Lawrence Scott Sheets tells A Smuggler’s Story, explaining how a minor-league hustler got his hands on weapons-grade highly enriched uranium — and describing the local market as of a few months ago:
Somehow, Khintsagov acquired the uranium, and once he did, he needed to find a buyer.One natural hunting ground was South Ossetia, a tiny region of Georgia that borders Russia and is one of several unrecognized, Moscow-supported statelets left over from the Soviet collapse. A strip of land about the size of Long Island and home to no more than 50,000 people, the region is partly controlled by Russian-backed separatists, and partly by the Georgian authorities. It effectively split off from Georgia in 1992, after a year of ethnic bloodletting between Georgians and Ossetians that left about 1,000 people dead and at least another 10,000 homeless.
Today, any pretense South Ossetia had to independence has been abandoned. The Russian flag flies alongside the South Ossetian yellow, white, and red tricolor over the separatist government headquarters, a drab, early- Khrushchev-looking affair in the run-down capital of Tskhinvali. The tree-lined main avenue is still called “Stalin Street” (an ethnic Georgian, Stalin was said to have also had Ossetian roots). Most of the government’s top leaders are Russians with no ties to the region. Russia keeps 1,000 peacekeepers there (500 ethnic Russians and 500 North Ossetians) as part of a 16-year-old agreement; it has handed out passports to the local population and says it will defend the territory if Georgia acts to reassert control.
Faced at independence with economic collapse, Georgia’s corrupt central government had essentially ignored South Ossetia, which became what its inhabitants joked was “the world’s biggest duty-free shop.” Near the administrative border with Georgia, traders even set up an enormous open-air market where people from all over the region came to buy everything from Russian gasoline to pasta, all free of the import duties that they would pay in other parts of Georgia. (In 2004, shortly after President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in Georgia, his government shut down the market by placing a police and customs post nearby.) South Ossetia also became especially popular with car thieves—Ossetian, Georgian, and Russian alike—who ripped off automobiles in Georgia, drove them the short distance to South Ossetia, and sold them to middlemen who then ferried them to Russia. And the U.S. government says counterfeit $100 bills traceable to South Ossetia have surfaced in at least four American cities.
According to Georgian authorities, Khintsagov first tried to find a buyer for his uranium in South Ossetia, which he visited at least five times during 2005. Meanwhile, he was also working with his old smuggling buddies back in Georgia, who had “business partners” in South Ossetia, according to Pavlenishvili. At least one of Khintsagov’s associates had been under Georgian government surveillance for drug dealing. That’s how the Georgian authorities first heard about the nuclear material. They decided to set their trap using a Turkish-speaking Georgian agent, who approached Khintsagov’s Georgian associates with an offer of $1 million for a “test shipment” of 100 grams of bomb-grade uranium—more money than Khintsagov could ever have hoped to get in South Ossetia. By having Khintsagov bring the HEU into Georgia, Interior Minister Ivane Merabishvili told me, the Tbilisi government could also ensure that the materials did not disappear into the “black hole” of South Ossetia.