"Lunev explains war would begin with the infiltration of Russian special operations troops into the U.S., who would kill top political and military leaders. Lunev also warns that Russian GRU (military intelligence) agents have already deposited, near key water reservoirs, deadly poisons and toxins which would result in millions of civilians being ravaged by disease. Lunev says, for instance, that the Russians have determined that they could wipe out a significant part of the population of Florida by polluting water sources in the Carolinas....Lunev says he personally scouted a site in the Hudson Valley just above New York City for one such suitcase nuke." - Internet Vortex, Vol. 1 number 3 (January 1999)- Christopher Ruddy
KGB WEAPONS CACHES ACROSS U.S.
"On the floor of the House of Representatives last night, Representative Curt Weldon (Rep., Penn.) dropped a bombshell. He presented “chapter and verse” on underground caches of weapons and other implements of war the Soviet KGB secreted in underground storage locations across the United States and in western European Countries. The caches are still there today.
Weldon gave the names of several Russian sources for the information. Since this writer has not seen the names in print, no attempt will be made to use them in this article. The spelling would indubitably be wrong. However, the positions the sources held make their stories more than credible.
The main source of the information is a mountain of copies of documents spirited out of the Kremlin archives by a Russian defector, which were furnished to British intelligence in 1992. The documents spell out the general location of some of the caches in the U.S. but the information is not specific enough to lead to the actual locations. . However the defector was able to furnish specific locations of caches in Switzerland and Belgium.
Officials in those two countries found the underground sites (which, by the way, were booby trapped) and verified the storage of a range of weaponry, ammunition, and electronic communications equipment.
An open hearing was held in a House sub-committee about ten days ago at which several Russian sources testified as to the accuracy of the documents from the Kremlin archives. One was the highest ranked Russian defector to date, a former KGB station chief in London. Weldon stated his purpose in disclosing the information on the House floor was motivated by the fact that there had been no media coverage of that hearing.
Weldon expressed a concern that weapons hidden in the United States might include suitcase size nuclear devices in the one to ten kiloton ranges. (Ten kilotons is the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Several years ago, a story appeared in the media that Russia had “lost” a number of these nuclear devices and some speculated they might have been sold or transferred to “rogue” nations."
[End of Partial Transcript]
Russia Loses Its Suitcase Nukes
The Electronic Telegraph
By Ivo Dawnay in Washington
November 9, 1997
The nightmare scenario of terrorists acquiring Russian suitcase-sized nuclear weapons took a dramatic turn last week when the Kremlin implicitly admitted that the bombs exist - and some may be missing. Until now, persistent rumours of the existence of the small, portable bombs have been vehemently denied by Moscow, with even Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin shrugging off the claims as an "absolute absurdity".
But The Telegraph has learned that Professor Alexei Yablokov, who first disclosed the existence of the sophisticated device, was quietly co-opted by the Russian Defence Council last week to devise new legislation to control the weapons.
On Thursday, he was secretly summoned to the Kremlin and ordered to help to draft a presidential decree to co-ordinate the location of "compact nuclear weapons", bring them under secure control, and arrange for their speedy destruction.
The Yeltsin government's decision to bring in the professor is a tacit admission that the suitcase bombs not only exist, but could be outside secure control and represent a genuine international security risk.
It was Prof Yablokov, a distinguished ecologist, academician and former special adviser to Boris Yeltsin, who first alerted the world to the danger posed by the bombs - ideal portable terrorist weapons. In October, he told a United States Congressional committee that he was "absolutely certain" they had been built as he had met someone involved in their construction.
This week he told The Telegraph that while there was "no certainty" that any of the bombs were unaccounted for, there were indeed "some suspicions". He said: "I won't say how many I think have gone missing - you will publish it and scare the whole world," he said. "It is a question of units, not dozens."
The Kremlin's decision to draft the professor represents a momentous U-turn. Only a week earlier, Prof Yablokov had issued an ultimatum to President Yeltsin, threatening to go public with technical details of the bombs if action were not taken immediately.
The Kremlin's decision also represents a personal triumph for US Congressman Curt Weldon. As chairman of the House of Representatives' National Security, in May, he disclosed that Gen Alexander Lebed had told him of his own concerns about suitcase nuclear weapons. Gen Lebed, who in his brief six months in government was charged by President Yeltsin to review nuclear security, said that only 48 out of 132 known bombs had been adequately accounted for.
He suspected that some of the weapons may have been built for the KGB by the Ministry of Atomic Energy without the knowledge of the Defence Ministry. Yesterday Mr Weldon welcomed the news of Prof Yablokov's appointment as vindicating his campaign. "We finally have full confirmation of our suspicions that these devices have existed and do exist," Mr Weldon said. "This is not a time to embarrass Russia, but to come together to secure nuclear stability for people in Russia, the US and the world."
Small, tactical nuclear devices have long been deployed on both sides of the Cold War trenches. The US military is believed to have as many as 600 atomic demolition munitions (ADMs) - some of which are known to troops as "satchel" bombs. The weapons were intended for special forces to use behind enemy lines for blowing up key infrastructure like airports and roads. Similar equipment is understood to have been issued to Soviet Spetznaz units as part of some 25,000 tactical nuclear weapons in the Red Army's armoury.
In 1995, rumours swirled round Moscow that two such bombs had been acquired in Vilnius, Lithuania by Chechen rebels. According to the Russian nationalist paper Zavtra, the weapons were bought for $600,000 and all those associated with the transaction were later murdered to ensure secrecy. The correspondent who wrote the article was subsequently abducted and threatened with death if he pursued the story - which was later withdrawn by Zavtra.
Despite the "official" American acceptance of Russia's assurances that there was no threat, US Intelligence agencies are believed to have been probing claims of loose tactical nuclear weapons since 1995. According to One Point Safe, a book by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, two Washington-based journalists, the US was approached by the Chechens during their war of secession and threatened with nuclear blackmail.
"They told them that if Washington did not formally recognise the Chechen state, they would sell the weapons to Gaddafi (the Libyan dictator)," Andrew Cockburn claims. A subsequent clandestine CIA mission to Chechenya - secretly agreed to by the Russians - failed to turn up evidence of a bomb.
This and other stories of hoaxes and skulduggery, however, proved sufficiently compelling to inspire the Cockburns to write the screenplay for The Peacemaker, a fictionalised thriller bought by Steven Spielberg. Professional analysts are not so much interested in whether the bombs exist, but in where exactly they are located and whether they are under Russia's secure control.
Now that Prof Yablokov has persuaded the Kremlin to take the issue seriously, it may be easier to discover whether any bombs are missing. But, given that the Russians have lied repeatedly about the very existence of the weapons, it may be too much to expect them to report honestly about when or whether they have this arsenal of terror under firm control.
Additional reporting by Alan Philps in Moscow
Copyright Telegraph Group Limited 1997.
Former Spy Says Russia Buried Explosives in U.S.
INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1998 (House of Representatives - November 07, 1997
"I do not intend to get into the policy side of this debate here today. Whether we decide that sanctions should be imposed or continued on these countries is secondary, but there is a fact here that simply cannot be ignored. As a Nation, we will not be able to gauge the success or failure of our policies or know the threat without an effective intelligence community. We simply have to have the eyes and ears to let us know what is going on.
We are told that there are no Russian missiles aimed at American children as they go to bed at night. Mr. Speaker, how do we know that for sure? How can we make that statement with certainty? How long will it take to retarget such weapons? How can we know how tenuous is the chain of command in the Russian strategic rocket forces? And how are we to catch profiteers trying to steal and sell suitcase nukes, if indeed they exist? And how are we to uncover and disrupt the secret nuclear weapons programs underway in hostile rogue states we read about virtually every day in the paper and see on television every night? The answer to all of these questions is one word, `intelligence.' "