1. Tajikistan

After my career as a correspondent in Moscow, in the mid-nineties I was hanging around
unemployed in Berlin. I had just gone through a divorce and really wanted to
to move abroad. That's when I received a job offer from the Swiss CARITAS, Lucerne at just the right time.
They were looking for a project manager for a humanitarian project in the south of the
former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. There had been a terrible civil war there.
Caritas should rebuild the destroyed villages. As I speak Russian, knew my way around the CIS countries and am also a skilled construction worker (!), I applied - and to my surprise was accepted.
This is how the five most exciting and formative years of my life began in September.
20 km from the Afghan border. We rebuilt almost 2000 farmhouses and in 2000 the project was awarded as the best UN project in Central Asia.

All of this would have been unthinkable without the constant support and training provided by
internationally highly regarded Swiss development aid...

Back in Berlin, I applied for a job at the Federal Foreign Office, again received special
training and from 2001 I found myself representing the OSCE in various countries in the East,
most recently in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2004.

My son Mischa was born there and I married Irina.
There was an oddity in connection with Irina: the Foreign Office tried to prevent this marriage by all means.
Shortly after I married her anyway, I was informed that I had been dismissed.

I should never find a job in the CIS again.

There were enough applications, there were also enough interviews. But every time, often literally at the last moment, another supposedly better competitor turned up and got the job.
I often called the missed job to find out that the position was still vacant.
As I had a lot of time to think, I came up with a small detail: Some HR person once remarked: “There must have been something in Tajikistan..."

And indeed. Something had happened in Tajikistan...

During the preparations in Lucerne in 1995, CARITAS informed me that another GDR citizen would be joining me as my deputy.

He had previously worked as an officer in the Headquarters A (HVA) of the Ministry of State Security (MFS) of the GDR.

When I asked if this was not a problematic career for the Catholic Church, the laconic answer was: He speaks Russian well and wants to help the poor!
I found that remarkable. An organization that not only postulates mercy, but lives it daily!

It was only ten years later that I discovered the very special professional profile of my deputy by chance: Wolf Dieter P. studied from 1969 to 1973 at the Mendeleev Institute for Inorganic Chemistry and Structure of Matter in Moscow.
The Russian Atomic Bomb Institute. As a colonel and personal advisor to the head of the HVA, P. was the nuclear weapons specialist of the MFS.

He was with me in Tajikistan for a reason.

In the north-west of Tajikistan, the most important and largest uranium enrichment plant of the USSR was built in the 1940s. Built exclusively for the production of plutonium for atomic bombs.

In the late 1980s, workers had tried to sell plutonium in the milligram range on the black market. The facility was then placed under special guard. The Boss was the head of the Tajik KGB (The Committee for State Security). A Russian.

Having said this, I am no longer surprised that P. immediately after our arrival in September 1995 made contact with the Tajik KGB and the 211st Russian Mot. Division stationed there.

The pretext was the search for trucks and generators, which P. bought for thousands of dollars. Since he also spread the legend that we were a Swiss construction company, we soon had many interested KGB friends. P. organized special barbecue parties. On this occasion, one of the many deputy KGB chiefs said: "Imagine, our boss sold nuclear material for $20 million. Now he's sitting in his villa in the south of France, and we're in this banana republic."
P. was uncomfortable that I had heard this sentence and not understood it. There were no more meetings or parties after that.
Why is that?

P. had fulfilled his mission.

2. Sweden

One year before P. collected this remarkable statement, on the night of September 24-25, the Estonian-flagged “Estonia” had sunk, which claimed the lives of 852 people, including 500 Swedes.

There are a number of facts to support the thesis that the Tajik plutonium, 30-50kg, that is, material for a nuclear bomb, was on board and this fact was the starting point for the disaster.
- the "Estonia" had Russian military trucks on board.
- the Tallinn-Stockholm route was at that time the most common smuggling route for opium from Afghanistan. She had been used.
- Shortly after the sinking, Sweden's prime minister promised to recover all the bodies. He      retracted the promise after about a month.

Radioactive radiation, especially in the case of plutonium, changes the lattice structure of the molecules. This has damaged the DNA of the victims. No longer readable.

- Only in 2003 did it become known that a remote-controlled US underwater robot was active in the "Estonia" about a month after the disaster. Such robots are usually used to investigate and recover the nuclear weapons of crashed nuclear submarines.
- After the robot was deployed, there was a reportable flight of a plane carrying nuclear material on board from Stockholm.


3. Tajikistan

So, thanks to P., the security services involved knew where the stuff they found in the "Estonia" came from.

Plutonium is usually transported in heavy, specially secured railway sarcophagi. To get it to the opium route and to the "Estonia", the boys had made a special part of concrete, lead and iron, which had been loaded onto two military trucks. As is often the case, a bit sloppy. The anchorage on the truck floor had survived the careful drive through the Pamir Mountains and the Kazakh steppe, but the guys, who were well versed in the mountains, had no idea how much even a large ferry ship can stomp and roll in a storm. That's how the anchorage cracked and the dozens of tons of lead-concrete construction hung over the cargo side. All attempts to get it back by pressing on other trucks failed. They needed a strong crane. The crane was only in Stockholm, then there would have been a lot of questions. The boys wouldn't have survived the answers.

So that was resolved.
But there were dozens of other unsolved problems.
The plutonium plant in Tajikistan was still producing. Tajikistan is bordered by Pakistan, which built a bomb in 1995. Iran, which is not far away, was also interested in a bomb.
And in the south, in Afghanistan, was Osama bin Laden, for whom a bomb of his own would surely have fulfilled his biggest dreams.

In early 1996, the Clinton administration announced a generous plan. It provided $20 million (there they are again) for a one-off project: The security of nuclear installations, including military ones, in the CIS should be improved.
In 1998, as part of this programme, the comprehensive and complete decommissioning of the uranium enrichment plant in Tajikistan was announced. It is now a popular technology museum, with a slight scare factor.

But why, then, is the "Estonia" case still unsolved?
There's a lot to speculate about.

To this day there are still attempts to find out the truth. If that were to happen, a rat-tail of subsequent processes would be inevitable. The shipping company Meyerwerft, which has since been wound up, would seek millions for image damage. Two of the passengers were U.S. citizens, making it a multibillion-dollar lawsuit. And so on and so on.

By the way: Putin knows the whole story too. In 2009, it was revealed that Estonia’s deputy intelligence chief was a Russian double agent.

If you used to have Russia and Jelzin in your hands, now it is the other way around.


4. Wolf-Dieter P.

P. bought himself a nice condo after the most important intelligence operation since World War II and retired. He has no worries. His daughter and grandchildren deserve all his attention.
I don't hold a grudge against him.
He did an immeasurable service to the peoples of Europe.

signed by Lutz Leichtfuss