On a cold spring night this year, two Armenian acquaintances took a trip together on the train that grinds its way through the Caucasus from Yerevan to Tbilisi.
The night train is always full of traders trying to make a living out of the slim margins between buying goods on Georgia’s Black Sea coast and selling them back home. But this particular pair were hoping for something better. Both Hrant Ohanyan, 59, a semi-retired physicist in poor health, and Sumbat Tonoyan, four years older, a ruined businessmen who had gambled away his fortune, were facing old age on the brink of poverty.
However, they hoped they were about to turn fate on its head. They had with them a small package they believed would make them a fortune.
Illustration: Mountain People
It did nothing of the sort. Their trip to Georgia on March 11 was doomed from the start, and the little box they were carrying so carefully would be their downfall.
Within a few hours, it would trigger alarms from Tbilisi to Washington and bring a heavily armed SWAT team down on the two frightened old men.
Ohanyan and Tonoyan were carrying highly enriched uranium (HEU), the stuff that nuclear warheads are made of.
The US and its allies have gone to war in Iraq, have refused to rule out another conflict in Iran and are spending billions of dollars around the world to stop this very same elusive substance “falling into the wrong hands.”
In the movies, the nuclear weapon is stolen by a ruthless, black-clad special forces team, killing anyone in its way.
The reality of nuclear smuggling was on that Yerevan-Tbilisi train: two slightly shabby men, unarmed and out of their depth.
They were on the way to sell their precious sample to a man of whom they knew nothing other than that he was probably a Muslim and claimed to represent “very serious people” willing to pay up to US$50,000 a gram. If the sale went as planned, the two smugglers had arranged to go back to their Armenian supplier for more.
According to their testimony, the supplier was a man called Garik Dadayan, a passing acquaintance of Ohanyan’s who had turned up at his apartment one day in 2002 with a packet of gray-green powder. Dadayan wanted to know whether it was weapons-grade and whether it would make him rich.
Ohanyan, a scientist at the Yerevan Physics Institute, tested the sample and confirmed it was uranium, but he had no way of gauging its level of enrichment or its market price.
Dadayan disappeared and the next time Ohanyan heard anything more about him was when news came he had been caught on the Georgian border in 2003 when the 200g of HEU he was carrying tripped a sensor.
By 2005, Dadayan was out of jail again, telling Ohanyan how close he had come to striking it rich.
“I had one chance in life but I was betrayed,” Dadayan said, according to Ohanyan’s testimony.
So when Tonoyan gambled away the last of the money from his dairy business and came to his acquaintance Ohanyan pleading with him to find some HEU, Ohanyan knew where to turn.
Dadayan boasted that he still had friends in the Urals and Siberia who could supply him with unlimited HEU on demand. He suggested a trial sample of 100g, but in the end only handed over 18g when Tonoyan and Ohanyan set off on March 10.
Sell that and next time there will be more, he promised.
The smugglers stuffed the small ziplock bag of gray-green powder into a cigarette box. Ohanyan had lined the box with lead strips.
They were not there for health reasons — as weapons-grade uranium is paradoxically safe to handle in small quantities — but to fool the sensors installed along the borders of the old Soviet Union.
The “portal radiation detectors,” built at great expense by the US government, represent a “second line of defense” to keep stolen bombs and bomb material from being smuggled out of the region.
But they risk becoming the Maginot Line of the nuclear age. It is easy for smugglers to bypass them on mountain tracks, and well-shielded HEU is less likely to set off the alarms than the natural radiation emitted by a shipment of bananas.
Ohanyan and Tonoyan were taking no chances.
As an added precaution, they stashed the box in a small maintenance hatch between two carriages and got off the train when it pulled into Ayrum, on the Armenian side of the border at 3am.
They then hired a taxi to drive them to Tbilisi, entering the Georgian capital at 5am, well ahead of the train. That gave them more than two hours in Tbilisi and they used the time to perform a final act of Bond-inspired tradecraft.
They zigzagged the empty streets to reassure themselves they were not being followed, before heading to the station to meet their train and pick up their stash.
All this time the Georgian police had been watching them in bemusement. A special counter-proliferation unit had been on the Armenians’ trail since February, when Tonoyan had gone to Batumi, close to Turkey on the Black Sea coast, to look for buyers.
“There is a rumor among smugglers here that the main black market for radioactive materials is in Turkey. Whether or not it is true is another question, because I never heard of any successful attempt to sell this stuff in Turkey,” said Archil Pavlenishvili, head of the radioactive materials investigation team at the Georgian Ministry of the Interior, who masterminded the sting operation.
It was the unit’s third successful interception of HEU since it was set up in 2005.
“The Armenians were looking for Muslim buyers. There is a belief that Muslims, particularly Arabs, are ready to buy this kind of materials,” Pavlenishvili said.
So Pavlenishvili supplied a buyer — a Turkish-speaking undercover policeman, who let it be known he was in the market for nuclear materials on behalf of mysterious “serious people.”
That was good enough for Tonoyan, who was new to smuggling, but did know a local man who seemed to know what he was doing and promised to guide him through the minefields of the black market.
His name was Kaka Kvirikadze and in truth he had not had a stellar career in smuggling. He had tried selling “red mercury” — a fabled substance which had appeared on the black market in the 1990s, touted as the secret ingredient in Soviet nuclear warheads, but which usually turned out to be chemical slurry tinted pink.
When that failed, investigators say he tried his hand at smuggling people from the old Soviet Union into Europe across the demarcation line in Cyprus, for which he spent two years in prison.
This uranium job was supposed to be Kvirikadze’s first smuggling venture since he got out of jail, and his first step was to unwittingly lead his new Armenian partners to Pavlenishvili’s undercover man. When Ohanyan and Tonoyan arrived by taxi at 5am, Georgian security men were waiting at the outskirts of Tbilisi, ready to follow them.
The sale was to take place at 1pm at the Tori hotel, an imposing modern place intended for the business traveler.
The “buyer” had reserved a room, while Pavlenishvili and a SWAT team were booked in next door, watching the action unfold on a video feed from a hidden camera.
They moved in as soon as the exchange was made. Only Tonoyan and Kvirikadze had actually turned up for the deal. Ohanyan had claimed he wanted to sleep off the journey in another hotel. It seems than in the final hours, this odd couple may have tried to cheat each other. Ohanyan stayed away at the most perilous moment, although he was actually sleeping when he was arrested. For his part, Tonoyan had asked US$50,000 a gram for the powder, but told his partner they were only getting US$10,000 per gram, to be split two ways. Nuclear experts draw some comfort in knowing that there are such hapless amateurs involved in the nuclear smuggling game, but they may not be the only ones out there.
As Matthew Bunn, an expert on nuclear security at Harvard University, puts it: “Do we see desperate people because they are the only ones doing this stuff, or is it because they’re the only ones who get caught? We don’t know.”
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