This is another tip off...to suggest al-Qaida is paying former Russian special forces Spetznaz to assist the terrorist group in locating nuclear weapons formerly concealed inside the U.S. by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~These guys are about 70 years old now and went down in the cold war. Russia's army is in very bad shape.
Spetznaz
At the turn of the 21st century, much of what would be generally considered as nonsense for military junkies was written about Spetsnaz, GRU, KGB, and similar "top secret" and "exciting" topics. The word "Spetsnaz" was sometimes frivolously used to refer to anything the speaker deemed somehow special or "cool". For example, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a well-known populist and nationalist politician of very ill repute, once referred to his and his political party comrades' going for a swim at a party-organized festival as a "Spetsnaz on the water", while speaking on camera. This somewhat intentionally extreme incident should give some sense of the extent the term has been debased for many less literate users.
http://www.answers.com/topic/spetsnaz
"These guys are about 70 years old now and went down in the cold war. Russia's army is in very bad shape."
Not everything was off-base, but hard to sift fact from fiction.
Lots of bad things and bad people got loose when the USSR came apart. Things are probably better now, but a lot of damage was done.
Most militaries have some sort of special forces. If it weren't for them, the USSR would probably still be around. They saved Yeltsin and stopped the coup in 1991. But they had some very bad characters as well. Then, there were the neither bad nor good, but those who could not feed their families after the fall of the USSR as they often went months without pay, and they were corrupted.
Russia's military has big problems, but they are bottoming out. There are still special forces (spetznaz), but while they probably have their share of Timothy McVeighs, they are not as a matter of policy arming Al Qaeda with nukes as they are active on their territory (Chechnya) and in their neighborhood (Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan, etc). So the first place AQ would bomb if they got one would be Moscow. Russians may be a lot of things, but not stupid.
However, stupid things happened in the chaos after the USSR collapse. And those things may one day soon come to haunt us.