Experts said smugglers have been using Bulgaria as a depot
for radioactive materials from the former Soviet Union. They
said the " nuclear mafia" was also engaged in smuggling
explosives."
[source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur September 1, 1995 ]
Separately, Russian Interior Minister Viktor Yerin, in a speech to the United
Nations Conference on organized crime, said a ''Cold War'' style scare over
mafia crime in the former Soviet Union was being whipped up to isolate Russia
and harm its economy.
[source: Reuters November 21, 1994 ]
"''We do not share the exaggerated estimates of the danger
posed by organised crime from the territory of the former
Soviet Union including Russia contained in some mass media,
both foreign and Russian,'' Yerin said.
''Such statements often (recall) the language of Cold War
times -- 'The Russians are coming','' he told delegates to the
138-nation conference in Naples."
[Reuters, as above]
... Consider a transaction that took place last summer at the Bremen train station. At first, the Bremen prosecutors announced they had caught a German frontman for the Russian mafia delivering a sample of weapons-grade plutonium to a buyer representing a Third World country.
Later, however, officials admitted the "Third World" buyer was actually a Hamburg journalist working in co-operation with the Bremen police; the Mafia seller was a former federal narcotics agent; and the sample was the nuclear smuggler's equivalent of baby laxative -- 0.05 micrograms of Plutonium -239 contained in an East German smoke detector, of which there are hundreds in circulation....
In the higher-profile Munich case, known as Operation Hades, parliament has appointed a panel to investigate charges that overzealous BND informants lured a Colombian and two Spanish Basques into smuggling plutonium.
The panel has not yet completed its inquiry and, in the meantime, the German press has been feverishly speculating about motivations for the operation. Was it spurred by German fear and loathing of Moscow?
After all, the BND had been built by the CIA from the ruins of the Gestapo's counterintelligence explicitly to target Cold War Russia, and many of its operatives remain instinctively hostile to Russia. Was it an elaborate scheme hatched by the government for securing Yeltsin's co-operation on nuclear security or even for buffing up Helmut Kohl's image during a campaign?...
... After the magazine Der Spiegel ran a report claiming the whole smuggling case had been the work of BND agents provocateurs, Schmidbauer [Bernd Schmidbauer, one of Kohl's two ministers without portfolio] vowed: "I'll put my job on the line to swear that no agents of the federal government played any role in encouraging this material be brought into Germany."
"Rubbish," says Peter Struck, formerly the leading Social Democrat on the intelligence oversight committee. After hearing Munich Judge Heinz Alert describe the government's handling of the case as "scurrilous," "dangerous" and "barely permissible," the new plutonium panel is lusting for blood. Alert left open the possibility government agents might also be tried for their roles in the case....
For many Germans, that's the nub of the problem: if the German officials knew plutonium was being flown in over a populous area, how could they not have stopped it?
A group that represents airplane crews and an organization called International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War have sued the BND, the federal and Bavarian police and Schmidbauer, claiming the authorities knowingly endangered passengers, as well as the population of Munich, by allowing the material to be flown into the city aboard a plane that could have crashed, vaporizing the plutonium into inhalable, deadly motes."
[source: ARTHUR ALLEN; THE NEW REPUBLIC as reprinted in: The Ottawa Citizen September 2, 1995, pg B3 ]
...The case that gives me the greatest concern is the interception in Vilnius,
Lithuania in 1993 of four
tonnes of beryllium that were diverted from a nuclear research
institute at Obninsk in Russia. There is some ambiguity regarding
the amount of HEU that was included with the beryllium.
The significance of the Vilnius case is not the amount of weapon-
usable fissile material that was involved; rather it is that it
had all the elements associated with the most worrisome scenario
that potentially could involve the successful diversion of very
large quantities of fissile material from Russia to the Middle
East. Involved in this single case were
One other aspect of the Vilnius case is noteworthy. This case involved the shipment of four tonnes (2 cubic meters) of beryllium metal in 33 shipping crates. Each shipping crate was about 0.13 cubic meters (about five cubic feet) in volume. It would be very easy to hide a few kilograms of plutonium or HEU in such a shipment. Much larger shipments of metals are routinely exported from Russia legally. The Vilnius case demonstrates how easy it would be to divert enough plutonium or HEU for an arsenal of several nuclear weapons by hiding the fissile material among several tons of metal shipped in the course of a normal commercial transaction....
...Two of the significant cases of Russian nuclear materials diversion since 1992 (identified in Table 2) each involve the theft of about 3 kg of weapon-grade HEU. From Figure 2, we see that three to five kilograms of HEU is sufficient to construct a nuclear device with a yield on the order of one kiloton of TNT equivalent using technology that was available to the United States in the early 1950s...
May 1993: 33 crates containing 4 tonnes (t) of beryllium (Be) metal and a small quantity of HEU were discovered in a bank vault in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Lithuanian Nuclear Power Authority (VATESI) claims there were 3,860 kg .of pure Be and 140 kg of a Be alloy containing 150 g of uranium enriched to 50 percent. Apparently, the beryllium was intercepted as it was being shipped from the Minatom Institute of Physics and Power Engineering (IPE) in Obninsk, by a company called AMI (two mobsters) in Zarechny, Sverdlovsk region (Yekaterinburg), to an organized crime group in Lithuania.
Feb. 9, 1994: 3 kg (90% U-235) HEU stolen from the Elektrostal plant near Moscow. A St. Petersburg butcher was apprehended in an attempt to sell it.
Aug. 10, 1994: German authorities intercepted 0.5 kg of material in a suitcase at the Munich airport after arrival by plane from Moscow. Of this, 0.3-0.35 kg were Pu-239 (87.5% Pu-239). The Pu was a peculiar mixture of oxide powders similar to mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel. The suspected couriers, two Spaniards and a Columbian were arrested. Also in 1994 (on May 10, June 13, and August 14) German authorities intercepted smaller samples of plutonium and HEU.
Dec. 14, 1994; 2.7 kg of HEU (87.7% U-235) were seized by Czech authorities in Prague."
[source: TESTIMONY OF THOMAS B. COCHRAN, PH.D. SENIOR SCIENTIST, NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL, INC. BEFORE THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, EUROPEAN SUBCOMMITTEE as reported in Federal News Service AUGUST 23, 1995 ]
[source: Sunday Telegraph November 20, 1994, quoting FBI Director Lousi Freeh]
Most of the materials are stolen from power plants, laboratories and weapons bases in the former Soviet Union and are then slipped into Switzerland where the customers have them analyzed in illegal laboratories to determine whether they are authentic. Once tested, the substance is delivered to a destination usually in the West, such as Germany, or in the Middle East, where the materials are used either to make bombs or commit terrorism.
According to Klastersky, some terrorist groups have used such threats to demand the release of prisoners. For example, one group threatened to place radioactive chemicals in the air-conditioning ducts of a skyscraper unless one its members was released from prison. The threat was never carried out.
Often the people who illegally transport such materials are inexperienced
and unaware of what they are carrying. "The mafia typically seeks out people
with no criminal record. In many instance they are students," Klastersky said.
Some use sophisticated plastic tubes and containers that are designed to look
like car parts, while others use nothing more than a plastic grocery bag," he
said."
[source: The Warsaw Voice April 25, 1993 ]