A first: Criminals steal nuclear material, than demand ransom for its return

It took two armed men no more than three minutes to break into an underground bunker in Argentina, swipe a canister of radioactive material, and make a quick getaway after tying up the lone security guard on duty at the facility.

Siobhan Gorman writes that the heist of cesium-137 from a Baker Atlas Co. oil-drilling operations base earlier this year, the first theft of radioactive material in Argentina, put to the test a new emergency-response process that Argentina’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority launched as part of a U.S. global nuclear security program. The program, officials in both countries say, enabled Argentine authorities to recover the radioactive material in less than two days.

The safe resolution of the theft, which police suspect was part of an extortion plot, has touched off a surge of interest in a program at the little-known U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration that helps foreign governments establish nuclear emergency-response centers and provides detection equipment and training.

For the United States., initiatives like the emergency-response program mark an expansion of the NNSA’s role, from securing U.S. nuclear weapons to working with other countries to bolster emergency nuclear-response capabilities. “We want to shift ourselves from a nuclear-weapons complex to a nuclear-security enterprise,” says NNSA administrator Thomas D’Agostino, who took the helm of the agency in 2007 and continued under President Barack Obama.

The Obama administration hopes the program will be viewed as a significant step in controlling the global risk of radioactive material falling into the wrong hands.

Gorman writes that some analysts say that tracking similar threats in less-friendly environments will be much more difficult. David Mosher, a senior policy analyst specializing in nuclear issues at Rand Corporation, a think tank, said bolstering emergency response in allied foreign countries like Argentina is considerably easier than ensuring that stolen radioactive and nuclear materials can be recovered in more troublesome corners of the world. The sheer volume of radioactive material used for industrial and medical purposes also makes response and recovery a continuing problem. “It’s a real challenge,” he says. “There is still more to go.”

Baker Atlas, a subsidiary of the multinational drilling company Baker Hughes, uses cesium to gage how much oil or natural gas a well is likely to produce.

The material also can be used to make a so-called dirty bomb, in which radioactive material would be added to a conventional bomb.

The amount of cesium-137 stolen, a wafer about the size of a quarter, was not enough to make a bomb, said Raul Racana, chairman of the board of directors of Argentina’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority. Exposure to very high concentrations of cesium-137 can lead to radiation sickness and death. The greater threat from a sample of this size, U.S. officials say, is that it could be sold on the black market and combined with other sources.

Gorman reports that at 3:30 a.m. on 19 February, two men crawled under the barbed-wire fence surrounding a Baker Atlas facility that houses drilling equipment in the Patagonian city of Neuquén. Surveillance camera footage shows the two men running to a guard shack, says Ed Apodaca, director of Latin American security for Baker Hughes.

Inside the shack, the two men threatened the guard with a handgun and tied him up, the guard later told company security officials. The two men then broke into a nearby bunker where the cesium was stored.

The men opened the bunker’s hatch and struggled to lift a shoebox-size, lead-lined container for the cesium that weighs about 60 pounds, and carried it to a getaway car awaiting them.

Baker Atlas immediately suspected a former employee, in part because the thieves were so familiar with the property. The company began receiving extortion calls, demanding $500,000 and threatening “to make this city glow” if the thieves did not get the money, Apodaca says.

Argentine authorities traced the cellphone calls to an area of suburban Neuquén, where a heavily loaded taxi triggered radiation sensors on high-tech detection equipment provided by the United States.

The taxi’s passenger was identified as a former Baker Hughes technician’s assistant, Benjamín Eduardo Soria, who had been fired for cause, says Apodaca, who declined to provide the reason for Soria’s dismissal. Company officials later matched Soria’s voice with the one from the threatening calls, and he was charged with aggravated theft.