Are Russian Nukes Buried in the US?
The lost luggage in the FBI basement.
WASHINGTON ? A Pennsylvania congressman is warning the FBI that there may be old, suitcase-size Soviet nuclear bombs buried throughout the United States.
So far, FBI agents have already combed through Brainerd, Minn., hoping to discover secret stockpiles of everything from nuclear weapons to pistols, radios, maps and currency, congressional sources told The New York Post.
"There is no doubt that the Soviets stored material in this country. The question is what and where," Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., told The Post.
The FBI has refused to confirm that account, or to comment on the stories that Soviet nukes may be floating around the country.
Weldon, an expert on Cold War Russia, says the former Soviet Union produced 132 suitcase-sized, 10-kiloton nuclear weapons, but hasn't fessed up to where 84 of them are, meaning they could have been sold to other countries or might even still be stationed at secret sites in the U.S.
Right now, bombs could be laying in wait in upstate New York, California, Texas, Montana and Minnesota, he said. He draws his conclusions from the congressional testimony of KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin and nationalist Russian Gen. Alexander Lebed.
Weldon teaches a class on Russia at Widener University in Pennsylvania, and has been to the country 19 times.
FBI Director Louis Freeh admitted to the congressman two weeks ago that there might hidden weapons caches in the U.S., but he's refused to perform anything but a perfunctory search, Weldon said.
The only way the FBI will be able to find these suitcase bombs is if Russia hands over KGB files, Weldon said. Weldon said that until Russia agrees to turn over KGB files on the location of the suitcases, it's highly unlikely the FBI could find the stockpiles.
"The administration is not asking the right questions," Weldon said.
He says President Clinton doesn't want to rock the boat for ailing President Boris Yeltsin, the administration?s strongest ally in the tumultuous former Soviet Union.
Two weeks ago, a former KGB agent and a British scholar both added fuel to the reports of buried weapons when they testified to the House Armed Services subcommittee on military research and development, which Weldon chairs.
Col. Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB agent ever to defect, and Christopher Andrew, a professor at Cambridge University and author of a book about the KGB, both said that based on KGB documents and what's happened in other NATO countries, they believe small nuclear bombs are buried in caches across the United States. However, they said it wasn?t a certainty.
The KGB had standing orders to blow up power stations, dams, telecommunications centers and landing strips for Air Force One in the event of war, according to Russian experts, including Stanislav Lunev, a former Russian military intelligence official who defected to the United States in 1992.
There have long been accusations that the Soviets smuggled weapons and other equipment with a military use into the United States during the Cold War. But the charges finally seemed to be turning into a reality in September, when prosecutors in Belgium confirmed that they had found three secret depots filled with radio sets that had been buried in the 1960s.
Steve Berry, an FBI spokesman, last Thursday told The Post the agency had "no comment" about reports of possible suitcase bombs and buried weapons caches in the United States.
But he acknowledged that FBI experts are familiar with the claims outlined by Mitrokhin, who has passed scores of KGB documents to the West.
On Oct. 22, Weldon and Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright a letter alerting her to the charges by the KGB agents and urging the administration to "aggressively pursue the Russian government to identify all pre-deployed weapons sites in the United States, and ... eliminate such remnants of the Cold War."
Weldon said he will release her reply when he receives one.
Fox News, November 7, 1999 |
