Isegoria

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.

Gary Brecher, the ever-cynical War Nerd, explains that South Ossetia is The War of [His] Dreams:

What’s happening to Georgia here is like the teeny-tiny version of Germany in the twentieth century: overplay your hand and you lose everything. So if you’re a Georgian nationalist, this war is a tragedy; if you’re a Russian or Ossetian nationalist, it’s a triumph, a victory for justice, whatever. To the rest of us, it’s just kind of fun to watch. And damn, this one has been a LOT of fun! The videos that came out of it! You know, [digital video] is the best thing to happen to war in a long time. All the fun, none of the screaming agony — it’s war as Diet Coke.

See, this is the war that I used to see in the paintings commissioned by Defense contractors in Aviation Week and AFJ: a war between two conventional armies, both using air forces and armored columns, in pine-forested terrain. That was what those pictures showed every time, with a highlighted closeup of the weapon they were selling homing in on a Warsaw Pact convoy coming through a German pine forest. Of course, a real NATO/Warsaw Pact war would never, ever have happened that way. It would have gone nuclear in an hour or less, which both sides knew, which is why it never happened. So all that beautiful weaponry was kind of a farce, if it was only going to be used in the Fulda Gap. But damn, God is good, because here it all is, in the same kind of terrain, all your favorite old images: Russian-made tanks burning, a Soviet-model fighter-bomber falling from the sky in pieces, troops in Russian camo fighting other troops, also in Russian camo, in a skirmish by some dilapidated country shack.

No racial overtones to get bummed out by — everybody on both sides is white! And white from places you don’t know or care about!

Somehow I missed the recent revelation that cooking celebrity Julia Child served in the OSS, the WWII precursor to our modern CIA:

She took the Civil Service Exam, applied to the Waves (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Services) and the WAC (Women’s Army Corps). She was, at 6-foot-2, however, apparently considered too tall for the service. Nonetheless, she moved to Washington, where, she told a friend, “the action” was. “The war was the change in my life,” she wrote.

First as senior typist in the Office of War Information (August 1942), then as junior research assistant in the office of OSS Director “Wild” Bill Donovan, Julia joined America’s novice intelligence team: the Ivy Leaguers, the Martini-drinking best and brightest, many of whose names have only recently been revealed, including Allen Dulles, later head of the CIA, and future Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg. The OSS members were disparaged as fly-by-nighters, “Oh So Social” or “Oh Such Snobs.”

Julia “rose through the ranks” from senior clerk to administrative assistant, organizing a large office. She lived in the Brighton Hotel, cooked (badly) on a hot plate that splattered the wallpaper with chicken fat, she admitted.

When she heard in 1943 that the OSS wanted volunteers for service in India, she applied; bored and in search of adventure, she was “free, white, and thirty-one,” ready and eager to go.

And it was in Asia, not France — especially on assignment in China and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) — that the palate of the star of the future “French Chef” TV series would first be awakened, weaned from the golden age of canned, frozen and other processed food, the world of Pasadena home cooking.

And it was Asia that changed her life, for it was there, in May 1944, in Kandy (Ceylon) that Julia McWilliams met Paul Child, 10 years her senior, a connoisseur of wine, women and cuisine, who became her lover, mentor and initiator into those fine tastes available even in war-torn China and Ceylon.

The move to HQ in the Shangri-La setting of Kandy had a serious purpose: guerrilla warfare against the Japanese. Though Julia knew more of golf clubs than international cables and spies, she had high security clearance to file and process classified dispatches for the SEAC (South East Asia Command) under Lord Mountbatten.

While she came to hate the routine of office work, Julia thrilled at the secrets and at the proximity of danger and of her new-found colleague, Paul Child, who worked in graphics and photography designing war rooms. With Paul she came to share passion, but also a passion for the Rijstafel curry table with “as many condiments as the human imagination can devise.” She brought to the table her keen sense of humor and her propensity for practical jokes.

After 10 months in Kandy, Julia flew, via Calcutta, to Kunming, China, to set up and run the OSS Registry. It was March 1945 (Germany was to surrender in May), and Asia was now the focus of the war.

Paul designed Gen. Albert Wedemeyer’s China War Room, and Julia, with a staff of 10 assistants, opened, numbered and directed all forms, devising new systems for code names and filing secret papers. The conflict between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong was already in the offing, and Americans were divided in their loyalties.

Meanwhile, Chinese cuisine beckoned: “American food in China was terrible; we thought it was cooked by grease monkeys. The Chinese food was wonderful, and we ate out as often as we could. That is when I became interested in food. I just loved Chinese food.”

More than that, her sophisticated Ivy League colleagues talked so much about the food they ate. Julia, Paul would later say, was always hungry: “She’s a wolf by nature.”

The war against Japan ended in August 1945; Julia’s career in espionage, almost as soon. For a brief two years Julia became the consummate Georgetown housewife with a newly jobless husband, Paul, to feed, depleting his OSS savings and her family inheritance. Julia studied “The Joy of Cooking.” Eager to please her new husband, she struggled with recipes, relying on Paul’s savvy.

A move to France, where Paul joined the U.S. Information Agency, came none too soon in October 1948.

On Nov. 3 of that year, Julia was to “master the joy of devouring French cooking,” having her personal gastronomic epiphany when she sat down to a feast of oysters, sole meunière, Pouilly-Fuissé and tarte tatin at Restaurant La Couronne on the Place du Vieux-Marché in Rouen. “The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me. I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out.”

As kids, we could only dream of Rubber Band Machine Guns. Now they’re for sale — for $400. I guess that’s equally inaccessible. True geeks can buy the plans for less and build their own:

The rubber band machine gun uses a similar mechanism to the famous Gatling Gun of the old west. It stands 40 inches tall and 44 inches from the handle to the tip of the barrels. The turret effortlessly spins a full 360 degrees and tilts from 45 degrees up to 22 degrees down so you can easily keep a moving target in your sights, no matter how they run. We keep one loaded in the office at all times to defend against hostile takeover attempts and pushy vendors.