You probably noticed reports recently about the secret trial in Georgia of two Armenian men who tried to sell highly enriched uranium (HEU) to a man purporting to be an Islamist terrorist. The whole thing was a sting operation from start to finish.
The would-be sellers of the HEU were two naive losers, a 63-year-old failed businessman called Sumbat Tonoyan who had gambled his money away and a 59-year-old physicist named Hrant Obanyan who was chronically ill. They fell right into the Georgian police trap.
A petty criminal called Garik Dadayan first approached Obanyan in 2002 with a packet of metallic powder, asking whether it was highly enriched uranium. Obanyan, a scientist at the Yerevan Physics Institute, confirmed that it was uranium though he could not say how enriched it was - and Dadayan was subsequently arrested trying to cross the frontier into Georgia with 200g of HEU.
Dadayan was out of jail again by 2005, so Obanyan knew where to go when his friend Tonoyan suggested that they could make a fortune by peddling HEU to terrorists.
It's almost certain Dadayan was working for the Georgian intelligence service by this time. The fact that in the end he only gave them 18g of HEU to take to Georgia reinforces that suspicion. And of course it was the Georgian police who supplied the buyer, a Turkish-speaking undercover policeman.
Last March, the two mugs took the night train from Yerevan to Tbilisi, with the 18g of HEU hidden in a cigarette box that was lined with lead strips to fool the American-supplied radiation detectors at the border. When Tonoyan showed up at a Tbilisi hotel the next day to close the sale (he was asking $US50,000 per gram), the police arrested him and his partner-in-crime.
Prime Minister Mikheil Saakashvili is trying to rebuild the close relationship he used to have with the United States before his rash failed attempt to seize South Ossetia by force in 2008. He will do anything he can do to make himself useful to the American intelligence services.
Why do the US intelligence services want to emphasise the risk of nuclear material falling into the wrong hands? Because that would be a bad thing, of course, but also to underline the fact that thwarting nuclear terrorism is entirely a job for the intelligence services.
They want us to conclude that the military should not be allowed anywhere near counter-terrorist operations, partly because the tools they use - infantry, artillery, etc - are entirely inappropriate for the job, and partly because invading countries tends to radicalise people and turn them into your enemies.
I'm happy to have them play their intelligence games, because it just might prevent something like a dirty bomb from exploding in an American city. If that did happen, the popular pressure on President Obama to invade some other Muslim country would be well-nigh irresistible. That's not what we need right now.
• Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
