dirty bombs - an terrifying read!

What a fascinating (and terrifying ) read!

Dirty-bomb' warheads lost
Ex-Soviet republic stored missing rockets
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post

TIRASPOL, Moldova - In the ethnic conflicts that surrounded the collapse of the Soviet Union, fighters in several countries seized upon an unlikely new weapon: a small, thin rocket known as the Alazan. Originally built for weather experiments, the Alazan was transformed into a terror weapon, packed with explosives and lobbed into cities. Military records show that at least 38 Alazan warheads were modified to carry radioactive material, effectively creating the world's first surface-to-surface "dirty bomb."
Now, according to experts and officials, the warheads have disappeared.

The last known repository was in a tiny separatist enclave, Transdniester, that broke away from Moldova 12 years ago. The Transdniester Moldovan Republic is a sliver of land no bigger than Rhode Island located along Moldova's eastern border with Ukraine. Its government is recognized by no other nation. But its weapons stocks - new, used and modified - have attracted the attention of black-market arms dealers worldwide. And they're for sale, according to U.S. and Moldovan officials and weapons experts.

When the Soviet army withdrew from this corner of Eastern Europe, the weapons were deposited into an arsenal of stupefying proportions. In fortified bunkers are stored 50,000 tons of aging artillery shells, mines and rockets, enough to fill 2,500 boxcars.

Conventional arms originating in Transdniester have been turning up for years in conflict zones from the Caucasus to Central Africa, evidence of what U.S. officials describe as an invisible pipeline for smuggled goods that runs through Tiraspol to the Black Sea and beyond. Now, governments and terrorism experts fear that the same pipeline is carrying non- conventional weapons such as the radioactive Alazan and that terrorists are starting to tap in.

"For terrorists, this is the best market you could imagine: cheap, efficient and forgotten by the whole world," said Vladimir Orlov, founding director of the Center for Policy Studies in Moscow, a group that studies proliferation issues.

Why the Alazan warheads were made is unknown. The urgent question - where are they now? - is a matter of grave concern to terrorism and non-proliferation experts who know the damage such devices could do. A dirty bomb is not a nuclear device but a weapon that uses conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials, which could cause widespread disruption and expose people to dangerous radiation.

Unlike other kinds of dirty bombs, this one would come with its own delivery system, and a 10-mile range. A number of terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, have sought to build or buy one.

In interviews with U.S. and Moldovan government officials knowledgeable about Transdniester's weapons, several said they are familiar with the reports of radioactive Alazans, but could neither verify or dispute the existence of such devices.

Oazu Nantoi, a former Moldovan government official and political analyst, sought in 2001 to trace the Alazans with radiological warheads, using contacts in Moldova and Transdniester. He said that the last known location of the weapons was a military airfield north of Tiraspol, but what happened to them after the 1990s remains a mystery.

"They are not Scuds, but clearly, the only application for these rockets is a military one," said Nantoi. "Our fear is someone, somewhere, will turn these rockets into dirty bombs."

While it has no nuclear bombs of its own, Transdniester is regarded by experts as a prime shopping ground for outlaw groups for weapons of every type. It is the embodiment of the gray zone, where failed states, porous borders and weak law enforcement allow the buying and selling of instruments of terror.

Transdniester possesses many of the trappings of statehood, including an army and border guards who demand visas and special entrance fees from visitors. But according to Western diplomats based in the region, these procedures are window dressing used to mask the activities of a small clique that runs the country by its own rules.

Much of the enclave's trade is controlled by a single company, Sheriff, which is owned by the son of the Transdniester's president, Igor Smirnov. Vladimir Smirnov also heads the Transdniester Customs Service, which oversees a river of goods flowing in and out of the country. The cargoes move through the Tiraspol airport; by truck overland to Ukraine or Moldova; and on a rail-to-ship line that connects the capital to the Black Sea port of Odessa. The Transdniester interior minister, Maj. Gen. Vadim Shevtsov, is a former Soviet KGB agent wanted by Interpol for a murderous attack on pro-independence Latvians in 1991.

Organized crime figures and reputed terrorists flit in and out of the region, according to law enforcement and government officials in Moldova, and U.S. officials. Their cargoes are often disguised. "This is one of the places where the buyers connect with the sellers," said William C. Potter, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. "It's one-stop shopping for weapons and all kinds of other illicit goods. Very possibly, that includes the materials for weapons of mass destruction."

Time warp

The enormous Soviet-style banners stretched across intersections in downtown Tiraspol bid visitors welcome to "The People's Pride: The Transdniester Moldovan Republic." The city is locked in a Brezhnev-era time warp. Nearly every corner bears a reminder of the regime's stubborn embrace of old-school Soviet communism: a statue of Lenin, a hammer-and-sickle banner, a street named for Karl Marx.

A large portion of the population is made up of Russian-speaking pensioners, many of them Soviet military retirees who served in the area and chose to stay because of the relatively mild climate. Like the elderly elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, the retirees are nostalgic for a simpler, more predictable time when the socialist state took care of all their needs.

North of Tiraspol, an industrial center straddles the main rail line into town. Steam blasts from a complex of gray buildings housing the city's Elektromash works, a leading factory that describes itself officially as a producer of electrical engines. According to Moldovan and Western intelligence officials, the factory's product line includes assault rifles and machine pistols, a centerpiece of Transdniester's most profitable industry: weapons.

Once the industrial heartland of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, Transdniester has a long history as a production center for arms and weapons, including machine guns and rockets.

Today, the tradition continues in at least six sprawling factories in the capital and the cities of Tighina and Rybnitsa, according to Ceslav Ciobanu, a former Moldovan ambassador to the United States and now a senior research scholar for James Madison University's William R. Nelson Institute.

Among the weapons in production are Grad and Duga multiple-rocket launchers, antitank mines, rocket-propelled grenades and multiple lines of small arms, Ciobanu said.

It's an impressive output for a country whose army, the Dniester Republican Guard, numbers only 5,000. But hardly any of the weapons are manufactured for local use, according to Ciobanu, who described the arms trade in a Nelson Institute white paper released in June. "Production of armaments and illegal weapons traffic constitutes the most important factor of the economic and military policy of the Tiraspol administration and the biggest source of revenues for its corrupt elites," Ciobanu said.

The same powerful troika that dominates Transdniester's political and economic life controls the production of weapons as well as exports abroad, Ciobanu said: "Father, Son and Sheriff."

It's a view shared by Western officials based in the region, as well as law-enforcement and weapons experts abroad. Several Moldova-based diplomats, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed there is an eastern flow of arms from Tiraspol to Odessa, the Ukrainian port on the Black Sea. They also described seizures of Transdniester-made weapons in conflicts zones outside the enclave.

Last year, one such cache of pistols and other small arms was seized in the basement of the home of one of the leaders of the separatist Gagauz movement. The Gagauz are a tiny Turkik-speaking minority in southern Moldova. The weapons turned out to be poorly made counterfeits of American weapons. "The guns were stamped 'U.S. Army,' but the brand names were misspelled," said one diplomatic source familiar with the case. Transdniester weapons exports also have been traced to the breakaway Abkhazia region, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and to war zones in the Congo and Ivory Coast, according to Moldovan officials and independent weapons experts.

But the largest weapons stockpile in Transdniester is located at a massive arsenal near the northern town of Kolbasna. Originally a supply depot for Red Army forces in the Black Sea region, the Kolbasna arsenal swelled in the early 1990s as troops departing newly independent Eastern European states deposited weapons and ammunition there. The arsenal currently holds an estimated 50,000 tons of munitions of all kinds, including large numbers of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.

Moldova has pressed Russia to remove the munitions and the 2,800 Russian troops who guard them. But over the years, both Russia and Transdniester have used a variety of excuses to block or delay their departure. The arsenal, which is 600 miles from the Russian border, is one of the main sticking points in ongoing negotiations aimed at reconciling Moldova and its former province, which fought a short, bloody civil war that ended in 1992. Transdniester has opposed removing the stockpile, partly because it hopes to receive payment for the weapons, and also because the Russian presence has helped guarantee Transdniester's survival as an autonomous region.

Moldova does not formally recognize that an independent Transdniester exists. Thus, the largest border between them - and the one most likely to be used for weapons-trafficking - is unprotected. On the Moldovan side, it has no checkpoints, no detectors and no guards.

Hundreds of westbound trucks and cars cross into Moldova each day along the main Tiraspol-Chisinau highway, just as freely as the trains heading east along the rails to Odessa. Moldovan officials fret privately about the smuggled goods they don't catch. "Transdniester is like a cancer, and there's nothing we can do about it," said one senior Moldovan official who declined to be identified for fear he would lose his job. "We're battling our own corruption, and out there is a 400-kilometer border over which we have no control.

"Trucks cross the border every day, slip into one of the smaller roads and disappear," the official continued. "And I'm 100 percent sure of this: Some of those trucks are carrying weapons."

Western and Moldovan officials point to numerous cases in which seized weapons were traced back to Kolbasna. In one well-documented case in 1999, a truck halted by Moldovan police on the Transdniester border was discovered to contain Russian-made shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, along with plastic explosives and detonators. Driving the truck were several members of Transdniester's army, along with Lt. Col. Vladimir Nemkoff, a deputy commander of Russian peacekeeping troops in the enclave.

On the same day, Nemkoff's son, an officer in Transdniester's Ministry of Security, was arrested while driving a vehicle that contained three Soviet-made Igla surface-to-air rockets, similar to the U.S.-made Stinger missile..

Nemkoff was convicted of weapons-trafficking in a trial in Moldova, but later he was pardoned and allowed to return to Transdniester. Within days, he regained his old job as a Russian peacekeeper.

Such cases suggest the Kolbasna arsenal is a "black hole" where dangerous weapons can be obtained, if the price is right, said Iurie Rosca, leader of the Christian Democratic People's Party, a leading pro-Western opposition faction in Moldova.

"It's well known to us: If you need a Stinger and you have the money, you can get one," Rosca said. "If it's a Kalashnikov you want, you can get one of those, too."

Corrupted purpose

The most unusual weapon in Transdniester's arsenal was never meant to be a weapon at all. The Alazan, a slender, three-foot-long rocket, was part of a broader, rather extravagant Soviet experiment in weather control. Soviet scientists believed that hail could be suppressed by firing rockets into approaching storm clouds. The idea is vaguely similar to cloud-seeding as practiced in the United States. American scientists familiar with the anti-hail program say the results are highly dubious, at best.

When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, scores of batteries of tube-fired Alazans were left throughout the Soviet bloc, including Eastern Europe. As ethnic clashes erupted in the newly independent former Soviet republics, the Alazan and a slightly larger rocket called the Alan, were reactivated for war.

Potter documented 50 cases in which the rockets were used in clashes, by both guerrilla fighters and government forces. In most cases, Alazans were fired indiscriminately at civilian targets, often crowded urban centers. They were used by Azerbaijan forces in the war with Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, and used by separatists in South Ossetia in clashes with Georgian troops.

"Some of the reports indicated that the Alazan, which is notoriously inaccurate as a surface-to-surface missile, was used as a psychological or terror weapon," Potter said.

Since Soviet times, at least three Alazan batteries were known to exist in the Transdniester region, as documented by military inventories of the time. In 1992, there was a confirmed case of attempted smuggling of Alazans for use as weapons. On May 24 of that year, two Moldovan police were killed when they tried to stop delivery of Alazan rockets to ethnic Gagauz militants, according to local press accounts of the slaying. Moldovan officials believe the source of the rockets was Transdniester.

But the existence of "radiological warheads" for the Alazan was unknown until two years ago, when military documents describing them were obtained by the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group in Chisinau, the Moldovan capital.

The documents, which were provided to The Washington Post, are a series of official letters written in 1994 by a Transdniester civil defense commander, Col. V. Kireev, who apparently became concerned about radiation given off by the rockets. One document described an inventory of 38 "isotopic radioactive warheads of missiles of the Alazan type," including 24 that were attached to rocket. In the two other documents, the commander requested technical help in dealing with radiation exposure related to storage of the warheads. He complained that uniforms of soldiers working with the warheads were so contaminated that they had to be "destroyed by burning and burying."

"I propose to categorically ban all work with the missile . . . and to label it as a radioactive danger," the commander, Kireev, wrote on Oct. 24, 1994.