beryllium was handled by a trading firm that police officials have linked to a powerful Russian mafiya. Payment for the deal was guaranteed by a Moscow-based karate club through its director general, a Sverdlovsk native who has never been convicted of a crime but whom Russian police interviewed in connection with the beryllium shipment and consider to be a racketeer. In 1994, after the beryllium shipment, the man was promoted to deputy governor of the Sverdlovsk region and appointed its chief representative to the Russian Federation.
The beryllium shipment originated at a restricted nuclear research facility, the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering in the city of Obninsk, located some 60 miles from Moscow. The purchase order for the beryllium, which came from another nuclear research institute in the Sverdlovsk region, was bogus. In addition to beryllium, the Obninsk facility was home to hundreds of kilograms of poorly guarded plutonium and highly enriched uranium -- the essential fuel for nuclear weapons.
The beryllium was mixed with small amounts of highly enriched uranium. Nine kilograms of radioactive cesium -- a substance lethal in even small amounts --were also released by Obninsk to the Russian trading syndicate handling the beryllium transaction. The cesium has since disappeared.
Just before the beryllium was seized in Vilnius, the Russian trading syndicate located an Austrian firm prepared to buy the shipment for $ 2.7 million. That firm in turn had lined up a buyer in Zurich, who was willing to pay an inflated price of $ 24 million for the beryllium. An Interpol investigation could not learn the identity of the prospective buyer. But the managing director of the Austrian firm indicated to U.S. News and "60 Minutes" that the Zurich buyer represented Korean interests. At the time, North Korea had a thriving covert program to develop both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Contrary to public statements of concern about the problem of proliferation, the government of Boris Yeltsin rejected entreaties from Lithuania's government to take control of the beryllium after it had been seized and frustrated efforts by Washington to find out more about the case. Instead, Moscow argued that the shipment was legal and should be returned to the Sverdlovsk trading firm involved in the transaction. Because Moscow declined to assume responsibility for the beryllium, more than two years after its seizure, the ingots remain in limbo, stuck in the same Vilnius bank vault where they were discovered.
The Lithuanian Institute of Physics is housed in a dilapidated building in the gentle hills outside Vilnius. Like research labs throughout the former Soviet Union, it is staffed by well- trained scientists who now have little work and almost no money. When a truck began delivering crates ofberyllium to the institute in the late spring of 1993, Deputy Director Vidmantas Remeikas and Senior Scientist Regimantas Kalinauskas wasted little time plucking the radioactive pieces from the assorted boxes. The total amount of radioactive beryllium came to approximately 141 kilograms. Some of the beryllium pieces were so radioactive that the two scientists first thought they had a really hot load on their hands. "What if all the boxes have such a sample," they remember saying to each other. Subsequent analysis, however, brought the estimate of uranium contamination down to between 100 and 200 grams.
"Thingamabobs." The origin of the beryllium eventually became clear. While nosing through the institute's labs one day, a visiting Russian physicist, Yevgeny Makarov, came across some of the beryllium pieces. He recognized them immediately: They were parts from an experimental reactor he had built while working at Obninsk in 1955. To Makarov, now a professor of physcs in Moscow, the fact that some of the beryllium was radioactive was not surprising. As reactor fuel rods were pushed and pulled through holes in the beryllium, he recalls, they would break off or leave deposits of radioactive uranium-235. What was a surprise was coming across the beryllium almost 40 years later in a Lithuanian research lab. "How," Makarov wondered, "did my thingamabobs get here?"
The answer lies in Russia's Sverdlovsk region. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Sverdlovsk has been at the forefront of the many Russian regions struggling to loosen Moscow's grip on their affairs. With its enormous wealth of mineral resources, extensive military-industrial complex and old- boy connections to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, the region has become a hotbed of corrupt capitalism (Page 65). "It is," says Louise Shelley, an expert on Russian organized crime at American University in Washington, D.C., "the gangster capital of Russia."
One of the most popular ways to make money in Sverdlovsk is in commodities. The scheme is simple. Pay for your goods in rubles, then ship them out of the country -- legally or illegally -- and sell them for dollars. Thanks to the artificially low ruble prices in Russia, profits can be huge. In the chaotic days following the Soviet Union's collapse, Igor Vladimirovich Rudenko was well placed to take advantage of such opportunities. Deputy commercial director of the Sverdlovsk trading firm ALT Ltd., Rudenko was also chief of the Materials and Technical Supply Department of the local nuclear research institute operated by Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, known as Minatom. As chief of that department, Rudenko had access to lists detailing all surplus materials available at nuclear facilities throughout the Minatom system.
There is no evidence Rudenko is involved in organized crime, but in early 1992 he and his ALT colleagues decided that they could make some serious money by purchasing surplus beryllium. Rudenko knew from his lists that Minatom's Institute of Physics and Power Engineering in Obninsk had a surplus of 4,000 kilograms of the metal. Before Rudenko could proceed, however, there were a few hitches. First, they needed financial assistance. The beryllium would cost upward of 30 million rubles; ALT had nowhere near that much cash on hand. Money wasn't the only problem, though. As ALT Director Alexander Palvinsky explained to police, the company needed not just any old money but Moscow money. In early 1992, he claimed, movement of money to the Russian capital from outlying regions was being blocked; cash from Moscow would open doors.
Enter Yuri Ivanovich Alexeyev. A prototype of the new Russian capitalist, Alexeyev operates in the gray zone that exists in Russia between the underworld and the official world. Alexeyev states categorically that, as far as his role in the beryllium deal was concerned, "no one has broken the law." He denies any knowledge of where the beryllium ended up and insists that, "within the country, we are allowed to trade any materials that are not on a special control list." He was interrogated by police but not prosecuted.
Alexeyev's is an intriguing tale. He grew up in the Sverdlovsk region and, until last month, was its deputy governor and chief representative to the Russian Federation. According to a Sverdlovsk acquaintance, who spoke nervously about him, Alexeyev got his start in Sverdlovsk running a series of video parlors in the late 1980s. Alexeyev, according to this person, employed karate students he had trained to guard his parlors. Russian police sources say Alexeyev also began a career of "basic racketeering" at the time. According to a Russian police colonel, one of Alexeyev's groups did a lot of business with a man named Oleg Korataev, a professional boxer who was murdered in Brooklyn, N.Y., last year. U.S. law enforcement authorities described the hit as an assassination orchestrated by a Russian mafiya; there is no evidence Alexeyev had any involvement.
In Russia, there are two levels of racketeering. The first is inhabited by street thugs -- known as "tattoos," for their extensive prison body art. The tattoos are basically low-level muscle who extort payoffs for protection. Alexeyev was above that, according to Russian police sources, operating at a far more profitable level known as "the roof." This level is peopled by traditional crime bosses, along with some of Russia's new entrepreneurs and the bureaucrats of the old regime possessed of connections, strong stomachs and a driving ambition to make the most of new opportunities to get rich quick. Businesses that deal with these groups are brought under the roof. If they cannot afford to develop their own security forces, protection is provided. More important, they may get connections and access to lucrative contracts -- all for a hefty cut, of course, typically about 30 percent and sometimes up to 70 percent of profits.
Links to power. With his many connections, Alexeyev soon emerged as one of the more powerful entrepreneurs in Sverdlovsk. "He is organized crime," says a former police officer there. "But you cannot make money in Russia without breaking the law. So I would not call him simply a criminal. He is a businessman who is forced to break the law and who earns money from his connections to power." Others are more cautious, but not solely because Alexeyev has stayed out of jail. "Of course, I cannot call him a criminal," says a senior Russian police official assigned to organized-crime investigations. "The response would hit me between the eyes."
In the early 1990s, Alexeyev made the move to Moscow and established a number of sports clubs and commodity trading firms. In the new Russia, many sports clubs are considered by police and organized-crime experts to be training venues for security thugs and racketeers. Even Russian mafiosi have started to joke openly about the new phenomenon of "organized sport"; in Russian, the phrase rhymes with "organized crime." "The Soviet Union had a huge number of athletes and athletic organizations," says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences. "Society does not need these people after they leave sports. But mafiya organizations do need them."
Alexeyev's flagship sports organization, the Karate-Do Federation of the European-Asian Region, was certainly a full- service outfit. In addition to promoting karate, Article 2 of Karate-Do's registration document lists among its main goals the rather opaque objective of "satisfying the needs of citizens in trade and services." Article 3 is more explicit. It lists the "main activities of the society" as producing and selling consumer goods, construction, tourism, public catering, running video game halls and casinos and consulting on legal issues and questions of foreign economic activity ... "and other activities permitted by law."
Alexeyev also was the man to see in Moscow regarding exports from Sverdlovsk. By early 1992, he had added a semiofficial capacity to his array of private ventures in the capital -- lobbying the Russian federal government for export licenses and quotas for the Sverdlovsk region. That put Alexeyev at the center of the export action. "Practically everything is decided in Moscow. The quotas, the licenses, they are all handed out in Moscow," explains the Russian police official. "Behind all these licenses are connections between the government and criminal structures. That's natural, of course."
In 1992, when Rudenko of ALT Ltd. arrived in Moscow to meet with his colleague from Sverdlovsk and propose a transaction involving 4.4 tons of beryllium, Alexeyev was happy to talk. Rudenko told police that in a meeting held at Alexeyev's Moscow residence, in the President Hotel, the rising young star of Sverdlovsk promised to front money for the beryllium, drawing on Karate-Do's Moscow bank.
Writing a letter. Having lined up the financing, Rudenko decided that an order for surplus beryllium on his institute's letterhead was needed to turn the trick with his colleagues at Obninsk. Laying his hands on letterhead was not a problem. The institute he worked for in Sverdlovsk was actually just a branch of Minatom's Research and Design Institute of Energy Technologies, located in Moscow. A year or so earlier, a printing house had mistakenly omitted the designation "Sverdlovsk Branch" on an order of institute stationery. Instead of throwing the whole batch out, it was used as scrap paper throughout the institute.
Rudenko grabbed a few sheets, then ran up a formal requisition. It was dated April 7, 1992. The order asked for 4,000 kilograms of surplus beryllium. For good measure, Rudenko threw in an additional request, for 9 kilograms of cesium. Estimates are difficult to come by, but German police believe cesium commands a price of $ 100,000 or more per kilogram on the black market. Rudenko addressed the order to the chief engineer of the Obninsk facility, then signed it in the name of his institute's deputy director, Vladimir Ilyin, who happened to be out sick. Ilyin later told police he had no knowledge of the transaction.
The financing was interesting. According to the purchase order, a copy of which was obtained by U.S. News, "payment for and receipt of the metals shall be performed by the General Directorate of the Union of Karate-Do Organizations." At the bottom of the order, underneath the initials Rudenko placed in his deputy director's name, were the signature and seal of Yuri Alexeyev. Alexeyev admitted to police in 1993 that he signed the order, but he said he had no idea why it mentioned beryllium and knew nothing about what had become of the shipment. Less than a month after the shipment, ALT Ltd. changed its name to AMI. Alexeyev told police he was not familiar with the company. "The name AMI does not ring a bell," Alexeyev said, "and I cannot say whether any contractual obligations existed with the company." In his interview with U.S. News and "60 Minutes," Alexeyev told a slightly different story. He admitted knowing AMI but said he only "guaranteed" payment for the beryllium and cesium as a simple gesture of gratitude to AMI, because it had sponsored a big championship for his Karate-Do federation. "We have created the federation," Alexeyev explained, "to prevent people from turning to the criminal world."
Powerfully built, just 36 years old, Alexeyev appears uncowed by his brush with police. Before Russian investigators got around to asking him queston arate-Do was liquidated, and all records rat the beryllium deal were destroyed. Now Alexeyev has taken to handing out a glossy brochure of all the high-tech weapons the Sverdlovsk region is trying to sell. "We don't have an air conditioner in it," he says regretfully of the best tank on offer, quickly stressing its modern fire-control system.
That nuclear-related materials are being offered for sale in the former Soviet Union should not be a surprise; the surprise is that it has taken organized crime so long to get into the act. Although Vladimir Ilyin, Rudenko's boss at the Sverdlovsk institute, denied to police any knowledge of the Obninsk beryllium deal he admitted that his institute had also sold some beryllium in 1992, in order to meet the payroll. Like the Obnisnk sale, the material went to a private trading company, called EVA Ltd. Unlike the Obninsk sale, that beryllium disappeared. Obninsk was in no better position to refuse an offer for beryllium when it arrived in April 1992. "The finances," Obninsk chief accountant G.I. Kozlov told Russian investigators, "were very bad at the time."
A decision to sell the beryllium was made easier by Russia's confusing regulations. Was beryllium a restricted material or not? Even Viktor Mikhailov, the director of Minatom, reflects a lack of knowledge on the subject. "Beryllium is used widely in many industries except for the military," Mikhailov incorrectly told U.S. News and "60 Minutes." He added, also incorrectly, that beryllium is not on the list of dual-use items that Russia agreed to start restricting in 1993 as a member of the international Nuclear Suppliers Group. "It came from a nuclear facility, from a nuclear end use .... It should have been the national government's responsibility, whatever they say," says a State Department expert on proliferation issues who was involved with the case.
Under the "roof." Bureaucratic bungling is one thing; bogus purchase orders are another. Alexeyev says that he and his sports club, Karate-Do, were never directly involved in the beryllium transaction and that a beryllium shipment, institute to institute, was OK. Rudenko's Institute of Energy Technologies in Sverdlovsk never took possession of the beryllium that ended up in Lithuania, however. Contrary to Alexeyev's denials, invoices clearly indicate that the recipient of the beryllium was none other than Karate-Do. "Let's put it this way," says the senior police official, regarding Karate-Do. "It has some criminal inclinations. But I simply can't say anything more." Ultimately, the beryllium was shipped east to Sverdlovsk, where AMI, the successor company to Rudenko's ALT, took control.
Getting the beryllium out of Obninsk was one thing; getting it out of the country and making a profit on it was another. For that operation, AMI turned to yet another trading firm -- the Urals Association for Business Development (UADS is its Russian acronym). It, too, was deeply connected with the Sverdlovsk region's organized-crime syndicates, Russian police say.
UADS was a natural choice for the export and sale of beryllium. Before the Soviet Union collapsed, the UADS director, Mikhail Dolmatov, worked in the metallurgical institute of the Urals branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He knew metals and where they might be sold abroad. Like Alexeyev, Dolmatov had pull in the new Sverdlovsk political universe, in part through his connections to Valery Trushnikov. At the time of the beryllium transaction, Trushnikov was "head of government," which made him the No. 2 politician in the region.
Perhaps inevitably, given Dolmatov's connections and interest in the metals trade, UADS operated under an organized crime "roof," police officials say. According to the senior Russian investigator responsible for organized crime, in the early days of the new Russia, trading copper and precious metals was a profitable way for crime groups to invest their illegal profits. UADS, says this official after checking his computer database, had the backing of one of the Sverdlovsk region's most violent and powerful crime groups, known as the "Central Group," for its location in the heart of the city of Yekaterinburg.
Dolmatov and UADS quickly made a name for themselves in the metals export business. In April 1992, as the beryllium deal was coming to fruition, KGB officers seized 12 tons of zirconium, another precious metal with nuclear applications, at a Sverdlovsk airport and accused UADS of smuggling. The zirconium was bound for Lithuania and a trading firm called VEKA. Despite that hitch, Dolmatov turned to VEKA again in June 1992 -- this time with a contract to sell the 4.4 tons of beryllium from Obninsk for $ 2.7 million.
The deal was sweet. According to an agreement UADS reached with the government of Sverdlovsk, 20 percent of the profits would be used to purchase wool from Austria for a wool production complex in Sverdlovsk; the remaining 80 percent allegedly would be used to purchase consumer goods to be re- imported and sold in the region. The Sverdlovsk regional government, which was making a lot of money from export deals like this one, promptly issued an export license for the beryllium.
The UADS export application came up short, at least in two respects. "It was always necessary," says Rustam Safaraliev, executive secretary of the Commission on Export Control in Moscow, "to declare why and for what purpose the material would be used." The UADS application made no mention of what the 4.4 tons of beryllium would be used for outside Russia. There was a bigger problem. The beryllium from Obninsk was contaminated with highly enriched uranium. Under Russian law, it was and is illegal to export such contaminated materials without permission. No such permission had been sought or granted.
If VEKA, the Lithuanian firm, had had a buyer lined up and ready to go, the beryllium might never have been seized. VEKA had purchased the beryllium on spec, however, hoping to find an end user or another middleman willing to pay a good markup. After importing the shipment into Lithuania, VEKA advertised the beryllium to businesses and would-be buyers across Europe. Months later, AMI -- the Russian firm for whom Yuri Alexeyev had "guaranteed" the financing of the beryllium purchase -- grew frustrated with VEKA. After some dispute with the Lithuanian firm, AMI secured the return of the beryllium. AMI had lined up a buyer of its own.
Going for broke. That buyer was H-Kontor, headquartered in Klagenfurt, Austria. According to contract documents, H-Kontor was willing to pay $ 2.7 million for the beryllium. It was a lot of money. But if the deal went through, the company stood to make even more in profit. According to Interpol officials, H- Kontor and a partner firm called ATRACO-- thought by police to be based in the northern Italian city of Brescia -- had identified a buyer in Zurich who was willing to pay $ 24 million for the beryllium.
After months of frustration, AMI was about to hit the jackpot. AMI officials quickly arranged a charter to fly the beryllium from Vilnius to Switzerland. Before delivery and payment, however, the mystery buyer wanted a sample of the beryllium to verify its purity. The delay was deadly. Just before the sample could be sent, the beryllium was seized by police. The Zurich buyer vanished.
Subsequent investigation by Interpol failed to identify who the buyer was or what he or she intended to use the beryllium for. ATRACO, the Italian partner, appeared to be a front company; police in Italy could not locate it. They questioned executives from a similar-sounding operation in Brescia but got nowhere. By the time the Lithuanian police asked their Italian counterparts to go back for more interviews, the company had disappeared.
Who was the beryllium intended for? Janus Kozmus, the managing director of H-Kontor, was questioned twice by police and said nothing about the buyer. Questioned by U.S. News and "60 Minutes," Kozmus said the end user was to be a Korean company. Whatever the truth, investigators are resigned to living with their suspicions. "I think [the beryllium] would have gone to a third country for special purposes," says the chief of Interpol in Lithuania, Aurilijus Racevicius. "[But] the end user of this metal was never established, and I don't think we will ever establish it."
Washington weighs in. The Clinton administration learned of the beryllium seizure through its embassy in Vilnius in May 1993, and immediately tried to put a stop to its travels. In a letter dated Aug. 17, 1993, to Lithuanian Prime Minister Adolfas Slezevicius, U.S. Ambassador Darryl Johnson laid out the administration's concerns. "Some pieces [of the beryllium] contain HEU (highly enriched uranium), which has been enriched to a level sufficient for use in nuclear weapons. ... In any event, the uncontrolled shipment of beryllium remains of proliferation concern due to its presence on the list of nuclear-related dual-use materials." Washington's preferred solution was for the Lithuanian government simply to confiscate the entire shipment.
That was easier said than done. Lithuania had no laws controlling beryllium. And from the moment the shipment was seized, Moscow and AMI began pressuring Vilnius to release all the beryllium that was uncontaminated. rushnikov, the head of government in Sverdlovsk, weighed in, alluding to profits to be made. "We would like to ask for your assistance," Trushnikov wrote the Lithuanian government, "to return the beryllium in order to sell it to a foreign partner."
That was exactly the outcome Washington wanted to prevent. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow had approached the Russian government to find out more about the shipment. It got nowhere. When Lithuanian Prime Minister Slezevicius started to waver, Ambassador Johnson pulled out all the stops. "If this stuff ends up in Iraq or Libya," he told Slezevicius, "you are going to look awful, and Lithuania is going to have a lot to answer for." Desperate for a solution, in March 1994, Prime Minister Slezevicius wrote Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin asking that Moscow take control of the beryllium. He got no reply. Despite the requests of both Vilnius and Washington --and the obligation to control beryllium that it assumed under 1992 amendments to the international Nuclear Suppliers Group Guidelines that went into effect in 1993, before the beryllium was seized -- Moscow stood firm and continued to insist that the shipment be returned to its Sverdlovsk owners.
Ultimately, Washington prevailed. In May 1994, the Lithuanian government returned the uncontaminated beryllium to the bank and made sure it was not allowed to leave the country. It remains in the bank today, and probably will for some time to come.
Controlling additional leakage from Russia's nuclear facilities will be more difficult. Since 1993, Moscow has taken steps to tighten its control on dual-use and fissile materials. Major security upgrades have taken place at Obninsk and two other installations, with U.S. assistance. Work continues elsewhere. But almost 100 priority sites remain vulnerable to theft. Most problematic is the fact that thousands of workers throughout Russia's nuclear facilities continue to live hand to mouth, despite aid from abroad. Russia's nuclear infrastructure continues to be characterized by a degree of confusion and disorganization. And Russia's aggressive criminal mafiyas continue to look for profit-making opportunities wherever they can be found. "The conditions that made possible this [beryllium] export, if anything, are more acute now," says William Potter, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif.
Alexeyev and the Sverdlovsk regional government, in fact, are frustrated by Washington's reluctance to allow them to profit legally on the international market. "We want to trade nuclear materials," Yuri Alexeyev says. "Our nuclear materials are 1.5 times less expensive than yours. We are able to cover the world's demand for nuclear fuel twice."
It is this mentality -- capitalism with a vengeance -- that in the end may defeat efforts to secure Russia's nuclear assets. "This is the time of making fortunes, gang wars," Alexeyev says of Russia today. "You have had the same in your time." There is a difference, however. In the United States, the illicit commodity was liquor. In the new Russia, among other things, it happens to be the stuff of nuclear nightmares.
In May 1995, U.S. News reporter Tim Zimmermann began hearing stories about a mysterious shipment of nuclear-related material that had been seized by Lithuanian police. At approximately the same time, producers for CBS News were following some of the same leads. Independently, each news organization went after the story. By summer, U.S. News and CBS's "60 Minutes" had decided to work together on it. Reporter Zimmermann and U.S. News Moscow Bureau Chief Alan Cooperman linked up with a "60 Minutes" team led by correspondent Steve Kroft. The team was composed of producers Michael Gavshon and Gary Scurka with associate producers Claudia Weinstein, Carolyn McEwen and Kathy Wolff. Additionally, Channel One, the educational TV programmer, provided important contributions to the reporting. The joint effort involved interviews and research in six countries over five months.
[Map is not available.]
Path of beryllium shipment
"Beryllium has no realistic substitutes in its strategic nuclear applications," says a U.S. Department of Commerce analysis. It is one of 16 nuclear-related materials that are supposed to be tightly controlled by the 31-member Nuclear Suppliers Group, which includes both the United States and Russia.
A highly efficient neutron reflector, beryllium is used in modern bomb designs to significantly increase the weapon's explosive power and reduce the amount of fissile material the bomb designer needs.
In the late 1980s, the CIA concluded that India was trying to develop a sophisticated hydrogen bomb. One of the key tipoffs: India was buying beryllium.
In this U.S. hydrogen bomb design, the explosive power of a fission trigger is boosted to several kilotons by the use of a beryllium reflector and deuterium-tritium gas. This "primary" in turn triggers a "secondary" fusion device. The total explosive power is 300 kilotons -- equal to 300,000 tons of TNT.
USN&WR -- Basic data: Natural Resources Defense Council
GRAPHIC: Drawing, No caption (Illustration by Scott Swales for USN&WR); Picture, Suspicions. Joseph Rimkevicius, Lithuania's chief investigator of organized crime (Tim Zimmermann -- USN&WR); Pictures: Operator. Yuri Alexeyev mixes politics and business easily. He financed the beryllium deal as "a favor." (Alan Cooperman -- USN&WR); Map, A smuggler's trail; Drawing, A smuggler's trail (Rod Little -- USN&WR); Picture, Computer mod rlum atom (Photo by Ken Eward -- Science Source); Drawing, Bombs and beryllium (Robert Kemp, Richard Gage -- USN&WR); Chart, Bombs and beryllium (Natural Resources Defense Council); Pictures: Seizure. Lithuanian special forces, with beryllium, in the bank vault (Police Photos); Picture, Hot box. The contaminated beryllium, in a locked vault in Vilnius (Heidi Bradner for USN&WR)