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The businessman, who had brokered occasional arms deals from the old Soviet Union to Third World countries for two decades, wasn't surprised. The Soviets had long ago set up routes to disguise Moscow's involvement in clandestine ventures by shipping arms through East bloc countries. Now, because newly independent but still cash-hungry Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia all support networks of privatized export firms to stimulate arms sales from their own faltering factories, it is easier than ever to use such channels. Even so, my companion was impressed at the influence wielded by powerful members of the military-industrial establishment eyeing a $100 million deal: overnight the old comrade's network had worked out methods to obtain supplies and components from several different factories to restart production and persuaded the government to enlist the aid of another country to give cover to the sale.
RARE-METALS CONSPIRACY
Our final stop was Yekaterinburg, formerly known as Sverdlovsk, the provincial city in the Urals where the Bolsheviks assassinated Russia's last Czar, Nicholas II, and his family in 1918. It is also the place where Boris Yeltsin rose to power as a party boss: he was there in 1979 when a leak from a biological-warfare plant released a cloud of deadly anthrax virus that killed 64 people.
But the broker was less interested in Yekaterinburg's history than he was in Sverdlovsk-45, the site of Russia's assembly plant for nuclear warheads, 124 miles farther north. There scientists and technicians have begun the process of dismantling most of Russia's 32,000 nuclear weapons, converting the weapons-grade plutonium into commercial-reactor fuel. The KGB still blocks any visits to Sverdlovsk-45, even turning away Yeltsin's nuclear-safety inspectors. But because of its proximity to all the nuclear and missile complexes in the area, Yekaterinburg has become a shopping center for the hottest market in restricted products: the rare- and strategic-metals trade.
There are staggering profits to be made selling Russia's precious metals, especially those mined or produced by MINATOM. These include internationally restricted materials like boron 10, which is used in reactor control rods, and osmium 187, a nonradioactive isotope that can sell for more than $100,000 a gram. International trade in other, less exotic materials, such as zirconium, beryllium and hafnium, is controlled by nuclear nonproliferation agreements.
More sophisticated buyers cultivate contacts with a small community of international brokers, mostly Germans and Americans, who work out of Switzerland. These brokers have sanitized their operations so thoroughly that they never actually meet the seller. According to participants in the trade, couriers deliver the seller's metals and the buyer's cash to one of the Swiss banks specializing in the metals trade. There the metals are tested by an independent laboratory for atomic count and purity. If the metals are certified, the bankers hand them over to the buyer and deposit the cash in the seller's numbered account.