trafficking

When South African police raided the warehouse of a company called Tradefin Engineering, a manufacturer of pipes and valves, in September 2004, they discovered stacks of shipping containers eleven stories high loaded with parts marked for reassembly in Libya, that would have given the Libyans the ability to process enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs. Tradefin had become part of a vast, worldwide network supplying parts for the manufacture of nuclear weapons under the direction of A.Q. Khan, the former architect of Pakistan's nuclear program.

But the three men running the Tradefin operation were not new to the nuclear black market. All three had previously worked with the South African government obtaining, through underground trafficking networks, critical technology for South Africa's own top-secret nuclear weapons program in the mid 1980s.

South Africa's nuclear bomb program was conducted out of a top-secret facility called Kentron Circle, located in the broad savannah about thirty miles from Pretoria. Its still there, a conical concrete bunker, now empty, hidden in the hills about a ten-minute drive off the main road leading to Botswana. Inside, a team of twenty scientists, working in secrecy, ultimately succeeded in building six nuclear bombs, working from designs and technology smuggled in from illicit dealers around the world. At the time, South Africa's apartheid government was operating under severe international sanctions.

"We would tell them what we needed, and two or three weeks later it arrived," recalls Andre Buys, who was one of those scientists. Buys, now a Physics professor at Pretoria University, has since become active in global non-proliferation efforts. "[When] such equipment arrived, I'd say 'thanks'. I didn't ask how ask how it got there … Sanctions busting was a big business back then." Sanctions-busting brought everything from oil to consumer goods into South Africa's black market. The most sensitive and secret component of that illicit trade were the black market connections supplying the material and know-how for South Africa’s nuclear weapons program.

Among those sanctions-busters were three business-savvy engineers who would later surface as key players in the A.Q. Khan network: Gerhard Wisser, organizer of the Tradefin deal; Daniel Geiges, his chief engineer; and Johan Meyer, the owner of Tradefin.

In the 1980's Wisser's firm, Krisch Engineering, was a "key supplier of equipment" to the South African Atomic Energy Corporation, according to Wisser's plea agreement filed with South African prosecutors last year. The energy corporation was run by the apartheid government of the time and was one of the main companies responsible for the development of the secret nuclear weapons program at Kentron Circle—the place where Buys helped to build South Africa's nuclear bombs.

Daniel Geiges, Wisser's aide-de-camp and chief engineer, began working for him in 1981 and would later manage the Libyan project at Tradefin. They worked together to import technology to the South African nuclear program in defiance of international sanctions. While at the AEC, Wisser met the man who would some two decades later nickname their joint nuclear enterprise, "the beast." Johan Meyer was working for the South African Uranium Corporation—the company responsible for mining and processing the uranium that would be used in the nuclear weapons being assembled at Kentron Circle.

Wisser is German and Geiges is Swiss; both had become residents of South Africa, which at the time had what amounted to an open door policy for white immigrants, no questions asked. Meyer is a native South African afrikaneer.

Their trafficking was not an exclusively one-way enterprise. Wisser and Geiges were also in the business of exporting South Africa's own sensitive nuclear technology. And one of their key overseas clients was AQ Khan in Pakistan. Those dealings are laid out in the indictment of Daniel Geiges. It was all perfectly legal: South Africa's government-owned arms company made a profit too.

Over some twenty years, Wisser, Geiges, and Meyer were participants in a global underground network that helped facilitate some of the most egregious violations of non-proliferation laws in history. They enabled not only South Africa to build its bombs, but also helped AQ Khan himself develop Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

By 1989, South Africa began its historic revolution. Nelson Mandela was freed from twenty-seven years in prison, and by 1993 was preparing to take office as the country's first democratically elected president. Shortly before Mandela was inaugurated, then-President FW deKlerk informed the IAEA that the country had "decommissioned" its nuclear weapons. This was unprecedented; South Africa was the first country to have built, and then destroyed, a nuclear arsenal.

But this epic change did not eliminate the trafficking networks that had evolved over the many years of South Africa's international isolation. Men like Wisser, Geiges, and Meyer were left without the lucrative black market deals that had made them wealthy. By the end of the century, the three were working together once again, manufacturing and exporting parts for A.Q. Khan's global nuclear weapons manufacturing scheme. Wisser and Geiges were paid $1.5 million for their work on behalf of A.Q. Khan, with checks drawn on Libyan, Pakistani and Middle Eastern banks; another $1 million was paid to Tradefin's owner, Johan Meyer.

Oleg Khintsagov left his apartment in southern Russia in February 2006 with 80 grams of highly enriched uranium stuffed in his pocket and a plan to make a million dollars. After slipping past border guards in neighboring Georgia, he traveled to the capital, Tbilisi, to meet a buyer who claimed he was from "a serious Muslim organization." If the buyer was satisfied with the bomb-grade quality of this small sample, Khintsagov promised up to three more kilograms.

The "serious Muslim organization," however, turned out to be a Georgian government agent: While casting about for a buyer on previous trips, Khintsagov had become the target of an elaborate sting operation that involved the FBI, the US Department of Energy and police in the Republic of Georgia. He was arrested, tried in secret and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.

The story of Oleg Khintsagov encapsulates the threat from smugglers secreting nuclear material across the porous borders of the former Soviet Union. This type of nuclear smuggling is a staple of Hollywood films and is often cited as the most dangerous source of nuclear proliferation.

But the Khintsagov case illustrates something else: that nearly all reported smuggling cases of fissile material involve low-level figures and only minute amounts of radioactive material—nowhere close to enough fuel to make a bomb.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Moscow lost direct control over a vast nuclear weapons infrastructure. In 1992, in response to the perceived threat from this material getting into the wrong hands, the International Atomic Energy Agency created the Illicit Trafficking Database to track incidents of nuclear smuggling.

Today, when one imagines the threat posed by nuclear smuggling, it is the cases in this database—many of them widely reported by the press—on which those fears are based. Khintsagov was one of the most recent* smuggling incidents reported on the database. We conducted a review of what those cases tell us about the threat from smuggled plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the essential ingredients of a nuclear bomb. Our review suggests that the cumulative total of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium seized by law enforcement since 1992 is not enough to manufacture one bomb.

Of 18 cases listed on the database, only 13 actually involved smuggling. The remainder were: two cases of missing material from nuclear power facilities, in Japan and New Jersey; radioactive material, including highly enriched uranium, stored in a bank vault in Lithuania; and two cases from Germany, one involving scrap metal contaminated with trace amounts of uranium and the other an apparently accidental theft of a vial containing .001 gram of plutonium.

Of the 13 smuggling incidents, none of the individuals arrested have been linked to a larger terrorist or rogue state smuggling network, according to William Potter, one of the leading experts on the status of the former Soviet nuclear facilities and director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies .

The bulk of cases—9 out of 13—occurred in the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, between 1992 and 1995. No incidents were reported to the IAEA between 1996 and 1998. Since 1999, reports have been less frequent and involved smaller quantities of fissile material than previously.

"There's been a lull in nuclear smuggling activity," says Potter. "The question that is important to address is: Is this apparent lull a function of more effective security or simply the rise of more clever nuclear smugglers, and decisions by governments not to report incidents to the IAEA?"

Potter and other experts we consulted identified additional common characteristics of those cases on the IAEA list:

Most of the uranium seized has not been enriched enough for use in weapons. Only three cases involved uranium enriched to more than 90 percent, the critical level for use in a nuclear weapon. Four other cases involved tiny amounts of plutonium, a fissionable material that results from the enrichment of uranium, and also has either energy or military application.

Since 1992, seizures by law enforcement amount to 3.3 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium and 370 grams of plutonium—which cumulatively are not enough to manufacture one bomb. That requires at minimum some 25 kilograms of uranium enriched to 90 percent or eight kilograms of plutonium, according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Arrests in at least five, or nearly 40 percent, of the incidents were made as the result of sting operations by Georgian, Russian, German and U.S. law enforcement--creating what Rensellaer Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, calls "an artificial market for nuclear material."

All experts concede that what we don't know, of course, is how many smugglers have evaded interception. As Lee, who has been studying the nuclear and narcotics black markets for more than 20 years, puts it: "By definition, successful transactions are not going to come to light. They're going to remain in the shadows. What we don't know, what we don't see, is what worries me most."

* The only more recent case occurred in March 2007, when a steel tube in Germany—part of a load of scrap metal—was discovered to contain a trace amount of highly enriched uranium.