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Most rare-metals traders, however, abandon any pretense of legitimacy and begin to act more like characters in a Hollywood thriller. Buyers, accompanied by bodyguards carrying suitcases of cash and by their own scientific experts for testing the goods, fill hotels in Baltic ports, where Russian smugglers congregate. The sellers are most likely to be mafia-connected hustlers or former KGB agents -- some of whom have even set up joint ventures with former CIA agents to smuggle strategic materials. The trade is so brisk that Estonia has emerged as one of the world's leading exporters of rare metals, even though it produces none.
Few buyers take the most profitable -- and dangerous -- route of traveling directly to the mining cities to find a contact and cut a deal without middlemen. After weeks of travel, we knew how risky that could be, but we had also discovered that the KGB was running most of the clandestine trade to generate hard currency to help support the secret-police agency. "The KGB has no real mission anymore. Its budget has been slashed, and Yeltsin has signaled a purge is on the way," explained a Western intelligence source. "But conservatives in the defense establishment believe the KGB may be needed again, and have encouraged them to become more self-supporting."
So my traveling companion and I found ourselves parked at the side of the road, approximately 93 miles south of Sverdlovsk-45, sharing a picnic lunch with a Russian scientist and two former military officers. Ignoring the freezing wind, we ate brown bread heaped with butter and red caviar. We drank tea from a thermos that had given up its heat hours ago, and stamped our feet in the snow as we discussed the import of a meeting held two hours earlier.
The Russians took turns explaining the situation. The plan to buy certain rare metals from a factory dismantling warheads would have to be revamped. Even though my companion was interested in purchasing only "dual use" rare metals (rather than unequivocally illegal material, such as plutonium), there was a problem. Last summer, they said, more than a dozen plant directors and supervisors from Sverdlovsk-45 -- most of them KGB officers attached to the facility -- had been arrested and sent to prison for conspiring with the mafia to sell enriched uranium and plutonium abroad. Moscow had sent in a new KGB colonel to clean up the place.