The trafficking of radioactive material

Twelve thousand nuclear warheads, fifteen hundred tons of one hundred and fifty tons of enriched uranium and plutonium is the legacy left by the Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War. A huge arsenal capable of turning the entire planet into a desert that still risks falling into the hands of terrorists and criminal organizations.

The trafficking of radioactive material from Russia and the former socialist republics is a real threat. This is not the plot of a film in which the fate of the world is threatened by ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines, but rather the feasibility of widespread contamination by the detonation of a "dirty bomb": a deadly mix of nuclear substances traditional and explosive.

An attack "virtually certain" according to Warren Buffett, the billionaire American who has devoted years to the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to the point that the real question is "no longer if, but when will be put in place." The statement, based on an analysis of hundreds of cases of theft or illegal movement of radioactive substances was confirmed recently by some cable traffic released by WikiLeaks, which highlight excerpts of wiretaps and backroom negotiations between secret agents, traffickers and intermediaries. A trade out of control proportions of which mainly concerned the White House.

"We have no idea the extent of the global trafficking of nuclear weapons or radioactive material," said last year, the U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Robert Joseph, "but we know, thanks to intelligence, which has recently increased the demand on the part of terrorist groups. "

In states such as Russia where the safety of military arsenals still rough, thick walls and most of the soldiers on guard, the danger of attack was averted only by the ability of the security services and, last not least, the "lack of determination "terrorists.

Twenty years after the end of the Soviet atomic nightmare has not ceased to fear.

Traffickers and corruption in post-Soviet Russia

Since the early '90s, the chaos and the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall has transformed the former socialist countries, in particular Russia, in a large discount of radioactive material. A business that has been extraordinarily profitable since a new source of income for organized crime infiltrated the highest levels of power thanks all'ossequioso silence of fallen Communist nomeklatura, a great number of officers and agents of the KGB who moved among the rubble of the era of Boris Yeltsin, ready to be recycled as merchants of atomic death.

Rumors about the theft and sale of nuclear weapons in the Russian Federation began to circulate ever more insistently since 1992, when a Russian scientist was arrested in Moscow in possession of three pounds of enriched uranium, used for the manufacture of a atomic bomb. A year later, in the cold Murmansk, almost two pounds of the same substance were intercepted by police after being stolen by two common criminals. But the most impressive episode remains the seizure of the merchant ship in the port of Kaliningrad Russian "Mussorgsky Composer", which took place on 12 December 1993. According to the news agency Interfax reported the ship was carrying westward as many as 200 tons of uranium.

In 1995, a bomb containing cesium-137 was found in a park in the capital, not far from Red Square. But even the recurrence of incidents such as these have deterred from interrupting the Kremlin, in November of the same year, the agreements with the United States on the transparency of military depots. Just the security of nuclear material into the former Soviet republics is still a matter of concern to the international community. Holes in fences, alarms and guards out of little-trained, are just some of the issues raised in the course of inspections carried out in facilities that are often in a state of decay or neglect. As in the case of the central Siewiersku, one of the most important plants for uranium enrichment and plutonium processing of the Russian Federation, which in 2009 was still guarded by soldiers armed with guns without ammunition.

But the number one danger to the security continues to be the conduct of internal staff to nuclear facilities. Scientists and engineers with low wages and thus easily corruptible.

To facilitate trafficking from the former USSR then there is the incredible lack of accurate inventories of dangerous substances held. Sufficient quantities to produce 85,500 new nuclear warheads according to the institute SIPRI, Stockholm; "Only" 40,000 in the opinion of the President of the United States Barack Obama. However, these are rough estimates, because contrary to what happens in the inventories of common civil warehouses, radioactive materials are often listed incorrectly or even not cataloged. In such conditions the removal of a few kilograms of uranium or plutonium could even go unnoticed. Eventuality that puts chills, but that may have already materialized.

The data provided by the Russian Interior Ministry speak of more than 300 episodes of trade of radioactive substances in the years between 1993 and 2005., 30% of them relates to the period 1993-1995, the most critical moment in the history of the new Russia which would have been smuggled weapons of all kinds.

In this regard, in 1997, General Alexander Lebed, one of the men symbol of the Red Army, he confided to the magazine Sixty Minutes that Russia would "lost some of its miniaturized nuclear weapons arsenals." A circumstance flatly denied by the Kremlin, which at that time had come to say that he had never produced such weapons.

In return, in 2008, arrived in Washington on the sale of the photos baffling plates of uranium to 25 pounds. Of the former Russian generals were quietly trading, we do not know to whom, by an anonymous broker name Orlando.

Stories of lethal contamination

The illegal movement of nuclear material covers not only what they need to produce weapons, but also slightly radioactive substance that can be used as instruments of death implacable. In 1993, the Russian mafia decided to use a device able to diffuse gamma rays to execute a businessman in Moscow. The contamination occurred in the office of man without his knowledge causing death within a few months.

In a similar way Cepov Roman died in 2004, responsible for the security of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The doctors diagnosed a disease caused by a radioactive substance ingested during feeding.

Even Lece Islamov, Chechen guerrilla, fell ill after a snack with tea and canapes offered to him in prison by the Russian secret services. Immediately he began to feel sick: the fever went up, his skin became inflamed and began to fall into his hair. He died in a few days.

Finally in 2006 the world public opinion was shocked by the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former agent of the Russian secret service and dissident. The man was contaminated at a sushi bar in London with a small dose of a dangerous radioactive isotope, polonium-210. Traces of the substance were found in the following days even on a British Airways plane and made ​​it necessary to control about 33,000 passengers.

Although in the absence of certain legal truth, it is widely believed that Litvinenko was killed because of his dissent to the Russian government. Before his death, the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin publicly accused the president of having sentenced to death: "You have shown to be barbaric and ruthless as claimed your most hostile critics."

Caucasus: the preferred route of nuclear garbage

The atomic smuggling often follows the paths already traced from drug trafficking and weapons. It is the Caucasus the preferred route to Europe and the rest of the world: twenty-one episodes of illicit trafficking of radioactive material recorded from 1991 to present.

Over the past decade the focus has increased beyond the levels of alarm, especially in Georgia, where territories are out of control. Traffickers can easily evade controls by passing the hazardous substances through the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, or across the border in the Russian autonomous republic of North Ossetia.

In 2003 Tbilisi was arrested a smuggler in possession of 173 grams of enriched uranium hidden in a box of tea. The goods had been expected for a turkish intermediary before being sold to a buyer Muslim never identified. Three years later another attempt was foiled by a citizen of North Ossetia to sell 100 grams of uranium for one million Euros. The material would presumably have been stolen by the transformation of Novosibirsk, Russia, without which no one had reported her missing.

Nuclear material comes and goes from the Georgian border in 2008. A car carrying three Armenians manage to cross the border crossing at Sadakhlo, despite the alarm is tripped radiation. The car was stopped the next day, while returning to Armenia, but the three men were immediately released. The reason: "despite the vehicle is contaminated by cesium-137, is now on board there is nothing left."

In 2009, the U.S. government decides to provide the Georgian police tens of meters of radioactivity is portable and immediately discovered another hidden underground cesium-137 in an area not far from Kutaisi. Laconic response of U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, informed of what happened: "They were not prepared for a timely intervention and have not conducted surveys to find out who it belonged to that substance."

The confirmation that the Caucasus is in the crosshairs of international terrorism arrives in April of 2010, when Georgian President Saakashvili himself announced during a summit held in Washington had foiled a plan to arm a nuclear warhead. The effluent of an Islamic group would have shown interest in purchasing a large quantity of uranium.

Transnistria, a Tortuga at the gates of Europe

The alarm for the existence of a separatist region used as a basis by the traffickers of nuclear material interesting Moldova. The dock is Transnistria, Moldova small strip of land, the site of one of the largest arsenals of the Soviet Union. A ghost of a communist republic not recognized by any state of the world, but for over twenty years is in fact independent of the government in Chisinau.

Transnistria is a kind of Tortuga two steps from the borders of Europe in which trades everything. From here would disappear in 2009, some batteries of rockets with warheads Alazan radioactive isotopes deployed for years in defense of the airport in the city of Tiraspol. Missiles designed to spread chemicals in the air, converted after the end of the Cold War in inaccurate and dangerous radioactive bullets. Their existence in Transnistria was disclosed by The Times in 2005 and had pushed the Pentagon to monitor their location via satellite. In this way it was discovered that four years later there were ten less.

Where is finite uranium and cesium content in the heads of those missiles is still a mystery, but according to British journalist Robert Boyes items that always associate the small breakaway republic to the most skullduggery of radioactive material could be based. To confirm there would be almost two kilograms of uranium-238 found in a garage on the outskirts of the capital of Moldova in 2010. Boyes has no doubts about their provenance: the nuclear Tortuga pirates.

About nine million euro estimated proceeds from the sale of the substance on the black market, with the strong suspicion that the deal was aimed at the manufacture of a dirty bomb for terrorist purposes.

In August of 2011 repeats an episode very similar. Moldovan police operation carried out under cover exposes another band of nuclear smugglers. This time the successful completion of the sale by an anonymous Muslim African country is touched by a whisker.

Italy: Mafia crossroads of the atom

In Italy, the traces of the apocalypse merchants appear shortly after the final descent of the red flag from the flagpole of the Kremlin. Some facts, never completely clarified, the main speakers were the unsuspecting intermediaries and fringe groups of the secret services of the East. Due to the strategic location of our country, even the mafia is involved from the beginning to the business of the atom. A very lucrative market and relatively simple, used to clean dirty money with foreign transactions of foreign currency, gold and diamonds. Just like in the 50s, when the Cosa Nostra passed from cigarette smuggling to drug trafficking, also trade in nuclear materials has been for the men of honor, a real turning point. A fast transformation began in 1991 with the first rumors about the Italian presence in the territory of tactical warheads with a range of between thirty and sixty miles, for sale at a price of twenty million dollars. The attention of the intelligence services focused since then on the rapacity of organized crime and the alleged existence of a mysterious international contact with the nations involved in the Soviet atomic garbage: Libya, the Middle East and Iraq.

The boundary between the fanciful plot of a spy story and the reality was finally crossed in October of 1991 when the office of the Roman Empire Sweet, Judge Como, two men presented themselves in possession of four grams of plutonium. They were Karl Friederich Federer, a Swiss citizen, and the Italian secret service agent who convinced him to build up before delivering the substance to an elusive Dr. Montini. It was just a glimpse of the 30 pounds of uranium and plutonium that Federer 10 turned out to be kept in a hiding place in Switzerland, ready to be traded through a network of over 200 ghost companies.

It was the beginning of an operation called "Uranium proletarian" November 1, 1991 that led to the arrest of six people and the seizure of the entire consignment of uranium in Zurich.

"It was what the critical step," Dolce told La Stampa, "until that moment we had only speculate. But the seizure of Zurich showed that the traffic was real. "Investigators Swiss instead showed themselves skeptical and evaluated the case as moot, given the low radioactivity of uranium found that made it unusable for military purposes. Subsequently, the investigation of Judge Sweet on nuclear trafficking former USSR underwent a stop suddenly, when the prosecutor Como came under investigation for allegedly having fake some findings of explosives and weapons in order to get publicity; at first instance sentenced to three years and eight months in prison, Romano Dolce was later acquitted on appeal in 2004 and then reinstated by the Supreme Council of Magistracy.
In January 1993, another city in Lombardy it turns suddenly in the middle of a traffic of nuclear materials. After seven months of investigation in Brescia breaks out the "plutonium connection". They were arrested two citizens from Brescia above all suspicion and a former counterintelligence agent in Bulgaria. The investigators hypothesize the existence of a Russia-Bulgaria-Italy axis and the possibility that there is behind the smuggling Cosa Nostra. Take the quest of 3.2 grams of plutonium destined for the Middle East that would be contained in a mustard-colored box "as big as a pack of Alka Seltzer." Within a species of metal screw of about 4 cm surmounted by a disk coated with enamel would serve to prevent the contamination of carriers, but that has never been found.
In 1994, a statement shockdel Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Enzo Tarantino suggested that the humanitarian flights departed from Chernobyl to bring in Italian children suffering from radiation could be served to smuggle junk Atomic currency and narcotics. As a result, the operation "Cheque Cheque to" conduct by the prosecutor in Torre Annunziata revealed the existence of an arms trafficking, radioactive material, gold and bonds. Among the suspects also the leader of the Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovski, accused of smuggling red mercury, osmium and plutonium from Belarus.
In 2005, Mario Scaramella, a consultant to the parliamentary committee Mitrokin, denounced the presence of a briefcase in Rimini with ten pounds of uranium. But four people were arrested in the progress of the investigation emerged discordant elements that did not convince the judges. Scaramella is currently on trial on charges of having deliberately mounted the case for accreditation as a person informed of the facts relating to trafficking from the former Soviet Union. A story yet to be clarified.
And the scion said, "Stop, or will be the end for all"

Rimini, August 1992. The police carried out a search in an ultra-luxury hotel: what should have been a normal drug control hides a surprise unthinkable. In the bedroom of Louis Baratiri, salesman Abruzzo good family, there is a briefcase that attracts the attention of men of the Force. Just a policeman tries to open it, the boy, visibly worried, ordering him not to do it, "Stop, or will be the end for all, 'screams. Inside the briefcase, protected by a lead container, there are about twenty grams of uranium-235. But even more surprising is the discovery of the young defensive line. "I am an agent provocateur of the Italian Military Intelligence Service, 'says investigators, also claiming to be on a mission to expose international traffickers of fossil material. It is believed to buyers Libya, Iraq or the Middle East, but in reality quell'uranio from the East would have to be handed over to the Dr. Campari, which turns out to be the false name of Aldo Anghessa: known character involved in multiple events related to traffic weapons, which in turn was called an agent provocateur. It would have been right to warn him of the danger, the prosecutor in Rimini, believing that he had to deal with a merchant of radioactive substances. The result is a mess worthy of a farce in which the only ones to be exposed are the real or alleged secret agents. The case of '"uranium atomic bomb a few meters away from the most crowded beach in Europe' ends in this way in the newspapers. "But really," asks Pier Luigi Martelli Corriere della Sera "you can put together a trade agent in Giulianova, self-styled secret agent, the beach of Rimini, the KGB and the atomic bomb?" Meanwhile arrive at the highest levels of Rimini 'intelligence and Baratiri, having spent only one night in prison, is released from prison. In March 1994, will be sentenced to a fine of 300,000 lire for failing to register the ownership of uranium in the appropriate registers.
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