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Washington Times
November 15, 2001
Russia's inner chaos a threat to the West
By David Satter

David Satter is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). His new book on Russia after the fall of communism is upcoming from the Yale University Press.

As President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin work out the framework of a new U.S.-Russian relationship, it is important to bear in mind that the U.S. needs not only cooperation in foreign policy from Russia but also measures to stem the inner lawlessness that has left entire sections of the country under the control of organized crime.

Russia today presents a serious danger to the U.S. because it has huge stores of poorly guarded weapons of mass destruction and powerful criminal syndicates prepared to sell anything to anyone, for a price.

The danger that Russian criminals may sell weapons of mass destruction to terrorists for use against the United States is the reason why some of the enthusiasm for Mr. Putin's turn to the West is misplaced. Russia's willingness to accept a U.S. military presence in Central Asia is very important but unless Russia also cracks down on its rampant lawlessness, it could join NATO and — by remaining a base area for Islamic terrorism — still represent a threat to the West.

Russia has enough plutonium and uranium to make 33,000 nuclear weapons. These materials are stored at 50 scientific centers guarded by soldiers who, in the past, have gone months without being paid. It also has vast quantities of nuclear waste that can be used to make crude bombs capable of contaminating large areas. It has the world's largest inventory of chemical weapons — 40,000 tons — and a wide variety of biological weapons, including drug-resistant anthrax, smallpox and plague.

At the same time, Russia's organized crime groups have a history of cooperation with terrorist organizations. Russian and Chechen criminal organizations cooperated in the transport and marketing of heroin from Afghanistan and, according to the Russian newspaper Izvestiya, after the Taliban came to power Osama bin Laden used these criminal organizations to launder money for the Taliban, receiving from $133 million to $1 billion a year.

In the sarin nerve gas attack by the Japanese doomsday sect Aum Shinri Kyo on the Tokyo subway in 1993, the only case where terrorists have ever used nerve gas successfully, the production design for the manufacture of sarin was given to the sect by Oleg Lobov, Russia's former first deputy prime minister, for $100,000, according to testimony by cult members at the trial of the group's leaders in Tokyo. There are some reports that Mr. Lobov, a close associate of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, was given $100 million for his many services to Aum Shinri Kyo. The Japanese "businessmen" were allowed to train on Russian military bases and attended lectures at the Institute of Thermodynamics of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow where they studied the circulation of gases.

In recent weeks, it has been reported that bin Laden has bought several suitcase nuclear bombs from Russia which have not been used only because they are protected by Soviet codes that require a signal from Moscow before the bomb can be detonated. Izvestiya has reported that bin Laden has already spent considerable sums on the recruitment of Russian scientists and former KGB agents capable of helping him with the breaking of these codes.

The Russian authorities deny the existence of suitcase nuclear bombs, but organized crime has been involved in nuclear smuggling from Russia since 1992. Recently, smugglers were arrested in Turkey after trying to sell 41/2 kilograms of unprocessed uranium and 6 grams of plutonium. Russian gangsters have sold combat helicopters to Colombian drug dealers and have attempted to sell not only surface-to-air missiles and a Tango-class submarine.

Under these circumstances, it is just as important for the Russian government to crack down on organized crime as it is for the Muslim world and the West to eliminate any network capable of facilitating terror. In the case of Russia, this would be relatively easy. The activities of Russia's criminal syndicates have been exhaustively documented not only by the organs of law enforcement but also by the security services of their commercial competitors. For years, under Mr. Yeltsin, a massive crackdown on Russian organized crime awaited only a signal from the political authorities. Unfortunately, that signal never came.

Under Mr. Putin, the indifference to the role of organized crime continues.

In 1997, then FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, in testimony before the House International Relations Committee, said U.S. law enforcement agencies took very seriously the possibility nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of Russian criminal gangs and that Russian organized crime, by fostering instability in a nuclear power, constituted a direct threat to the national security interests of the United States.

Now, with the entire world under direct threat from Islamic extremists, the United States needs to ask our new ally, Vladimir Putin, to begin to eradicate this danger even at the expense of the system of robber capitalism that has grown up in Russia during the last decade.