The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  On May 10, 1994, in the small town of Tengen-Wiechs, near Stuttgart, police searching the home of a businessman, Adolf Jaekle, unexpectedly discovered in the garage a cylinder containing 56.3 grams of powder. On testing, about 10 percent was extraordinarily pure plutonium. Jaekle was arrested and jailed, and the source of the plutonium never identified. Then, on August 10, Bavarian criminal police at Munich’s Franz Joseph Straus Airport confiscated a black suitcase being unloaded from a Lufthansa flight arriving from Moscow. Inside was a cylinder containing 560 grams of mixed-oxide fuel that included 363.4 grams of plutonium-239, 87.6 percent pure. The suitcase also included a plastic bag with 201 grams of nonradioactive lithium-6, a metallic element used in making tritium, a nuclear weapons component. Bavarian authorities arrested the apparent owner of the suitcase, Justiniano Torres Benitez, and two Spaniards, one of whom came to meet Benitez at the airport. The arrest was the culmination of a sting operation set up by the Bavarian police and the German federal intelligence service, the BND, and had a huge impact on thinking about fissile material in Russia, seeming to confirm that it was leaking, badly. “We were going crazy worrying about this stuff though much of 1994,” Bunn recalled.21 Fairfax, writing from Moscow, sent a message to Washington that pointed to four Russian nuclear facilities as “my best guesses on where to look” to find the origins of the material.22

  A month after the Munich arrests, Fairfax drove von Hippel to the Kurchatov Institute. Again, they visited Building 116, where Kurchatov employees poured out onto a tray some of their seventy kilos of highly-enriched uranium, pressed into washer shapes. Von Hippel noticed it was stored in what looked like high school lockers. “I was dumbfounded,” von Hippel said. There were no motion detectors, no guards. Anyone could have walked off with the uranium.

  In October, von Hippel returned to Mayak, near Chelyabinsk, which he had visited five years earlier on Velikhov’s glasnost tour. The facility was one of those on the Fairfax list of possible sources of the material seized in Munich. On this visit, von Hippel was taken to a building he had not seen before, No. 142, a single-story warehouse, originally built in the 1940s. A lone Interior Ministry guard held a key. Inside the building were stored 10,250 containers, each about the size of a hotel coffeepot. Each held 2.5 kilos of plutonium oxide. They were lined up in trenches. The cans were double-sealed to avoid leaks, but the warehouse was so hot with radioactivity that employees were allowed inside for only short periods each week. Moreover, the building was an easy target for theft. There were no security cameras; a ventilation shaft would have made an escape route. The building “would not offer much resistance to penetration,” von Hippel wrote after the visit. “The walls have multiple windows and doors and the roof is lightweight. The plutonium containers within are easily accessible by simply cutting the sealing wire, removing a 20-kg cover, and reaching down and pulling out the canisters. The seals are easily defeated lead seals. The guards do not have radios …” After the containers are put in the trenches, he added, “no inventories are made to check that the canisters are still there.” Von Hippel figured there was enough plutonium in the warehouse to make several thousand bombs.

  By autumn 1994 it was clear the entire former Soviet Union was awash in fissile material, and the United States had yet to do much about it. Von Hippel noted in a memorandum, “progress in gaining cooperation from the Russian side has been extremely slow” although “scores of facilities and hundreds of tons of weapons-usable material” were at risk.23

  After months of preparation, the covert mission to remove the uranium in Kazakhstan was almost ready in October. The winter snows were coming. “I kept pressing and pressing to get this thing going, knowing full well that winter comes early in this part of the world,” Weber said. “It would get messy if we didn’t get it finished before the first snowfall.” A small group of Americans slipped unnoticed into Ust-Kamenogorsk during the summer to check whether the airport runway could handle C5 Galaxy airlifters, and to examine the containers inside the Ulba warehouse. The Oak Ridge Y-12 laboratory built a mobile processing facility. A team of twenty-nine men and two women were recruited for the mission, including Elwood Gift, who made the first visit. On October 7, President Clinton signed a classified presidential directive approving the airlift, and the final briefing was held at Oak Ridge. The next day, three C5 aircraft, among the largest planes in the world, lifted off from Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, carrying the team and their processing facility. They flew to Turkey, and then, after some delays, to Ust-Kamenogorsk. Weber was waiting for them in the control tower of the small airport. “This was one of those bizarre post–Cold War experiences you have to live through to believe, but I’m in the control tower, nobody in the control tower speaks English,” Weber recalled. “So they said, ‘Andy, can you talk to the planes and guide them in?’” The C5s needed a six-thousand-foot runway, and landed like a “bucking bronco,” in the words of one pilot, on the bumpy eight-thousand-foot strip at Ust-Kamenogorsk. The planes were unloaded, and flew off to bases elsewhere until it was time to return.

  On the ground, at the Ulba factory, the team began its arduous work. Twenty-five members were from Oak Ridge; the others were a communications technician, a doctor and four military men, including three Russian-speaking interpreters. Each day, they left their hotel before dawn and returned after dark, spending twelve hours packaging all the uranium into special containers suitable for flying back to the United States. The total material to be packed up was 4,850 pounds, of which approximately 1,322 pounds was the highly-enriched uranium. There were seven different types of uranium-bearing materials in the warehouse, much of it laced with beryllium.24 Altogether, the team discovered 1,032 containers in the warehouse, and each had to be methodically unpacked, examined and repacked for transport into quart-sized cans that were then inserted into 448 shipping containers—55-gallon drums with foam inserts—for the flight. Laborious checking was necessary, each can compared with the Ulba handwritten logs. In the end, the Americans discovered several canisters lying in the warehouse without dog tags. Some of the uranium had to be heated in special ovens to remove water to facilitate the repacking. The entire process required precision, endurance and secrecy. If word leaked, the whole effort might have to be aborted. The tiger team in Washington had worked out a cover story—if the Americans were discovered, they were to say they were helping Kazakhstan prepare declarations for the International Atomic Energy Agency. Working conditions were stressful; many of the team members had never been outside the United States. Some were so homesick they broke the rules and called home from local telephones. From a distance, Kazakh special forces troops kept a watchful eye to protect the Americans inside the plant.

  By November 11, the job was finished and the 448 barrels loaded onto trucks. The team was determined to get home for Thanksgiving, but then winter weather set in. The original air force order was for five C5s to evacuate the uranium and the team. But only three planes were ready when the right moment came. Mechanical problems and bad weather caused delays. Finally, on November 18, one plane left Turkey for Kazakhstan. While it was in the air, at 3 A.M., the uranium was driven from the Ulba plant to the airport, with Weber in the lead security car, a Soviet-era Volga. “It was black ice conditions,” Weber said. “And these trucks were sliding all over the place, and I’m thinking, I don’t want to make the call to Washington saying one of the trucks with highly-enriched uranium went off the bridge into the river, and we’re trying to locate it. But somehow, miraculously, we made it all safely to the airport.”

  The plane took three hours to load. But before it could take off, the runway had to be cleared of snow. A pilot recalled the airfield was being pummeled by sleet, ice and rain. There were no snowplows to be seen. Then the local airport workers brought out a truck with a jet engine mounted on the back. They fired up the engine and blasted the runway free for takeoff. The Galaxy heaved itself into the sky. The next day, two more C5s flew out the remaining uranium, the gear and the team.
The enormous transports, operating in total secrecy, flew twenty hours straight through to Dover with several aerial refuelings, the longest C5 flights in history. Once on the ground, the uranium was loaded into large, unmarked trucks specially outfitted to protect nuclear materials and driven by different routes to Oak Ridge.

  Weber remained on the tarmac until the last plane took off.

  When it was announced to the public at a Washington press conference on Wednesday morning, November 23, Project Sapphire caused a sensation. Defense Secretary William Perry called it “defense by other means, in a big way.” He added, “We have put this bomb-grade nuclear material forever out of the reach of potential black marketers, terrorists or a new nuclear regime.”25 With imagination and daring, Sapphire underscored what could be done. The United States had reached into another country, which was willing to cooperate, removed dangerous material and paid for it.26 But that method could not be replicated inside Russia, where there was far more uranium and plutonium, and much more suspicion. It was hard to imagine landing C5s in Moscow and emptying out Building 116 at the Kurchatov Institute.

  The U.S. government has long run a secretive intelligence committee, spanning different agencies, which studies nuclear developments overseas. In late 1994, the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee prepared a report about the extent of the Russian nuclear materials crisis. The top-secret report concluded: not a single facility storing highly-enriched uranium or plutonium in the former Soviet Union had adequate safeguards up to Western standards. Not one.

  In the White House science office, Bunn felt he had “zero power” and worked “10 tiers down from the top.” His quick-fix idea was dead on arrival. In late 1994, on advice from his staff, Clinton asked for a blueprint for action on nuclear smuggling and loose fissile material, to be written by the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. The study was chaired by Professor John Holdren, then of the University of California at Berkeley, and Bunn was named study director. When finished in March 1995, the study, classified secret, called for a multifront war. The study identified approximately one hundred sites handling sizable quantities of weapons-usable nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.27 Then, to drive home their point, Bunn and Holdren lobbied for, and won, permission to give a briefing to President Clinton and Vice President Gore in the Oval Office.

  They stayed up until 2 A.M. the night before preparing. On May 1, 1995, just weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing, they told Clinton and Gore the fissile material crisis was one of the gravest national security problems the country faced. Holdren described to Clinton the serious gaps: how Russian facilities had no idea, or precise records, of the amount of uranium and plutonium lying about; the weak links in buildings, fences and guard forces; and the threat that terrorists could walk off with a bag or bucket of uranium or plutonium. In a clever move, Holdren had brought an empty casing from one of the fuel pellets used at the nuclear power and engineering institute at Obninsk, south of Moscow. He tossed it on a table and told Clinton there were perhaps eighty thousand of those filled with uranium or plutonium, and not one with an inventory number on it. The institute had no monitors to stop someone from carrying one out in their pocket. Bunn thumped on the table a two-inch stack of press clippings he’d assembled, including a Time magazine cover with the headline “Nuclear Terror for Sale.” At the end of the presentation, they showed Clinton a diagram of what would happen to the White House if the Oklahoma City bomb had been set off on Pennsylvania Avenue—superficial damage. Then they showed what would happen if it was a one-kiloton nuclear “fizzle”—a bomb that didn’t work very well. In that case, the White House was at the edge of the crater.

  Clinton said he realized that security was bad, but he had no idea that the Russians didn’t even know if something had been stolen.28

  In the weeks after Clinton’s briefing, a delegation from the United States Department of Energy arrived in Ukraine, including a young logistics assistant, Erik Engling. He had landed a job in the department just the year before, doing administrative chores for the office of National Security and Nonproliferation, which required a security clearance. Engling possessed the right credentials from an earlier job working in a government library. He helped with visas, cables, and chores for government officials struggling to cope with the fissile materials crisis in the former Soviet Union. One day, he recalled, a senior policy-maker came and sat down in his office. Engling was twenty-nine years old then, a large young man, blunt-spoken and eager to learn more about the nuclear problems they were discovering. “The problem is so huge,” the senior policy-maker said, “your grandchildren won’t be able to work this out.”29

  In June, Engling made his first visit to the former Soviet Union, accompanying the delegation to Ukraine. The team went to the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, once a premier research institute. Engling wound his way through a labyrinthine corridor, up and down stairs and then through a door. “And we went through the door, and into that room, and there’s 75 kilos of highly-enriched uranium lying on the floor. On the floor! You’ve got it on racks, too. There’s an oversized dumbwaiter that goes up and down to one of the rooms above where they were doing experiments. The uranium is in all sorts of configurations. Some in tubes, some in boxes. And we all had this sinking feeling, like, why? Why do you guys even have this shit?” The uranium was entirely unprotected. “We walked up a couple of stairs, we’re out in a parking lot. This is where the nuclear materials are stored, and not a thing between the parking lots and these doors. The stuff was sitting just 55 feet from the back door. You could just walk in, and walk out.”30

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  FACE TO FACE WITH EVIL

  On a brilliant summer day, June 2, 1995, a chartered white and blue Yak-40 jet descended to the remote city of Stepnogorsk in northern Kazakhstan, landing on a bumpy airstrip of concrete slabs. The plane, emblazoned with the name Kazakhstan Airlines, carried Andy Weber and a team of biological weapons experts from the United States. About nine miles away stood the anthrax factory Alibek had built in the 1980s. Never before had a Westerner set foot in the secret plant, where, in the event of war, anthrax bacteria was to be fermented, processed into a thick brown slurry, dried, milled and filled into bombs—by the ton.

  Weber’s flight to Stepnogorsk was the culmination of months of careful preparation. His mission was to find a new entryway into the secret empire of Biopreparat. In Russia, attempts by American and British officials to penetrate the biological weapons program had been blocked, made even more difficult after Aldrich Ames gave the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate to the Russians in late 1993. Moreover, Yeltsin’s promises of openness had been subverted by his own generals.

  But now, there was another chance. A colossal anthrax-processing machine stood intact at Stepnogorsk, and if Weber could get inside, it might hold a key to the larger Soviet biological weapons story.

  Weber began laying the groundwork for this mission days after Project Sapphire was over. In November 1994, he started a series of inoculations against potential pathogens he might encounter at Stepnogorsk, including anthrax and tularemia. Then he lobbied the Kazakh government for permission to visit three facilities with a team of experts: the chemical weapons plant at Pavlodar, in the northeast near the Russian border; the biological weapons plant at Stepnogorsk, also in the north; and a testing grounds for germ warfare agents at Vozrozhdeniye Island, in the Aral Sea, which borders Kazakhstan in the far west. The hulking industrial works were frozen in time, equipment mothballed or rusting, the halls and laboratories monitored by Russians who remained the stewards long after the Soviet Union imploded.

  When Weber discovered the highly-enriched uranium in Ust-Kamenogorsk, he had followed a single tip on a small piece of paper. This time, he had much more information, thanks to Alibek, who was debriefed for more than a year by American intelligence and military agencies, meeting daily in a second-floor conference room in an office building
in northern Virginia. Alibek sketched out the sprawling Biopreparat and military germ warfare complex: the facilities, pathogens, history, scientists, directors, structure, accomplishments and goals. While Pasechnik had done the same for the British in London, Alibek held a higher-ranking position.

  To the Americans, there were still many unknowns—not only the hidden history, but also the urgent questions about whether the Russians were actually closing down the Soviet biological weapons program, as Yeltsin had promised. The earlier visits to Obolensk, Vector and other facilities had all been frustrated by the cover-up. The Trilateral Agreement reached a dead end. The Americans wanted to know: which pathogens and laboratories could still be a proliferation threat?1

  Alibek provided a gold mine of new data about the laboratories and factories of Biopreparat. He knew a great deal about Stepnogorsk, which he had directed in the 1980s: the layout, building numbers, pipelines, processes, machinery, fermenters and bunkers. Thanks to Alibek, Weber had a road map.2