#9
Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2002
Customs Trains Old Soviet Ports In Thwarting Nuclear Smugglers
By GARY FIELDS and SHARON BEGLEY
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
[for personal use only]

WASHINGTON -- The first line of defense in the government's fight to keep terrorists from smuggling a dirty bomb into the U.S. isn't at the nation's borders -- it's at ports thousands of miles away in the former Soviet Union.

Since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has dispatched neutron flux detectors and gamma ray detectors that can detect nuclear materials to points of entry around Washington, New York and other major cities. At the same time, the U.S. Customs Service has outfitted its inspectors with some 4,000 personal radiation detectors -- souped-up Geiger counters -- with plans to provide another 4,500 in the coming months. Customs also has been installing radiation detectors large enough for cars and trucks to pass through, at some border crossings.

Beyond that, customs has been using State Department and Pentagon funds and working jointly with the Energy Department to boost training for its agents and those of foreign agents from the former Soviet Union. In recent years, the agency has shipped more than 600 radiation detectors to those countries to help authorities there stop smugglers. While no smuggling has been detected since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, agents have been on highest alert since then.

Obtaining Nuclear Materials

Monday's announcement that an American citizen had been working with al Qaeda to detonate a dirty bomb in the U.S. has renewed concerns about al Qaeda's abilities to obtain nuclear materials. The alleged al Qaeda scout, Jose Padilla, now being held at a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., was on a mission to pinpoint either bomb sites or potential places to find nuclear materials, law-enforcement officials said.

Unlike the military's nuclear arsenal, a dirty bomb is made with radioactive material that is wrapped around explosives. Rather than setting off a nuclear reaction, the bomb disperses relatively low-level radiation in a limited area.

"We have improved our training and detection capabilities and we are pushing our zone of security out further," said Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner. The agency is focusing on Eastern Europe from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in the north to Turkey, Cyprus and Malta in the south.

One customs official said the agency fears that "a lot of unsecured [radioactive] material in the former Soviet Union" is being smuggled into Uzbekistan, which abuts Afghanistan and is near Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. "We don't want this stuff going there," he said. Much of the material comes from weapons programs and power-generating plants.

Radioactive Lead Containers

One smuggled shipment nearly ended up in Pakistan in March 2000, customs officials said. The hand-held radiation detectors provided by the U.S. started beeping wildly when a truck filled with scrap metal tried to cross the Uzbekistan border. Inside, agents found 10 radioactive lead containers, and an Iranian driver intent on delivering his load to Quetta, Pakistan, a border town known as a smuggling center to Afghanistan.

Detection is a matter of the training and equipment that needs to be close by to pick up radioactive materials as opposed to satellites, which are too far away, scientists say.

"To detect a suitcase bomb you have to get very close," said senior scientist Thomas B. Cochran at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. "If the radioactive source is plutonium, a neutron detector can see it up to a few tens of meters away." Gamma detectors, which sense the radiation signature of cobalt-60 and cesium-137 need fairly sophisticated instrumentation to sort out the energy spectra of the radiation; that spectrum determines whether the source is plutonium or uranium-235, or some innocuous background source, Dr. Cochran said. These work from a few meters away -- with one obvious caveat: "If it's shielded, you'll never see it."

'Thousands of Facilities'

"Radioactive materials that could be used for such attacks are stored in thousands of facilities around the U.S., many of which may not be adequately protected against theft by determined terrorists," said Henry Kelly, a physicist with the Federation of American Scientists. Radioactive materials are used in laboratories, food-irradiation plants, oil-drilling facilities and medical centers, among other places.

The agency also is getting permission from foreign countries to station inspectors in their ports, looking at ship containers that come in, rather than waiting for them to arrive in the U.S. and be inspected. Canada is already allowing it and Singapore, the world's second largest port in terms of shipping containers, recently agreed to let U.S. inspectors come there. Customs also is in discussions with Tokyo, Rotterdam, Netherlands and Antwerp, Belgium.

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