Bush: fear of bin Laden nukes
By RICHARD SALE, UPI Terrorism Correspondent The Bush administration is concerned that the al Qaida network of accused terrorist
mastermind Osama bin Laden might try to use a small nuclear weapon in a super-spectacular
strike to decapitate the U.S. political leadership, according to a half dozen serving
and former U.S. government and intelligence officials.
"They believe it's a real possibility," said one former senior U.S. government official,
adding that secret plans for protecting the U.S. president and his successors in the
event of a nuclear attack were in place.
The Bush administration believes that bin Laden -- the prime suspect in the Sept.
11 terror attacks -- may be in possession of one or more small, portable nuclear weapons,
according to one former senior U.S. intelligence official. Other experts agree that
the danger is real. "We're not at all discounting that possibility," agreed Rose Gottemoeller,
senior associate and Russian weapons expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace.
Bin Laden's efforts to get hold of nuclear material are no secret. Peter Probst,
an anti-terrorism analyst formerly with the Pentagon's Office of Special Operations
Low-Intensity Conflict says the Saudi fugitive "has been obsessed with nuclear weapons."
During his trial for involvement in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. Embassies in East
Africa, Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl, an al Qaida operative, outlined bin Laden's efforts to
spend $1.5 million to obtain a cylinder of enriched uranium. Plans were made, said
al-Fadl, to test uranium samples to see if they could be made into a bomb. The project
fell through, he said, according to court documents.
But Monday, the Times of London cited unnamed Western intelligence sources as saying
bin Laden had obtained nuclear materials from Pakistan.
And there have also been several reports -- variously citing unnamed intelligence
sources from Israel, Russia and Arab nations -- about bin Laden's attempts to purchase
a small nuclear device from the arsenal of a former Soviet republic, through terrorist
or mafia groups in Chechnya or Central Asia.
According to Probst, what the U.S. intelligence community fears is that tactical
nuclear weapons of one kind or another have been sold to terrorists via corrupt Russian
military officers or the Russian or Chechen mafias with whom bin Laden is known to
have had contact.
Probst explained that portable nuclear weapons were developed by the Soviets in the
1960s. They were designed for use by their Spetznatz special operations forces against
NATO command and control sites.
Until recently, the best information the United States had about these weapons described
them as "suitcase bombs," although former CIA counter-terrorism expert, Vince Cannistraro,
says that they are the size of a footlocker and Gottemoeller adds that they actually
come in two sections, "both rather cumbersome."
Cannistraro denounces reports that bin Laden has obtained such weapons as "total
crap."
But a former senior U.S. intelligence and Eastern Bloc specialist cautioned that
"the Soviets were able to build weapons of such smallness and lightness that they
could be carried by one person," pointing out that one U.S. nuclear warhead weighs
less than 60 lbs.
While much has been written about suitcase bombs, until now, nothing has appeared
in any public report about these smaller "backpack" nuclear weapons, according to
several U.S. government sources.
One U.S. government expert said that the United States gained new knowledge of the
backpack weapons in the 1990s through Russian double agents run by the CIA. One U.S.
source familiar with the program said: "We had defectors who trained on backpack weapons
and who bluntly told the agency that everything they knew about the devices was wrong.
We didn't understand how they were assembled or how they were to be used."
In 1998, this new information was put into a CIA "blue border" report, meaning it
"contains material from a foreign source of the greatest sensitivity," a former senior
U.S. intelligence official said. The report was presented to then President Bill Clinton
and his National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. The report was so secret, the two
men were only allowed to initial the document before it was returned to the agency's
custody, U.S. government officials said.
Berger's assistant told United Press International that he declined to comment because,
"It's an intelligence matter."
But the Federation of American Scientists says, "nuclear weapons that can fit in
a very heavy, normal-sized suitcase are a real possibility."
"The possibility that these devices have been stolen and sold to terrorist groups
is nearly anyone's worst nightmare," said Carey Sublette of the Federation of American
Scientists.
General Aleksandr Lebed, the former Russian security czar, said in 1997 that several
nuclear suitcase bombs and tactical nukes had disappeared from the Russian arsenal.
In testimony before the Congressional Military Research and Development Subcommittee
in October 1997, Lebed said there were bombs made to look like suitcases that could
be detonated by one person with less than 30-minute preparation.
Lebed also said that nuclear bombs only 24 x 16 x 8 inches were distributed among
Soviet military intelligence units. He made no mention of nuclear backpack bombs.
Probst told UPI he believes that Lebed is accurate about missing Soviet tactical
nuclear weapons. "I firmly believe that some were sold to groups by corrupt Russian
military, probably in the Central Asian republics," he said. On Oct. 28, 1999, Rep.
Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) said that he believed that some 48 Russian nuclear devices remained
unaccounted for.
"We simply don't know what was floating around out there when the Soviet Union dissolved,"
especially in the Central Asian republics, an administration official said. "That's
one of the questions we need to ask: what are the threats?"