The Past is Prologue

Back in 1991, when the USSR collapsed, the CIA used a Wall Street War Lord named Manny Granov as the financier and cutout for the purchase of nuclear warheads in Kazakstan. The Kazak military there, in the belly of the former Soviet Union, had been on starvation wages, having gone unpaid for months. Wooed by elements of Russia’s boldest crime syndicate, Solntsevskaya Bratva, the Kazak missile regiment stationed at the crumbling Kökshetau storage facility, northeast of the capital in Astana, removed five of ten warheads from an SS-18 Mod 4 – R-36UTTh ICBM.

The Solntsevskaya gang paid the missile regiment $1 million for each warhead while the mob received $200 million from the CIA, advanced by Granov. The deal was done in stolen bearer bonds held at Riggs Bank in Washington, DC and issued by Edder Industries. Such investment instruments are liquid, untraceable, and nearly eternal.

All was treachery and felony. Four of these olive drab colored traffic-cone shaped warheads—each, 100 times more powerful than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima—arrived as negotiated in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. However, once on the ground, the CIA discovered one warhead had rolled off the truck. It came to be known as the “fifth bomb.” In 2009, 18 years later, the fifth bomb was resurfaced by the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency.

The operation to recover the aging weapon was designated Megiddo Oculus. Translated from the Greek, Megiddo was English for Armageddon.

On September 28, 2009, a nuclear device destroyed Washington, DC and decapitated the government—White House, Congress, and Supreme Court. The fifth bomb was the immediate suspect. Within 48 hours, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico determined that the weapon most closely fit the design of A.Q. Khan, the militant genius who built Pakistan’s uranium enrichment facilities.

While American military forces retaliated against Pakistan for providing the weapon, Peshawar was innocent, and that remained a closely held secret. As well, the whereabouts of the fifth bomb remain secret. The question is, who was keeping these secrets, and why?