The Minatom Conspiracy

On September 6 Vladimir Slivyak was walking along the sidewalk near his home in downtown Moscow when a black sedan pulled up next to him and two men got out. They told him they were officers with the Moscow Criminal Police (known as the MUR) and that he was under arrest. The men promptly hauled Slivyak into their car, seized his ID papers, and informed him he was under investigation for involvement in an act of terrorism.

In this context the cops mentioned the August 31 explosion at the Manezhnaya Palace in Moscow. Now, Slivyak is a leading figure in the Social Ecological Union, Russia's largest environmental group. He's also the founder of Ecodefense, a group that has led the campaign against the Russian nuclear industry--a campaign that has begun to vex plans hatched with the complicity of top national security players here in the U.S. to make Russia the world's dump for nuclear waste.

Slivyak tells Nature and Politics that he informed the officer he knew nothing about the Manezhnaya bombing (which has been widely regarded as the work of rebels supporting the secession of Dagestan) and asked them to show him their badges and identification cards. The men from MUR laughed, started the car and began driving around Moscow. One of them began roughing up Slivyak.

The cop sitting in the back seat next to Slivyak identified himself as Lieut. Kosterov, from Department 6 of the MUR. He said he knew all about Slivyak and his role in terrorism, adding that he had a big file on the ties of the Russian environmental groups to terrorism. Kosterov claimed that he was 100 percent sure who planted the August 31 bomb in Moscow, that the bomber was a green, and that Slivyak knew him. This same man, said Kosterov, would soon show up at Slivyak's house and that he should call the MUR and point him out to them.

Slivyak told Kosterov he would do no such thing and demanded that the police either take him to the MUR office and fill out a protocol (the equivalent of an arrest report/warrant, as required by Russian law) or let him out. Kosterov snickered, reached his hand down into a black bag and pulled out an ounce of marijuana, which he dangled in front of Slivyak's face, telling him he could either cooperate or the dope would find its way into Slivyak's backpack. Then, Kosterov said, Slivyak would be arrested for real, prosecuted under Russia's harsh drug laws, and spend the next three years in prison. Go ahead, arrest me, Slivyak replied, take me to the office and fill out a protocol.

It was then that Kosterov told Slivyak that the investigation into his environmental activities went beyond the MUR. Indeed, Kosterov said that the MUR was only doing the dirty work for the Russian Security Police (FSB), the reincarnation of the KGB.

The recent wave of bombings in Russia (usually credited to separatists or rightwing elements) has been used as a pretext for probes into the activities of environmentalists, who have become one of the strongest forces for political change inside Russia. The FSB has made a particular habit of targeting anti-nuclear activists. On July 2, the FSB charged environmentalist Aleksandr Nikitin with high treason and spying, claiming he divulged state secrets when he co-wrote a 1995 report on radiation hazards in the Russian Northern Fleet. The report was published by the Norwegian anti-nuke group Bellona. It is the eighth time Nikitin has been charged with such crimes. In February, the Russian Supreme Court dismissed previous charges against Nikitin, calling the case against him inconsistent, vague, and incomprehensible.

The zeroing in on anti-nuke organizers has everything to do with the FSB's intimate ties with Minatom, the Russian nuclear agency. Along with the FSB, Minatom is one of the most powerful and unsupervised agencies in Russia. Russian greens such as Slivyak view Minatom as being corrupt, violent, and unanswerable to anyone. Moreover, at a time when the Russian economy is in a state of free-fall, Minatom may be the one government institution with prospects for a steady flow of revenue. In March, Yuri Adamov, the blustery head of the Russian nuclear agency, announced that Minatom was set to cash in on the international market in nuclear materials.

In other words, Minatom is poised to make Russia the dumping ground for the world's radioactive waste. Adamov estimated that the potential fees for accepting the spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors in Japan, Switzerland, and Korea alone could total $150 billion.

Minatom has an American partner in this scheme, a group with the benign title of the Non-Proliferation Trust. The Trust plans to do much of the initial dirty work for Minatom, such as securing the waste from the utilities, building a nuclear waste armada, and constructing storage facilities inside Russia. This outfit is headed up by Daniel Murphy (former deputy director of the CIA), Bruce DeMars (former head of the Navy's nuclear program), and William Webster (former director of the CIA and FBI). Although the Trust is set up as a nonprofit corporation, it and its principals stand to make a ton of money from the deal, perhaps as much as $1.2 billion.

They've also spread the slush around to companies with ties to key American politicians. As noted, the plan calls for the building of a fleet of nuclear waste cargo ships, by the Gulfport, Mississippi firm of Halter Marine. Halter Marine is closely linked to Senator Trent Lott. Construction of the storage facilities will be overseen by the Alaska Interstate Construction Company, an Anchorage-based outfit on good terms with Senator Frank Murkowski. The company has handled much of the work at the filthy Prudhoe Bay oil refineries.

In an attempt to quash criticism by Russian enviros, the Trust brought on board the Natural Resources Defense Council and the head of its nuclear program, Thomas Cochran. In exchange for giving the project green cachet, NRDC will get 10% of the money passing through a program set up by the Trust called the Russian Environmental Fund. NRDC's take may top $20 million, a sum only slightly less than the group's annual budget.

The latest round of FSB/MUR attacks on Russian anti-nuke organizers came after greens protested the Minatom/NPT deal before the Duma, where Minatom was seeking to overturn Russian environmental statutes that currently ban the import of foreign nuclear waste. The Minatom plan was defeated by a narrow margin.

In the end the MUR officers released Slivyak without getting anything from him. "Finally, after spending 90 to 100 minutes in this car, I was released," Slivyak tells us. "They didn't tell me anything. They just said, 'go home.' When I asked them to return my ID papers, they shook their heads and said that I was going to be arrested sooner or later anyway and they'd keep them until then. Then they left."

On September 7, an FSB agent placed a threatening phone call to Slivyak's colleague Alexey Kozlov, who is the chief anti-nuclear organizer for the Social Ecological Union in Voronezh, south of Moscow on the river Don. The FSB agent told Kozlov that he "better get his fucking ass down to the FSB headquarters" for what the agent slyly referred to as an informal conversation. The agent said he wanted Kozlov to describe the recent protest at the Novovoronezh nuclear plant and the names of the organizers and participants. Kozlov said forget it. Then the FSB man upped the ante, intimating that charges could be brought against him as well. "Your Moscow friends have some problems, I hear. You don't want to experience the same, do you?" Kozlov told the security officers he still wasn't interested. "If that's the way you want it," the agent said, "fine. But if we don't capture the bombers, consider yourself arrested."

Nature & Politics appears weekly in the Anderson Valley Advertiser ( 12451 Anderson Valley Way, Boonville, CA 95415, $40/year). Cockburn and St. Clair also edit the biweekly newsletter CounterPunch, which "tells the facts and names the names" (3220 N. Street NW, PMB 346, Washington, DC 2007-2829, $40/year).