Chelyabinsk to Novosibirsk - A Glowing Report

     With another day ahead of me on this dirty train filled with cockroaches, very little water to drink, and that "duggity-duggity (2 seconds) duggity-duggity" sound non-stop, I decided to pull out and read some of the materials that Joe had given Yuri to deliver to me.  The train had finally pulled out of Chelyabinsk at 4pm  which would put us in Novosibirsk tomorrow around noon. A younger looking woman with two boys had planted herself in my compartment and immediately unhooked the upper and middle bunks allowing them to rest against the wall opposite my bunk. She looked at me and suggested I do the same so that no other passengers would be tempted to take the upper bunks...especially if the train didn't fill up as the afternoon progressed.

     Techniques for discouraging passengers from coming into your compartment ranged from spreading smelly food everywhere or placing baggage in such a way as to make others think that the compartment is full and the others are in the dining car. More aggressive tactics included putting a sign up that says "NO MORE PLACES" or "BUSY".  If the conductor came by and you gave him a few dollars, he might put the official sign up himself for you and deliver a nice cup of tea and cakes at some point in the journey.  That had happened to me several times traveling on Russian trains from Berlin to Warsaw.  On one of those occasions, the conductor had advised against coming out of my compartment until after the crossing into Poland. As I described in the previous book, On the Job Training, the rail car sleeper was systematically disassembled and all the smugglers on board were filling every possible hidden nick and cranny with goods (and whatever else) to avoid detection and, of course, to avoid paying customs duty or taxes.  Without borders to cross, I wasn't worried about customs issues but, judging from the crowds that were on the platform and the amount of luggage they were carrying, this rail route looked to be a major line. In fact, we were traveling on the same line as the famous Trans-Siberian Railway but a lot less elegant I was told.  The smells of Asian and Russian foods mixed in the dusty air as temperatures had gone up quite a bit and windows or vents were being forced open where it was possible.  Faces of travelers, often now began to reflect the changing ethnic groups here in the Caucasus and Central Asia. I pulled out my 'PLEASE READ" envelope from Embassy Joe that Yuri had given me and was given a bit of a lesson on this subject. More interesting though, was the info that the CIA was getting so early in 1992 on the relationship between entities that had access to nuclear materials and the groups that would be vying for and collaborating with local criminals to get the materials...and that also included the possibility of complete bombs.

This next part was for those that had been recruited like me:

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We know and are tracking organized terrorists actively engaged in using various criminal groups and corrupt connections to gain access to nuclear material and transport it to their desired locations. 

You are now involved in this tracking and reporting activity.

Similar to the US program that developed the atomic bomb, the Russians have organized and managed "closed cities" for decades. These cities are industrial towns that are organized to carry out the design and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction that includes nuclear bombs during the Cold War.  Within these closed cities, the criminal elements that could be motivated to sell materials to a terrorist include:  

• Convicts who have returned to the city • Ordinary workers motivated by non-payment of wages * Drug couriers/university students • Workers from the Tatar or Bashkir communities • City officials • Guards and disgruntled military and/or scientific personnel 

Once secured, nuclear material can be transported out of the cities via: • Corrupt soldiers among the military conscripts surrounding the city • a multitude of growing criminalized elements including "taxi services" and the so-called Russian Mafia groups • Construction industry transportation 

Once outside these closed cities, material can be transported by truck, rail, uncontrolled Russian airlines • experienced drug and gun runners supplying to southern republics for Muslim terrorist groups • Other ethnic criminal groups • Customs brokers •  

What is most important for you is that this material is already flowing out of these cities.  Through bribery and corruption at extreme levels, the security systems have been bypassed or disabled. The criminals within the closed cities and the terrorists are in the midst of wooing each other for their goods and money. This capacity for working together is growing.  Exacerbating this problem is the fact that law enforcement in these cities and in Siberian regions has deteriorated to the point that it is as corrupt as the criminal organizations we are talking about. The current political instability also adds to the uncertainty of the situation and the anarchic environment  that law enforcement officials are working in. While we are attempting to work with the former KGB in finding common ground for controlling this huge risk to the civilized world, we are not yet able to say that we have a good working relationship.  

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My general instructions to you:

Your role should remain passive and exploratory with the contacts you are going to make in Novosibirsk. Remain somewhat aloof while there and do not become a television personality...PLEASE!  Listen for opportunity. Don't believe everything that Dima says but be especially attentive to the nuclear group(s) and try to assess if they have information on the growing threat of criminal/terrorist marriages.  Stay clean in Novosibirsk and then when you meet Yuri in Chelyabinsk, we will ensure your safety going out to the Soyuz debris sites.  Yuri, Toshek and Vlad will take full responsibility for safety.  Do not risk your own safety if the sites are under criminal control...of any kind. If for some reason your security team doesn't show up at your appointed meeting time and place, give them a two day window and then leave if they have still not shown up. Vlad is also a little "on the edge" with an unpleasant task to complete that one of our partners threw in at the last minute. Give him some space for now.

(Now I understood Yuri's "two day window" request...and I wish I had read this before Vlad set out to decapitate me yesterday.)

     Thoughts of Artur and his magic fax machines in Warsaw began to come to my head. He'd said that all of his non-stop faxing had taken nearly a year to develop. The crazy nuclear material offers started coming a few months back. There had been one "special" Pole who had come to his office. He lived in Przemysl next to the Ukrainian border. He called himself "Scooby". We never knew his real name. He seemed filled with knowledge of what plants or factories beyond Samara were producing high value materials and acted willing to help Artur get involved in a "deal". Artur and I had surmised that this man's social skills and personal hygiene had precluded him from getting very far in a transaction but Artur's assessment of him was that he knew what he was talking about and probably had been approached by intelligence officers of at least one Western country to share his knowledge. (It was difficult to be in the same room with him for very long with his horrible body odor.) His German and Russian were perfect, though, and he spent all day on Artur's phone calling to Russia and to Germany.  He mysteriously disappeared about three months ago and the faxes from Samara, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Ozyorsk, Mayak, and others started up shortly thereafter. (Artur was left with a phone bill that was nearly $5000.)

     As I was getting up to speed on the geography and the demographics of these plants and the closed cities around Chelyabinsk, it started to make sense that Artur would eventually start getting such strategic material offers since most of the other metals refineries and chemical plants were located nearby. Scooby had probably given Artur's number to a lot of his agent contacts and, as the nuclear material market developed, Artur was on lists as an agent with possible buyers somewhere in his chain. Scooby always acted like I was some kind of "king pin" for Western contacts. Someone had told him that I hung out with the Kennedy Family when they were in Poland and he was certain I could pick up the phone and call anyone. He once suggested that I should call my "Kennedy Buddies" when he was pushing a deal to sell supertankers from Libya. He reasoned, "Kennedy family knows the Onassis crowd, so give your buddies a call and tell them they'll never get a better deal for a cheap supertanker parked 5 miles off the Port of Tripoli."

***

     The soup of the day in the dining car was goulash. Whatever the meat was in the goulash, it didn't look, taste, or behave like any meat I had ever eaten but it was a large portion and I ate it all. A mineral water and a small package of sugar wafer cookies and I was ready for a walk. My roommates in my compartment were eating sandwiches and sardines. The company was quite ok but I felt I should give the young mother some time without my presence. Most of the new passengers that had gotten on in Chelyabinsk had been able to get a proper seat in the compartments. Only a few passengers were sitting in the aisles on luggage or the pull down seats. It was quite easy, then, to make my way through the five cars that were all 2nd class compartments after car 7. In cars 11 and 12, I could see that there was somewhere between twenty and thirty workers in similarly designed coveralls. Most of them also had some kind of emblem on their left breast.

While not all of them had this emblem, ALL of them had the international radioactivity symbol at the bottom of the shirt.

    Staring at the symbol on their shirt breast pockets, I suddenly remembered about the secret cities of Chelyabinsk:  MAYAK, OZYORSK, Chelyabinsk-40, Chelyabinsk-65. These were all part of the Soviet Union's equivalent of the Manhattan Project. (Ozyorsk, Russia and Richland, WA have the distinction of being the first cities where plutonium was produced for the production of Cold War nuclear bombs.)  These workers were all from the Mayak facility in Ozyorsk...still a closed city due to the sensitive nature of the nuclear material that is produced.

(Take a look at Mayak now. The website has an English version you will see at this link:  https://www.po-mayak.ru/en/products_services/ )

Looking at these men getting drunk, probably headed home to villages outside the closed city after a week at the plant, it hit me that these are exactly the guys that could be pulling out material from the plant. I decided with some excitement to go back to my compartment and pull my trusty 007 geiger counter out of my toolkit stuffed deep in my bag.  Huffing and puffing as I finally made it to my compartment, nine rail cars toward the chugging locomotive, I saw that the young mother was napping with the smaller boy on her lap, also asleep, and the second boy was looking through one of my bags he had pulled out of my suitcase. Startled, I let out a loud, "HEY! Get out of there! Goddamnit!" To which the little boy started crying and jumped on top of his mother, who was already looking for something to swat him with. He tried to hug her as she was slapping him across the face. I turned my attention back to my things on the floor and saw that he had only gotten to my clothes and toiletries. Much further and he would have found my cute little leather "toolkit" and been playing with my ultra sharp self-defense tool and other spy-delights. He'd have probably cut his own tongue off if he'd put the scalpel-like blade in his mouth or sliced a finger badly if he'd run the blade along his hand.

     The mother calmed down and I put my bag up on the highest bunk with a double finger to the little boy saying "NO-NO!".  I left the compartment with my geiger counter (GC) stuffed in my coat and the cord to the sensor bar down my sleeve to my hand where I could turn the machine on and off without being seen.

     It took about 5 to 7 minutes to get back to the 2nd Class cars where the men were. In my haste to grab the GC, I'd completely forgotten to turn the volume down on the machine. As I entered the car where I'd seen most of the men, I touched the on switch and got a very loud positive sound for radioactivity. The flow of particle detection sounded more like a fire-hose on high.  I wasn't even anywhere near these guys and it was already going off. I thought about it for a moment and then decided to go to the bathroom to turn the "squelch" down on the device so that background radiation would be minimized and only relative increases would register. I turned the volume down, as well. Testing it, I pointed it at various things in the bathroom and got extremely high readings, especially on the floor and in the garbage receptacle.

     Coming out into the corridor, I put my hand up faking a stretching movement and touched the sensor wand to a bag that had one of the Mayak symbols on it, I could hear the crackling "flow" of particle detection going off as the wand brushed the bag. Noticing that the men were frequently going to the bathroom at the opposite end of the corridor, I planted myself on a seat nearest the compartments they were crammed in and easily allowed  5 or 6 guys to pass as I lightly touched their pant legs. Three out of the half dozen men were hotter than anything I had seen in the Krakow markets for Russian traders after the Chernobyl accident in 1986.  By comparison, the other people going by me were registering about the same as when I tested myself. The lower I got to the floor, the more radioactive I was. One lady passed with potatoes and some kind of vegetables in her bag. That bag was just as hot as the floor...off the scale.

     The GC was recording the measurements I was taking so I didn't have to memorize anything other than WHAT I was testing.  I stopped my experiment pretty convinced that when the sun went down we would all be glowing brightly in the Russian Siberian night.  These men looked to be blue collar workers from the Mayak factory. Their hands did not look to be pushing pens very much. Machinists, material handlers, millwrights, steam fitters, carpenters, steel workers, operators, and who knows what else they did.  I had no idea when they would be getting off the train but decided to go back to my compartment. My guess was that, since this train would be stopping soon in a small village, they'd likely be getting off there. I'd seen enough.

     The Global Security website devoted to monitoring the "progress" of reducing the spread of WMD around the world has a very good description of the history of the nuclear work done at Mayak and other facilities in the area. https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/russia/chelyabinsk-65_nuc.htm
One of the paragraphs is particularly alarming as it describes the type of extremely dangerous materials that these guys had access to at the time of this trip of mine:

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"Chelyabinsk-65 has also been producing tritium and other special isotopes. At present, tritium and other isotopes (plutonium-238, cobalt-60, carbon-14, irridium-192, and others) are produced by the reactors "Ruslan" (start-up in 1979), and "Ludmila" (start-up in 1986-87).

Tritium is transferred to the Mayak's tritium plant, producing tritium components of nuclear warheads. The isotopes are transferred to the radioisotope plant (in operation since 1962), which manufactures alpha-, gamma-, and beta radiation sources, plutonium-238 and strontsium-90 thermal generators, and a wide range of radionuclides.

At present, three production lines of the RT-1 plant reprocess spent LEU fuel from VVER-440 reactors as well as HEU fuel from BN-600, naval propulsion, research and material production reactors. In addition to reprocessing of spent fuel, the RT-1 plant is a storage site for approximately 30 t reactor-grade plutonium, and is involved in radioactive waste management, and research and pilot production of uranium-plutonium MOX fuel."

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No finer dirty bomb could be made from the materials described above!  It is also worth looking into the horrible accidents that have occurred at these locations and at the nuclear generating facilities nearby. They rank up with Chernobyl and Fukushima in severity and the degree of human exposure to radioactivity.

***

     As I guessed, all the men were gone by the time I got to the dining car at around 7 the next morning. My chef friend had been replaced by a younger cook that smiled at me as I sat down at the same booth that Katerina, Zhenia, and I had had our first meeting. Just like everything else, as we headed East, the products offered for sale and the menu were evolving into more Asian flavors. He knew I was an American and offered scrambled eggs and toast with a special "off the menu" cup of coffee. I gladly accepted. He was from Uzbekistan and had a Ukrainian wife that spoke Polish. He understood everything I said in Polish and was happy to be serving someone who smiled at him.

     Taking my empty plate and cup up to him, I asked him if he was living around Chelyabinsk. He nodded and said he was from a village an hour away. I asked if he knew much about the radiation accidents that had occurred around Chelyabinsk over the years. He looked stricken with fear when I asked and told me that his parents and he had been forcibly relocated after such an event. He added, "No one in my family had felt the same since. We are chronically tired and always sick. All my aunts, three of them, have died mysteriously before they were 60 years old."  The way he described the accident (at least what he knew of it) it sounded like it was part of a well known accident near Chelyabinsk:

(From www.globalsecurity.org)
"the September 1957 explosion that occurred in a radioactive waste storage site involved some 20 million curies of material. A cooling system of a radioactive waste containment unit malfunctioned, and some 2 million curies spewed across Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Tyumen Oblasts covering a total area of 23,000 square kilometers inhabited by a quarter of a million people. Massive evacuations of the population were taken. Significant radioactive contamination covered an area of more than 800 square kilometers, and there are areas where the concentration of Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 are still hazardous to human health."  

     
     Dima had a man waiting for me on the platform at the station with a large sign that read, "Wilkommen Herr Mayes" as the train pulled up. He guessed correctly that I would be in a 1st Class car and I saw the sign a half mile before the train got to the station. (The damn thing was six feet long and four feet high decorated with American flags...but written in German.) I asked him in German why it was not in English and he said, "I don't speak English, why would I make a sign in English?"