TERRORISM WITHOUT A RETURN ADDRESS: The nuclear suitcase bombs threat

In September 2002, the head of Ukraine’s Communist party admitted that some 200 Soviet nuclear warheads had ‘disappeared’.  The Russian newspaper ‘Pravda’ subsequently reported that a Ukrainian parliamentary member revealed that some of the warheads had been ‘lost’. Bin Laden has reportedly received ‘fatwa’s’ or religious sanctions which provide him with the rationale for using nuclear weapons against the United States. The most potent threat in this context is the nuclear suitcase bomb.

Does Bin Laden have access to nuclear suitcase bombs (NSBs)? Has he obtained such devices? Has he been offered NSBs? Have Iraqi, Iranian or Pakistani experts helped him access such devices? Has he purchased or been given nuclear devices from Russian crime groups?  Does he have one or more nuclear suitcase bombs positioned for use and to be activated on response to a recognition signal (which could not be identified in intercept traffic) in the United States or England? How many sleeper agents does Bin Laden have installed in Muslim communities in Western countries who have deep cover and expertise and motivation to assist in detonating a nuclear suitcase bomb? How many sleeper agents with uncheckable backgrounds have entered Western countries posing as refugees or persecuted immigrants and would participate in such operations?

'Terrorism without a return address' refers to the capacity of a hostile state or group, through a combination of miniaturised weapons of mass destruction and sophisticated clandestine agent running techniques involving a host of witting or unwitting assets and agents, to launch a (nuclear)  terrorist attack  - without any  means of  obtaining early warning or identifying the source or origins of a terrorist attack.

‘Where is  the evidence?’ could not be answered by any government. The terrorists or their sponsors  would ensure there would be no evidence. Law enforcement and security services would face a wall of religious and political discrimination claims from permanently aggrieved ethnic communities and their supporters and agents if they attempted to obtain ‘evidence’.

Size would be the terrorists greatest operational advantage. The nuclear suitcase bomb is portable, it carries like a suitcase, does not need coded instructions, can be detonated by a single person or through a remote device, can be concealed in a boat or car, can be assembled in the target area, can be preset by timing devices for detonation and can be placed at virtually any location or target. The device could be detonated within an hour and have the capacity to inflict mass elite disorientation and kill up to 100, 000.  

The characteristics of NSBs

According to Lt General Lebed, the nuclear suitcase bombs:

1. were disguised and made to look like suitcases, measured 60 x40 x20 centimetres and weighed 30-45 kilos.

2. were commonly used for sabotage behind ‘enemy’ lines, and had been distributed amongst special Soviet army intelligence units, or Spetznaz (Special) forces of the G.R.U. (Soviet Military Intelligence)

3. did not require expertise to be detonated. The devices lacked the usual 'keyed' security and safety systems, which were designed to prevent unauthorised use.

4. were 'an ideal weapon for nuclear terror'. 

Testifying to the United States House Military Research and Development Subcommittee in 1997, Lebed claimed that Moscow had secretly developed suitcase bombs, under KGB orders, in the 1970s specifically for terrorist purposes:

I am absolutely sure they have been made,” he claimed, adding that the devices had an explosive capacity of one kiloton — the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT — and could be activated by a single person.’  Lebed also claimed that he had spoken to scientists who had worked on the weapons'. On 2 October 1997, Lebed insisted that: 'compact nuclear devices are possible and have been made'. He repeated his earlier claim that the commission he had formed in 1996 to study the problem had determined that 'so-called backpack or suitcase nuclear devices were in the possession of the Soviet armed forces.' He also reiterated that he had not been able to account for all such devices and that he considered it a 'matter of principal importance.' Later, on 6 October 1997, Lebed insisted at an international conference in Berlin that he remained 'convinced' that Soviet NSBs had been built and repeated that he had been unable to ascertain their current locations whilst in office. He pointed out that the United States had built such weapons 'about thirty years ago, and at that time, the USSR did not lag behind America in anything'.

Senator Curt Weldon (R-PA) holds a CIA mock-up of a nuclear suitcase bomb

Lyalin's testimony

Lebed’s timeframe is confirmed indirectly by the Soviet defector, Colonel Oleg Adolfovich Lyalin, an expert in hand-to-hand combat, a highly proficient marksman and parachutist and member of Department V of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. The function of this department was to prepare contingency plans for the sabotage of foreign public services, transport, communications and the nerve centres of government at the outbreak of war or in a time of crisis prior to war. In 1971, Lyalin supplied details of Soviet sabotage plans in London, Washington, Paris, Bonn, Rome and other Western capitals.  

Lyalin defected to the West, in London, in September 1973. His specific tasks included selecting and monitoring  key targets for assassination and to recruit local agents to assist them and provide support. Sabotage plans in Britain included flooding the London underground railway, destroying British nuclear bombers on the ground and attack other military targets. 

However, his main task was to identify vital installations that undercover Spetsnaz forces could immobilise prior to or at the outbreak of war. If, as Lebed claimed, Spetsnaz forces had nuclear suitcases bombs at the time, these could be secreted in selected spots. (A novel and film – The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth was predicated on this proposition.)

 Yablokov's support for Lebed

Throughout 1997, Russian environmentalist and former adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, Professor Aleksey Yablokov of the Russian Academy of Sciences provided independent support for Lebed’s claims.

On 9 September 1997, Yablokov forwarded a letter to the Russian 'Novaya Gazeta'. The letter was conveniently 'lost' en route and he passed another copy to the newspaper, which printed it.

In this letter, Yablokov claimed that 'the statements' by General Lebed concerning suitcases with nuclear bombs were definitely not groundless. However, Yablokov claimed that the devices were created for the KGB for 'terrorist purposes' and not for the GRU as Yebed had claimed.

The nuclear devices were deliberately not assigned to the Ministry of Defence and therefore, not included in negotiations on nuclear weapons reduction.

Yablokov claimed:

1. that he had face to face conversations with individuals who worked on the production of the bombs and reported that there were originally 132 constructed and 82 were unaccounted for.

2. that 'the very point of KGB's nuclear terror bombs was to explode them in an American city at the right moment'.

3. The bombs did not have codes and therefore, could be detonated without Presidential approval. The United States or other target country could not threaten retaliation against Russia if an unaccountable terrorist group unilaterally placed a suitcase bomb in an American city.

Testifying to the United States House Subcommittee on Military Research and Development on 2 October 1997, Yablokov also affirmed his assessment. He stated that he was 'absolutely certain that nuclear suitcase-sized weapons had been manufactured for the KGB during the 1970s.' Yablokov repeated his statement to the effect he had met with Soviet scientists who had designed the weapons, which had not been included on any 'official' list.

Yablokov criticised Russian officials for concealing the truth and stated that the nuclear suitcase bomb issue was 'connected' with the broader problem of nuclear security in Russia. On 31 October 1997, Yablokov increased his demands and threatened to release technical details of the 'nuclear suitcases' if President Yeltsin did not reply to a letter forwarded to him on 27 October.

On 6 October 1997, President Yeltsin signed a set of amendments to the Russian Federation Law on State Secrets, which extensively classified all information about military nuclear facilities. The new laws were widely interpreted as a measure to terminate the nuclear suitcase controversy. On  6 November 1997, he  was secretly summoned to the Kremlin and ordered to help draft a presidential decree to coordinate the location of 'compact nuclear weapons', bring them under secure control and arrange for their special destruction.

On 10 September 1997, the Operational Intelligence Directorate of the GRU, the most secretive of Russian intelligence services, publicly denied the existence of 'any 60 x40 x20 briefcases containing nuclear charges'. An anonymous GRU source pointed out that special GRU detachments were tasked to conduct sabotage operations behind enemy lines but claimed that: 'they never used nuclear munitions to do so' and relied on conventional explosives.

A representative of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the successor organisation to the KGB, claimed that the SVR had 'no information' concerning the alleged suitcase bombs. Former KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov described the allegations as 'complete nonsense' and stated that the KGB never had the need to have nuclear weapons.

A spokesman for the FSB (internal security service) stated that the FSB 'has no information about the KGB possessing nuclear ammunition of this kind — that is, super-small charges in the form of nuclear suitcases'.

The official Russian denials were typically  equivocal. Some, which denied that Russia had or built such weapons, were contradictory. Some Russian spokesmen simultaneously denied that such weapons existed, whilst pointing out that the United States possessed such weapons, as if the issue was thereby resolved.

The 9 /11 terrorist attacks and the influence of Russian military and special services doctrines

Many Russian observers were not surprised at the form of the 9 /11 attacks on the United States as a they resembled operational plans of Russian military and special services. For the previous three decades sleeper agents of the GRU and Spetznaz forces had trained in nuclear weapons handling and  'illegals' (spies operating under assumed identities in target countries) were tasked to gather information on key points of vulnerability in Western target countries, as did the 9/11 hijackers who acted as ‘ilegals’ in the US from 1999-2001.

A favoured Russian scenario envisaged sabotage and 9/11 style attacks by Spetznaz forces against Western targets, assisted by illegal 'sleeper' agents in target countries.

The political leadership, administrative centres and the members of intelligence services, especially those concerned specifically with analysing and countering the GRU, were to be assassinated. Similarly, Bin Laden has placed a bounty on the heads of US intelligence and defence officials.

Soviet military and GRU invasion scenarios developed during the Cold War resemble the terrorist attacks against the US on 9/11; including timing, surprise, deception and objectives -decapitation of the US command, control and communication centres.

Interviews and interrogations of terrorists and intercepts have established that  the 9/11 targets were Spetznaz type- targets: the White House  the Pentagon and Congress, and the commercial heart of New York – the World Trade Centre.

The 1990s: Case studies of clandestine acquisition of materials for Weapons of Mass Destruction

In 1993, under the sleep-laden eyes of Australian security services, leading members of the Japanese AUM sect, visited Australia and tested the deadly nerve gas sarin on livestock in Western Australia. The AUM was responsible for the subway sarin attacks in Japan in March 1995, which killed 12 and seriously injured 3,776 others. The sect also attempted to acquire or develop a nuclear weapon in addition to its existing stock of highly toxic biological and chemical agents. AUM members made numerous visits to Russia, and there have been reliable reports that they attempted to purchase nuclear materials. Certainly they had operational contacts with ‘former’ GRU officers. Japanese authorities raided the AUM sect after the 1995 gas attack and located technical information on uranium enrichment processes and a notebook, which listed enquiries concerning the cost of obtaining a nuclear warhead.

Victims of AUM sarin attack and AUM leader, Shoko Asahara

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the illicit market in nuclear material developed into what has been called a 'clandestine global trade'. In 1992, Arkadiy Chuvin, deputy head of Tekhsneksport (responsible for nuclear exports) admitted it was impossible to check the end delivery of nuclear materials from Russia: 'I can give no guarantees that uranium or plutonium we supply to the Czechs, for instance, won’t be sold to a third party'.

On 9 March 1992, two Russian émigrés were arrested in Bavaria for attempting to sell 2 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium for nearly three million Deutschemarks. Shortly after, Italian police arrested an Italian businessman who had offered to sell two Israelis a consignment of uranium, deuterium and plutonium. A firm in Norway in the same year received an offer from a business in Volgograd, Russia to sell eight tonnes of 'heavy water' (deuterium) at 440 dollars per kilogram. At the end of 1992, there were twenty-five separate attempts to smuggle Russian uranium into Germany alone.

As early as 1992, there were approximately three hundred seizures throughout Europe of various types of radioactive material which had been offered for sale.

The failure of Russian authorities to maintain adequate security measures at civilian and military nuclear installations was evident as early as 1993. In 1993, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs logged 900 cases of unauthorised personnel attempting to gain entry to restricted nuclear facilities.

An American visitor to the prestigious Kurchatov Institute near Moscow discovered 80 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium 'secured' in 'American high school style lockers fastened only by a single chain through the handles'.

In 1993, a thief climbed through a hole in the wooden fence around the secured area of Sevmorput shipyard near Murmansk. He used a hacksaw to cut through a common padlock on a storage container in which radioactive fuel for nuclear submarines was stored and stole three fuel assemblies, each containing 4.5 kg of enriched (30 per cent pure) uranium. The fuel was later located in the residence of a Russian naval officer, who had conspired with another naval officer. The Russian navy investigating officer in the case remarked 'even potatoes are probably much better guarded today than radioactive materials'.

 In July 1993, two Russian sailors stole 1.8 kg of 30 per cent enriched uranium U235 from the Adreeva Guba Northern Fleet Naval Base. They later accused two senior officers of ordering the theft. In 1994, the Russian Counter Intelligence Service recorded 900 thefts of secret technology in the last half of 1993.

On 14 December 1994, Czech authorities, acting on anonymous information, found a Saab parked in a busy street in the centre of Prague. In the boot they found 2.72 kg of highly enriched uranium with a Russian certificate of authentication. The material was contained in two cylindrical metal canisters in the form of uranium 235 oxide and was 87.7 per cent pure. Three men arrested in the car were nuclear workers in Czechoslovakia and the former Soviet Union. The owner of the car was a Czech physicist who had worked in Czechoslovakia’s nuclear industry and the former Soviet Union. Co-conspirators were a Russian and a Belarusian from Minsk who had been employed in their countries’ nuclear industries. Two other persons were subsequently arrested including a police officer. The group had been attempting to sell the uranium for several million dollars.

In 1992, former Russian and East German security officers attempted to sell 45 kg of cobalt-60 to a German arms dealer. In 1993, a criminal syndicate specialising in nuclear materials, former KGB officers, brought four tonnes of beryllium together to meet the requirements of their client, North Korea.

On 19 May 1994, German police accidentally located 6 grams of 99.75 per cent pure plutonium at a German businessman’s residence. The degree of enrichment of the recovered plutonium was higher than that needed in a nuclear weapon. The businessmen’s links included former KGB and Stasi (East German security service) officers and the notorious arms and drug export-import organisation, the Bulgarian-based Kintex.

On 1 June 1994, German authorities acquired two uranium pallets of approximately 0.8 per cent enriched uranium-235. In June 1994, a six-man criminal enterprise was apprehended after police had obtained an extra 900 grams of low-enriched uranium in the form of 120 other pallets.

On 25 July 1994, the BLKA (Bavarian State Criminal Agency) was provided with a sample of nuclear material weighing approximately half a gram of which 240 mg was plutonium-239. This operation led to the arrest, on 10 August 1994, of a businessman as he alighted on a Lufthansa flight from Moscow. His suitcase was found to contain 363 grams of 87.2 per cent plutonium 239 mixed with 152 grams uranium oxide and 1 kg of lithium-6 (used as a precursor for thermonuclear bombs). Two Spanish nationals were arrested who were later found to have connections to the Basque terrorist separatist organisation, ETA. The police believed that the material originated in the Russian Institute of Physics and Power Engineering in Obinsk, Russia. The two Spaniards had earlier offered to deliver a total of 4 kilograms of plutonium (approximately half of what is necessary to make a nuclear bomb). They offered small samples of this material to prove their bona fides and indicated that more was available from the 'source' in Moscow.

 Investigators found the plutonium in a shielded cylinder inside the briefcase of one of the conspirators who had lived for many years as a student in Moscow. They also found a kilogram of lithium-6, a non-radioactive substance used to enhance bomb yields. The significance of this case is that three amateurs succeeded in obtaining a substantial amount of high-grade plutonium. Trained agents and terrorists would undoubtedly be more effective in gaining access to such material.

As early as  October 1998, there were reports that members of al-Qaeda, closely linked to Osama bin Laden, had attempted in 1993 to purchase enriched uranium. Further reports indicated that bin Laden might possess tactical nuclear weapons from the illicit black market, probably from sympathisers in the Central Asian Republics, who in turn acquired the weapons from the Ukraine.
Nuclear weapons designs were included in the 25-page al Qaeda document found in a Kabul house reportedly used by al Qaeda operatives.

In early 1999, Russian authorities seized 3.8 kilograms of stolen uranium isotope kept in a metal cylinder inside a lead insulator, at the home of an unemployed man in the North Caucuses. A criminal gang suspected of attempting to sell the material to buyers in Russia and the Baltic States was detained. The uranium had been stolen in 1994 from the Arzamas-16 nuclear research centre close to Nizhniy Novgorod, only 400 kilometres from Moscow.

Stanislav Lunev’s testimony

In 1998, Stanislav Lunev, a Russian defector and former colonel in the GRU, claimed Russia was engaged in gathering information on the President of the United States, key Congressmen, military leaders and cabinet members as targets for assassination squads in the event of war. Lunev has claimed that special forces (Spetsnaz) teams would blow up power stations, telephone switching systems and dams and target secret landing sites for Air Force One, prior to a missile strike.

Lunev claimed that special agents were entering the United States as foreign tourists with false passports and were locating sites to deposit small nuclear devices known as 'suitcase bombs' in the Shenandoah Valley outside Washington and Hudson Valley of New York. Lunev also claimed that the Russian government could not account for 100 nuclear devices.

The ‘right moment’

In 1997, at the beginning of the nuclear suitcase controversy,  Yablovsky stated that:’ the very point of the nuclear terrorist bombs was to explode them in an American city at the right moment ‘.

Assessing the ‘right moment’ is complicated by the size of the nuclear suitcase bombs. Miniaturised and portable weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are easily disguised weapons for 'unstructured' terrorist groups.

Such groups are notoriously difficult to monitor as they  are circuitously linked through intelligence services to a patron state by cut outs, unwitting assets, sleeper agents and cells who are trained or cued to respond to a pre–arranged signal. Other assets, who offer operational support for terrorism  without a return address include manipulable third parties such as ethnic and Islamic  ‘friendship' and charity groups, refugee organisations  and a wide variety of notional organisations and ‘useful idiots’  attracted to progressive anti-US and anti-Western causes.

Given the long-standing friendship and special relations between Russia and Iraq, the long-standing operational relationship between the Russian intelligence services (the GRU in particular) and Iraqi intelligence services and the personality of Sadam Hussein, the nuclear suitcase bomb would be Iraq’s - and Al Qaida’s - most valuable terrorist weapon – terrorism which could not be traced or predicted - terrorism without a return address.

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