Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  The culture of fraud does provide one safeguard. A Georgian police official told me that as many as 95 percent of the smugglers who say they have centrifuges or uranium turn out to be con artists themselves who sell only worthless chemicals or broken equipment. Red mercury, also known as cinnabar, is one common fill product. There have been cases, too, where the seized uranium is far below bomb-grade enrichment (most likely stolen from a power plant) and is also therefore useless. Helmet-shaped casings from reactors are said to be especially good for nuclear rip-offs because they have radioactivity symbols convincingly stamped upon them, though they contain nothing of value. Those who deal in such goods would be the spiritual cousins of the nervy Sudanese individual who conned Osama bin Laden out of $1.5 million for phony uranium.

  Georgia has become an atomic crossroads at least in part because of its geography, some of the most spectacular on the Eurasian landmass. A popular folk myth says that the people of Georgia were having a binge at the time of Creation when God was busy handing out land to all the peoples of the earth. The Georgians arrived late and hungover. God told them he was sorry, but that no further territory was available. The Georgians thought quickly and told him they had been late only because they were raising their wineglasses in toasts to God. This pleased the Almighty, and he gave them the most beautiful land in the whole world, which he had been saving. The nation was thereby founded on a scam.

  Perhaps there is a shade of knowing guilt to this story, as Georgia’s spectacular physical setting has also been its curse. For centuries it served as a buffer between Mother Russia and the Islamic principalities to the south. Successive waves of Byzantines, Mongols, Ottomans, and Cossacks have ransacked their way through the mountain passes on their way to greater glories. The capital city of Tbilisi has been destroyed and reconstructed an estimated twenty-nine times, by one count. Many of the Orthodox monasteries resemble hilltop fortresses. The people here—not ethnically Slavic—nevertheless preserved their own language and poetry in the midst of the periodic sackings and conquests. The region first came under the knout of the Russians under Tsar Paul I in 1800 and was later forced under Communist rule in the 1920s. A onetime Georgian seminary student who took the name Josef Stalin (for “man of steel”) maneuvered and backstabbed his way to the head of the Communist Party, a source of considerable embarrassment in Georgia today. When Stalin came to power, Georgia was swallowed up into the USSR and became a favorite warm-weather getaway for the elite. It also became the site of the largest metal fabrication plant in the world. A new city named Rustavi, a grid of exquisite awfulness, was built to accommodate the labor: a phalanx of gray apartment blocks marching in relentless sequence toward the soot-blackened mills.

  Georgia won its independence in 1991 and immediately drew close to the United States, offering easements for a gigantic oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Turkey and stripping all signs with Russian letters from the roadsides and public buildings. But under the haphazard leadership of former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, the nation fell into a state of kleptocracy. For nearly a decade, the famous Article Fifteen of the Congo appeared to be the only relevant statute on the books. Georgia became a place where literally everything was for sale.

  “The police disappeared, the courts disappeared, the government disappeared. There were only people with guns,” said Alexandre Kukhianidze, a former professor of political science who now runs a nonprofit group. “There were only two to three hours of electricity each day. Ministries turned into pyramid schemes.”

  As much as 60 percent of the cash flow in those years was located in a parallel market of bribes, smuggled goods, and counterfeiting. Western foreign aid also disappeared into the sinkhole. The regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia formed rump provisional governments and expelled federal troops. At some point in the chaos, about four and a half pounds of highly enriched uranium disappeared from a laboratory shelf in a technical institute in Abkhazia. It has never been located. Shevardnadze was ousted in the bloodless Rose Revolution in 2003, and most of the police force was fired in the subsequent reform. Five years later, tensions over South Ossetia created a vicious shooting war with Russia, which Georgia accused of trying to undermine its territorial integrity.

  Tbilisi is today a city of brutalist Soviet tenements with bunches of colorful plastic flowers draped over the balconies and oppressive concrete superblocks with vodka bars and young women in spike-heeled boots lighting cigarettes outside sad little shops without electricity that sell fatty sausages and Mars bars. Across the street from the opulent Parliament building is a kiosk shielding a hardy survivor: A rotary-dial pay telephone from the 1960s that still emits a dial tone. Soldiers wear uniforms with Velcro strips for the red-and-white Georgian flag pressed on their shoulders. The United States has invested heavily in the security infrastructure here—it sees a valuable regional ally, as well as a host for the Caspian pipeline project—and has built a series of new checkpoint stations with radiation detectors. One of them on the Armenian border cost $2.4 million in a grant from the Department of Homeland Security. The FBI has helped train some of the guards.

  “To take contraband through our territory takes a little more effort now,” said the deputy minister of defense, Batu Kutelia.

  He told me there had been a debate about whether to arrest Oleg Khinsagov on the spot or let him travel back to Russia for the rest of the promised material. The latter choice would have carried the risk of his disappearing forever, but it also may have led to the recovery of more uranium and possibly shown which mobsters were in his upline. The decision was made to arrest him in the Tbilisi apartment, however, in the hopes that the fish salesman would talk. He didn’t. The Georgian government was silent about the incident for nearly a year, but then disclosed the story to the journalist Lawrence Scott Sheets, who has speculated that Georgia was trying to shame Russia into doing more to interdict the loose atomic goods.

  Khinsagov had taken his plastic bags of uranium through a mountain border checkpoint called Kazbegi, where the guards had been secretly instructed to turn off the radiation detector and let him through. Yet Khinsagov could not have known this, and something about the state of affairs at the crossing must have led him to believe that he wouldn’t get caught. I wanted to go for a look and hired a driver to take me there. This was in late July 2007, a little more than a year and a half after his arrest.

  The main road from Tbilisi to the border is known as the Georgian Military Highway, a very old cattle-droving route that was widened and improved in the first decade of the nineteenth century to solidify Russia’s hold on its unwilling client state. Maintenance has not been a priority. Pot-holes and ruts are everywhere, and the road turns to dirt in many places before the broken tapestry of asphalt resumes. Cows find relief from the rain under the concrete roofs of bus shelters, and men wearing brown suit jackets urge horse-drawn carts through the hedged lanes of farm towns. The settlements peter away as the road begins its switchbacking ascent up the first escarpment of the Caucasus Mountains, the high rock wall that traditionally divided Europe from Asia. The air grows sharper up here, and giant valleys open into panoptic vistas of air and stone and grass.

  We crested a first summit, passed through the village of Kazbegi, and followed the streamside road into the Darial Gorge, a spot mentioned in Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis in A.d. 77. This was the site of what he called the Caucasian Gates, a fortified garrison of soldiers that was supposed to protect the cities of the Romans from incursions by Huns and Goths from the northern plains. The gorge was so narrow, Pliny said, that a legion of three hundred soldiers could fend off a much larger army. The gates “divided the world in two parts,” he reported, and kept the civilized world safe from the barbarians. Oleg Khinsagov had been through here eighteen months ago with his packets of uranium.

  We stopped at the checkpoint on the Russian border, which was temporarily closed while a new American-funded facility was under construction. Five men wearing Georgi
an military uniforms came out of a nearby barracks. After some translated pleasantries, they took me on a tour of the old facility, a wood-sided shed with cracked linoleum floors. It was marked PASSPORT CONTROL. Out on the roadway, there were two plastic pillars wired up to a gamma-ray detector whose stamp indicated that it had been made by a company in Sweetwater, Texas.

  About five hundred cars a day pass through here when the road is open. The detector rings about once a week on average, they said, which means the offending vehicle must undergo a closer inspection. Bananas and ceramics have a way of setting off false alarms. The new checkpoint would have more sophisticated detection equipment, they told me, even though it wouldn’t pick up a signal if anyone took the precaution of shielding a block of uranium with a lead sleeve. The soldiers also had a case of handheld radiation detectors, about the size of a telephone pager, that they were supposed to wave over suspicious trucks and cars. They had wanted to show me these detectors, but the case was locked, and they had lost the keys. Above the highway was a giant colorful billboard instructing drivers who felt they were being asked for a bribe to call a special telephone number in Tbilisi to complain.

  The guards were friendly and happy to have company. One of them showed me a cell-phone photograph of what he said was the preserved kneecap of Saint George—the national saint—which is kept as a relic in a nearby church. Another pointed to the remains of a castle clinging to a precipice over the stream where a thirteenth-century aristocrat named Tamara had lived. She was said to have been in the habit of seducing lone male travelers and having them beheaded the next morning, their bodies cast in the river. We all went into a small mess hall and shared a lunch of bean soup and thick fresh bread. Somebody poured us glasses of beer. Eventually, a bottle of Chechen grappa came out. They wanted to do shots. We toasted one another’s countries.

  “Russia is just a big supermarket,” one of them said, and laughed. “Whatever you want, you can buy it there. Heroin, uranium, whatever you want.”

  When I stepped back outside into the cold air, reeling and woozy, I asked the commander, a middle-aged man named Shoto Lomtadze, if he wasn’t worried that somebody would simply try to move uranium around this checkpoint, through any one of the other mountain passes that open a hole from Russia into the south. A package of uranium big enough to achieve critical mass would be about the size of a grapefruit and weigh a little bit more than a case of Coca-Cola. The uranium would need to be split in two halves to prevent a premature explosion, but the halves could be easily tucked into a pair of backpacks and simply carried into the country on foot.

  Lomtadze smiled and shook his head no. “It would be much more dangerous for them over there,” he said, pointing toward the peaks across the gorge. “They would never make it.”

  8

  RENAISSANCE

  The minister of electricity could hardly contain his excitement. He leaped out of his chair and began to pace back and forth on the office carpet in front of me, gesturing to the air while he talked. His impoverished nation of Yemen was destined to have the first nuclear power on the Arabian Peninsula, he told me, and this had to happen within five years. Otherwise there would be a major problem.

  “We are in a grave, grave situation,” he said. “For us, we have no choice. Coal is too dirty. Dirty, dirty, dirty . . . Hydroelectric? We are a dry country. God did not give me rivers. Natural gas? Nice, if you own it. If you import it, it is five or six cents a kilowatt-hour.

  “I have no oil,” he said, beating me to the question. “Do you know how much we have? It’s declining, and I’m scared we might not have enough for transportation. . . . Right now we are running on diesel and natural gas, paying anywhere from seventeen to twenty-two cents a kilowatt-hour. I am subsidizing electricity here at the rate of twelve cents! The electricity situation is a joke, and it is costing the government a lot of money.”

  He kept pacing before the cream-colored sofa in his anteroom, building to his peroration.

  “There is not a single city in the developing world that is not praying for a huge increase in nuclear power. There is no doubt, my friend, that the nuclear industry is now living in a renaissance.”

  Yemen’s minister of electricity is an exuberant, barrel-chested man named Dr. Mustafa Bahran, who earned the nickname “Dr. Bahranium” in the local press for his evangelism on behalf of bringing a uranium-fueled power station to the edge of the Red Sea as a solution to his country’s energy thirst. He has a trim mustache and an intense, probing stare and favors business suits over robes. His doctorate is from the University of Oklahoma, and he proudly refers to himself as a Sooner. He had just returned from a shopping vacation in Dubai when I saw him in his office in August 2007.

  Bahran used to be in charge of the grandly named National Atomic Energy Commission, which was responsible mainly for the disposal of old X-ray machines from doctors’ offices. After being promoted to the head of the Ministry of Electricity, he created an immediate stir by announcing that his country was “in talks” with at least four nuclear power companies—two from Canada and two from the United States—to host a thousand-megawatt facility. The Yemeni government would have no control over the plant, furnishing just a strip of coastal land and a special unit of the military to guard it. This would make Yemen, as Bahran phrased it to me, “not a nuclear state, but a state with a nuclear plant inside of it.”

  Such a model has never been tried anywhere, and Yemen seems, at first, like an unlikely place for a pilot. It is a mountain-cleft republic on the southern border of Saudi Arabia, and is often regarded by its neighbors as a throwback—something on the order of the Appalachia of Arabia. Its oil reserves are meager, and poverty is widespread, though it was not always that way. The pastoral tribes who settled here had a monopoly on the trade in spices, especially frankincense and myrrh, up until the second century B.C., and the resulting wealth helped build up the ancient kingdom of Sheba, whose queen is singled out for praise in the Bible and whose economic reach was a source of envy for the Romans. Ptolemy called it Arabia Felix, or “Fortunate Arabia.” The people here came under the influence of the Persians and were one of the first foreign entities to embrace Islam, with many converting in the seventh century when the Prophet, Muhammad, was still living. But tribal warfare and power struggles prevented the reestablishment of a unified kingdom, and large portions of the region were run from afar by a series of Egyptian and Ottoman hegemons and then the British Colonial Office until the late twentieth century, when a civil war split the region for more than two decades. It is still said that a Yemeni’s true patriotism lies not with the state—generally seen as an artificial construct—but with his extended family in the desert settlements, whose succor and protection meant the difference between life and death in the ancient caravan days; it sometimes still does. If fighting broke out between families, one man in the capital told me, “Half of the government’s offices would empty out overnight” as men rushed back to defend their hometowns.

  Yemen’s rough-edged topography of mesas and hermit valleys seems almost designed for localized warfare, with villages atop the well-protected high ground. Many have public basins chipped out of the mudstone, a kind of natural well to store rainfall for siege. Yet there is also a strong tradition of diplomacy and truces, with complex peacekeeping arrangements, and poems to commemorate them—a particular kind of national opera. Kidnapping is regarded as a fair tool of negotiation, and those who are taken captive are invariably fed lavish meals and treated as if they are honored guests. The federal government keeps a grip on power through a complex series of appeasements and tributes to rural family interests. In this sense, the presidency is like a clan that happens to occupy the capital.

  Even in its capital, Yemen seems like a place stuck in antiquity. The core of the lovely city of Sana’a is a district of medieval adobe towers, built in the thick-walled style of Chicago’s Monadnock Building amid a twist of cobblestone streets, where eight-hundred-year-old mosques share the same narrow passag
eways with woodworking shops and the carts of apricot salesmen. The shadows of lamps on stone and the echo of unseen footfalls after dark give the place the aroma of assignation. But a sexual Jim Crow system is in effect, and men who speak with or touch a woman outside their immediate families are asking for trouble. Arranged marriages are the norm: Cousins at some remove usually marry each other in order to keep the clan structure intact. Yemeni women may appear in public only when wearing a black body gown and a niqab—a veil that covers the whole face except for a narrow slit for the eyes. Almost every residential window in the Old City is frosted in order to preserve the privacy of women in their houses.

  The men usually wear a white sheath garment with a curved ceremonial dagger called a jambiya tied around the waist. Though often compared to a phallic symbol, the dagger functions more like a necktie—an ornament meant to signify formality and respect. A big silver coin called a Maria Theresa thaler is still exchanged in some market stalls, though not so much now. First minted in the eighteenth century and bearing the visage of the buxom archduchess of Austria, the coin became the most respected currency in the Arab world. Some merchants here used to accept no other payment for foreign transactions. The coins were legal tender until the early 1960s, which is also when slavery was finally outlawed. (A curiosity: The silver for some of these first thalers circulated in Yemen was mined from St. Joachimsthal, the birthplace of uranium mining.)

  Most of the arable land in the countryside and a huge portion of the national water supply is dedicated to the growing of khat, a small leaf that, when chewed in handfuls, provides a sensation similar to that of downing two quick double espressos. Khat is considered a hazardous drug in most other nations, including the United States, where its import is banned. An estimated 75 percent of the men in Yemen (and an unknown, lesser number of women) make chewing khat a daily affair. The leaf is actually sucked rather than chewed, but the “khat chew” has an exalted place in the Yemeni heart as a social ritual among friends and would-be enemies. By 3 p.m. on most days, the right cheeks of most men are bulging as though they have placed a racquetball in their mouths. The government has made it illegal for public employees to use khat on the job, but the rule is widely ignored.