The men were traveling 100 miles to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, to meet a Turk who had earlier told Khintsagov’s three Georgian associates that he represented a Muslim from a “serious organization” that was interested in getting HEU. There was, of course, the problem of the Russian-Georgian customs post, just a few miles from Nogir. But one of Khintsagov’s relatives worked there on the Russian side, and he saw to it that things went smoothly. When Khintsagov and his group approached Tbilisi, they veered off to the hardscrabble Mukhiani district on the outskirts and then arrived at a run-down, nine-story Soviet-style apartment block. There, in a squalid two-and-a-half-room apartment on the seventh floor, Khintsagov and Sud­jash­vili waited for their Turkish buyer.

Unfortunately for Khintsagov, however, the “buyer” was a Turkish-speaking operative of Georgia’s security service, which had gotten wind of his plans and set up a sting.

At first, the Georgian government didn’t believe that Khint­sagov’s uranium was weapons grade. “There are a lot of scammers saying they have nuclear materials,” Archil Pavlenishvili, Georgia’s chief nuclear investigator, told me in Tbilisi in January 2007. “In Khint­sagov’s case, we thought that, at most, he had some low-grade radioactive stuff, not highly enriched.” In fact, according to tests done by the U.S. government shortly after Khint­sagov’s arrest, his HEU was more than 89 percent pure, a level that the U.S. testing report described as “suitable for … military purposes including nuclear weapons.” Even more alarming was the apparent ease with which Khintsagov, a minor-league hustler, had acquired the material (most likely in the Siberian city of Novo­si­birsk, as he initially claimed to the Georgian authorities). Only by happenstance had the Georgians been able to apprehend Khintsagov, who had made several attempts to sell his HEU in Georgia’s lawless, breakaway territory of South Ossetia—one of several geopolitical black holes created in the region by the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

In 1989, the Soviet economy was imploding. Khint­sa­gov, who had worked at a state-run auto-repair facility and as a tractor driver after he finished school in 1973, was lucky enough to land a job in Iraq, as one of several thousand Soviet citizens brought in by Saddam Hussein to help develop the country’s oil fields. But that stint ended in 1991, and Khintsagov headed home, where he had no prospect of a decent job. Much of the Soviet workforce was either unemployed or, more often, underemployed. Professors had become paupers. White-collar professionals were being turned into penniless paper pushers.

So Khintsagov became a spekulant—a speculator—still a pejorative in those early days after the fall of the U.S.S.R., where such activity had once been a crime. First he traded in fish, anything from the dried vobbly that working-class Russian men washed down with vodka, to the trout that thrive in the streams of the Caucasus and the much more expensive, and illicit, Caspian Sea beluga that pass through Khintsagov’s home region on the way to markets in Moscow. He dabbled in another Russian staple—kolbasa, or sausage. And at some point he began dealing in furs, a trade that took him from Nogir to Novosibirsk, the Siberian city famous for its academic research facilities, and infamous for the secret cities nearby that formed the heart of the Russian nuclear-weapons complex.