He was picked up on a street corner, taken to an apartment building and shown to the door of a company that sold hunting rifles, scopes and night-vision equipment. Inside, he found a lively former Soviet navy submarine commander, Vitaly Mette, who wore a leather jacket. Mette’s thick hair was combed back from an angular face, and he carried himself with a self-confident air. Standing nearby was a large man with a polished head like a bullet, introduced as Colonel Korbator, and a very attractive blonde woman. Weber sat on a chair in the small room. The colonel left, then so did the blonde.
When they were alone, Mette turned serious. He said he wanted to discuss the possibility of selling uranium to the U.S. government.
Mette was vague about the nature of the uranium, except that it was stored at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, an enormous industrial complex that fabricated reactor fuel in the grimy city of Ust-Kamenogorsk, in Kazakhstan’s northeast. Mette was the factory director. As he listened, Weber was curious, but his training told him not to rush. He wanted to talk to Courtney, the ambassador, an experienced foreign service officer who knew something about the Soviet military-industrial complex. That night, Weber and Courtney drove together to see Mette at a guesthouse in Almaty. Courtney asked questions about the material Mette was offering, but Mette just said “uranium.”
Then Mette turned to Weber. Please come hunting with us, he asked.
Kazakhstan, the second largest of the former Soviet republics, suffered as a Cold War proving ground and arms depot. In the remote steppe, the Soviet Union built test sites and factories for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The most spectacular was Semipalatinsk in the northeast, where 456 nuclear blasts were carried out from 1949 until 1989. Eighty-six of them were exploded in the air, 30 at the surface, and 340 underground in tunnels and boreholes.2 Contamination poisoned the population.3 Fallout from a 1956 explosion drifted over Ust-Kamenogorsk. Also in the north, at Stepnogorsk, anthrax was weaponized at the mammoth factory Alibek once led. A third facility in the north, built at Pavlodar on the banks of the Irtysh River, was a dualpurpose plant to make chemicals for civilian use and, if needed upon war mobilization, for weapons.4 Farther to the west, missiles were launched from the Soviet space complex at Scientific Research Test Range No. 5, at Tyuratam, later named Baikonur. And in the southwest was the Aral Sea, where the Soviet biological weapons testing site was built on Vozrozhdeniye Island. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Kazakhstan inherited the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal, including 104 SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles with ten warheads each.5
Richly endowed with natural resources, Kazakhstan’s greatest treasure was 70 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 16.4 billion barrels of oil reserves. But despite this wealth, as author Martha Brill Olcott has observed, the new Kazakhstan was a fragile state, crippled by history and geography and born entirely out of the collapse of an empire, without a cohesive national identity.6 About 37 percent of the population was Russian, concentrated in the north, and 40 percent Kazakh, among a total of nearly one hundred ethnic groups and nationalities. In Soviet times, the Russians were the elite, but after the collapse many felt shipwrecked there. The newly minted country was ruled by Nursultan Nazarbayev, a onetime steelworker whom Gorbachev had named Communist Party leader of the republic. An ethnic Kazakh, Nazarbayev gradually transformed himself after the Soviet collapse into a Central Asian potentate, mixing authoritarianism, oil wealth and crony capitalism. Now Nazarbayev wanted to be rid of the scourge of weapons that had so disfigured the landscape. He had no use for the uranium at Ust-Kamenogorsk.7
A few weeks after their first meeting, Weber flew to join Mette for a hunting expedition. They drove in a jeep for hours to a base camp in the Altai Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan, near the borders of Russia and China, an ideal territory for hunting. Weber enjoyed the banya steam baths, chewed on smoked pork fat and shivered in the early-morning cold with the Russians, speaking their language, hunting with them and earning their trust. He also shot a moose. He did not ask them about the uranium then. At the end of the trip, returning to the city, Mette volunteered to show Weber the plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk. They drove him around the gargantuan factory, fenced off, dark and brooding. Mette’s workers were making fuel for Russian nuclear power plants. If they weren’t exactly thriving, Weber saw they were not starving either. The entire town seemed to be a “little Russia”—Weber saw no Kazakhs there. Just before leaving, Weber inquired gently about the uranium. “If it is not a secret,” he asked, “do you have any highly-enriched uranium?” Highly-enriched uranium could be used for nuclear weapons. Mette was still evasive.
The former Soviet Union was brimming with highly-enriched uranium and plutonium. Viktor Mikhailov, the Russian atomic energy minister, revealed in the summer of 1993 that Russia had accumulated much more highly-enriched uranium, up to twelve hundred metric tons, than was previously thought.8 Outside of Russia, in the other former republics, less was known about stockpiles, but much was feared about the Iranians and the Iraqis hunting for material to build nuclear bombs. “We knew that Iran was all over Central Asia and the Caucasus with their purchasing agents,” recalled Jeff Starr, who was principal director for threat reduction policy at the Pentagon.
At the same time, all the former Soviet lands were awash in scams and deceptions—people offering to sell MiGs, missile guidance systems or fissile material, real and imagined. There was such a frenzy to strike gold that it was hard to detect what offer was genuine. “A lot of people thought it was a scam,” Weber recalled of the initial reaction to his reports of finding enriched uranium.
He went back to Mette. “Look,” he remembered saying, “for us to take this seriously, you have to tell me what the enrichment level is, and how much of it there is.”
In December 1993, Weber was extremely busy. Vice President Al Gore visited Kazakhstan in the middle of the month. During the bustle, Slava, the mechanic, came to Weber and said, “Colonel Korbator wants to meet you.” Weber quickly agreed. On a snowy day, he went back to the same small office where he had first seen Mette and Korbator a few months earlier.
Korbator said, “Andy, I want to talk to you. Let’s take a walk.”
They walked through the snowy, dim courtyard of the apartment complex. Korbator spoke first. “Andy, I have a message for you from Vitaly,” he said. “This is the answer to your question.”
Korbator handed Weber a piece of paper. Weber unfolded it. On the paper was written:
U235
90 percent
600 kilos
Weber calculated that was 1,322 pounds of highly-enriched uranium, enough to make about twenty-four nuclear bombs. Weber closed the piece of paper and put it in his pocket. He said, “Thank you very much. Please tell him, thank you. This is very important.”
Weber sent a cable to Washington, with very limited distribution. Then for a few days he was preoccupied by the Gore visit. Immediately after Gore departed on December 14, Weber was awakened after midnight by the embassy communications officer, who called saying a night action cable from Washington had arrived, requiring his immediate attention. Weber drove back to the embassy. The cable asked a thousand questions about the uranium. What was Mette’s motivation? They wanted to make sure Weber was confident of his source. Weber answered the questions as best he could.
Nothing happened for about a month. Weber’s response languished in the State Department until one day in January 1994, when it came up as an afterthought at a White House meeting. Ashton B. Carter, who had helped frame the Nunn-Lugar legislation in 1991 and was now an assistant secretary of defense, volunteered to take over the issue. Shortly after the meeting, he called Starr into his office. “Your job is to put together a team and go get this stuff out of Kazakhstan,” Carter said. “Whatever you need—do it.” Carter said to get the uranium out within a month. Starr quickly put together a top-secret “tiger team,” an ad hoc group of action-oriented officials from different agencies.9
On February 14, 1994, Na
zarbayev made his first visit to see President Bill Clinton. In a White House ceremony, Clinton praised Nazarbayev’s “great courage, vision and leadership,” and announced that American aid to Kazakhstan would be tripled to over $311 million. In their public remarks, neither Clinton nor Nazarbayev, nor the official who briefed reporters that day, used the word “uranium.” But when Nazarbayev was at Blair House, the guest residence across the street from the White House, Weber and Courtney quietly paid him a visit. They asked Nazarbayev if the United States could send an expert to verify the composition of the uranium at Ust-Kamenogorsk. He agreed, but insisted it be kept under wraps.10
Starr’s tiger team was uncertain of conditions at the plant in Kazakhstan. They needed someone who could quickly lay “eyes on target,” as Starr put it, and know exactly what was stored there, and how vulnerable it was. They couldn’t be sure if they could take samples, or photographs, so it had to be someone who could mentally absorb everything, who would know about canisters and metals. The job went to Elwood Gift of the National Security Programs Office at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A chemical-nuclear engineer, Gift had experience in most of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment.
Gift arrived in Kazakhstan March 1 amid swirling snowstorms, and for several days holed up at Weber’s house. When the weather cleared, they boarded an An-12 turboprop for Ust-Kamenogorsk. The Kazakh government purchased tickets in false names to hide their identity. Fuel was scarce. Just ten minutes after takeoff, they unexpectedly landed again—the tanks were almost empty and the pilot attempted to coax more fuel from a military airfield. Gift and Weber spotted old Soviet fighter jets parked on the tarmac. After an hour or so, they took off again for the 535-mile flight north.
By this time, Weber had come to know Mette better. As plant director, Mette was perhaps the most powerful person in Ust-Kamenogorsk. Weber found him charismatic, gutsy and intelligent, the opposite of an old Soviet bureaucrat. When Weber and Gift showed up the first morning and proposed to take samples of the uranium, Mette consented, knowing that they had Nazarbayev’s approval, and he told them the story of how it got there. The Soviet Union had designed and built a small attack submarine, known as Project 705, given the code name Alfa by NATO. The sub was distinguished by a sleek design, titanium hull and relatively small crew. The most futuristic part of Project 705 was the nuclear power plant, which used an unusual liquid lead-bismuth alloy to moderate heat from the reactor. The subs were completed in the late 1970s, but the reactors proved troublesome—the lead-bismuth alloy had to be kept molten at 275 degrees Fahrenheit—and designers scrambled to build a new reactor. The uranium at Mette’s factory was to be used to make the fuel for the new reactor, but Project 705 was scrapped altogether in the 1980s. Mette was left with the highly-enriched uranium.11
When they approached the building where the uranium was stored, Weber saw the doors were protected by what he later described as a Civil War padlock. The doors swung open into a large room with concrete walls, a dirt floor and high windows. Knee-high brick platforms stretched from one end to the other. On top of the platforms, sheets of plywood were laid out, and resting on the wood, about ten feet apart, were steel buckets and canisters holding the highly-enriched uranium, separated to avoid a chain reaction. Each container had a small metal dog tag stating the contents and quantity. Weber and Gift, working with plant technicians, randomly selected a few containers and took them to a small laboratory area. They weighed them to verify the dog tag was correct. In one canister they found uranium rods wrapped in foil, like so many ice packs in a picnic cooler. From another container, they took a rod-shaped ingot, and Weber hefted it, surprised at how heavy the uranium felt. Gift wanted to break off a piece and bring it back as a sample. He asked a technician to take a wood-handled hammer and a chisel to it, but the ingot would not break.
Weber went off with another worker to watch him file off some shavings they could take as samples. At first, the technicians handled the uranium in a glove box, but one of them took it out and placed it on an open table in the center of the room. The technician slid a piece of paper under it and began to file the ingot. Sparks flew, like a child’s holiday sparkler.
“My eyes are lighting up, because I’ve had this chunk of metal in my hand,” Weber recalled. “I know it is bomb material. This uranium metal would require nothing—just being banged into the right shape and more of it to make a bomb. It didn’t need any processing. This is 90 or 91 percent enriched uranium 235, in pure metal form. And I remember thinking that dozens of nuclear weapons could be fabricated from this, easily fabricated from this material, and how mundane it is. It was just a piece of metal. And just looking at these buckets, how could something this mundane have such awesome power and potential for destruction? So, as he started filing, and sparks are coming off, you can imagine what’s going through my head. What is this bomb material going to do?”
Gift was on the other side of the room, dealing with another sample. When he saw the sparks, Weber said, “Elwood! It’s sparking!” Gift didn’t realize they had taken the uranium out of the glove box, but he didn’t look up. “Don’t worry,” he said, “that’s just normal oxidation.”
Gift collected eight samples of highly-enriched uranium while at the plant. Portions of four samples were dissolved in acid and analyzed by mass spectrograph while Gift and Weber were still there, and they confirmed it was 90 percent enriched uranium. Three of the dissolved samples and the eight original samples were taken by Gift for further analysis.12
Gift carried a miniature dosimeter in his shirt pocket while they were inside. He and Weber wore face masks to protect against dust with beryllium, which is highly toxic and carcinogenic. Weber felt comfortable that they were protected—the dosimeter didn’t issue any alarms. Mette reassured them that the uranium was fabricated from natural sources, not reprocessed, so in its present state, although highly enriched, it was not very radioactive. After they finished taking the samples, Weber cheerfully suggested that Gift show the little dosimeter in his pocket to Mette. Gift took it out and discovered that he had forgotten to turn it on. “I thought, oh great!” Weber recalled. In his briefcase, Gift placed the small glass vials that held the eleven samples into holes cut in foam cushioning and snapped it shut. When they walked away from the uranium warehouse, Gift, carrying the briefcase, suddenly slipped and fell hard on the ice. Weber and Mette helped him to his feet but looked at each other. “Both of us, our initial reaction was, Oh my God, the samples!” Weber said. Both Gift and the samples were fine. Back in Almaty, they told the ambassador they had verified the uranium was highly enriched. Courtney immediately sent a cable to Washington, noting the ancient padlock on the door. The cable, Weber recalled, “hit Washington like a ton of bricks.” Starr, who was in Washington, said the cable “established there was a potentially serious proliferation issue.”
Weber thought there was only one thing to do. “In my mind it was a no-brainer,” he said. “Let’s buy this stuff as quickly as we can and move it to the United States.” He knew there was a risk Iran might buy it. Later, it was discovered the plant had a shipment of beryllium, which is used as a neutron reflector in an atomic bomb, packed in crates. Stenciled on the side was an address: Tehran, Iran. Apparently a paperwork glitch was the only thing that had kept the shipment from being sent.13
Gift could not carry the samples on a commercial flight—orders from Washington had arrived saying it was too risky. Weber locked the samples in his safe and waited for instructions. Soon, three boxes came addressed to him on the embassy’s regular resupply flight. Weber put Gift’s briefcase with the samples in his jeep and drove out to greet the arriving C-130. He opened the first two boxes and carefully packed the samples in them, and resealed them to be shipped back home. Then he opened the third box: it was the gloves, dosimeter and protective gear he was supposed to have worn while packing the first two boxes.
When the samples got back to the United States, an analysis confirm
ed the uranium was 90 percent enriched. The tiger team went into high gear, and Starr looked at all the possible options. One was to do nothing, but that was quickly rejected. Another was to secure the uranium in place; that too was rejected on grounds that no one knew what would happen at the plant, or to Kazakhstan, in a few years. A third option was to turn the uranium over to Russia. A tense debate unfolded on this point. The Pentagon representatives wanted nothing to do with the Russians. The State Department people thought it would be an opportunity to show some goodwill and make a point about nonproliferation. A few low-level queries were sent to Moscow. The first went unanswered. A second triggered a reply that Russia would, naturally, want millions of dollars from the United States. After more internal arguments, a decision was made to have Gore raise the issue at his next meeting with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, in June. Gore carried with him a set of talking points that did not ask, but informed, the Russians that the United States would take the uranium out of Kazakhstan. Everyone held their breath, but Chernomyrdin did not object. Nazarbayev at one point picked up the phone and called Yeltsin, who agreed not to interfere. The tiger team wrestled with other difficult issues over the summer, such as how much to pay Kazakhstan, and how to prepare an environmental impact statement for the arrival of uranium at Oak Ridge. They went over every detail to make sure the mission would succeed. Weber, waiting for action in Almaty, was frustrated by the delays. “It was absurd because the Iranians probably would have paid a billion dollars for just one bomb’s worth of uranium, and we were talking about dozens of bombs’ worth,” he recalled.
———
By early 1994, there were signs of progress in the struggle to avert a nuclear nightmare. Russia managed to bring its tactical nuclear weapons back from Eastern Europe and the outlying former Soviet republics. The rail cars carrying warheads were upgraded. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan were moving toward giving up their strategic nuclear weapons. The United States announced plans to buy 500 tons of highly-enriched uranium from Russia and blend it down into reactor fuel. In the first year of his presidency, Clinton appointed several architects of the Nunn-Lugar legislation to high-level policy positions. He named Les Aspin his first defense secretary. William Perry, the Stanford professor, was appointed deputy defense secretary, and became secretary in February 1994. Carter was appointed assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, overseeing the Nunn-Lugar legislation.14 In Russia, after a violent confrontation with hard-liners in October 1993, Yeltsin won a new constitution giving him broad powers and a new legislature.
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