By Rick Atkinson Washington Post Foreign Service Column: POLITICS OF PLUTONIUM
Sunday, August 28, 1994 ; Page A01

BERLIN -- BERLIN -- Two weeks after the seizure by German police of a large quantity of contraband plutonium, investigators in Europe and the United States have concluded that the threat to public safety from smuggled radioactive materials may have been substantially exaggerated by German officials.

Those investigating the contraband plutonium and enriched uranium confiscated in Germany this summer acknowledge that they still have more questions than answers about the origins and intended buyers of the material. Nor do they discount the potentially catastrophic consequences of uncurbed nuclear smuggling.

But interviews with officials in Vienna, Frankfurt, Bonn, Luxembourg and Washington indicate that while the contraband probably came from Russia, there is no firm evidence that it was diverted from nuclear weapons or weapons production lines. Nor is there evidence that bomb-building fissile material has fallen into unauthorized hands. Nor has proof emerged of an organized "Russian mafia" brokering radioactive contraband or of rogue Third World states seeking to buy black-market plutonium.

In fact, some law enforcement officials suspect that at least part of the recent uproar may be a case of the tiger chasing its tail -- that aggressive undercover sting operations intended to bait and snare nuclear smugglers have created an artificial demand for radioactive material.

A further complication is that the irresistible combination of crime and nuclear bombs has become a campaign issue in Germany as federal elections draw closer this fall. A leading opposition politician charged this week -- without offering any proof -- that the government cynically staged several recent arrests of nuclear crooks to bolster Chancellor Helmut Kohl's law-and-order image.

Anti-proliferation experts take pains to stress the gravity of nuclear smuggling, while expressing hope that this month's furor accelerates plans to safeguard nuclear stockpiles. "We don't have a crisis," one U.S. official said. "We have a serious problem."

All agree that the extraordinary purity of one contraband plutonium stash recently seized in Germany was particularly alarming, as was the relatively large size of the plutonium cache found in another bust.

"It is serious, but not very serious," said David Kyd, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. "Serious in that the quality of some samples is exceptionally high, but not very serious in that there's no indication of organized trafficking here... . There doesn't appear to be anybody big time out there in a purchasing mode."

Harald Mueller, a top nonproliferation expert at Frankfurt's Peace Research Institute, added: "My guess is we're still dealing with a trickle and not with a stream. As long as it's only a trickle, we have an opportunity to stem the stream. But that supposes that we do a lot in the next weeks or months."

The "trickle" became manifest in four German incidents in as many months, two of them considered particularly worrisome. On May 10, in the southwest German town of Tengen, police arrested a suspected counterfeiter named Adolf Jaekle. In his garage, they found 2.4 ounces of radioactive powder that included one-fifth of an ounce of 99.75 percent-pure plutonium-239 -- the same isotope, although with a higher purity, as that used in hydrogen bombs.

The other especially alarming incident came Aug. 10, when a Colombian and two Spaniards were arrested at the Munich airport after a flight from Moscow. In a suitcase, investigators found 20 ounces of radioactive material, much of it composed of 87.2 percent-pure plutonium-239, again the same telltale isotope but this time at lower purity than is commonly used in bombs.

Yet the Tengen and Munich seizures were only the most recent and most sinister of hundreds of nuclear smuggling cases in the past few years. In 1990, according to federal police statistics, German authorities investigated four cases of suspected nuclear contraband. The numbers climbed to 41 in 1991, 158 in 1992 and 241 last year. Through the first six months of this year, 90 cases had been investigated.

The majority have been simple frauds, hucksters seeking gullible buyers for the nuclear equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Speculation about prospective buyers has led in recent weeks to assertions -- none proven -- of involvement by the North Koreans, the Pakistanis, Basque separatists, Saddam Hussein and sundry others. Bernd Schmidbauer, Kohl's intelligence coordinator and a man whose passion for intrigue is suggested by the nickname "Agent 008," told the parliament on Thursday that "it is not absurd to believe that buyers may be acting on behalf of governments." Schmidbauer provided no details, nor did he elaborate on his assertion that former East German Stasi secret police officials may be involved in the trade.

Most proliferation experts, in fact, say they believe that the nuclear peddlers thus far have been greedy freelancers -- "traders or adventurers or opportunists," as Mueller put it. "Like gentlemen of the old Wild West who went into a gold digger's camp and were willing to do anything to make a dollar... . That appears to be the mentality of the people caught so far."

"Whereas we're seeing people trucking this stuff west," said Kyd of the IAEA, "we are not aware of anybody really seriously being in the market to buy this stuff -- neither terrorists nor intermediaries who might have government clients."

Schmidbauer this week acknowledged "there are no indications that central mafia-like structures are involved" in the trade -- an oft-repeated hypothesis -- and U.S. State Department spokesman Michael McCurry said, "We are not aware of what I would describe as a black market for diverted fissile material."

The sellers "have no clear indication of who their final customers will be," Mueller added. "They hope there will be somebody around to buy the stuff."

In virtually all cases disclosed thus far, that "somebody" has been an undercover agent. Some officials fear the spiraling number of cases in Germany has as much to do with clandestine police offers of huge bounties for fissile material as it does with poor security at former Soviet stockpiles.

"There's no evidence of a real market for plutonium in Germany," Hans Georg von Bock und Polach, the Bremen prosecutor, recently observed. "There's a hazard that our interest in pursuing criminals is bringing danger to Germany. As law enforcers we simply can't do that."

Another lawyer involved in the issue, Werner Leitner, told German television, "Undercover agents, policemen, spies and journalists are all working on this market. The millions offered in the business are waking up sleeping dogs and attracting lots of copycats."

Without such an artificial lure, some security officials believe, it seems unlikely that smugglers would descend on Germany, with its highly trained police forces and sophisticated detection devices.

But Mueller disagrees. "Put yourself in the shoes of somebody in Moscow standing with a few grams of plutonium and considering where to go," he said. "For the Russians, there are two paradises: One is Germany and the other is the U.S. The U.S. is very far away. Germany is close by; it's a country with 80 million people and a lot of trade in chemicals and metals."

Federal authorities say they have done no more than set a snare for those who already had nuclear larceny in their hearts. "Once the stuff started coming into Germany in '91 and '92, what would you expect our police to do?" one German nonproliferation authority said. "If they had done nothing, the same journalists who now are floating this particular hypothesis would have chewed them up."

Still unresolved is the source of the recently seized contraband. Euratom, the European atomic regulatory commission, has concluded that the extremely pure plutonium found in Tengen originated at one of three Russian plants: Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk or Arzamas-16. But investigators say it may have been pilfered from one of several research institutes, which had received samples of the isotope.

Euratom continues to analyze the larger, less pure batch discovered in Munich, but results thus far indicate it "presumably" came from Russia, Georges Herbillon, assistant to the safeguards directorate, said in a telephone interview from Luxembourg.

Publicly, the U.S. government has refused to finger Russia as the source. One official, however, on condition of anonymity, said this week: "It's clear that some of these contraband shipments came from Russia. All of them most likely came from somewhere in the former Soviet Union."

Although Herbillon said Euratom considers the Tengen plutonium to be "weapons-grade" -- suitable for a bomb -- Washington has concluded that the purity of the isotope more likely indicates it was "some kind of calibration sample or special purpose sample used for scientific and measurement applications," a U.S. official said. None of the material confiscated in Germany this summer, the official added, suggests that security at former Soviet nuclear weapons facilities has been breached.

Investigators are in fact less interested in where the substance was made than in determining where and how it was stolen. "When you talk about security," a State Department official said, "the point is who had it last, not who made it."

And to unravel that mystery, Mueller added, requires Russian cooperation. "The secret is with the Russians," he said. "They know the history of their own nuclear programs... . We can narrow the range of possibilities, but not pinpoint it."

How forthcoming the Russians will be -- both in these investigations and in the broad range of nonproliferation issues -- remains perhaps the most critical question facing the West. Bonn and Washington both assume Moscow will be animated by enlightened self-interest, seeing no benefit in sharing its nuclear stockpile with aspirants to the nuclear club.

After bridling at earlier German accusations of lax security, Russian officials this week welcomed a conciliatory gesture by Schmidbauer. Both sides signed an agreement calling for closer ties in the fight against smugglers. As a sign of good faith, Russian security officials trumpeted the arrest of two men trying to steal 22 pounds of low-grade uranium, although an Atomic Energy Ministry spokesman said the stuff was so harmless it could be used "to make presses for buckets of sauerkraut."

In Germany, such assurances are less than soothing. An alarmed electorate -- recent polls indicate two-thirds of all Germans feel directly threatened by nuclear smugglers -- has propelled the issue into Germany's political arena, with a potential impact on Russian-German relations.

Finance Minister Theo Waigel recently implied, for example, that continued financial aid to Russia might be contingent on Russian vigor in thwarting smugglers. Guenter Verheugen, campaign manager for the opposition Social Democrats, suggested on Thursday that "these most poisonous of poisons were brought to Germany with the help of German authorities. This smacks of a stunt." Schmidbauer called the charge "absurd, monstrous and pure polemic," while Rudolf Scharping, the Social Democratic candidate for chancellor in the Oct. 16 election, today distanced himself from Verheugen's accusation.

Nonproliferation experts believe one benefit of this month's uproar is to move nuclear smuggling to the fore as an international issue. European Union interior and foreign ministers will take up the matter in separate meetings in early September, as will Kohl and Russian President Boris Yeltsin when Yeltsin visits Berlin next week for the departure of the last Russian troops in Germany. Nuclear promiscuity also has been placed on the agenda of the summit meeting between Yeltsin and President Clinton in late September.

"Suddenly, the question of what I would describe as a trickle of nuclear material is back in the minds of the political leadership, not just of Germany but of the United States and other places," Kyd said.

"We've been dealing with this whole thing as if it was a normal problem," said Mueller. "But it's an emergency. If you have a fire in your house, you don't send a commission to investigate the fire department."

Added a U.S. official: "We think this is goddamn serious. It's something we've been working to prevent. Having seen these little smuggling episodes, we want to turn them off and make sure we don't get others that are genuine security problems."

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