The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American For

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American

Postby admin » Fri May 26, 2017 6:29 am

Chapter 18: Injustice

Carl Duckett's top-secret CIA estimate in 1968 that Israel had three or four nuclear bombs was primarily based on his conviction that an American Jew named Zalman Shapiro had smuggled more than two hundred pounds of enriched uranium into Israel-enough for four bombs. The alleged smuggled uranium also was a major factor in Duckett's second estimate, in '974, that credited Israel with at least ten bombs; it was based on the amount of uranium he believed Shapiro had diverted plus a guess that the technicians at Dimona could have chemically separated enough plutonium from the reactor to have produced six weapons or more since '970. Just how Israel would accomplish that feat without a chemical reprocessing plant-the CIA still had no proof that such a plant existed in Israel-was not clear, but what was clear was Shapiro's culpability. To Duckett and his colleagues, especially Richard Helms, the case against Shapiro was unassailable.

In the CIA's view, Shapiro was more than just a Jew who supported Israel; he was a Jew in the nuclear-fuel-processing business who traveled regularly to Israel and was a partner with the Israeli government in some business ventures. He fit the dual-loyalty stereotype in many other ways: he was the high-achieving son of an Orthodox rabbi who emigrated from Lithuania; he was valedictorian of his high school class in Passaic, New Jersey, before attending Johns Hopkins University; he got a master's degree while going to night school; and-with the aid of a fellowship from Standard Oil of Indiana-he earned his doctorate in chemistry in 1948, at the age of twenty-eight. Shapiro, with his brilliance and capacity for hard work, was among the first scientists-and most certainly one of the first Jews-to be hired to develop submarine reactors for a newly established laboratory operated by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation for the U.S. Navy.

As his career progressed, Shapiro--who underwent rigorous national security checks while at Westinghouse-made no secret of his strong commitment to Israel; some of his family had been victims of the Nazis, and he believed in the need for an independent Jewish state. He became an active member of the Zionist Organization of America and also generously supported the American Technion Society, which raises funds and provides equipment to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel's most advanced school of science and engineering.

In 1957, he organized a publicly owned nuclear fuel processing firm, with at least twenty-five stockholders, in an abandoned World War II steel plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, twenty-five miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The firm, known as the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), was a small company in a nuclear-fuel-processing world that was dominated by Fortune 500 firms; there was a constant struggle to get contracts. Shapiro was aggressive in the pursuit of work for his young company, and by the early 1960s NUMEC was providing nuclear services for at least nine foreign countries. There was a steady stream of foreign visitors to the factory, many at the instigation of the Department of Commerce and the State Department, which were eager to show off the government's Atoms for Peace effort. There were at least three foreign employees at NUMEC, including an Israeli metallurgist assigned to unclassified breeder reactor fuel research. There also was constant back-and-forth in those years between AEC security officials and NUMEC over the handling of classified materials, and the company was required to improve its procedures.

In 1965, after years of internal audits and reviews, an AEC inspection team determined that more than two hundred pounds of enriched uranium that had been supplied by Westinghouse and the Navy to NUMEC for processing and fabrication could not be accounted for; eventually the Joint Atomic Energy Committee-as well as the CIA-came to suspect that Shapiro had diverted the uranium to Israel.

Shapiro would be hounded by those suspicions for the next twenty-five years-although the most significant evidence against him seemed to be his Jewishness and the fact that one of the major investors in NUMEC shared his support for Israel. A number of experienced investigators from the government and the Congress, as well as dozens of journalists, assumed that Shapiro's emotional tie to Israel was enough of a motive for him to commit nuclear espionage, a crime punishable by death under the Atomic Energy Act.

Despite more than ten years of intensive investigation involving active FBI surveillance, however, no significant evidence proving that Shapiro had diverted any uranium from his plant was ever found. Nonetheless, he remained guilty in the minds of many in the government and the press; reporters invariably included an account of Shapiro's ties to Israel and the alleged NUMEC diversion in any story about the development of nuclear arms in Israel. Some of the newspaper and book accounts did note that the charges against Shapiro were never proved; many others simply declared that it was the Shapiro uranium that gave Israel the nuclear bomb.

Zalman Shapiro did not divert uranium from his processing plant to Israel, but there is little solace for the nuclear industry in that fact: the missing uranium was not stolen at all-it ended up in the air and water of the city of Apollo as well as in the ducts, tubes, and floors of the NUMEC plant. There is little solace, too, for the American intelligence community in Shapiro's noninvolvement with nuclear diversion, for it failed to learn of Shapiro's close ties to Ernst David Bergmann and Binyamin Blumberg and the sensitive-and legitimate-mission he did conduct for his beloved Israel.

***

Shapiro's business was not a pretty one: many of NUMEC's contracts involved the chemical isolation and recovery of enriched uranium from the dirt and scrap generated in fabricating nuclear fuel. The scrap was chemically treated -- sometimes two or three times-in an attempt to isolate the salvageable uranium. The process inherently generated some loss; small amounts of enriched uranium were constantly being flushed out in waste water or lodged in scrub brushes, air vents, filtration systems, cleaning pads, and air masks. It was the kind of work NUMEC's larger and more solidly financed competitors did not want. Other NUMEC contracts involved cleaner work, such the conversion of highly enriched uranium (93 percent U-235) from gaseous uranium hexafluoride-the form in which it was shipped from the government's huge uranium diffusion plants-into uranium oxide powder capable of being fabricated into nuclear fuel for Navy reactors. That process, too, created waste -- as much as 10 to 15 percent of the uranium eventually ended up as scrap and needed to be recovered. Since working with weapons-grade material was exceedingly dangerous, NUMEC had to divide the uranium being processed into small lots -- creating more opportunity for waste -- to guard against the horrible possibility of setting off a chain reaction. Under the stringent AEC rules governing the reprocessing of weapons- grade uranium and plutonium, Shapiro's firm was responsible and had to pay enormous penalties for any enriched materials that could not be accounted for -- as much as $10 a gram; each missing pound thus meant a loss of more than $4,500.

The term MUF, for "material unaccounted for," became a common one in the nuclear processing industry. Making the contractors pay for missing materials also was the backbone of the AEC's safeguards program; the assumption was that no reprocessing firm would divert or steal uranium if it resulted in a stiff fine.

The AEC eventually worked out complicated rules for ac counting for MUF that enabled private firms such as NUMEC to estimate in their regular reports how much missing but ac countable uranium was believed to be in a plant's air filtration system or buried in its waste pits. NUMEC would routinely report seemingly huge losses of enriched materials on any given contract-thirty or forty pounds was not unusual-and then estimate that 80 percent or more of the lost materials would be recovered upon cleanup. The AEC accepted such estimates as realistic, and deferred the assessments of any penalties.

The fact that nuclear waste was considered an inevitable byproduct of the business, just as sawmills produce sawdust, was not really a secret-it was just one of those facts that the public did not need to know, and especially so as the nation became increasingly sensitized to the environmental costs of the nuclear industry. The enriched materials handled by the workers at NUMEC were not "hot," as commonly understood, for they had not yet been irradiated in a reactor and thus did not emit penetrating and lethal radiation. The danger facing the NUMEC employees came from breathing in or otherwise ingesting uranium, which, like all heavy metals, accumulates in bones, where it eventually impacts on bone marrow, causing leukemia. Enriched uranium, if breathed into the lungs, also could trigger lung cancer, and the NUMEC employees were constantly urged to wear face masks, although many refused to do so in the summer.

Zalman Shapiro's career-destroying problems began in 1962, when he was the low bidder for two complicated Westinghouse contracts, involving the processing of more than 2,500 pounds of enriched uranium. NUMEC was assured by Westinghouse that 60 percent or more of each hundred kilograms of uranium could successfully be processed-meaning that as much as 40 percent of the uranium would be scrap, to be separately recovered. In fact, NUMEC found that the process was far more difficult than Westinghouse had claimed for one of the contracts, and resulted in only a 35 percent yield of acceptable product. Nearly two thirds of the Westinghouse-supplied uranium ended up as scrap, much of it-so Shapiro and his associates thought-eventually buried in barrels, along with contaminated rags and other cleaning equipment, in two huge waste pits on the NUMEC grounds. The pits included contaminated waste not only from the Westinghouse contract but from other processing jobs for private companies; Shapiro had not isolated the scrap from each of his contracts, as the AEC demanded. AEC investigators subsequently became convinced that Shapiro had deliberately commingled the scrap from different contracts as a money-saving bookkeeping measure. Shapiro also angered the AEC by his reluctance -- again for pocketbook reasons-to begin the time-consuming job of reprocessing the scrap to extract the missing uranium; he instead kept his employees at work on new processing contracts, for which there would be immediate payment. Stalling the AEC inspection teams, which were demanding that the missing uranium be accounted for, one way or another, became a way of life at NUMEC.

***

The AEC tried to resolve the complicated mess in a series of extensive negotiations in 1964 and 1965, with Shapiro constantly citing NUMEC's precarious financial condition to justify his actions. Portions of the 1963 waste pit eventually were dug up, and AEC inspectors found that the amount of enriched uranium buried there was not nearly enough to match the huge losses. The inspectors concluded that there was a MUF of 93.8 kilograms (206 pounds) of enriched uranium; they also told headquarters that because of NUMEC's "inadequate and incomplete accounting records," a diversion could not be ruled out, although there was "no evidence" that a diversion had taken place. The issue was aired at a special meeting in February 1966 of the AEC commissioners and senior staff, and, according to a declassified transcript of that meeting, the commissioners agreed that NUMEC's employees be interviewed to find out what had happened. It was further agreed that a trip would have to be taken to Capitol Hill to inform the Joint Atomic Energy Committee of the loss.

The report to Congress was a bombshell. The American nuclear community already had been rocked in October 1964 upon learning that China's first nuclear bomb had been triggered by uranium, and not plutonium, as the CIA and other intelligence agencies had widely anticipated. There was immediate suspicion that China had somehow bought on the black market-or stolen-the enriched uranium for its bomb (the CIA would not learn for another year or so that China had completed a huge diffusion plant much earlier than expected). A special study into AEC safeguards was commissioned, and it questioned the commission's heavy reliance on financial penalties as a sufficient bar against nuclear diversion. The Joint Committee's report noted that the AEC's position seemed to be that all of its responsibility "had been fulfilled as long as material was paid for."

The AEC, sensitive to the diversion issue, had referred the NUMEC losses to the FBI in October 1965, but the FBI saw no basis for an investigation; its senior counterintelligence officials concluded, according to declassified documents, that "this situation up to now has been rightfully treated by AEC as an administration matter and there appears to be no basis for us to take any action. . . ." An AEC inspection team eventually interviewed more than 120 employees at NUMEC. No evidence of a diversion was established.

***

The CIA, nonetheless, found Shapiro's long-standing ties to Israel to be of continuing interest. Shapiro was a frequent visitor to Israel, and Israelis were among the many foreign visitors who had registered for tours of NUMEC. Shapiro also was a partner with the Israeli government in a business involving the pasteurization of food and the sterilization of medical supplies by irradiation; packages to and from NUMEC were being shipped out of and into Israel. By late 1966, although reports of Israel's progress in nuclear weaponry began to flow from the American embassy in Tel Aviv, John Hadden, the CIA station chief, was still unable to find proof that Israel had a chemical reprocessing plant at Dimona. And without such a plant, Israel would have needed an independent source of enriched uranium or plutonium to manufacture the bombs that, so Hadden's informants told him, existed.

Duckett and Helms shared Hadden's view that Shapiro had to have been the source for the Israeli progress in nuclear weaponry; the two men would spend the next few years pushing their suspicions on anybody-including Presidents Johnson and Nixon-who would listen. They were mesmerized by Shapiro's links to Israel and the fact that one of the initial stockholders in NUMEC, David Lowenthal, had helped bring illegal immigrants into Israel before 1948. Duckett even came to believe, as he later told congressional investigators, that NUMEC had been set up in 1957 by Shapiro as part of a long-range Israeli intelligence scheme to divert uranium. Duckett and Helms were supported in most of their suspicions by George F. Murphy, assistant staff director of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, who also was convinced that the two hundred pounds of enriched uranium could not simply have disappeared into NUMEC's refuse pits and air ducts. Murphy, who had no technical understanding of the nuclear fuel cycle, found Shapiro's alleged sloppy bookkeeping, as reported by the AEC, to be preposterous: in his view, "Shapiro was the sharpest, hardest-headed businessman I've ever known." Murphy also was appalled by what he considered to be a lack of security at UMEC and told a congressional investigator of seeing uranium pellets scattered "all over the benches" during a visit to the Apollo plant. The possibility of a diversion to Israel seemed solid, and Shapiro was put under FBI surveillance in the late 1960s.

Shapiro, meanwhile, in a desperate effort to save his company, hired James E. Lovett, a senior AEC scientist, to take over nuclear materials accountability at NUMEG One of Lovett's first acts was to insist that the concrete floor of the old plant be protected with stainless steel; concrete, Lovett knew, absorbed far more uranium than suspected. Shapiro and other company officials "were deluding themselves," Lovett recalled. "They honestly thought that if it came down to the end, they'd recover most" of the two hundred or more pounds of missing uranium in NUMEC's waste pits. But most of the uranium was not in the plant's waste pits; it was embedded in the concrete floor, clinging to ventilation ducts, flushed out with other plant wastes into the local waterways, and scattered in the air.

The continuing controversy over the alleged diversion became widely known inside the tight-knit nuclear community, and Shapiro suffered. "I was a smelly dead fish," he bitterly recalled. "Contracts were pulled away and given to others." In 1967, Shapiro and his partners were forced to merge their interest in NUMEC into the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO); Shapiro, with his special Q-clearance (for atomic energy matters) still intact, continued to run the plant.

Shapiro, as the CIA and AEC never learned, did have a secret life. He had met and befriended many of Israel's senior nuclear scientists on his visits there, and was especially devoted to Ernst David Bergmann, who was head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission until 1966. "He was a genius," Shapiro said of Bergmann. "He was a genius's genius. He worked night and day. I don't know when he slept." Bergmann was especially interested in a nuclear-powered water desalinization plant, Shapiro said.

Water, of course, was the most precious of commodities in Israel. In 1964, the country completed a 150-mile conduit, known as the National Water Carrier, to bring water from the north to the Negev. The system, then Israel's largest development project, linked local and regional water conduits to form an integrated network that sought to capture all of the nation's rainfall and channel it into reservoirs. The National Water Carrier was not completed, however, without a series of disputes with Syria, especially over Israel's goal of bringing water south from Lake Kinneret in Galilee. There were huge stretches in northern Israel where water being moved to the south was in the open, protected only by fencing; the waterway was an obvious target for terrorists. El Fatah, the Arab guerrilla group (and later an important member of the Palestine Liberation Organization), boasted that it would poison the water. At one point, Israeli security officials suspected that El Fatah had attempted to cut the fence protecting the water works in what was feared to be an effort to plant a bomb.

It was at this point that Zalman Shapiro was asked by Israel to devise a rapid and accurate method of determining whether water had been contaminated with toxic materials. There was a second problem: as much as 30 percent of the water was disappearing while traveling to the south, and Israeli officials were unable to determine where and how the loss was taking place. Shapiro acknowledged, reluctantly, that he also advised on that issue, eventually recommending that a radioactive tracer be added to the water in Lake Kinneret to monitor the flow. He had decided not to discuss specifically all of his activities on behalf of Israel during the many government and congressional investigations into NUMEC, he said, because of the continued threat to the Israeli water supply: "I didn't want to put any ideas into people's minds."

In the late 1960s, Shapiro convened a series of meetings -- some in his home -- of American scientists and Israelis to discuss, he said, the issue of how to protect the National Water Carrier from potential terrorists. Some of the sessions, considered prima facie suspect by Duckett and his colleagues, were monitored by the FBI. At the time, NUMEC was under contract to provide to Israel specialized small power sources, whose function Shapiro refused to spell out, other than to acknowledge that they were linked to the security of the waterways. All of the items shipped were approved by the Commerce Department for export, he said. "We had permits for what we did. I never transmitted any documents to anybody," he insisted. "The meetings pertained only to the water supply."

Shapiro would not say whether he knew-as did many American scientists--of the work being done at Dimona. He did acknowledge an acquaintanceship with Binyamin Blumberg, the director of Israel's Science Liaison Bureau: "I never said I didn't know him." But he denied revealing any American secrets or diverting any materials. "I worked my butt off to assure the security of this country-do you think for a moment I'd do anything to impair its security?"

***

Duckett and Helms remained convinced that Shapiro was guilty of espionage. Duckett's conversation with Edward Teller and his early-I968 estimate of Israeli nuclear capacity led Helms to urge the FBI to renew its investigation into Shapiro's dealings with Israel. The FBI's J. Edgar Hoover was then in the midst of a bitter dispute with James Angleton's counterintelligence shop over the CIA's handling of defectors, as well as the continuing-and illegal-CIA spying inside the United States under a presidential mandate to determine whether the anti-Vietnam War movement was being directed by Moscow. Hoover chose to spar with Helms over the Shapiro issue for the next year, according to a former congressional investigator who has reviewed the Senate and House intelligence committees' files on Shapiro. "The CIA was saying to Hoover," the investigator recalled, "'You're responsible for counterintelligence in America. Investigate Shapiro, and if he's a spy, catch him.' Hoover's answer was, 'We don't really know if anything's been taken. Go to Israel and get inside Dimona, and if you find it [evidence of the Shapiro uranium], let us know.' It was kind of a game," the investigator added. "The memos were hysterical- they went back and forth."

***

The NUMEC file remained buried, with Shapiro again working for 'Westinghouse, until 1975, when James H. Conran, an analyst in the Nuclear Regulation Commission (NRC), one of two new agencies that had been formed when the AEC was dissolved earlier in the year, was assigned to write a history of nuclear safeguards. He was denied access to the NUMEC file on grounds of security, and began a fervid campaign to get a briefing on NUMEC for the five NRC commissioners and their immediate staffs. He could not write his report, he said, unless he got that file.

There was another significant issue at stake: the nuclear power industry was pushing hard to get public and government support for a huge plutonium recycling industry. It seemed as if the future of nuclear power now depended on public acceptance of fast breeder reactors capable of generating more plutonium fuel than they consumed. The public policy issue was obvious: how could the world's governments prevent the diversion of plutonium for military use? Bringing up the NUMEC issue once again created a very much unwanted dilemma: either there had been a diversion, or the inherent loss of plutonium and uranium at processing facilities such as NUMEC -- and there were many scattered across the nation -- was far higher than publicly understood.

The advocates of nuclear power, who included many in the NRC, shuddered at the prospect of more adverse publicity about nuclear reactor safety and possible widespread contamination. Antinuclear groups were being organized around the world and had begun large, and sometimes violent, demonstrations in an effort to halt nuclear power.

Conran's insistence on determining what had happened to the missing uranium at NUMEC won him few friends, therefore, inside the NRC. A high-level briefing by Carl Duckett was arranged to discuss the possibility of a diversion. Victor Gilinsky, then an NRC commissioner, recalled Duckett's presentation as matter-of-fact: "Basically, Duckett was asked [about an Israeli bomb] and said the CIA thought Israel had nuclear weapons and the Agency thought there was a diversion. e didn't say anything that would convince you that was the case-but the issue from our point, our little world, is that he said what he did. We [the NRC commissioners] did not have responsibility for dealing with the Israelis-we take what other agencies think as a starting point." Gilinsky's contention was that the NRC had no obligation to determine whether Duckett's assertions were correct, but it agreed on the basis of what Duckett said to tighten up procedures for dealing with nuclear materials. Most of those at the Duckett briefing "were not involved in foreign affairs," Gilinsky noted. "They were protecting the notion that the NRC's procedures were adequate to protect plutonium. It was a threat to our claims that you could protect the stuff."

Duckett's briefing to the NRC and his subsequent informal talk at the CIA before the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Association, while ruinous to his career, did provoke another brief flurry of concern over NUMEC at the Ford White House-yet another investigation of Shapiro was initiated. Once again, however, the FBI could find no evidence of a diversion.

There was independent evidence, moreover, demonstrating that Shapiro's problems in operating NUMEC were not as exceptional as the AEC had publicly indicated in the mid-1960s. A continuing NRC investigation of the plant, which had been taken over in the early 1970s by Babcock & Wilcox, one of the nation's major reactor designers, concluded that another 198 pounds of enriched uranium was missing over a twenty-nine-month period beginning in April 1974. Further study showed that more than no pounds could be accounted for by what the NRC study called previously "unidentified and undocumented loss mechanisms"-such as the contamination of workers' clothing, losses from scrubber systems, material embedded in the flooring, and residual deposits in the processing equipment. The remaining lost uranium was attributed to "inevitable uncertainties in the measurement system and errors in the accounting system." In other words, uranium loss is hard to measure. The high volume of lost uranium raised obvious pollution questions for the immediate area; the Apollo facility had been discharging an average of 13,300 gallons of water and waste effluents daily into the nearby Kiskiminetas River, a tributary of the Allegheny River, which is the main source of drinking water for several communities in the Pittsburgh area. [1]

In October 1977, Jody Powell, President Jimmy Carter's press secretary, publicly announced that "four years of continuing investigation" by the AEC, FBI, and General Accounting Office had "failed to reveal" a diversion of uranium to Israel. By the end of the year the NUMEC case was being actively pursued by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, one of the most competent and aggressive investigative units in the Congress, as well as the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. Carl Duckett and John Hadden, both retired from the CIA, cooperated fully with the subcommittees; at one point, Duckett telephoned an investigator in the middle of the night and insisted that he go to a pay telephone at a gas station to return the call. He then urged that the investigation into Shapiro be carried forward. Hadden, meanwhile, was repeatedly suggesting that the Israeli government had to have a "mole"-a clandestine operative-inside the Atomic Energy Commission who had protected Shapiro in the early investigations of a possible diversion.

There was little due process for Shapiro in all of this. The subcommittee investigators seemed to take everyone of Duckett's and Hadden's claims at face value. But it is through those claims that outsiders can begin to understand how the CIA and the two congressional subcommittees weighed evidence and what kind of internal checks and balances were imposed on their investigations.

Duckett's beliefs were most directly expressed in a 1981 ABC television interview, when he said there had been a "clear consensus" inside the CIA that the "most likely case" was that Israel had become a nuclear power because of uranium supplied by Shapiro. "I certainly believe that to be the case.... I believe that all of my senior analysts who worked on the problem agreed with me fully," Duckett said. The subcommittee investigators had no way of knowing, of course, how little Duckett and his "senior analysts" had been able to learn about the Israeli nuclear arsenal. The subcommittees also did not know that Duckett's initial estimate of Israeli nuclear capability was primarily based on an assertion to that effect by Edward Teller, and not on any specific intelligence about the capacity of the Israeli reactor or the established existence of a chemical reprocessing plant at Dimona. There also was no specific evidence linking Shapiro to the delivery of enriched ranium to Israel. Nor did the subcommittees realize that Duckett's 1974 CIA estimate was not without its critics at the time. Intelligence officials at the Atomic Energy Commission insisted that a footnote be added to the estimate pointing out that "any information" about a diversion of uranium to Israel was unknown to the commission. "Duckett pushed real hard inside the USIB [United States Intelligence Board] to incorporate Israel and Apollo" in the special estimate, one AEC official recalled, "and it got in there."

Nonetheless, Henry R. Myers and Peter D. Stockton, the chief investigators for the congressional subcommittees, have spent nearly fifteen years relaying the Duckett and Hadden suppositions to journalists as the views of knowledgeable intelligence sources; many reporters published the beliefs of Duckett and Hadden as "facts."

For example, Myers, a specialist on energy issues for the House Subcommittee on Energy, told the author at the beginning of his research into Zalman Shapiro that there "are reasons to believe that NVMEC had been set up solely for the diversion. The reason for this," Myers explained, "is that no one's ever seen clearly where the money came from." Myers referred to David Lowenthal's role in 1948 in Israel and added: "There were reports of a secure telephone or teletype between NUMEC and the Israeli embassy." Myers also told of sitting in on a meeting about NUMEC between Richard Helms and a group of legislators: "Helms said, in effect, that Shapiro was the head of a group of people collecting information, some classified and some not, for Israel." There was a further allegation that CIA operatives in Israel had found "traces of enriched uranium" near Dimona that was similar to the enriched products that had been delivered for processing to Shapiro's plant. There also was a highly suspicious meeting at the airport in Pittsburgh between Shapiro and Jeruham Kafkafi, an Israeli scientific attache, who flew, so the FBI reported, from Washington to Pittsburgh for the meeting and returned immediately to Washington. Myers described Kafkafi as "a possible Israeli intelligence officer."

Myers continued to believe well into the early 1990S that his statements were correct. But the fact is that David Lowenthal was one of a number of investors in NUMEC, some of whom were not Jewish. There was no special secure telephone or teletype at NUMEC, a fact acknowledged by Duckett and others who have investigated the alleged diversion. Richard Helms may indeed have been convinced that Shapiro was the head of an Israeli spy ring, but there is no known factual basis for that assertion. Duckett and other government investigators into NUMEC acknowledged that there was no meaningful correlation between the uranium processed in the NUMEC plant and the traces of enriched uranium picked up by American agents outside Dimona. And, finally, Shapiro told the congressional investigators-who obviously did not believe him-that his airport meeting with Kafkafi was arranged at his request because he had not been paid for the antiterrorist equipment his company had shipped to Israel; NUMEC was owed $32,000 -- a fact he found "embarrassing" -- but the company needed the money.

***

Duckett, in a 1991 interview, essentially recanted many of his previous assertions. "With all the grief I've caused," he said, referring to Shapiro's ruined career, "I know of nothing at all to indicate that Shapiro was guilty. There's circumstantial information, but I have never attempted to make a judgment on this. At no point did I have any vested interest in this whole process. It was a matter of trying to be sure when you had information that you passed it along. Ultimately," Duckett said, "you have no control over the information. I never met Shapiro and at no point was I interested in peddling the story."

Peter Stockton also acknowledged in a 1991 interview that he'd had continuing doubts about the credibility of Hadden. "I was never overwhelmed with him," Stockton said. He had been troubled, he said, when Hadden told one story to subcommittee investigators and legislators, and then told a different version of the same event to officials of the Government Accounting Office, which did a separate investigation of the alleged NUMEC diversion. "We were dependent on certain people," Stockton said, "who jerked us around." Yet Stockton continued to meet with reporters about NUMEC and continued to spread the same misinformation, and many journalists remain convinced that Shapiro diverted uranium for the Israeli bomb. In their book Dangerous Liaison, published in 1991, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, who interviewed Stockton in 1989, depicted Shapiro's role in the Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons as being so "delicate" that five American Presidents covered it up. "Stockton," they wrote, "found that at least one CIA official had a very clear idea of what the NUMEC affair was really all about. John Hadden...."

***

Babcock & Wilcox shut down Zalman Shapiro's Apollo plant in 1978, when the nuclear fuels business suffered a downturn, largely because of reduced business from the Navy. Shapiro's insistence that the missing uranium had seeped into the ground or been flung into the air eventually spawned a controversy over nuclear pollution; Babcock & Wilcox, under public pressure, agreed to keep the Apollo plant open in an attempt to determine how much contamination existed. In 1989 the firm began to decontaminate the plant, an expensive process that involved the virtual dismantling of some areas. Babcock & Wilcox told the community that it would explore ways to return the site to productive use -- and promised that future operations would involve no radioactive materials.

Late in 1990, Congress approved a Defense Department appropriations bill that included $30 million to be spent in an attempt to clean up the plant, with matching funds from Babcock & Wilcox. Company officials acknowledged that many sections of the plant, including its concrete floor, were so contaminated that they had to be dismantled, piece by piece, and buried at appropriate sites-after the valuable uranium was removed. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials subsequently admitted that more than one hundred kilograms of enriched uranium-the amount allegedly diverted to Israel by Zalman Shapiro-was recovered from the decommissioned plant by 1982, with still more being recovered each year. (Such recoveries are called "inventory gains" by the NRC.) It wasn't clear how much uranium would finally be found. It also wasn't clear whether the $60 million allotted for the cleanup by the government and Babcock & Wilcox would be enough to do the job. And it wasn't clear that the site would ever be safe for occupancy.

_______________

Notes:

1. An Apollo housewife, Cynthia A. Virostek, eventually began a campaign to increase public awareness of the potential pollution risk from the plant. In 1990, largely on the strength of her protests, she was elected local councilwoman. Mrs. Virostek, then thirty-five years old, lives with her husband and two sons five hundred feet from the Babcock & Wilcox plant. She became involved after company officials announced in the early 1980s that they were beginning decontamination operations. "That kind of opened my eyes," she said. "I began asking questions about the plant and nobody gave me answers." She then began a relentless campaign, through Freedom of Information inquiries, to force information out into the open. A Pennsylvania health department study eventually noted, Mrs. Virostek said, that her community was the only one in the immediate area to have a statistically significant excess in the number of cancer deaths.
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Re: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American

Postby admin » Fri May 26, 2017 6:32 am

Chapter 19: The Carter Malaise

The surprising victory of Menachem Begin's Likud Party in the May 1977 national elections ended twenty-nine years of Mapai and Labor Party domination of the political process in Israel. It brought to power a government that was even more committed than Labor to the Samson Option and the necessity of an Israeli nuclear arsenal. Begin and his political followers represented a populist-nationalist view of a greater Israel with a right to permanent control of the West Bank; in their view, the mainstream Zionists, represented "by men such as David Ben-Gurion, had fought three major wars with no grand strategy. Israel's military aims were seen as having been dictated by the other side, whose leaders had chosen when and on which front war would begin. Begin and his coalition were determined-as they would demonstrate with disastrous effect in the 1982 Lebanon War-to use Israeli might to redraw the political map of the Middle East.

Nuclear weapons appealed to another side of Begin's character- his fascination with dramatic military moves, as exemplified by his insistence on the bombing of Iraq's Osirak and his involvement, as a leader of Irgun, the underground Jewish terrorist organization, in the July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. [1] Unlike many Israelis who had immigrated from Eastern Europe, Begin had a hatred of Communism and the Soviet Union. He and his family had fled to eastern Poland after the 1939 German blitzkrieg and, like many Zionists, were arrested by Soviet troops and expelled to a Siberian gulag, only to be released into a hastily assembled Polish contingent of the Red Army after the 1941 Nazi invasion of Russia.

***

By all accounts, Begin had never visited Dimona before becoming prime minister, nor was he especially well informed about it. His initial briefings on sensitive national security matters were provided by the outgoing prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli signals intelligence expert then serving as a civilian official in the ministry of defense, recalled that Begin strongly endorsed Dimona's plans for the nuclear targeting of the Soviet Union. Begin went a step further, according to Ben-Menashe: "He gave orders to target more Soviet cities." [2] The increased targeting, Ben-Menashe said, created a heightened demand for American satellite intelligence. But Israeli military attaches and diplomats were running into a brick wall in Washington, as the Carter administration retreated from the intense relationship that had developed under Presidents Nixon and Ford. One American officer who was in charge of a military intelligence agency in the first years of the Carter presidency depicted the Israelis as being all over the Pentagon and preoccupied with intelligence on the Soviets: "They were buzzing around. They were trying to get into overhead and they also wanted to know what our [military] attaches were reporting and what our requirements were. Our establishment was like a honeycomb for them."

***

Begin's enthusiastic support for the targeting of the Soviet Union was not known to the American intelligence community, still obsessed with its efforts to prove that Zalman Shapiro had diverted uranium to Israel. There was no doubt inside the intelligence community that Israel had the bomb, and yet no one in Washington-not even the new administration of Jimmy Carter, the first to be seriously committed to nuclear nonproliferation- saw any reason to raise the issue.

The Israeli government, worried about a backlash from its American supporters, continued to publicly deny the existence of any nuclear weapons--even when faced with evidence to the contrary. In 1976, after Carl Duckett inadvertently revealed in Washington that the CIA estimated Israel's arsenal to total at least ten warheads, U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon had been summoned by Yigal Allon, the foreign minister, to discuss the issue. "[Allon] was very disturbed over this development," Toon said in a cable to the State Department, "and felt it scarcely compatible with relationship between our two countries.... He asked rhetorically why CIA had done it." Toon reported that he dutifully explained to Allon that Duckett's remarks were supposed to have been off-the-record. He then asked Allon whether Duckett's conclusion was accurate: "Allon looked at me, somewhat startled," Toon reported, "and said, 'It is not true.'"

Allon's bald denial rankled, and a year later, after Carter's election, Toon told a delegation of thirteen visiting American senators that he was sure Israel had the bomb. The senators, led by Abraham Ribicoff, Democrat of Connecticut, were on a fact-finding tour about the prospects for nonproliferation in the Middle East. They asked permission to inspect Dimona and were flatly told that no outsider had visited the reactor since the American inspections had ended in 1969, and none was welcome. Toon cabled the State Department about their treatment, complaining that "it was indecent for Israel to keep us out of Dimona." He vividly recalled the bureaucratic response: "Don't stir up the waters." [3]

The senators went much further than the State Department in attempting to paper over the fact that they had been denied entrance to the reactor. "This denial was dramatized by the press far beyond its actual significance," their subsequent public report noted. "Most of the delegation did not wish to visit Dimona because they lacked the technical expertise to make such a visit worthwhile. The delegation received no information as to whether Israel has nuclear weapons or not."

The senators were especially sensitive to the issue, for Congress had just approved an amendment to the Arms Export Control Act making it illegal to provide U.S. foreign aid funds to those nations that sold or received nuclear reprocessing or enrichment materials, equipment, or technology. The amendment, as written, had no impact on those nations, such as Israel, which had been involved in the transfer or sale of nu clear materials prior to the bill's enactment. Israel, in other words, had been grandfathered out. The legislation, sponsored by Senator Stuart Symington, also provided for the President to override the law if he determined that the termination of such aid would be damaging to American national security. [4] The law has been applied two times to Pakistan, and to no other nation, since its approval.


Congress and the White House were, in essence, acceding to what had become the arms control community's rationalization for its failure to raise questions about the Israeli bomb: Israel was no longer a proliferation problem-it had already proliferated. One ranking State Department intelligence official, whose testimony was crucial to the first Pakistani foreign aid cutoff, recalled his cynicism about the Symington legislation: "Did any of these guys [senators] who were grilling me so mercilessly about Pakistan ever ask about Israel?" A former Nuclear Regulatory Commission official, who was responsible for testimony on the NRC's position on Israeli compliance with the Symington Amendment, recalled his understanding that Congress "doesn't want to discover anything in an open hearing." Although he was personally convinced Israel had developed nuclear arms, the official said that he repeatedly testified that he had "no evidence" of such weapons existing in Israel. If there were any significant items of information that needed to be passed along, the official added, "you told them over coffee. Never at an open hearing."

America's tolerance for a nuclear-armed Israel may not have troubled the Congress or the media, but it rankled Pakistan's President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. George H. Rathjens, a deputy early in the Carter administration to Gerard C. Smith, the President's specially appointed ambassador-at-large for nonproliferation issues, vividly recalled Zia's response when Smith raised questions about Pakistan's nuclear program: "'Why don't you people talk to Israel?' Smith was upset," Rathjens added, "but there was no way to answer Zia-no satisfactory answer." The Israeli nuclear program "wasn't anything people [in the U.S. government] wanted to talk about or discuss," Rathjens said. "It was an embarrassment."

***

Cooperation between Israel and South Africa on nuclear issues began in earnest after the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel, rebuffed by Charles de Gaulle, was forced to look elsewhere for support. Pierre Pean, in Les deux bombes, told of the surprising encounter in Johannesburg in 1967 between a French nuclear scientist who had been at Dimona and a group of Israeli nuclear scientists who had worked ten years earlier with the French at Saclay and Marcoule. The French physicist and his colleagues had helped the Israelis learn skills that they were now passing along to the South Africans. Israel was trading its expertise in nuclear physics for the uranium ore and other strategic minerals that existed in abundance in South Africa. The South Africans needed all the technical support they could get, recalled Ari Ben-Menashe: "They weren't good at all as a nuclear state. We had to help all the way."

In 1968, Ernst David Bergmann, out of office in Israel but still influential on nuclear issues, traveled to South Africa, where he spoke publicly on the "move toward international collaboration" on nuclear issues. In a speech to the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg, Bergmann said nothing about nuclear weapons, but talked candidly about the "common problem" facing Israel and South Africa: "Neither of us has neighbors to whom we can speak and to whom we are going to be able to speak in the near future. If we are in this position of isolation, perhaps it might be best for both countries to speak to each other."

Bergmann's talk of isolation seemed prophetic as all but three black African states (Malawi, Lesotho, and Swaziland) broke diplomatic relations with Israel in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and Israel's continued insistence on holding on to the occupied territories. Many of Israel's former allies in Africa increasingly began to support Palestinian aspirations. In November 1975, the United Nations General Assembly voted seventy-two to thirty-five (with thirty-two abstentions) in favor of a resolution that defined Zionism as "a form of racism and racial discrimination." Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog responded by accusing the United Nations of becoming "the world center of anti-Semitism."

Israel and South Africa, two "pariah" states, had turned to each other with renewed trading and arms sales after the war; within three years, joint trade grew from $30 million to $100 million a year. South Africa's small but influential Jewish population of 118,000 were always large contributors to Israeli bond drives and charities; now they also became more vocal in their support for Israel's more conservative political parties, including Menachem Begin's Likud Party. In 1974, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had made a secret trip to Pretoria, where, according to Ari Ben-Menashe, he discussed the possibility of an Israeli nuclear test on South African soil. Dayan left the Israeli cabinet a few months later, when Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister, but continuity on key Israeli-South African defense and nuclear issues was assured with Rabin's appointment of Shimon Peres to the defense portfolio. Two years later, Prime Minister John Vorster, who had sided with Germany during World War II, visited Israel-the first official state visit by a South African prime minister in Israel's history. [5]

Peres made at least one private trip to Pretoria before the Vorster visit, just as he had made private trips to France twenty years earlier to arrange for arms and nuclear cooperation. His agenda included nuclear testing-the issue initially raised by Moshe Dayan-and he won a commitment in principle from John Vorster, according to Ben-Menashe, for a series of joint Israeli-South African tests in South Africa. Vorster's highly publicized visit to Israel resulted in a renewal of full diplomatic relations, as well as secret arms transfer agreements that would enable the two countries, working together in defiance of international opinion and United Nations sanctions, to emerge by the early 1980s as economies that were highly dependent on foreign arms sales.

Israeli sources put the number of secret military and nuclear understandings between Israel and South Africa at "six or seven" by the end of the Vorster visit. "Why?" a former Israeli official asked rhetorically. He cited four reasons. "One: to share basic resources. South Africa is a very rich country and Israel is poor. Two: the supply of raw materials. Three: testing grounds. Try to do a [nuclear] test in Israel and all hell breaks loose. In South Africa it's different. Four: there is a certain sympathy for the situation of South Africa among Israelis. They are also European settlers standing against a hostile world.

"South Africa, when it realized it wanted to go nuclear, also realized there was one country it could turn to," added the Israeli, who has firsthand knowledge of Israel's nuclear policy. The issue of Israel's nuclear arms remained in the background in the first years of the Carter administration, whose major priorities included a Middle East solution. The nuclear intelligence experts at Los Alamos and Livermore had been trying to monitor the shipment of uranium ore from South Africa to Israel since the early 1960s, but simply failed to see, or failed to understand, the full scope of South Africa's continuing efforts in nuclear technology. In 1970, Prime Minister John Vorster informed Parliament that the nation's nuclear scientists had developed a unique uranium enrichment process involving jet-nozzle enrichment and a sophisticated cascade technique. Within a few years, South Africa began construction of a pilot plant for the production of enriched uranium, not subject to IAEA safeguards, at a plant called Valindaba near Pretoria. [6]

The American intelligence community knew nothing of the secret negotiations between Vorster and Peres, but there were a few analysts who knew something was up between the two nations. By the mid-1970s, one American official recalled, " [t]he South Africans and Israel were suddenly doing things in such a different way that it took us by surprise. They went from the drawing board to the production [of enriched uranium]. They leapfrogged us in production design and output and we weren't looking in the right places." The official's point was that the nuclear production process in the United States was so huge and unwieldy that innovations were difficult to achieve; any new process would be tested for years in pilot production before being adopted in the government's main weapons assembly line near Amarillo, Texas, which is capable of producing five thousand or more warheads a year.

***

By the mid-1970s, South Africa considered itself in an analogous position to that faced by Israel after 1967: it was fighting an internal war against the African National Congress and the anti-apartheid movement as well as a war of secession in Namibia, and an external war against the growing black nationalism and emerging independence of Angola and Mozambique in the frontline states of southern Africa. In the long run, the military prospects of South Africa were bleak: the leaders of South Africa saw themselves, as did the men running Israel, to be vastly outnumbered by their enemies.

There was security, so the Afrikaners believed, in the nuclear bomb. And, like Israel, South Africa would need a weapon- low-yield nuclear artillery shell-that could be used in case frontline defenses were breached and urban centers threatened. In August 1977, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev privately warned the Carter administration that his nation's Cosmos satellite system had detected evidence of South African preparations for a nuclear test, or series of tests, at what was determined to be an underground site in the Kalahari. Similar warnings were sent to Britain, France, and West Germany, all participants-with the Soviets and the United States-in a 1975 conference in London that had set up the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which established a series of voluntary guidelines for limiting technical and material aid to non-nuclear nations. [7]

An American satellite was immediately routed over the Kalahari and saw the classic signs of preparations for an underground nuclear test-a test hole had been dug with casing around it, an observation tower had been put up, and the many cables needed for measurement were in place. Carter and Brezhnev, working together, led an international campaign of protest, and the South African government, facing the loss of diplomatic relations, backed down by the end of August. Carter publicly announced that "South Africa has informed us that they do not have and do not intend to develop nuclear explosive devices for any purpose, either peaceful or as a weapon." The President also said he had been assured that the Kalahari test site "is not designed ... to test nuclear explosives, and that no nuclear explosive test will be taken In South Africa now or in the future."

The White House, jubilant over its first major foreign policy success, arranged for a series of elaborate briefings to the news media about the intricacies of its successful diplomacy. The reporters were not told, however, that the CIA had reported that Israeli military personnel, in civilian clothes, were all over the Kalahari test site, and being "quite open about it," as a CIA officer recalled. The press also was not told that a senior South African diplomat had privately assured the United States at the height of the crisis in early August that his military was not planning to test a long-range missile, but only "a rocket or artillery round-something like that."

The CIA would later conclude, in a formal assessment for the White House, that the strong international protests over Kalahari had deflected South Africa "at least temporarily" from carrying out its planned test. Israelis, added the CIA assessment, have "participated in certain South African nuclear research activities over the last few years...."

Carter's heavily promoted diplomatic "victory in the desert" was far less significant than it appeared; a real triumph would have involved going a step further and taking on the Israeli nuclear program, and no one in the Carter White House had the stomach for that.

***

It was into this Washington that an Israeli with inside information about Dimona-seeking to trade that information for personal advancement-arrived late in the year. He contacted a senior official in the American nuclear intelligence community with whom he had dealt professionally in the past, and immediately revealed the fact that Israel had assembled well over one hundred nuclear warheads. There would be more than two hundred warheads, many of them low-yield devices, by the year 1980, the Israeli added. The American official, who is Jewish, understood why the Israeli was willing to talk: "He was a technical person looking for favors. This guy wanted to become a U.S. citizen." The fact that Israel had nuclear weapons, the American rationalized, was "general knowledge throughout the U.S. government. My feeling was this one individual wanted to hustle information for personal advantage. I decided to ignore it."

And so he did not forward the information to his superiors and colleagues, although he had no doubt that the information was accurate. The American said he knew of Israelis in other technical fields, apparently dismayed by the election of Begin, who had approached their American counterparts with offers to trade information and intelligence for a chance to emigrate to the United States.

There were other, and more traditional, approaches, as the relationship between Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin became increasingly strained in the wake of Camp David, and as some Israeli officials tried-apparently without high-level approval- to get some strategic help for Israeli ambitions and put an end to America's refusal to recognize the reality of the Israeli nuclear arsenal.

Their starting point was an appropriately obscure corner of the Pentagon known as the Office of Net Assessments, whose director, Andrew W. Marshall, a former Rand Corporation analyst, has been providing secretaries of defense with an independent flow of intelligence and analysis for two decades. In the last months of the Ford administration, Marshall won acceptance of a plan to begin a strategic dialogue with Israel; one goal was to investigate a possible cooperative U.S.-Israeli defense treaty. Some of Israel's most sophisticated strategic thinkers were assigned by Prime Minister Rabin to the ad hoc group, including Avraham Tamir, an Israeli Army general who would later serve as director general of the foreign ministry. It was Tamir, one member of the Marshall group recalled, who repeatedly sought to discuss nuclear issues after Anwar Sadat's dramatic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, the first step toward the Camp David talks. [8] The question was: would Marshall and his Defense Department staff discuss contingency plans for joint nuclear targeting of southern Russia in case of war?

That question was supersensitive, as all involved understood -America was still officially accepting Israeli assurances it had no nuclear arms-and it was referred in writing on at least two occasions to Secretary of Defense Harold Brown for guidance. The answer, in both cases, came back quickly: there was to be no discussion of nuclear doctrine by Marshall's shop.

Brown, interviewed later about Tamir's initiative, at first dismissed it as another example of the need for military planners to make contingency plans. He then spoke hypothetically: "If such a request did come to me, it didn't take me long to think about it." He finally acknowledged that he had rejected the Israeli approach without discussing it with President Carter. The Carter administration, Brown asserted, "would not have wanted to get involved in an Israeli-Soviet conflict. The whole idea of Israel becoming our asset seems crazy to me. The Israelis would say, 'Let us help you,' and then you end up being their tool. The Israelis have their own security interests and we have our interests. They are not identical." Andrew Marshall and his colleagues in the Office of Net Assessments viewed Brown's position as-as one American put it- a foolish constraint," but followed his instructions and, of course, told no one else in the U.S. government about the Israeli request for joint nuclear targeting. [9]

It was another disconnect as the American bureaucracy instinctively continued to protect its President from learning the facts about the Israeli nuclear capability-and from having to act on that knowledge. That instinct reached its height in the fall of 1979, when the Israelis and the South Africans finally pulled off their test.

_______________

Notes:

1. The hotel, which was the headquarters for the British military in Jerusalem, was destroyed after months of planning, following a major British sweep against the Jewish resistance movement in Palestine that resulted in many arrests and the capture of some weapons. The explosion killed eighty-two people, including forty Arabs and seventeen Jews, and led to international condemnation. The British responded a week later by hanging three suspected Irgun terrorists, and Begin, in turn, ordered the execution of two British sergeants held captive by Begin's terrorist organization; their bodies were booby-trapped and left hanging upside down, to the long-lasting horror of many Jews.

2. Ben-Menashe served more than ten years in the External Relations Department of the Israeli Defense Force, one of the most sensitive offices in Israel's intelligence community. He left the ministry in 1987, he said, to work directly for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as an adviser on intelligence affairs. He was arrested in 1989 in the United States on charges of conspiring to violate the Arms Export Control Act by attempting to sell Israeli-owned C-130 military aircraft to Iran; he was acquitted in November 1990 by a federal jury in New York City. During preliminary proceedings and the trial, the Israeli government provided a series of conflicting statements about Ben-Menashe, who claimed that the illegal sale had been sanctioned by his government and the United States. Israel initially told the court that it had no knowledge of Ben-Menashe. It later accused Ben-Menashe of forging the four letters of reference that he had obtained upon leaving his job in External Relations. After acknowledging that the letters were genuine, it then depicted Ben-Menashe as nothing more than a low-level translator for the Israeli intelligence community. Ben-Menashe, in turn, accused his government of betrayal after Israel insisted to the court that he had been moonlighting as an arms salesman, and he began to talk publicly about what he alleged was his involvement in hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of authorized arms sales to Iran in the early 1980s that had been secretly endorsed by the Reagan administration. He also accused Robert M. Gates, a senior CIA official under Reagan, of direct involvement, despite Israeli protests, in the sale of arms, including chemical weapons, to Iraq from 1986 to 1989. Ben-Menashe's allegations, which have been strongly denied in Washington and Jerusalem, were still under congressional review as of summer 1991.

The author was initially contacted by Ben-Menashe in mid-1990 and began interviewing him in Washington and elsewhere in early 1991, about the Israeli nuclear arsenal and his activities inside the Israeli signals intelligence establishment. Ben-Menashe agreed -- as no other Israeli would -- to be directly quoted by the author on nuclear issues and other matters. In June, he left America for exile in Australia.

3. Mordecai Vanunu, in one of his many interviews with the London Sunday Times, told of finding a newspaper clip about the rebuff of the senators derisively taped to a wall in Machan 2, the chemical separation plant at Dimona, when he began working there in August 1977.

4. Victor Gilinsky, the NRC commissioner, said he had been at a Washington dinner party shortly after the legislation was passed and listened intently as Symington made an informal speech about the importance of limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. "When he sat down," Gilinsky said, "I asked him, 'What about Israel?' 'Oh, they need it,' the senator responded. 'I've been telling Dayan for thirty years they have to have the bomb.'"

5. The April 1976 visit was denounced by the Organization of African States (GAS) and the Cairo-based Arab League, as well as by the Soviet Union and the Netherlands.

6. The plant's name, Valindaba, hints at its real purpose: it means "the council is closed" or "the talking is over" in the local African Sotho dialect.

7. Third World nations, not without reason, accused the Nuclear Suppliers Group -- convened after India's 1974 nuclear test--of instituting what amounted to an international cartel to perpetuate the advanced positions of the major powers; there were further claims that the agreements violated the promise given to non•nuc1ear states in Article Six of the Nonproliferation Treaty, which explicitly calls on all parties to facilitate "the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy." The NPT also called for special attention to the "needs of the developing areas of the world."

8. Sadat met privately with Begin shortly after arriving in Jerusalem, and, according to Israeli officials, his first questions dealt with the Israeli nuclear arsenal. One Israeli who has seen a high-level summary of the Begin-Sadat meeting said that the Egyptian leader sought assurances that Israel would pledge not to use nuclear weapons against Egypt if a peace treaty between the two nations was signed. Begin did not reply, according to the Israeli account.

9. A senior American intelligence official recalled that the French had occasionally made similar requests to the Pentagon for joint nuclear targeting and intelligence sharing and invariably been rejected out of hand, without the issue being raised at the secretary of defense level, as was done with Avraham Tamir's proposal. "It was manifest that no one was afraid of the French," the official said, "but they were afraid of the Israelis. We all knew the French didn't have a back-door relationship" with the White House, as Israel did.
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Re: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American

Postby admin » Fri May 26, 2017 6:35 am

Chapter 20: An Israeli Test

Just before dawn on the stormy morning of September 22, 1979, the clouds over the South Indian Ocean suddenly broke and an American satellite was able to record two distinctive bright flashes of light within a fraction of a second-probable evidence of a nuclear explosion. The nuclear detection satellite, known as VELA, had seen similar flashes of light on forty-one previous occasions, and in each case it was subsequently determined that a nuclear explosion had taken place. Most of the sightings were over Lap Nor, where the Chinese atmospheric nuclear tests took place, or in the South Pacific, site of the French tests. There were a few intelligence officials and nonproliferation experts in the Carter administration who immediately concluded that Israel and South Africa had finally conducted a nuclear test, a test that they had tried, and failed, to accomplish two years earlier.

They were right.

Former Israeli government officials, whose information on other aspects of Dimona's activities has been corroborated, said that the warhead tested that Saturday morning was a low-yield nuclear artillery shell that had been standardized for use by the Israeli Defense Force. The Israeli sources also said the event captured by the VELA satellite was not the first but the third test of a nuclear device over the Indian Ocean. At least two Israeli Navy ships had sailed to the site in advance, and a contingent of Israeli military men and nuclear experts-along with the South African Navy-was observing the tests. "We wouldn't send ships down there for one test," one Israeli said. "It was a fuck-up," he added, referring to the capture of a test by the VELA satellite. "There was a storm and we figured it would block VELA, but there was a gap in the weather -- a window -- and VELA got blinded by the flash."

***

The VELA satellite, as it was programmed to do, digitally relayed its sighting to the headquarters of the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC) at Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida; it was Friday night, September 21, on the East Coast. Once evaluated and confirmed, the intelligence was routed, via the Defense Intelligence Agency, to the Pentagon's National Military Command Center and relayed to America's top civilian and military leaders. The nuclear event was estimated to have taken place off the coast of Prince Edward Island, about fifteen hundred miles southeast of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, halfway to Antarctica. The intelligence was at the top of the CIA's and DIA's Saturday-morning briefing for President Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Gerald G. Oplinger, Brzezinski's aide for global issues, was spending the early fall weekend at his summer house at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, when word of the possible test came: he was summoned back to an urgent meeting in the White House situation room. Oplinger had retired from the Foreign Service and worked at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before joining Brzezinski's staff; he was familiar with the VELA program and knew that its previous sightings of Chinese and French atmospheric tests had been unfailingly accurate. "Everybody showed up," Oplinger recalled, meaning that Brzezinski was at the meeting, "and we went around and asked, 'Was it a test?' CIA and DIA said that odds were at least ninety percent that it had been a nuclear explosion." Oplinger personally had no doubt, as he recalled: "Common sense told me that there was a high probability that it was what it was -- it was just too incredible."

"People just stood there, paralyzed," recalled Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), a senior bureaucrat who had been involved in high-level scientific issues since the Eisenhower administration. Keeny realized, he said, that he and his colleagues "needed to buy some time. Even if a test was done, we didn't know who did it. This was a serious matter." Keeny also was troubled by the intelligence community's assurances that its assessment was 90 percent accurate. In his view, the CIA and DIA officials at the situation-room meeting surely could not know all the facts: "They were middle-level bureaucrats relaying data."

In Keeny's account, it was his idea to set up an outside panel to study the VELA data and ensure that the satellite had not made an error -- one with enormous political consequences. Jerry Oplinger had a different recollection: "The meeting was going nowhere and Frank Press [the presidential science adviser] said, 'Let's convene an unbiased outside study.''' Oplinger had no illusions about what Frank Press meant: "Press kept on asking, 'What do we do if it leaks out that we've concluded it was a test?' He did not want that panel to conclude there had been a nuclear explosion." Brzezinski had little to say during the meeting, Oplinger recalled. [1]

Frank Press, a seismologist who had worked for years on classified nuclear detection issues, knew the VELA program far better than any of his peers in the White House. He knew that the satellites were ancient by satellite standards-some having been launched in the early 1960s-and were constantly being updated and analyzed by scientists at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, who had helped design the system, to ensure that no deterioration had set in. There had been, in fact, recent concern about false alarms that could trigger a phony intelligence report. The outside panel was a natural step, one that would indeed buy some time, and one that would also add a patina of legitimacy to the delaying effort. Meanwhile, existence of the VELA sighting became one of the most important secrets of the Carter administration.

The officials at the top of the troubled Carter administration knew that public revelation of the VELA sighting, with its strong inference of an illicit Israeli-South African test, would create a horrible dilemma for the President, just a few months away from the 1980 presidential campaign. Carter had draped himself in the flag of nonproliferation, and if he did not get tough with the two pariah nations, he would be criticized for hypocrisy; if he did seek sanctions, there would be political hell to pay. "When that thing up there went 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star,' " recalled Hodding Carter III, then the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, "I can remember running around on the seventh floor," where Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance's office was located. "There was sheer panic," Carter said. "It was very much 'Oh, shit. Oh, dear. What do we do with this?'"

"We were in the worst possible position," another government official recalled. "Here we are, ready to send the SALT treaty up to the Senate, and we know there's been a violation of the [1963] test ban treaty and we can't prove it and we can't pin it on anyone. There was a very immediate strategic imperative to make this thing go away." The official, who had access to all of the available intelligence on the VELA sighting, said it was evident that the satellite had observed what "could only be a nuclear event. Our capturing it fortuitously was an embarrassment, a big political problem, and there were a lot of people who wanted to obscure the event."

The American policy in Iran was in chaos, with the ailing shah-who had been so warmly toasted two years earlier by Jimmy Carter-in Mexico and pleading for admission to the United States. [2] There had been a stupendous intelligence gaffe just a few weeks before over a breathtaking report suggesting that a Soviet brigade had moved into Cuba, presenting a direct challenge to Carter, just as the Soviets had challenged John F. Kennedy in 1962. The intelligence leaked, and the administration, taking the hard line in public, demanded that the Soviets remove their troops. It turned out not to be a triumphant Cuban missile crisis, however, as embarrassed Carter officials were forced to acknowledge that their initial intelligence report was simply wrong: Soviet soldiers had been in Cuba since the early 1960s. Adding to the mortification was the fact that the administration was then preparing for what was sure to be a bitter fight with Senate Republicans over the U.S. government's ability to verify the June 1979 SALT II agreements. The SALT agreement plus Carter's success at Camp David were scheduled to be featured in his reelection campaign.

An Israeli bomb threatened all this and made it imperative that the American President, once again, not know what there was to know. The American bureaucracy had been in training for more than thirty years in looking the other way when it came to the Israeli nuclear program, and every part of the system instinctively sought to find a way to avoid calling the Israeli-South African test a test.

***

There was widespread knowledge of the test in Israel. Ari Ben-Menashe recalled seeing correspondence on the issue in his ministry of defense office shortly after Menachem Begin's election in 1977. It was widely assumed that there had been some secret diplomacy between former Defense Minister Shimon Peres and John Vorster during Peres's visit to South Africa in 1976, but just what commitments had been made were not widely known inside the Israeli government. It was also understood, Ben-Menashe said, that Peres was not going to tell Menachem Begin about it. And Begin, in turn, would not directly approach Peres, who--along with David Ben-Gurion -- had treated him with contempt and ridicule throughout his career. Begin's solution was to dispatch Ezer Weizman, the newly appointed minister of defense, to South Africa. Weizman's mission, said Ben-Menashe, was "just to find out what was going on."

"Weizman came back," Ben-Menashe recalled, "and said, 'We've promised these guys nuclear warheads.' He recommended to Begin that they pay up and carry out the promise." Ben-Menashe said he and others in External Relations understood that Begin responded by saying, in effect, "Yes. Do it!"

Another Israeli, who also had direct access to defense ministry information about the test in South Africa, said that Weizman signed an agreement before the 1979 tests calling for the sale to South Africa of technology and equipment needed for the manufacture of low-yield 175mm and 203mm nuclear artillery shells. Weizman's order triggered an internal dispute with senior nuclear officials, the Israeli recalled, who protested the government's decision to sell the information, considered by the men running Dimona to be "the best stuff we got." [3]

Frank Press finally settled on Jack P. Ruina, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to direct the outside panel and determine whether some of Israel's "best stuff" had ended up over the South Indian Ocean. It was a perfect choice, in terms of discretion: Ruina, a longtime consultant to the Pentagon on military and scientific issues, held many of the most sensitive clearances in the American military and scientific community; he had served as director in the early 1960s of the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), the Pentagon's research arm, and later directed the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), the Pentagon's most important think tank. Ruina was an honorable and cautious man who could be counted on to follow orders and not talk to reporters, especially after his hush- hush introduction to the White House crisis. "Press called and asked me to come on down [to the White House]," Ruina recalled. "He said, 'I can't talk about it on the phone. Just come on down.'"

Within weeks, as the White House's secret continued to hold, Press and Ruina picked an ad hoc panel of eight distinguished scientists, whose integrity was beyond reproach. Ruina's key colleagues included Luis Alvarez, of the physics department at the University of California, a Nobel laureate; Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky; of Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center; and Richard L. Garwin, of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Panofsky and Garwin had served often as government consultants and were known for their independence.

The panel's assignment, carefully drawn up by Spurgeon Keeny and Frank Press, was weighted, to no one's surprise, toward a thorough investigation into the possibility that the VELA sighting had been a false alarm. The Ruina panel was also told to investigate the possibility that the recorded signal "was of natural origin, possibly resulting from the coincidence of two or more natural phenomena... ."

Ruina was clear about the limits on his assignment. "My mandate was to only look at technical data," he recalled. He and his colleagues were provided with all of the available intelligence about the VELA sighting, Ruina said, "but we didn't include any political data-like are the Israelis interested in nuclear weapons? That was not in our charter." The panel members were comfortable with their mandate: purely technical studies were a way of life for scientific consultants to the government.

***

Despite its explosiveness, knowledge of the VELA report remained a closely held secret for more than a month, until ABC television reporter John Scali was told by an old friend about a simulated Soviet nuclear attack on the United States that had been missed by America's early warning system. The old friend was very conservative, Scali recalled, and he thought the American failure "was an outrage." Scali, who had been the ambassador to the United Nations under Nixon, ran the story by another old friend in the Pentagon. Within hours, he was summoned to the office of a senior Defense Department official who gave him the essential facts. [4] He broadcast his story on the evening of October 25: the secret had held for more than a month, long enough for the White House to have its cover story ready. Its spokesmen immediately informed the news media that there was "no confirmation" of a test. Secretary of State Vance, following the company line, also told journalists there was no conclusive evidence of a test, and South Africa issued a heated denial. [5] "Faced with a denial by South Africa of such nuclear activity," dutifully wrote the New York Times, "and lacking any proof beyond the uncorroborated evidence of a single satellite, the United States Government sought to avoid a major confrontation over what it said was only the possibility that some nation had secretly exploded a nuclear device in an area of some 4,500 square miles... ." Vance further told the press that within hours of the first VELA signal, he had discussed the matter with Brzezinski and Defense Secretary Harold Brown.

None of the reporters knew, of course, that Harold Brown's Office of Net Assessments had already been approached two times by a senior Israeli official seeking to discuss joint U.S.-Israeli strategic targeting of the Soviet Union. Did Brown tell Cyrus Vance at the time about the nuclear approach, or, for that matter, did he report it to the President and his national security adviser? Did anyone in the U.S. government review the intelligence files on the planned 1977 South African test in the Kalahari? Did any of the senior White House officials wonder why a flotilla of South African and Israeli military ships had been tracked by the National Security Agency and other elements of the intelligence community to a site fifteen hundred miles off the coast of South Africa? [6]

And, finally, did anyone notice what Prime Minister P. W. Botha had to say on September 25, 1979, three days after the test -three days in which there had been no international comment or outcry? Botha had reason to believe that his nation and its Israeli partners had pulled it off. There was a swagger in his remarks before a meeting of the Cape National Party congress as he warned, according to the Rand Daily Mail, that South Africa had and could produce sufficient arms to counter terrorism -- an obvious reference to the African National Congress (ANC), leaders of the anti-apartheid movement. "If there are people who are thinking of doing something else," the newspaper quoted Botha as saying, "I suggest they think twice about it. They might find out we have military weapons they do not know about."

The Ruina panel members would spend months effectively poking holes in and raising legitimate questions about the reliability and integrity of the VELA satellite system. The panel chose to concentrate on what became known as the "false alarm" issue. Nuclear explosions produce two distinctly characteristic and separate flashes of light-from the initial detonation and the subsequent fireball about one third of a second later-that are recorded as double humps on a graph by the VELA satellite. The panel was troubled by the anomalies it found in the double humps as recorded on September 22 and concluded, as it stated in its final report, that the VELA sighting "contains sufficient internal inconsistency to cast serious doubt whether that signal originated from a nuclear explosion or in fact from any light sources in the proximity of the VELA satellite." The panel also could find no collateral signs of a nuclear event-seismic signals, acoustic waves, ionospheric disturbances, magnetic or electromagnetic pulses that had accompanied previous VELA reports. No significant radioactive fallout or other debris was located; there was no "smoking gun" that made the panel's conclusion ineluctable. The lack of such findings was not unusual in itself, given the low yield of the test and its isolated location; Press and the panel members knew that U.S. government seismologists had long suspected the Soviets had conducted many low-yield tests in the 1950s and 1960s that were not detected by the available American systems.

The panel eventually reported in July 1980, ten months after the event, that the flash observed by the satellite "was probably not from a nuclear explosion. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that this signal was of nuclear origin," the unclassified version of the ad hoc report said, "the panel considers it more likely that the signal was one of the zoo events [a signal of unknown cause], possibly a consequence of the impact of a small meteoroid on the satellite."

The findings outraged the nuclear scientists and professional bomb makers of Los Alamos, who had designed the VELA system. Many of these men were members of the Nuclear Intelligence Panel (NIP), the most highly classified nuclear intelligence group in the U.S. government. NIP had done its own investigation into the VELA test, and had been ordered by the White House -- citing national security -- not to discuss it publicly.

Its finding, openly discussed by NIP members in interviews with the author, was that a low-yield nuclear weapon most certainly had been detonated on September 22. They were dismayed by the extent of White House interference in the investigation. "If it looks like a duck, it's got to be a duck," said Harold M. Agnew, a NIP member and director of the Los Alamos laboratory from 1970 to 1979. "But that wasn't an answer Carter liked." The overriding issue, in Agnew's view, was not whether a nuclear bomb was exploded, but "Who did it?" Another panel member, Louis H. Roddis, Jr., who played a major role in America's postwar nuclear weapons development, concluded that the South African-Israeli test had taken place on a barge, or on one of the islands in the South Indian Ocean archipelago. He, too, expressed anger at Frank Press and the White House. "There was a real effort on the part of the administration to downplay it," Roddis said. "They were, indeed, concealing the fact -- manipulating the facts. Everybody in New Mexico was convinced that it was a test."

The secret NIP study was directed by Donald M. Kerr, Jr., who had served in the Carter administration as acting director of the defense programs at the Department of Energy-he was the man responsible for America's nuclear bombs. "We were all insiders-not the kind of guys who'd run off at the mouth in public," pe said, in explaining why his panel members did not speak out on the issue at the time. "We had no doubt it was a bomb," Kerr said, adding that in his opinion the Ruina panel's mandate was driven by politics: "to find a different explanation."

One mystery is why the Ruina panel scientists, all honorable men, would place themselves in a position where others could limit what information they could evaluate. The panel members had been assured that they would be given all of the relevant intelligence about the satellite, and yet one of the most important discoveries-uncovered by Ruina himself and known to the White House-was not made available to them.

Ruina was a director of MIT's Defense and Arms Control Studies Program and, as such, was involved in late 1979 in the preparation of a federally funded MIT report that assessed the foreign availability of critical components for the assembly of short-range ballistic missiles and compared those components with those manufactured in the United States. One of Ruina's three colleagues in preparing the report was an Israeli postgraduate student. Shortly after Ruina's involvement on the VELA sighting became known at MIT, the Israeli, who said he had worked on the Israeli nuclear missile systems, began talking to Ruina about Israel's nuclear capability. "I had the feeling he [the Israeli] knew an enormous amount," recalled George Rathjens, the former Carter administration nonproliferation official who was Ruina's close colleague at MIT. "He knew about missiles and he knew about guidance systems, and he talked freely about anything. It was almost as if he had an ordinary kind of job." Ruina, appropriately, forwarded the Israeli's information in a written report to Spurgeon Keeny at ACDA. "Some people [in the intelligence community] thought he was telling it like it was," Keeny said of the Israeli's intelligence. "The message is 'We've got a huge system that's more sophisticated than you think.' The guy said it [the September 22 flash] was a joint Israeli-South African attempt."

Keeny, confronted with the potentially explosive intelligence about what had happened and who had been involved, remained loyal to the Carter presidency and dismissed the report as nonsense. "I concluded that it was very questionable," he acknowledged. "I took it with a grain of salt." His colleagues in the White House, Keeny said, shared his view that Ruina's postgraduate student was peddling Israeli disinformation. The information was not made known to the intelligence community or to Ruina's colleagues on the panel. It stayed buried in the bureaucracy.

There were a few government experts on nonproliferation policy who were convinced that Frank Press and Spurgeon Kenny made the right choice in seeking to mitigate the impact of a South African-Israeli nuclear test. "My belief is that the conclusion of the Ruina panel was the right conclusion for that time," one nonproliferation official said. "What do you do? Look at the issues involved-apartheid, Camp David, NPT, human rights, dealing with the Indians [on nuclear proliferation], stopping reprocessing worldwide. You would have do something strong, especially to Israel, but there was a large segment of the population that Carter couldn't alienate."

The American intelligence community had done far better in its reporting on the South African test-the CIA insisted in internal estimates throughout 1979 and 1980 that there had been a test-but it basically remained in the dark about the sophistication of the Israeli nuclear program. In 1980, the Agency published another Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) on Israeli capability and came up with essentially the same numbers as Carl Duckett had produced in 1974- Israel, the CIA said, had manufactured at least twenty and as many as thirty nuclear warheads. The new estimate, however, was much more comprehensive than previous studies. The CIA was able to report that the Israelis had upgraded the reactor to increase its output and also improved the reactor's cooling capacity-clear signs that a greater amount of plutonium for nuclear weapons was being generated. There was no longer any doubt, the estimate said, that Israel had completed construction of a chemical reprocessing plant-but just where and how was not known. "It was the first serious estimate," one Carter administration official said, "and it enabled the people in the field to really look out for what Israel had." Even so, the CIA report seriously underestimated the number of Israeli warheads and the sophistication of its nuclear operation. Sometimes facts were strained to keep the numbers low. The KH-11, with its brilliant photography, had captured an Israeli nuclear missile storage site and the experts at the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) had been able to count ten items that were subsequently confirmed as nuclear warheads. No one had ever seen an Israeli warhead before, and the intelligence community chose to take the fact that only ten warheads were seen, one official recalled, "as confirmation of our guesses. We thought the pictures were extraordinary, but decided that they didn't add anything new. It was consistent with our numbers."

The 1980 CIA estimate had been ordered by Deputy Under Secretary of State Joseph S. Nye, Jr., who emerged as the Carter administration's key -- and highly progressive -- adviser on nonproliferation policy. Nye acknowledged that coping with the Israeli bomb was a low priority under Jimmy Carter. "There wasn't much that could be done," Nye said. "The Israelis had already done it. It was not something you could make a demarche [diplomatic protest] about. The question is: do you make a big hullaballoo about it?"

The answer was no.

_______________

Notes:

1. Brzezinski, according to his aides, was never particularly interested in proliferation or nuclear-fuel-cycle issues. President Carter had triggered an uproar by continuing President Ford's 1976 ban on the commercial reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel for power reactors. Carter's action, based on environmental and proliferation concerns, was viewed by the American nuclear power industry as a foolish move that would stifle the sale of American reactors and equipment around the world. His NSC aides weren't convinced that Brzezinski fully understood the issue. At one stage early in the administration, Oplinger recalled being told, Brzezinski agreed to a briefing by Jessica Tuchman, Oplinger's predecessor on the NSC staff, and stood by as she described the nuclear fuel cycle, beginning with the insertion of nuclear fuel into a reactor and ending with the reprocessing of the spent fuel. "Zbig listened to all this," Oplinger related, "and then asked, 'Okay, now tell me -- where does the energy come from?'" Brzezinski did not mention the VELA incident in his 1983 memoir Power and Principle.

2. The shah was admitted for medical treatment into the United States on October 22, triggering a renewed wave of anti- American rioting in Tehran and the eventual seizure of the American embassy on November 4, beginning Jimmy Carter's hostage nightmare. During the tense discussions before the shah's arrival, recalled Nicholas Veliotes, then serving as the assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs, the ousted leader confided that he had been negotiating with the Israelis for the purchase of long-range missiles capable of firing a nuclear warhead. "He said that the Israelis had told him not to tell us," Veliotes added. Veliotes's information, like most intelligence data about Israeli nuclear intentions, was not made known to other American officials.

3. After the 1973 war, the Israeli Defense Force established at least three nuclear-capable artillery battalions, each containing twelve self-propelled 175mm cannons. The battalions were considered part of Israel's strategic reserve and operated under streamlined command-and-control: nuclear shells could be fired on the direct orders of the prime minister, as relayed through the minister of defense, the Army Chief of Staff, and the chief of operations directly to the artillery battalion commander. Clearance was not required, as in normal operations, from any officer at the regional headquarters, corps, division, or brigade level. Former Israeli army officers said at least three nuclear artillery shells eventually were stockpiled for each weapon -- a total of 108 warheads. Additional warheads were supplied for Israel's 203mm cannons.

4. Carter, with his emphasis on nonproliferation and human rights, was less than popular at the Pentagon.

5. One of the strangest denials to emerge from the controversy came from South African Vice Admiral J. C. Walters, who made public a statement suggesting that the flash could have been caused by an accident aboard a Soviet nuclear submarine. The admiral's statement, which said that Soviet involvement was "a real possibility," was reported by the New York Times to have been issued with the approval of Prime Minister P. W. Botha, who also was South Africa's minister of defense. The admiral offered no factual basis for his Cold War assertion, which soon sank from sight.

6. Victor Gilinsky, still serving in 1979 on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, recalled inquiring during an official briefing whether there were ships in the Indian Ocean and being told no. He learned the next day that there indeed had been ships there. Gilinsky wasn't surprised when the Ruina panel concluded that no nuclear test probably had taken place: "Everyone took the bureaucratically appropriate decision."
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Re: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American

Postby admin » Fri May 26, 2017 6:40 am

Chapter 21: Israel's Nuclear Spy

For many Americans, Jonathan Jay Pollard is the American Jew who spied for Israel out of misguided loyalty, a man who believed that his documents and information would make Israel more secure in its war against international terrorism. When arrested in November 1985, he claimed he had been turning over secret documents-many of which, he maintained, should have been provided to Israel by the United States-for only fourteen months. The Israeli government apologized for its spying and insisted that the recruitment .of Pollard was an aberration, an unauthorized "rogue" operation. Pollard is now serving a life sentence for espionage.

Pollard indeed spied for Israel out of misguided loyalty-and for money-but none of the other widely held beliefs about the case is true. He was Israel's first nuclear spy.

***

Pollard, who began working in 1979 as a civilian employee of U.S. Navy intelligence, offered to supply Israel with intelligence as early as 1980, but was not recruited as an operative until the fall of 1981, three years earlier than he and the Israeli government have admitted. He was then working as an intelligence specialist with the Navy's Field Operations Intelligence Office. Ai the height of his activity, in 1984 and 1985, one of his main assignments was the gathering of American intelligence relevant to Israel's nuclear targeting of the oil fields and Soviet military installations in southern Russia, a fact that was hidden from Justice Department investigators and prosecutors by Israeli officials.

Pollard has insisted in all of his Justice Department interrogations that his spying did not begin until July 1984, after a social meeting with Israeli Air Force Colonel Aviem Sella, one of his heroes, who had been involved in Israel's 1981 bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. In fact, Sella was one of the Israeli Air Force's leading nuclear bombing and targeting experts and was specifically assigned to serve as Pollard's handler. The nuclear targeting data supplied by Pollard included top-secret American intelligence on the location of Soviet military targets, as well as specific data on the Soviet means for protecting those targets, by concealment or hardening of the sites. Pollard also gave the Israelis American intelligence on Soviet air defenses, especially the feared SA-5 surface-to-air missile system, which was so effective against U.S. B-52s in the Vietnam War. Pollard eventually even turned over a copy of the U.S. intelligence community's annual review of the Soviet strategic arms system, known as the 11-38 and considered-because of its appendices dealing with satellite photography, communication intercepts, radar intelligence, and agent reports-to be one of the most sensitive documents in the U.S. government. Pollard also provided Israel with the codes for American diplomatic communications, enabling Israel's signals intelligence agency to intercept cables and backchannel messages to and from the office of Samuel W. Lewis, the well-informed U.S. ambassador who had been assigned to Israel in 1977. In all, according to federal prosecutors, Pollard provided Israel with eighteen hundred documents -- an estimated 500,000 pages -- before his arrest.

The top political officials of Israel, including Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yitzhak Shamir, understood that there was a high-level source inside the United States. In fact, some of the most important Pollard documents were retyped and sanitized by Israeli intelligence officials and then made available to the Soviet Union as a gesture of Israeli goodwill, at the specific instructions of Yitzhak Shamir, a longtime advocate of closer Israeli-Soviet ties. All of this was successfully hidden by the Israeli government after Pollard's arrest and subsequent plea bargain. Israel still continues to depict the Pollard affair as a rogue operation that was conducted without high-level involvement.

The Pollard story actually begins with the U.S.-Israeli meetings that took place inside the Reagan White House in September 1981, three months after the raid on Osirak. Ariel Sharon, newly named by Menachem Begin as minister of defense, had come to Washington with Begin to present a far-reaching agenda for U.S.-Israeli strategic cooperation. Israel would become America's military partner-and military arm-in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, and serve as a depository for pre-positioned arms and ammunition for American armed forces. The Israelis' most eagerly awaited meeting took place in the cabinet room with President Reagan and his top advisers, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and National Security Adviser Richard Allen.

Sam Lewis, as the U.S. ambassador to Israel, also was at the meeting. "Begin said, 'Mr. President, we share the same view of the Communist menace. We should formalize our relationship. I suggest a formal alliance.' Reagan said yes," Lewis recounted. "Everyone else was shocked. Begin then said, 'Mr. President, I'd like to ask Minister Sharon to outline to you our ideas.' Sharon then gave a half-hour outline about how the American and Israeli strategic interest should be established. Even Al Haig [a strong supporter of Israel] was turning green. Dick Allen and the rest of the White House staff were also turning green. Cap [Weinberger] turned purple. I thought he'd explode."

Sharon's plan, as outlined at the cabinet-room meeting, also called for joint use of airfields and Navy ports. One significant aspect was shared intelligence, including formal Israeli access to the KH-11 satellite, desperately sought by Israel -- as most of the Americans at the cabinet-room meeting did not understand -- for its nuclear targeting of the Soviet Union.

At the end of Sharon's presentation, Begin turned to the President, whose reactions were not discernible, and said, according to Lewis, "'Why don't we ask our two defense ministers to work it out.' I thought Cap would faint."

Over the next few months, Weinberger proceeded to "entangle" Sharon in a negotiation, Lewis recalled, that "turned out a mouse." There would be no joint U.S.-Israeli bases in the Middle East, and Israel would not get the access it wanted to American satellite intelligence. Sharon also was told that Israel would not be permitted a receiving station in Tel Aviv for the real-time KH-11 photography.

Sharon initially resisted any curtailing of his strategic plan, and he was ready to fight for it, but Begin, Lewis explained, was eager "to formalize an alliance with the United States -- especially after the Carter years." Sharon eventually was forced to accept the watered-down American version, which he vehemently opposed and then had to defend publicly before the Knesset. He remained loyal to his prime minister and did his bidding. There were bigger fish to fry.

Over the next few months, Sharon found a way to carry out his strategic goals without the help of Washington. He led Israel, with the support of Begin, into an invasion of Lebanon in an effort to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization and use Israel's military dominance to change the political structure of the Middle East. Israel would carry the fight, under Sharon's plan, to the outskirts of Beirut, serving as an anti-Syrian blocking force while its Lebanese Christian allies, the Phalangists, cleaned out the city of PLO followers. But the Phalangists failed to move, and the Israeli Air Force was called upon to begin the bombing of Beirut. Instead of victory, there was impasse, as five hundred Israeli soldiers were killed along with more than ten thousand Palestinians and Lebanese, some in the shocking massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila.

Before carrying out this plan, Sharon needed to control Israel's intelligence services and its "Temple" weapons-the nuclear arsenal. Men loyal to him and his strategic goals were put into key positions. One of the first of the Old Guard to be shoved out was Binyamin Blumberg, who had served since the 1950s as head of the Office of Special Tasks, widely known in the early 1980s by its Hebrew acronym, LAKAM. The new head of LAKAM was a Sharon crony and long- time clandestine operative named Rafael (Rafi) Eitan, who was then also serving as Begin's special assistant for counterterrorism. He would keep both jobs. The ambitious Eitan, known throughout Israel as "Rafi the stinker," [1] had participated in the 1960 kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires and was a veteran of many operations inside the Arab world. He had been forced to resign, nonetheless, from Mossad years earlier, and was bitter about his stunted career and the failure of Mossad and Israel's other intelligence agencies to cooperate with his counterterrorism office.

***

Sharon did not hide his political agenda, but publicly spelled it out on many occasions after leaving the Israeli Army in 1973. His major goals included the overthrow of King Hussein of Jordan and the transformation of that country into a Palestinian state, to which Palestinian refugees would be "transferred" -- or driven. A few weeks after his return from Washington in the early fall of 1981, Sharon called together the senior officer corps of the Israeli Defense Force and told them for the first time about his specific plans to put his political agenda into effect -- Israel was going to invade Lebanon. One officer who was present recalled that he and others were dismayed to hear Sharon "talk about the need to go to Lebanon and destroy the 'capital of terrorism.' He talked of the long reach of the IDE and the need -- "not in such words," the officer said "to change regimes in the Arab world." The Israeli officer, a former intelligence specialist, further recalled Sharon's talk about the "need to change the structure of Israeli intelligence."

"I was sitting with a bunch of brigadiers [generals]," the officer added, "and I said, 'He's going to take us to war in the Middle East.' There was nervous laughter all around."

There was one more distinct element in the Sharon briefing: "He returned [from Washington] anti-American, in a way I'd never detected before. He gave us his impression of Washington. He said, 'Americans treat us like an aircraft carrier -- a floating base. They don't understand our real significance: we're not one aircraft carrier. We are twenty aircraft carriers. We are much more important than they think. We can take the Middle East with us whenever we go.'" It was a strange and unsettling performance, the officer thought, punctuated by Sharon's threat to "court-martial" anyone who publicly discussed what he had said.

On December 15, Sharon, in a speech read by Aharon Yariv (Sharon was not present) at a conference at the Institute of Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, suggested that the United States was indirectly responsible for the growing threat posed by Moscow in the Middle East: "Soviet advances in the region have been made possible during the seventies because of the U.S. strategic passivity in those years and the freedom of action the Soviet Union has enjoyed...." The increased Soviet freedom of maneuver in the Middle East and Africa, he added, "endangers the stability of the region and vital interest of the free world. I want to stress this point with all possible emphasis. The great danger to the free world in the eighties would be to continue [to] indulge in the wishful thinking and the inaction which have characterized Western attitudes to Soviet gradual expansion during the last two decades."

Sharon called for Israel to broaden its national security interests "to include, beyond the Middle East and Red Sea, states like Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, and regions such as the Persian Gulf and central and northern Africa." The new minister of defense was telling his nation that Israel's national security now depended on its ability to influence events in a huge area that stretched from Kenya in the south to Turkey, and from Mauritania in the west to Pakistan.

There was one sure way to meet the new and expanded Soviet threat: increase Israeli reliance on its nuclear arsenal. But that could not be accomplished without KH-11 satellite information and other intelligence from the United States.

As Sharon was beginning to redesign Israel's strategic posture, Washington finally got some hard intelligence on the Israeli nuclear arsenal. It was a "walk-in," an Israeli scientist or technician who had worked at Dimona and who, as Mordecai Vanunu would do five years later, had taken some photographs of the underground storage bunkers there. "It was our first look inside," one senior intelligence official recalled. "What got our attention was the fact that he was inside a storage facility." The photographs showed Israeli warheads individually stored in heavy lead compartments, very similar to those used in American nuclear storage igloos: "We actually saw the weapons lined up there."

The men handling the defector were experts in weapons production and knew they were seeing the real thing- thermonuclear warheads. The defector told them that Israel had more than one hundred weapons in storage. "Our thought was 'Holy shit!'" one involved American recalled. "'How could we have been so wrong?' We always said, 'So the Israelis got ten warheads? Okay. So what? Anybody can build those.' All of a sudden we learned they'd become sophisticated. It blew everybody's mind. Why do you need a thermonuclear device? We know twenty KTs [kilotons] will take out Cairo. [Israel] was more advanced and better than any of our people had presumed it could be -- clean bombs, better warheads. The White House was briefed, but not in terms that I gave you because it was a real black eye for the [intelligence] community."

The defector also provided specific data about warhead size and delivery systems -- "we got lots of paper" -- that convinced the Americans that the Israelis were capable of delivering a nuclear warhead with accuracy. It was clear from the defector's data, the American said, that the Israelis "can do anything we or the Soviets can do."

There was the usual disconnect, as there had been with all Israeli nuclear information since the late 1950s, and the defector's data was not shared with the State Department's proliferation experts nor with any of the analysts of Z Division at Livermore, who were seen as liberals. "You bet your ass it was kept away from the people at Z Division," the Reagan administration official said. "We were paranoid that they'd get it anyway." The defector's information was left dangling, and those Americans who should have known the extent and nature of Israel's nuclear capability did not.

***

Jonathan Pollard was an unhappy child in South Bend, Indiana. The son of a professor at Notre Dame University, he was tormented and beaten in grade school for being Jewish. He told an interviewer that the "turning point" of his life came as a result of the Six-Day War, when he was thirteen. Israel's victory was "emotionally intoxicating" and triggered his lifelong obsession with Israeli security, and his fantasies of being part of it. He told fellow undergraduates at Stanford University that he had dual citizenship and was a colonel in the Israeli Army. Bragging and fanciful claims marked his years at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston, where he enrolled in 1977. He failed to earn his degree, and also failed in an attempt to join the CIA. In early 1981, Pollard sought a job as a defense analyst with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of Washington's most effective lobbies. AIPAC officials found his bragging about access to top-secret information inappropriate and "weird"; one AIPAC official recalled that Pollard's story sounded "too incredible to be real. So we got rid of him." There was a feeling that Pollard was part of a "sting" operation attempting to set up AIPAC. He was clearly trouble.

Pollard also had been offering his services to Israel in 1980 and 1981, but no serious Israeli intelligence official would consider the recruitment of an openly pro-Israel American Jew who worked for the American intelligence community. There also was an unwritten law prohibiting the recruitment of any American Jew, pro-Israel or not. It was just too high- risk.

Pollard's repeated offers to spy for the State of Israel had unnerved the Israeli intelligence community. "He was turned back in 1980," a former Mossad operative said. "He's crazy; he's Jewish-'Don't take him.' It's like recruiting a Communist to spy [in the United States] for the KGB. He's automatically a suspect."

Rafi Eitan, the aggressive new director of LAKAM, decided to change the rules after the unproductive meetings with the President and his senior aides in Washington. He agreed with Sharon that the United States was holding back on intelligence that was essential to Israeli security-such as the KH-11 photography. "It was a basic suspicion," recalled one Israeli who had worked in Mossad with Eitan. "Whatever you get is not the real stuff-there is even stuff beyond."

Ari Ben-Menashe and his colleagues in the External Relations Department were also appalled when Eitan recruited Pollard in October 1981. Pollard was a member of a Navy team that visited Israel that fall to coordinate the exchange of intelligence with the Israeli Navy. Such visits were routine, and the Israelis had worked out a novel way of making their counterparts feel welcome: each American would be invited to an Israeli officer's home for dinner. "Guess who shows up at Pollard's dinner?" asked Ben-Menashe. "Rafi. He bagged him [Pollard] in one night. He didn't even pay him very well- just gives him this big story." Eitan needed Pollard, Ben-Menashe explained, "to access papers he already had knowledge of. He needed an analyst." His recruitment was viewed by military intelligence as "the worst fucking thing Rafi could have done."

***

By early 1982, Reuven "Rudi" Yerdor had been promoted to brigadier general and was in charge of Unit 8200, the Israeli communications intelligence service. Yerdor was a senior analyst who worked closely with his counterparts in the American National Security Agency, traveling to Washington every three months for liaison meetings. Yerdor's official title was deputy chief of staff for military intelligence in the Israeli Defense Force; his immediate superior was Major General Yehoshua Saguy, the head of Aman (military intelligence) and a deputy to Sharon who, like Sharon, was dismissed after the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Every senior officer understood that Saguy, as head of military intelligence, was directly responsible under military procedure for briefing the prime minister. But Saguy was known throughout the upper echelon of the Israeli military for his reluctance to challenge Sharon and his willingness to step aside and permit Sharon to be the main conduit for military intelligence to Begin and the Israeli cabinet.

Over the 1981-82 New Year's holiday, Yerdor was summoned by Saguy and given two packets of documents to evaluate: "Tell me what you think." The first set dealt with highly technical American intelligence describing a Soviet military system in the hands of the Arabs. The second documents, far less interesting to Yerdor, were copies of the daily and weekly summaries of worldwide NSA intercepts. "Rudi tells him the technical stuff is terrific," an Israeli official recalled, "but that 'we'll never get it in this form from the U.S.' As for the intercepts, 'These are less useful.' " Yerdor, as he later explained to a colleague, assumed that his government's intelligence services had recruited two people inside the United States-a step he found deplorable and shortsighted. Eventually, the material began flowing "in huge quantities," as Yerdor told his friend, and Yerdor "had to assign a special team to read and analyze it."

In February, Israel learned that the Soviets had decided to upgrade the Syrian air defense command and supply it with three battalions of SA-ss, their most advanced high-altitude antiaircraft missile. It was the first appearance in the Middle East of the system. The missiles remained under Soviet control, but they were assigned to protect Syria's short-range SS-1 missiles, which were capable of striking Israel. They also posed a threat to Israel's most advanced F-15 and F-16 fighter-bomber aircraft. It was an alarming escalation. An official request to the United States for intelligence on the capabilities of the SA-5 was made, but Yerdor was told, as he anticipated, that there was very little intelligence available on the system; it was too sensitive. "Two days later," an Israeli friend of Yerdor's said, "out of the blue sky, Rudi gets the full [U.S.] intelligence on the SA-5, which makes it clear that it is not as good as we feared." As for the source of the report, as Yerdor told his colleague, "this doesn't come" through normal channels.

In mid-May 1982, three weeks before the invasion of Lebanon, Yerdor's office was handed an astonishing assortment of invaluable American technical data about the air defense systems in Syria. It included materials that the U.S. intelligence community had never supplied to Israel: detailed information on side-looking radar, electronic maps, and precise frequency of operations for Syria's SA-6, SA-8, and advanced SA-3 surface-to- air missile systems. Yerdor again raised questions with General Saguy: "We don't get these materials and if we asked for it, we wouldn't get it." The Israeli Air Force, utilizing electronic countermeasures (ECM), would demolish the Syrian Air Force and destroy more than seventy Syrian missile launchers during the Lebanon war.

There was much more. "NSA intercepts begin arriving," one fully informed Israeli recalled. Rafi Eitan himself showed up at Yerdor's office and "throws him a daily intercept" dealing with the diplomatic activities of Sam Lewis. Yerdor told Eitan: "I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole." Lewis, a career diplomat who would serve as ambassador until 1985, was widely known as a good friend of Israel but also was strongly opposed to Ariel Sharon and his policies.

Yerdor had little respect for Eitan, and worried about the long-range implications of Israeli intelligence activities in the United States, its best ally. He was convinced Eitan was driven by his personal ambition and his need to settle old scores with Yitzhak Hofi, the head of Mossad, and Avraham Shalom, Shin Beth's director. [2] He also was convinced, at least until the Pollard scandal became public, that Eitan had recruited two or more Americans; it wasn't clear how one person could have had as much access to such a variety of highly classified material as was flowing across his desk. Pollard, Yerdor learned later, had been cleared -- despite his openly pro-Israel views -- for access to the most sensitive intelligence in the U.S. government, and was using his office in Navy intelligence to place orders with abandon to classified archives throughout the Washington area.

Ben-Menashe, like Yerdor, remained convinced-even after Pollard's arrest and guilty plea-that Eitan had been working with more than one American. Under normal conditions, things were hectic in Ben-Menashe's Office of External Relations: Eitan's LAKAM operations in the United States produced a steady stream of routinely transferred scientific and technical documents-similar highly classified U.S. material had been arriving since the late 1950s, when the agency was set up. Now, illicitly obtained intelligence was flying so voluminously from LAKAM into Israeli intelligence that a special code name, JUMBO, was added to the security markings already on the documents. There were strict orders, Ben- Menashe recalled: "Anything marked JUMBO was not supposed to be discussed with your American counterparts."

After the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Sharon remained in Begin's cabinet, but as a minister without portfolio, and Moshe Arens, a former aeronautical engineer, was named defense minister. Israeli politics were in more disarray than usual over the next year; Menachem Begin's wife died in the spring, and a guilt-ridden Begin, who was in Washington at the time of her death, fell into a severe depression. He resigned as prime minister in September 1983 and was replaced by Yitzhak Shamir, a former senior Mossad operative and conservative member of the Likud coalition. Neither Labor nor Likud achieved a majority in the national elections in May 1984. A national unity coalition was negotiated over the next few months, with Shimon Peres and Shamir sharing power: Peres would serve as prime minister and Shamir as foreign minister until September 1986, when they would trade jobs. Yitzhak Rabin would serve as minister of defense throughout. Peres, Rabin, and Shamir became known as Israel's ruling troika.

Throughout the turmoil, Rafi Eitan stayed on the job-and so did Jonathan Pollard. A pattern for reporting was established: Pollard's intelligence would be summarized by Eitan and presented, without analysis or assessment, in a memorandum to the prime minister and minister of defense. By then, Pollard's material included essential KH-11 imagery as well as reporting and assessments from U.S. embassies and intelligence operatives inside Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt; such material is known in the diplomatic community as "third-party" information, and is never provided to outsiders. The top leadership, of course, knew what was going on. One former Israeli intelligence official recalled that Peres and Rabin, both very sophisticated in the handling of intelligence, were quick to ask, as the official put it, "Where are we getting this stuff?


They were told, the Israeli added, that Israeli intelligence" 'has a penetration into the U.S. intelligence community.' Both men let it go. No one said: 'Stop it here and now.''' Moshe Arens was viewed as far less sophisticated than Peres and Rabin about the nuances of intelligence. He did not raise any questions" too dumb to ask," said the Israeli-but he was briefed on the American penetration by "intelligence guys who wanted to protect their ass."

After Pollard's arrest, the top leadership denied having any knowledge of his activities, and two internal commissions authorized by the cabinet and the Knesset that investigated the scandal also cleared the leadership of any direct knowledge. Pollard himself seemed to know better. In a pleading filed before he was given his life sentence in March 1987, he argued that his 'Israeli handlers told him that "Israel's dependence upon a 'special source' " had been mentioned at Israeli cabinet meetings. He also said that he was routinely provided with lists of intelligence items wanted; the lists were coordinated and "prioritized" by the heads of all the various military intelligence services. Much of the material he supplied, he stated, was satellite photographs and communication intercepts-material that any Israeli official would have to know "was not being transferred through official channels." Pollard's handlers in the United States, who included Aviem Sella by mid-1984, had even arranged for the Israeli government to provide, via its embassy in Washington, the most sophisticated photocopying machines for the reproduction of top-secret documents, including KH-11 satellite photographs. The photocopying machines arrived with special metal shielding to prevent the interception of electronic emanations.

***

Ari Ben-Menashe was aware of Rudi Yerdor's distress about the spying: "Yerdor was bitching about the fact that Eitan was compromising Israel's relations with the United States." Ben-Menashe understood much more: he had personal knowledge that Yitzhak Shamir, while serving as prime minister in 1983 and 1984, had authorized some of the Pollard material to be sanitized, retyped, and turned over to Soviet intelligence officials.

Ben-Menashe, an Iraqi Jew, had close ties to Shamir; in 1987, two years before his arrest in the United States and subsequent disaffection from Israel, he left the External Relations Department and went to work directly as an intelligence adviser for Shamir, then again serving as prime minister. In essence, he said, he conducted secret operations for Shamir. It was a step up. Ben-Menashe's ties to Shamir also were familial; his father served with Shamir in the fervently anti- British Stern Gang before the 1948 War of Independence. [3] Shamir, who viscerally disliked the United States, Ben- Menashe said, also "couldn't stand Begin and his moralistic approach to foreign relations.The first thing he [Shamir] decides"-upon becoming prime minister-"without any hesitation is to open the Soviet bloc to Israel." There was an immediate impact in the intelligence community, Ben-Menashe added: "A directive to the Mossad representative in Bucharest [Romania] to exchange information, to open things up. Nobody in the intelligence community would dare to do it without the approval of the prime minister."

The Soviets recognized the overture, Ben-Menashe said, and late in the year invited Israel to an intelligence conference in India to discuss the Pakistani nuclear weapons facility at Kahuta. In early 1984, while still acting prime minister, Shamir "authorized the exchange of intelligence with the Soviets on U.S. weapons systems. Suddenly," Ben-Menashe said, "we're exchanging information." Raw American intelligence was not handed over directly to the Soviets, but was reworked in an attempt to minimize the damage to American methods and agents. The exchange of intelligence paid an immediate dividend, beyond the easing of diplomatic tensions and the increased flow of Soviet immigrants to Israel, Ben-Menashe said. In late 1984 the Polish government permitted him, as a representative of the State of Israel, to travel to Warsaw and negotiate the sale of AK-47s and SA-7S, among other weapons, for shipment to Iran.

Ben-Menashe's account might seem almost too startling to be believed, had it not been subsequently amplified by a second Israeli, who cannot be named. The Israeli said that Pollard material was sanitized and dictated to a secretary before being turned over to the Soviets. Some material was directly provided to Yevgeni M. Primakov, the Soviet foreign ministry specialist on the Middle East who met publicly and privately with Shamir while he was prime minister. Shamir's turning to the Soviets was consistent with his personal and political beliefs, the Israeli said. While in Mossad in the 1950s and 1960s, Shamir was known for his efforts to improve relationships with his KGB counterparts. He left the intelligence service in the mid-1960s to join Begin's Herut Party and became speaker of the Knesset in 1977, when Begin became prime minister. He worked diligently to develop new ties with the Soviet Union, which he envisioned as a means of balancing, or offsetting, Israel's traditional reliance on the U.S. "Shamir has always been fascinated with authority' and strong regimes," the Israeli said, "and very suspicious of democratic governments. He sees the U.S. as very soft, bourgeois, materialistic and effete."

For Shamir, the Israeli added, the relaying of the Pollard information to the Soviets was his way of demonstrating that Israel could be a much more dependable and important collaborator in the Middle East than the "fickle" Arabs: "What Arab could give you this?"

Shamir's unilateral decision to forward the material to the Soviets is now widely known in leading political circles in Israel, the Israeli source said. Rabin, who was close to the United States, went into a virtual "state of shock" upon being told, but kept his peace. Rabin and Peres, and their political advisers, understood that Shamir's action, if exposed, would mean the end of the increasingly shaky Likud coalition. They also realized, the Israeli source said, that the overall Israeli-United States relationship "would be at risk. So they kept quiet." Some officials of Mapam, the left-wing labor party with close ties to the Soviet bloc, also learned of Shamir's action and considered leaking that information to the press. The Mapam leaders "decided it was too explosive."

For his part, Shamir and his principals argued to their colleagues that his goal was to end the long-standing enmity between Israel and the Soviet Union and initiate some kind of strategic cooperation. Shamir also claimed, the Israeli said, that "he was not doing the United States such a disservice because he's telling the Soviets that they cannot hide -- the Americans can see and hear everything."

***

One senior American intelligence official confirmed that there have been distinct losses of human and technical intelligence collection ability inside the Soviet Union that have been attributed, after extensive analysis, to Pollard. "The Israeli objective [in the handling of Pollard] was to gather what they could and let the Soviets know that they have a strategic capability-for their survival and to get their people out [of the Soviet Union]," one former CIA official said. "Where it hurts us is our agents being rolled up and our ability to collect technical intelligence being shut down. When the Soviets found out what's being passed"-in the documents supplied by Pollard to the Israelis-"they shut down the source."

***

The Israeli officials most tarnished by the scandal were Rafi Eitan and Aviem Sella, but Eitan did not suffer financially. He was subsequently named to a high administrative position with the Israel Chemicals Company, the largest state-owned enterprise in Israel. His surprising appointment was authorized by none other than Ariel Sharon, who had been named minister of trade and industry in 1984. As for Sella, he was promoted to brigadier general after his return from the United States and assigned as commander of Tel Nof, the site of Israel's nuclear-ready air force squadron. After American protests, Sella instead was named head of the Israeli Defense Force staff college. His prospects for further advancement in the air force were bleak, and Sella retired.

"They all decided Rafi would take the fall," one knowledgeable American diplomat said, "and Sharon would take care of him." The American, who conducted his own private inquiry into the Pollard affair shortly after it became known, said that the Israeli leadership agreed on a cover-up from the beginning, despite the huge political differences between the parties. "There is a national security doctrine in Israel that goes beyond everything-protect our government," he added. "If they had allowed it (the investigation] to go deeper than Rafi, it'd have blown up the (ruling] coalition. There was nothing to gain for Israel or the Labor Party by saying anything." At one point, Rafi Eitan seemed to have second thoughts. He told an Israeli newspaper in early 1987, "All my actions, including the Pollard affair, were carried out with the knowledge of my superiors. I do not intend to be used as a sacrifice to cover up the knowledge and responsibility of others." (He changed his mind within a day, saying to an Israeli radio interviewer that all of the previously published statements attributed to him "were not made by me.")

***

The one aspect of the Pollard story that no one wanted revealed revolved around Aviem Sella. Sella was perhaps Israel's top air force expert in nuclear targeting and the delivery of nuclear weapons: it was his job to make sure that Israel's nuclear-armed F-16 aircraft could penetrate Soviet air defenses and reach their targets in the Soviet Union. Earlier in his career he had served as an F-4 pilot at Tel Nof, assigned to one of Israel's "black" -- nuclear-capable -- squadrons. Ariel Sharon's broadened view of Israeli national security and the Soviet threat had led to a dramatic upsurge in nuclear planning and nuclear targeting. The air force also was responsible for the advanced Jericho missile system, with its steadily increasing range. The new missile targets inside the Soviet Union required increased intelligence, and Sella's mission was to help pollard gather the essential information and then evaluate it. Israel would need the most advanced American intelligence on weather patterns and communication protocols, as well as data on emergency and alert procedures. Any American knowledge of the electromagnetic fields that lie between Israel and its main targets in the Soviet Union also was essential to the targeting of the Jericho.

Sella's superb skill and knowledge of nuclear targeting blinded Eitan and the Israeli intelligence community to the fact that Sella was a pilot who knew nothing about running a covert operation. When Pollard did get into trouble in late 1985, Sella had nothing to offer him -- Sella's main concern was fleeing the United States as quickly as possible before he, too, was arrested and asked a lot of questions that neither he nor the Israeli government wanted asked.

Those Israelis who know of the Sella mission and the reasons behind it also believe that Jonathan Pollard had to understand what he was doing. "Pollard knew it," said one Sella friend. "Of course he knew it. We didn't need Pollard to bring us photographs of the PLO headquarters in Tunis." (The Israeli was referring to Pollard's claim that his intelligence had helped plan Israel's 1985 bombing of the PLO offices in Tunis.)

***

Pollard refused to cooperate with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington for six months before finally giving up Sella's name-and describing what he said was his involvement-as part of a plea bargain. It is not known whether the prosecutors in Washington realized at the time of the Pollard plea bargain that Sella's mission was linked to nuclear intelligence; nor is it even clear whether anyone in the U.S. government learned it later. Many of the government's submissions in the case, including an extensive presentation by Caspar Weinberger, were highly classified.

The government acknowledged that few involved in the case told the truth. It was that awkward situation that led them to insist that Sella be extradited to the United States. The Israeli government refused, and Sella was indicted in absentia in March 1987, in the U.S. District Court in Washington. In June 1990, Sella was declared a fugitive from justice.

Since his retirement, Sella has given friends and colleagues an account of his involvement that is more credible, but still far short of the whole story. While in Israel, he was recruited, he has said, for the job of trying to control Pollard, who was drowning the Israeli intelligence bureaucracy in documents. By 1984, when Sella was approached, he had almost completed his requirement for a Ph.D. in computer science at New York University; the obvious thought was that his technical training would be an asset in evaluating and perhaps winnowing down Pollard's materials. Sella knew, as he told colleagues, that Pollard had been recruited long before 1984 -- "the potato was in the oven," he said to one friend -- but he was eager for the assignment: running a spy as important as Pollard would make his own climb to the top inevitable. before taking the assignment, he checked with his superior, Major General Amos Lapidot, the air force chief of staff. Lapidot assured him, Sella has said,. that Pollard was not a rogue-and clearance for his new assignment had been obtained from Yitzhak Rabin, the minister of defense. Once involved, Sella complained to a friend that Pollard "was running crazy." The spy, Sella said, "was giving him things he didn't want and didn't need."

***

Israel did make one direct attempt, nonetheless, to get the charges against the young colonel dismissed. In June 1986, shortly after Pollard gave up Sella's name, Israel hired Leonard Garment to represent the colonel. Garment, a former aide to Richard Nixon, was a prominent Washington attorney and private counsel to men such as former Attorney General Edwin Meese III. He also was a strong supporter of Israel, and under Nixon had occasionally become involved in high- level diplomacy.

In late June, Garment flew to Tel Aviv to interview Sella and speak with Israeli officials. His goal was to try to find some common ground between Washington and the government of Israel; to settle the matter before it led to even more damaging press. Sella's advisers in Israel included Chaim Joseph Zadok, a former minister of justice and elder statesman of the Labor Party, and government officials. They proposed that a factual proffer be offered the U.S. Justice Department, describing Sella's involvement-or lack of involvement. The document claimed that Sella had done nothing more than meet socially with Pollard. And Sella said that upon learning over dinner that Pollard was interested in forwarding documents to Israel, his only response was to suggest that "Pollard deal directly with the appropriate agency." The Israeli position, as outlined to Garment, was that the United States had no case against the colonel; there wasn't the slightest indication of spying on his part. Garment saw many state leaders while in Israel and even had dinner at the home of Shimon Peres. All assured him that they knew nothing of the Pollard matter.

After he had a long meeting with Sella and his brother in Tel Aviv, Garment began stalling for time; he refused to file the proffer, saying that it needed more work. Garment returned to Washington to try again to negotiate a diplomatic solution or find some way to come up with a document that could get his client off the hook without obstructing justice. After much communication back and forth, a six-man Israeli delegation arrived in Washington in August 1986 for a meeting with the Justice and State departments to resolve the issue. It was no ordinary group, but clear evidence that the necessity of protecting Sella reached to the top of the Israeli government. Its members were Chaim Zadok, the former justice minister; Meir Rosenne, a former Mossad official who was the Israeli ambassador to Washington; Rosenne's deputy, Elyakim Rubinstein, one of the brightest diplomats in Israel, who would become cabinet secretary; Ram Caspi, a prominent Labor Party lawyer and one of Shimon Peres's confidants; Avraham Shalom, the former head of Shin Beth (who had been forced to resign his post in ate June because of cover-up charges in connection with the Shin Beth killing in 1984 of two Palestinian hijackers while in custody); and Hanan Bar-on, deputy director general of the Israeli foreign ministry. Caspi, Shalom, and Bar-on had been appointed by Peres immediately after Pollard's arrest to conduct an internal investigation. The three men reported within a week that Pollard was part of a rogue intelligence-gathering unit that operated without any government awareness.

Garment invited the six men to his home on the day before their meeting with Justice and State. They worked for hours on the proffer. Garment had drafted a memorandum on obstruction of justice under U.S. law in an attempt to persuade the Israelis to stop insisting that he file the proffer as initially written. The meeting went on past midnight, with Garment's wife, Suzanne, then a well-known Washington columnist for the Wall Street Journal, put in charge of typing drafts of the disputed proffer. At one point, according to a witness (not Garment), as Garment continued to demur, the inevitable question came: "What kind of a Jew are you?" Garment was incensed: "I'm an American citizen, too." What they wanted also made no sense in terms of protecting the client. Garment decided it was time to let them know what he knew. He retrieved his notes of the dinner conversation with Sella and read them to the group. The Israelis listened quietly and then asked for a few moments of privacy. When Garment returned, they demanded the Sella notes. "These are my notes," Garment told them. They insisted. Garment held his ground. In that case, they said, "you're discharged."

Garment lost his temper. He told the men that they would never get the Sella notes and warned: "If any of you make a move in my direction, I'll throw you in the pool." Everyone settled down. It was later agreed that Garment would withdraw from the case, but do so quietly.

Garment's instinct for self-preservation -- he was, after all, a survivor of the Nixon White House -- was at its most acute. He did not know that Aviem Sella was a leading nuclear targeter, he did not know that U.S. nuclear targeting secrets were involved in the Pollard affair, and he did not know that three of the six men who negotiated with him over the Sella proffer had been involved in an internal investigation and cover-up of the Pollard scandal. What Garment did know, as he privately informed U.S. Attorney Joseph E. diGenova, who led the Pollard prosecution, and Mark M. Richard, a deputy assistant attorney general, was that he was leaving the case because he was not sure whether his client was Aviem Sella or the Israeli government. With his withdrawal, the Israeli government ended its attempt to protect Sella -- in effect, ending Sella's career. Sella, who retired from the air force in disillusionment and disappointment, remained in Israel, as of mid- 991 a fugitive from American justice.

_______________

Notes:

1. Eitan's nickname arose from his habit of refusing to change his socks while fighting in Israel's War of Independence in 1948.

2. Hofi also was a critic of Ariel Sharon, and had been since they had served together as paratroopers in the Suez War. His dislike of Sharon manifested itself in unprecedented public criticism, reported in the Israeli press after the invasion of Lebanon, in which Hofi, former chief of staff Mordecai Gur, and two other retired army generals accused Sharon of insubordination and cowardice under fire on repeated occasions in the 1950s, including the Suez War.

3. Yair Stern considered the Jews' fight against the British to be more important than the world war against the Axis powers. The organization's leaders made a brief attempt in 1940 to broker an agreement with the Third Reich that would permit the illegal passage to Palestine of Jews from Germany and Europe to continue the fight against the British, whose war effort was supported by David Ben-Gurion and even the Irgun, a rival terrorist group that would be taken over by Menachem Begin in 1943. (Irgun's founder, David Raziel, in fact was serving as a high-ranking officer in British intelligence and wearing a British uniform when he was killed while on a mission in Iraq in 1941.) The Stern group, resisting pressure to fight with the Allies, sought direct negotiations at one point with Otto von Hentig, a representative of the German foreign ministry. Nothing came of it. In his memoirs, von Hentig wrote of meeting with a Jewish delegation (from Stern) that offered to cooperate with the Nazis and, in essence, go to war against their pro-allied Zionist compatriots, if Hitler guaranteed the post-war independence of Jewish Palestine. Similar talks were held by Stern representatives with Benito Mussolini's Italy, calling on the Italians to provide transit camps and passage for Jewish refugees, as well as arms, in return for the Stern Gang's collaboration in expanding Italy's influence in the Middle East.
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Re: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American

Postby admin » Fri May 26, 2017 6:42 am

Chapter 22: An Israeli Asset

By October 1986, Jonathan Pollard had yet to be sentenced and there were many in the U.S. intelligence community who were convinced that he had one and perhaps many more accomplices inside the government-men or women who were supplying Israel with the identification of highly classified documents that Pollard could then be assigned to retrieve. The hunt for "Mr. X," as the government called Pollard's alleged accomplice, had only begun.

Israel was in the news, and so was spying. The Sunday Times of London had every reason to anticipate that its October 5, 1986, revelation about Dimona, based on its interviews with Mordecai Vanunu, would be a sensation. It was the first inside account of the Israeli nuclear establishment, based on a publicly named source. It also was another story of betrayal involving Israel: Vanunu and Pollard were primarily driven not by financial gain (although both accepted money), but by the conviction that they were doing the right thing.

The intelligence communities of the world were riveted by the Sunday Times account. One key American nuclear intelligence official acknowledged that the Vanunu story and Pierre Pean's 1982 book on the early French involvement at Dimona "together presented the evidence that filled in all the question marks. What we and Z Division didn't know, they provided."

But the press paid little attention. The Sunday Times's competitors on Fleet Street ignored the story, and so did much of the world's press. The Washington Post and the New York Times dismissed it in subsequent days with a few paragraphs buried inside their newspapers, and the major wire services treated it the same way.

Jerry Oplinger, the former White House aide, was appalled by the failure of the press to understand the importance of Vanunu. "I couldn't believe those guys. There was nothing [significant] in the Times, Post, and Wall Street Journal," he said. "Everybody in the arms control business was amazed that there was nothing. To me and my close friends, it was really discouraging. Here is a fascinating and scary story, and even the press isn't interested."

Peter Hounam, the primary reporter and writer of the Vanunu story, knew it was the most important of his career. He expected anything, except apathy. There were not even any calls from the major newspapers in the United States. It might have been different, Hounam knew, if Mordecai Vanunu had been available in person. The Sunday Times had worked out a careful public relations campaign to help promote the story. There was to be a news conference on the day of publication (the newspaper would also announce that Vanunu had agreed to write a book and that syndication rights had been sold to Stern, the West German news magazine). But Vanunu had dropped out of sight the week before, and the Sunday Times was unable to produce him when he was most needed.

***

Vanunu, of course, had been duped by Israeli intelligence into leaving London on September 30 and lured to Rome, where he was abducted by the Mossad. His decision to walk away from the London newspaper world had followed publication of Vanunu's photograph in the Sunday Mirror, Britain's second-largest tabloid, and a hostile story the week before, on September 28. Israeli officials were quoted claiming that Vanunu had been fired from Dimona the year before "for attempting to copy documents." An Israeli press attache added: "There is not, and there never has been, a scientist by this name working in nuclear research in Israel. I can confirm that a Mordecai Vanunu worked as a junior technician in the [Israeli] Atomic Energy Commission." The Sunday Mirror had attacked the credibility of Vanunu's photographs, quoting an unidentified nuclear weapons expert as saying that they could have been taken in an "egg factory." The Mirror also asked whether Vanunu's account was "a hoax, or even something more sinister -- a plot to discredit Israel."

The article had been given a lurid headline: "Strange Case of Israel and the Nuclear Conman." The alleged con man in the headline was not Vanunu, but Vanunu's agent, Oscar E. Guerrero, an opportunistic journalist from Colombia in South America who had befriended the hapless Vanunu in June, while he was still in exile in Australia. It was Guerrero who convinced Vanunu that his story and spectacular photographs were worth as much as $1 million. After failing to interest Newsweek magazine, Guerrero approached the London Times in late August, and within a few days, Peter Hounam was in Australia, interviewing Vanunu.

Guerrero, apparently fearful that he would be cut out of Vanunu's agreement with the Sunday Times, also approached the Sunday Mirror-known for its checkbook journalism -- while Hounam and the Sunday Times's "Insight Team" were preparing their story. It was that approach that put Ari Ben-Menashe and the Israeli intelligence community into the picture.

***

Hounam and the editors at the Sunday Times did not know that as they worked, Mordecai Vanunu had been compromised to the Israelis by a Fleet Street colleague named Nicholas Davies, the foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, sister newspaper of the Sunday Mirror. Davies's contact was Ari Ben-Menashe. He and Ben-Menashe had been partners in an international arms sales firm initially known as Ora Limited, which had operated out of Davies's London home since 1983. Ora Limited, set up with the approval of the Israeli government, according to Ben-Menashe, was designed to get arms flowing into Iran-one of many such undercover operations around the world. "Davies was my main backup on all the Iran arms sales," Ben-Menashe said.

Because of his ability to speak Farsi, Ben-Menashe had been assigned in November 1980 to a small working group inside the Israeli intelligence community that dealt with Iran, then an international outcast-like Israel-that needed arms for its war against Iraq. Ben-Menashe's assignment was to find ways of getting around the arms embargo. Front companies and credible people to run them were essential. "Nick had a friend in the Mossad," Ben-Menashe recalled, and there was a casual meeting in London. Davies accepted an invitation to visit Israel; it was just a few more steps before he became an Israeli asset. As a Catholic from northern England, Ben-Menashe said, Davies was the perfect cutout, a well-dressed charmer with a strong taste for the good life.

Ben-Menashe's files include hundreds of telexes and other documents indicating that Ora Limited was actively involved in arms trafficking with Iran at the highest levels. One 1987 cable, sent to Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, provided terms for the sale to Iran of four thousand TOW missiles at a cost of $13,800 each. The cable declared that a British citizen named Nicholas Davies, as a representative of Ora Limited, "will have the authority to sign contracts in Iran...." Another series of documents revolved around the 1987 efforts of Ora Limited to set up a communications company in Tucson, Arizona, to be headed by Robert D. Watters, then a broadcast engineer at the University of Arizona's television station. Watters, an expert on satellite voice communications, recalled many meetings with Ben-Menashe in Tucson and many telephone conversations with Davies in London. "I thought Nick was the money man," Watters said. "He was there representing Ora." [1]

Davies, reached by telephone in London at a number listed for Ora Limited, acknowledged that he knew Ben-Menashe but denied any involvement in arms sales: "All I will say is just keep investigating." Ben-Menashe, he added, was only a news source: "He's got amazing information." At one time, he said, he and Ben-Menashe had discussed collaborating on a book, but the prospective publisher was not interested. Ben-Menashe was now telling stories about him, Davies said, in revenge. "If any allegations are made in England," Davies warned, "I'll be seeing my solicitor."

But, in addition to the cable cited above, Ben-Menashe's allegations were explicitly confirmed by Janet Fielding, a London actress who was the second wife of Nicholas Davies from 1982 to 1985. She said that she knew that Davies was selling arms in partnership with Ben-Menashe at the same time he was serving as foreign editor of the Daily Mirror. Eventually, she said in a telephone interview, she became "appalled" by her then husband's activities. "Nick would try to tell me stuff [about the arms sales] and I said I didn't want to know. I left him because of it."

She had first known him as a journalist who had written critically of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon: "And then he gets involved with Ari." She especially recalled, she said, serving Ben-Menashe lunch at her home in late 1984: "I'd gone to the trouble of getting kosher salami and Ari didn't like it."

Asked whether she knew that Ben-Menashe was an Israeli intelligence operative, Fielding responded, "It wasn't difficult to put two and two together. Do you think I'm bloody stupid? I shut my ears and walked" -- out of the marriage.

***

Soon after Guerrero approached the Sunday Mirror, Ben-Menashe said, Davies learned of it and immediately telephoned him in Israel to tip him off: "The next I knew I was on the night plane to London. Some shithead from Colombia was peddling the pictures in London. Nick arranged a meeting with this 'hot' American journalist-me." At the meeting, Guerrero, eager for another sale, displayed some of Vanunu's color photographs. Ben-Menashe's problem, he recalled, was that he simply had no idea what they showed or whether they were significant. They would have to be seen, he knew, by experts in Israel. "I told him I needed copies." Guerrero balked. "I said, 'You want some money? I have to know they're real.' I told him Nick will vouch for me." Guerrero turned over copies of three Vanunu photographs.

***

The fact of Vanunu's defection had been known for weeks by the top political leadership of Israel. There had been discussions, Ben-Menashe said, about what to do, with some officials urging Vanunu's assassination and the intelligence community recommending that he be ignored. It wasn't clear how much Vanunu knew or how much damage could be caused by a low-level Moroccan-born technician. It was Shimon Peres who ruled out assassination, Ben-Menashe said: "Peres said, 'Let's make him an example.'"

Vanunu's photographs, which had been shipped by Ben-Menashe directly to Israel-he was under strict orders to stay away from the Israeli embassy-created havoc. Ben-Menashe was told the next morning, "They're real." He was also told that Peres was personally handling the crisis. Ben-Menashe learned one of the reasons a few days later: there was fear that Vanunu knew that Israel had deployed nuclear land mines along the Golan Heights-and that he would talk about it. The land mines had been put in place in the early 1980s, when Vanunu was still working at Dimona.

***

That news propelled a major disinformation effort by Israel, Ben-Menashe said: "To stop every story. To put out the word that it's bullshit." Davies did his part at the Sunday Mirror, Ben-Menashe said, working directly with Robert Maxwell, publisher of the Mirror Group newspapers, the largest group of popular tabloids in Great Britain, which included the Daily and Sunday Mirror. Davies provided the framework for the September 28 Vanunu story, Ben-Menashe recalled, and then "it went to Maxwell. He was dealing directly with Maxwell." At one point, Ben-Menashe said, Davies set up a meeting for Ben-Menashe with Maxwell at his ninth-floor office. Maxwell made it clear at the brief session, Ben- Menashe recalled, that he understood what was to be done about the Vanunu story. "I know what has to happen," Maxwell told Ben-Menashe. "I have already spoken to your bosses."

Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch's fellow press baron and major competitor, was known for his closeness to Israel's top leadership. He subsequently became an owner of Maariv, the Israeli daily newspaper, and also briefly was owner of the Cytex Corporation, an Israeli-based supplier of high-tech printing equipment, whose senior executives included Yair Shamir, a former air force colonel and the son of Yitzhak Shamir.

The Sunday Mirror reporting and editing team that handled the Vanunu story had no contact with Nicholas Davies, whom they knew only as the foreign editor of the Daily Mirror. What the reporters did know, however, was that the story that appeared under their names had been dictated in tone and content by the newspaper's editor, Michael Malloy. There were heated debates with the Mirror's reporting team, led by Tony Frost, insisting that the real story was not about Guerrero and his antics, as Malloy wanted to make it, but about the Vanunu photographs. Whatever Guerrero's problems, the Vanunu photographs could be real. If so, it was one hell of a story. The reporters recommended that the photographs be "splashed" across the front of the newspaper, with the accompanying story raising questions about their authenticity. But Malloy wanted none of Vanunu's photographs published and insisted on holding up Vanunu, and the Sunday Times, to ridicule.

The crunch came on the Thursday before publication, when Frost and a colleague named Mark Souster were ordered by Malloy to take the Vanunu photographs and data to the Israeli embassy. John C. Parker, then Malloy's senior deputy, understood that Maxwell himself had given the order. Parker and his colleagues were extremely concerned about what going to the embassy meant for Vanunu. It could lead to his arrest and even put his life in danger from assassination. "It's an editor's prerogative," Malloy told them, and the newspaper's staff did his bidding.

Frost knew that he and his colleagues had not participated in journalism's finest hour: "I was hoping one day that the full story would come out on this," he said.

Peter J. Miller, the Sunday Mirror's senior news editor, who was fired by Maxwell in 1990 (Frost also was dismissed in the dispute), angrily complained that the newspaper's treatment of the Vanunu story had been turned around because of pressure from above. "The line we were instructed to take," Miller said, "cost the Sunday Mirror a world-beating exclusive." [2]

Parker, who left the Mirror in 1988 to publish King of Fools, a best-selling biography of the Duke of Windsor, also expressed bitterness over the handling of the Vanunu story. "The Sunday Mirror had the biggest story in the world at that time and it collapsed because of the line they took," he said. "It was a classic exercise by the Israelis in disinformation."

***

Malloy, who was forced out in 1988 as editor of the Sunday Mirror, acknowledged that he had discussed the handling of the Vanunu story with Maxwell, but said there was "nothing sinister or strange about Maxwell's involvement. I told Bob about it because of his involvement with Israel. He does have powerful friends there and close links." Told of the complaints by Parker, Miller, and Frost, Malloy said that he himself had misjudged the importance of the Vanunu photographs. "My news instincts were bad," Malloy, now a free-lance writer and novelist, explained. "It sounded to me like a setup." It was Maxwell, however, Malloy recalled, who ordered the staff to take the photographs to the Israeli embassy. "I think he [Maxwell] probably said, 'Oh, let the Israelis have a look at it,' and that's how it came about. It wasn't as if we were handing them to a foreign enemy."

Malloy also said he could not deny that he had invoked Maxwell's name in telling Miller, Parker, and Frost how to handle the story. Although he could not specifically recall doing so in the Vanunu case, Malloy said, "generally Maxwell was given a draft [of stories] in advance." Malloy also acknowledged that it was possible that Maxwell was not keeping him fully informed of his independent contacts, with the Israelis or others on the Mirror newspaper group, such as Nicholas Davies. [3] Maxwell was in intelligence during the war," Malloy explained, "so he can be extremely disingenuous. So if he did know more than I knew, it's quite possible he wouldn't tell me."

Handling Robert Maxwell's Sunday Mirror was one thing, but the Sunday Times was still known to be at work on the Vanunu story -- and the Israeli intelligence community had no clout at the top at the Times. "Those guys were not us," Ben-Menashe said. "They wanted the real story." The next step was to find Vanunu, still hiding out in London, and somehow manage to get him out of England. "We didn't know what hotel he was staying at," Ben-Menashe added. "We asked Nick to ask around and find out where the fuck he was. Nick did it, and we spotted him." Within days, the lonely Vanunu, who did not know about the land mines, Ben-Menashe said, was entrapped by the Mossad's Cindy Hanin Bentov and en route to Rome.

Ben-Menashe's involvement in the incident ended at that point, but he maintained his business ties with Davies until his arrest in New York in 1989. He initially sought to keep secret Davies's role in the ongoing arms sales, Ben-Menashe said, as any good intelligence operative would, but he decided to talk after Davies made no move to come to his defense. Davies, in fact, retained a New York attorney in a successful effort to resist being deposed by Ben-Menashe's attorneys in the case.

If he had chosen to do so, Ben-Menashe claimed, Davies could have proven to the American prosecutors that the sale of the C-130s to Iran had been sanctioned by the Israeli government.

_______________

Notes:

1. Watters wasn't surprised to learn that Davies was in the newspaper business: "He called from what sounded like a very open room with lots of people talking and typewriters going. I always wondered where he was." Before agreeing to set up the company on behalf of Ora Limited, Watters added, he sought to check out Ben-Menashe and his London firm. Watters was also working under contract on a communications project for the U.S. Border Control and, through a friend there, was put in touch with officials of the U.S. Justice Department in Washington. "They said, 'Go ahead. Do anything he wants. Just keep us informed,'" Watters said.

2. Miller was fired in November 1990, after he was accused initially of neglect of duties and later with conspiring with another Sunday Mirror employee to sell a photo graph of Lady Diana, the Princess of Wales, dancing with John Travolta, the American actor, to rival publications after it had been printed in the Mirror. Miller, who was the publisher of a local London newspaper and magazine when interviewed, contested the firing before Britain's Industrial Tribunal, and in June 1991 won his case against Max well and the Sunday Mirror. The Tribunal, as of August 1991, was considering how much compensation to award Miller. Frost, now the deputy editor of the Sunday Sun in Newcastle, England, was also dismissed by Maxwell. He did not contest Maxwell's action against him.

3. Malloy said he knew nothing of Davies' ties to the Israelis but depicted him as serving as "son of equerry for Maxwell. When Bob travels, he always has an entourage and Nick became part of that entourage." Davies, Malloy added, "always was a kind of entrepreneurial character -- selling and importing on the side."
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Re: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American

Postby admin » Fri May 26, 2017 6:43 am

Epilogue

For the men in the White House, the first day of President George Bush's Persian Gulf War couldn't have gone better. As America -- and the world -- watched on television, U.S. cruise missiles and Air Force and Navy planes struck their targets in downtown Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq with precision. War seemed almost too easy. But the euphoria disappeared on the second day, as the Iraqi army carried out Saddam Hussein's pre-war pledge and fired eight Scud missiles at Israel from launchers that had supposedly been destroyed in the first hours of the war. Two Scuds landed in Tel Aviv and another near Haifa, and the world listened with dread to the initial, and erroneous, newscasts reporting that the Scud warheads contained nerve gas. Frightened Israelis, wearing gas masks, huddled in specially sealed above-ground rooms, waiting out the Iraqi bombardment; the streets below, as seen on television, were eerily quiet.

A senior American defense official rushed to Israel with a promise of future support, but it seemed inevitable that Israel would enter the Gulf War by sending its air force and its specially trained commando units into western Iraq, where the Scuds were located.

Adding to the tension was the fact that American intelligence had miscalculated in its predictions that Iraq had a limited number of Scud warheads and launchers -- some estimates before the war put that number at fewer than 20. It had been thought that Iraq could launch its Scuds only from fixed launcher sites or from mobile launchers -- no one had foreseen that Saddam Hussein's troops would convert a newly purchased fleet of flatbed trucks into makeshift launching pads. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the American commander, eventually acknowledged that Iraq could have as many as fifteen battalions of launchers, each supplied with fifteen Scuds -- a total of 225 missiles.

There was another element involved in those first hours, not known to the public but detected by an American satellite making its ninety-six-minute orbit around the earth. The satellite saw that Shamir had responded to the Scud barrage by ordering mobile missile launchers armed with nuclear weapons moved into the open and deployed facing Iraq, ready to launch on command. American intelligence picked up other signs indicating that Israel had gone on a full-scale nuclear alert that would remain in effect for weeks. No one in the Bush administration knew just what Israel would do if a Scud armed with nerve gas struck a crowded apartment building, killing thousands. All George Bush could offer Shamir, besides money and more batteries of Patriot missiles, was American assurance that the Iraqi Scud launcher sites would be made a priority target of the air war.

Such guarantees meant little; no Jews had been killed by poison gas since Treblinka and Auschwitz, and Israel, after all, had built its bomb so it would never have to depend on the goodwill of others when the lives of Jews were being threatened.

The escalation didn't happen, however; the conventionally armed Scud warheads caused -- amazingly -- minimal casualties, and military and financial commitments from the Bush administration rolled in. The government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir received international plaudits for its restraint.

American officials were full of private assurances for months after the crisis that things had been under control; newsmen were told that Israel, recognizing the enormous consequence of a nuclear strike, would not have launched its missiles at Baghdad.

The fact is, of course, that no one in America -- not even its President -- could have dissuaded Shamir and his advisers from ordering any military actions they deemed essential to the protection of their nation. Such sovereignty isn't new or unusual. What is unusual is that one of America's most important allies -- a beleaguered ally surrounded by avowed enemies constantly threatening war -- has secretly amassed a large nuclear arsenal while Washington looked the other way.

America's policy toward the Israeli arsenal, as we have seen in this book, was not just one of benign neglect: it was a conscious policy of ignoring reality.

By the mid-1980s, the technicians at Dimona had manufactured hundreds of low-yield neutron warheads capable of destroying large numbers of enemy troops with minimal property damage. The size and sophistication of Israel's arsenal allows men such as Ariel Sharon to dream of redrawing the map of the Middle East aided by the implicit threat of nuclear force. Israel also has been an exporter of nuclear technology and has collaborated on nuclear weapons research with other nations, including South Africa.

In September 1988, Israel launched its first satellite into orbit, bringing it a huge step closer to intercontinental missiles and a satellite intelligence capability -- no more Jonathan Pollards would be needed to steal America's secrets. Scientists at Z Division concluded that the rocket booster that launched the Israeli satellite produced enough thrust to deliver a small nuclear warhead to a target more than six thousand miles away. Israeli physicists are still at the cutting edge in weapons technology, and involved, as are their American and Soviet counterparts, in intensive research into nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray lasers, hydrodynamics, and radiation transport -- the next generation of weaponry.

None of this has ever been discussed in the open in Israel, or in the Knesset. Meanwhile, Israeli field commanders have accepted nuclear artillery shells and land mines as battlefield necessities: another means to an end. The basic target of Israel's nuclear arsenal has been and will continue to be its Arab neighbors. Should war break out in the Middle East again and should the Syrians and the Egyptians break through again as they did in 1973, or should any Arab nation fire missiles again at Israel, as Iraq did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability. Never again.

The Samson Option is no longer the only nuclear option available to Israel.
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Re: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American

Postby admin » Fri May 26, 2017 6:43 am

Acknowledgments

No author could have been blessed with a more intelligent, enthusiastic, or caring researcher, fact checker, editor, and colleague than Max Friedman of National Public Radio, an Oberlin College graduate who worked closely with me on this book for the past three years. He is a wonderful journalist.

Benjamin Frankel of Washington, a political scientist and an expert on national security, provided a seemingly unending tutelage on Israeli politics, history, and sociology.

Thomas W. Graham of the University of California at San Diego served as an in-house expert on the history of U.S. nonproliferation efforts, a subject few know better.

Thomas B. Cochran and Robert S. Norris graciously gave me a series of ad hoc, but expert, seminars on nuclear weapons and how they are made. Cochran is senior scientist and Norris is senior analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington.

My longtime editor and friend Robert Loomis of Random House cared about this book and what it said, and how it said it. His help was essential. Esther Newberg, my agent, knew when to crack the whip and when to share a joke. It is a delight to be represented by someone of her integrity and intelligence. My thanks to Heather Shroder for her help in getting this book to foreign publishers.

Thanks, too, to Mrs. Miriam Borgenicht Klein for her help.
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Re: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American

Postby admin » Fri May 26, 2017 6:46 am

Notes

Few books have been written specifically on Israel's nuclear arsenal. The first and most politically insightful is Israel and Nuclear Weapons, by Fuad Jabber (published for the International Institute for Strategic Studies by Chatta & Windus, London, 1971). See also Israel's Nuclear Arsenal, by Peter Pry (Westview Press, Boulder, Colo., 1984); Israeli Nuclear Deterrence, by Shai Feldman (Columbia University Press, New York, 1982), and Dimona: The Third Temple? by Mark Gaffney (Amana Books, Brattleboro, Vt., 1989). The best reference work on the status of world proliferation is compiled and written by Leonard S. Spector, of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, who publishes periodic updates. His most recent (with Jacqueline R. Smith) is Nuclear Ambitions: The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 1989-1990 (Westview Press, Boulder, Colo., 1990). And for the most recent Israeli view of the nuclear debate, see "Opaque Nuclear Proliferation," by Avner Cohen and Benjamin Frankel, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3. September 1990, beginning at page 14.

1. A Secret Agreement

A full description of America's satellite capability and hardware, including an account of the KH-11, can be found in American Espionage and the Soviet Target, by Jeffrey Richelson (William Morrow, New York, 1987). The first journalistic report on the CIA's KK MOUNTAIN activities can be found in Dangerous Liaison, by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn (HarperCollins, New York, 1991); see Chapter 5, "Dirty Work on the Mountain." For an excellent discussion of President Jimmy Carter's troubles with the CIA's intelligence in Iran, see All Fall Down, by Gary Sick (Penguin Books, New York, 1985). There were many newspaper and magazine articles on the Geoffrey Prime spy scandal in Britain; see, for example, "The Treason of Geoffrey Prime," Economist, November 13, 1982, page 63. William Kampiles's travails similarly were fully reported. Richard Allen was first interviewed for this book on May 19, 1989, and many times thereafter. For a good account of the internal feuding in Israel over the bombing of the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, see Israel's Secret Wars, by Ian Black and Benny Morris (Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1991), beginning at page 332. There have been many popular accounts of the raid itself; see, for example, Two Minutes over Baghdad, by Amos Perlmutter, Michael Handel, and Uri Bar-Joseph (Corgi Books, London, 1982). Also see First Strike, by Shlomo Nakdimon (Summit Books, New York, 1987, originally published by Yediot Ahronot/Eidanim, Tel Aviv, 1986). Menachem Begin's reaction to the raid can be found in the Israeli press for June 1982; see "Begin: Secret Atom Bunker Also Was Destroyed in Raid," Jerusalem Post. June 12, 1981, page 1. The cited State Department study on Mozambique is entitled "Summary of Mozambican Refugee Accounts of Principally Conflict-Related Experience in Mozambique," submitted to the State Department in April 1988 by Robert Gersony, a consultant to the Bureau for Refugee Programs. William Bader was interviewed in Washington on June 3, 1991.

2. The Scientist

Not surprisingly, very little has been written about Ernst Bergmann. He is discussed in Chaim Weizmann: A Biography by Several Hands, in a chapter by R.H.S. Crossman, "The Prisoner of Rehovot," at page 333 (Atheneum, New York, 1963). See also From These Men, by Shimon Peres (Wyndham Books, New York, 1979), pages 185-201. An excellent magazine account of Bergmann's career was published in the weekly Tel Aviv Magazine of Yediot Ahronot, Israel's largest newspaper, in March 1991: "Who Forgot the Father of the Israeli Atom, and Why?" by Rani Hadar. The article, because of Israeli censorship, only hints at Bergmann's important role. The best biography (in English) of David Ben- Gurion is Ben-Gurion, by Michael Bar-Zohar (Adama Books, New York, 1977). Bar-Zohar is cited throughout the early portions of this book. The diaries of Moshe Sharett, Personal Diary, in Hebrew (Maariv, Tel Aviv, 1980) have been translated only in part. There are eight volumes in the original. Details of the early announcements of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission can be found in Jabber and Pry. Bergmann's 1954 speech can be found in the Daily Report of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service for Tuesday, November 23, 1954, No. 227. Other details on Israel's early nuclear research program were provided by United Nations Ambassador Abba Eban in a speech on November 15, 1954; see page 335 et seq. of the official record for the General Assembly, Ninth Session. Ben-Gurion's remark about Israel being a "small spot" was cited in "The Hidden Debate," by Uri Bar-Joseph, Journal of Strategic Studies, June 1982, at page 212. Bar-Joseph's is one of many excellent scholarly articles on the Suez Crisis; see also "Israel's Relations' with the Arabs," by Avi Shlaim, Middle East journal, Spring 1983, beginning at page 180. Shlomo Aronson, an Israeli political scientist, has analyzed Israeli foreign policy in terms of its nuclear potential: see Conflict and Bargaining in the Middle East (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978). The death of Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky was reported in the Jerusalem Post, June I, 1972, "Leading Scientist Killed," page 3. Bergmann's quote about two atomic energies can be found in "Israelis Honor Atom Scientist," by James Feron, New York Times, May 14, 1966. Herman Mark was interviewed December 14, 1990, in Austin, Texas, and by telephone many times thereafter. Abe Feinberg was initially interviewed in New York on April 20, 1989, and many times in person and on the telephone thereafter. Bergmann's cited interview in 1969 was published in part in A Tacit Alliance, an excellent doctoral study of French-Israeli military ties by Sylvia K. Crosbie (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1974). Bertrand Goldschmidt was interviewed in Paris on November 24, 1990. More details can be found in his memoir, Atomic Rivals (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1990), and his history of nuclear energy, The Atomic Complex (American Nuclear Society, La Grange Park, Ill., 1980).

3. The French Connection

The best account of France's role in the Israeli bomb is the cited Les deux bombes, by Pierre Pean (Fayard, Paris, 1981). The announcement of the Canadian- Indian reactor can be found in "Canada to Help Build Atom Research Reactor for India," by Grey Hamilton, Toronto Globe and Mail, April 30, 1956. Basic sources for the period leading up to the Suez war include the diaries of Ben-Gurion and Sharett, as well as The Eisenhower Diaries, Robert Ferrell, editor (W. W. Norton, New York, 1981), and de Gaulle's Memoirs of Hope (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1970). See also Diary of the Sinai Campaign, by Moshe Dayan (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1965), and Suez, by Hugh Thomas (Harper & Row, New York, 1966). The Bulganin threat during the Suez War can be found in contemporary newspaper accounts; especially see "Soviet Protests Canal Blockade," New York Times, November 5, 1956. The cited Peres biography is Shimon Peres, by Matti Golan (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1982). The French reactor at Marcoule is described in Mechanical Engineering Magazine, November 1959, at page 60 (no mention is made of its weapons capability, however). For the French view of the nuclear issue, see The Balance of Terror, by Pierre Gallois (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1961), page 137 et seq.

4. First Knowledge

The best account of the U-2, can be found in Mayday, by Michael R. Beschloss (Harper & Row, New York, 1986). Arthur Lundahl was interviewed in Bethesda, Maryland, on June 19, 1989, and many times by telephone after ward. Dino Brugioni was interviewed dozens of times by telephone at his home in Hartwood, Virginia, beginning on July 5, 1989. His account of the Auschwitz findings (cited in Chapter 7) can be found in "The Serendipity Effect of Aerial Reconnaissance," by Dino A. Brugioni, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 124, No. I, 1989. America's difficulties in locating Soviet nuclear targets before the advent of the U-2 are described by David A. Rosenberg in "The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960," International Security, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring 1983), pages 3-71. Andrew Goodpaster was interviewed by telephone in Washington on January 11, 1991.

5. Internal Wars

See Jabber for the generally held and mistaken view of the early resignations of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, as well as Every Spy a Prince, by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1990), page 69. Raviv and Melman, however, mention Binyamin Blumberg's important and early role in the Israeli bomb on the same page. Black and Morris also deal with Blumberg's little-known history. Ian Smart was interviewed in New York on July 23, 1989. He was then living in London. Thomas Graham was interviewed in Washington on May IS, 1989; his cited article is "The Economics of Producing Nuclear Weapons in Nth Countries," by Thomas W. Graham, in Strategies for Managing Nuclear Proliferation, edited by D. L. Brito, M. D. Intriligator, and A. E. Wick (Lexington Books, Lexington, Mass., 1983). Peres's boast about raising money can be found in the previously cited weekend magazine of Yediot Abronot.

6. Going Public

John Finney was interviewed in Washington on April 18, 1989. The cited article was "U.S. Hears Israel Moves Toward A-Bomb Potential," New York Times, December 19. 1960, page I. McCone's resignation and TV appearance were also on page I that day: "McCone to Resign as AEC Member." The cited Buchwald column (reprinted in part, with his permission) was published January 10, 1961, in the New York Herald-Tribune, "The Smashing Tailors of Beersheba." Walter Elder was interviewed in his suburban Virginia home on August 28, 1989, and many times by telephone thereafter. Armand Meyer was interviewed in Rosslyn, Virginia, on June 15. 1990. The cited Herter statement can be found in The Alliance, by Richard J. Barnet (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1983), page 179. Philip Farley was interviewed in Palo Alto, California, on October 30, 1989. Chapman Pincher was interviewed by telephone on March 28, 1991; the cited article is "Israel May Be Making an A-Bomb," London Daily Express, December 16, 1960, page 2. Myron Kratzer was interviewed in Washington in June 1989, and by telephone thereafter. The cited Freedom of Information documents are in the author's possession. Christian Herter's testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee can be found in Vol. XIII, Part I, of the published Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series), made public April 1984.

7. Dual Loyalty

The Strauss biography is No Sacrifice Too Great, by Richard Pfau (University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, NC) There are many accounts of Oppenheimer's travails before the AEC; see The Oppenheimer Hearing, by John Major (Batsford, London, 1971). Strauss's test ban testimony was cited in The Glory and the Dream, by William Manchester (Little, Brown, Boston, 1973), page 985. Carl Kaysen was interviewed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 11, 1989, and thereafter by telephone. William L. Strauss was interviewed by telephone on April 3, 1991; Alice Strauss was interviewed by telephone on May 6, 1991. Algie Wells was interviewed by telephone on March 29, 1991.

8. A Presidential Struggle

Abe Feinberg's role in presidential politics and fund-raising was initially reported in an unpublished dissertation, "Ethnic Linkage and Foreign Policy," by Etta Zablocki, Columbia University, 1983 (available through UMI dissertation information service, Ann Arbor, Mich.). Similar material was published in The Lobby, by Edward Tivnan (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1987), and Truman and Israel, by Michael J. Cohen (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990). None of the accounts discusses Feinberg's relationship with the Israeli nuclear program. Clark Clifford was interviewed about Feinberg on April 8, 1991. Abraham Ribicoff was interviewed by telephone on November 5, 1990. Ben Bradlee and Arthur Schlesinger discussed President Kennedy on April 9, 1991. Kennedy's comments about campaign financing were made on October 4, 1961, according to Facts on File. A good account of Kennedy's efforts on campaign financing can be found in Congressional Quarterly's "Congress and the Nation 1965-1968," Vol. II, "Political Finances," p. 444. Myer Feldman was interviewed in Washington on June 13, 1989, and many times thereafter. Jerome Weisner was interviewed by telephone on June 17, 1991. Robert Komer was interviewed in Washington on April 3. 1989, and two times thereafter. William Crawford was interviewed in suburban Maryland on May 3, 1990. Israel's diversion of the Norwegian heavy water has been thoroughly researched and reported by Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington. Milhollin was the first to expose the issue, and has been more than generous in sharing his files and research. The explanation for the lack of a Shavit I can he found in "Publicity on Rocket Explained in Israel," New York Times, June 10, 1961. Paul Nitze was interviewed on October 9.199°. Robert McNamara's cryptic conversation with the author took place on January II, 1991. The more logical account of why the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission fell apart in the late 1950s was supplied by Yuval Neeman, minister of energy, in a conversation in Washington on April 15, 1991. Neeman would not discuss any current issues relating to Israel's nuclear capabilities. Floyd Culler was interviewed on November 30, 1989, in Palo Alto, California, and later by telephone. Phillips Talbot was interviewed briefly by telephone on April 8, 1991.

9. Years of Pressure

The declassified memorandum of the Kennedy talk with Golda Meir is available from the JFK Library in Boston and also can be found in President Kennedy's Policy Toward the Arab States and Israel, by Mordechai Gazit (Shiloah Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1983), page 108. The Gazit book provides invaluable background on Israeli policy in the Kennedy period. Much detail about Ben-Gurion's attitude and the history of that period, it should be noted again, comes from Michael Bar-Zohar's abridged biography. Daniel Ellsberg was interviewed in Washington on March 20, 1989. The most complete summary of Johnson's early ties to American Jews can be found in "Prologue," by Louis S. Gomolak, unpublished doctoral thesis (University of Texas, 1989), available through UMI dissertation information service.

10. The Samson Option

Excellent work on this period has been done by Shlomo Aronson, the Israeli political scientist and advocate of the deterrent value of Israel's nuclear arsenal. Moshe Dayan's Maariv article was summarized April 13, 1963, in the New York Times, "Israelis Warned on Arms Lag." Ben-Gurion's letter to the Times was published November 20, 196J. Theodore Taylor's paper was entitled "Can Nuclear Weapons Be Developed Without Full Testing?" It was a lecture given on December 11, 1988, at a workshop on Verification of Nuclear and Conventional Arms Reductions, Robin Brook Centre, St. Bartholomew's Medical College, London. The text of the lecture, with additional material, is reproduced in Theodore B. Taylor, "Nuclear Tests and Nuclear Weapons," in Benjamin Frankel, ed., Opaque Nuclear Proliferation: Methodological and Policy Implications (Frank Cass, London, 1991), pages 175-90. The cited White House papers are on file at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin. A number of books are useful on the background of international control of nuclear energy. See The International Atomic Energy Agency and World Nuclear Order, by Lawrence Scheinman (Resources for the Future, Washington, D.C., 1987) and Nuclear Power Issues and Choices, chaired by Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr. (Ballinger Publishing Company, Cambridge, Mass., 1977). For a discussion of the Sam son and Masada psychologies, see A Psycho-History of Zionism, by Jay Y. Gonen (Mason J. Charter, New York, 1975), Chapter 13. The cited Podhoretz article is entitled "The Abandonment of Israel" and appeared in the July 1976 issue of Commentary. The New York Times article on Bergmann appeared on June 14, 1966, and is cited above.

11. Playing the Game

The most comprehensive book on James Angleton is Cold Warrior, by Tom Mangold (Simon & Schuster, New York, (991). Mangold shows that Angleton always had the support of Richard Helms in his paranoid treatment of defectors. Samuel Halpern was interviewed in his suburban Virginia home on April 19, 199I. The CIA's estimate on the "Consequences of Israeli Acquisition of Nuclear Capability" can be found in the Mordechai Gazit book cited above. For an excellent account of the making of the Chinese nuclear bomb, see China Builds the Bomb, by John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai (Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 1<)88). The material cited from Glenn Seaborg's Stemming the Tide (Lexington Books, Lexington, Mass., 1987) can be found in Chapter 13, "A Tale of Two Committees." The quote about India from McGeorge Bundy's Danger and Survival (Random House, New York, (988) can he found on page 585/ Seaborg describes the debate over the Gilpatric panel. Robert Kennedy's cited Senate speech was delivered on June 23, 1965; see the Congressional Record for that day at page 14566. The John Finney story was "Israel Permits U.S. to Inspect Atomic Reactor," New York Times, March 14, 1965, page 1.

12. The Ambassador

Walworth Barbour is rarely mentioned in any of the contemporary books about Israel or Middle East policies. One of the few to single out Barbour was Abba Eban, in his Autobiography (Random House, New York, 1977); Eban correctly described him as "corpulent, good-natured and brilliantly incisive," at page 297. Edward Dale was interviewed the first of many times at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on September 7, 1990. John Hadden was interviewed in Brunswick, Maine, on June 8, 1989, and many times thereafter by telephone. Peter Jessup was interviewed in Washington on March 20, 1989, and later by telephone. Carmelo Alba was interviewed in suburban Virginia on April 10, 1991. Herman Pollack was interviewed by telephone on May 11, 1991. Max Ben was initially interviewed by telephone from his home in St. Petersburg, Florida, on May 22, 1991, and thereafter. The late Robert Webber's widow, Clytie Webber, discussed her husband with the author on May 21, 1991. Eugene Braderman of Washington was interviewed twice by telephone about his 1960s visit to Israel, on October I, 1990, and again the following April. The late Joseph Zurhellen was interviewed in New York on September 8, 1989. Arnold Kramish told of his meeting with Barbour in an interview on June 5, 1990. The cited Golda Meir comment about Barbour can be found in "Quiet Envoy to Israel," New York Times, April 3, 1971, one of the few times Barbour's name appeared in print while he was ambassador.

13. An Israeli Decision

Yigal Allon's boastful remarks made page I in the New York Times for December 11, 1967, "Allon Hints Israel Has Missiles," Moshe Dayan's Soviet warning was published in Frankfurter Allgemeine on July 7. 1967. Walter Rostow was interviewed at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, on October 14, 1990. Kissinger's nuclear remarks can be found on page 397 (footnotes) in the Aronson book cited above. The cited Time magazine article is "How Israel Got the Bomb," April 12, 1976. The Plumbat Affair was written by Elaine Davenport, Paul Eddy, and Peter Gillman (J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1978).

14. A Presidential Gift

Dan Rather's question for the President came during a December 19, 1967 news conference. The documents cited herein were released to the author under the Freedom of Information Act; they are available from the LBJ Library. James Critchfield was interviewed April 13, 1989, and later by telephone. Harry McPherson was interviewed by telephone on May 8, 1991. Carl Duckett was interviewed at his home in Hutchins, Virginia, on June 27, 1991. There have been many published accounts of Richard Helms's aborted attempt to brief Johnson on the Israeli bomb; see "LBJ Was Told in '68 That Israel Had Bomb," by John J. Fialka, Washington Star, March 1, 1978, page 1. Paul Warnke was interviewed March 23, 1989, and later by telephone. Yitzhak Rabin's account can be found at pages 141 and 142 of The Rabin Memoirs (Little, Brown, Boston, 1979); Warnke somehow became Vornike in the Rabin book, however. The late Harry Schwartz was interviewed July 14, 1989, at his home near Easton, Maryland. The Rothschild pipeline deal was initially reported July 18, 1959, in the New York Times, "Rothschild Investment Group To Operate Pipeline in Israel." Bill Moyers was interviewed by telephone on February 18, 1991.

15. The Tunnel

The best guide to the production of nuclear weapons is U.S. Nuclear Warhead Production, Vol. 2, by Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig (Ballinger, Cambridge, Mass., 1987). The essential Vanunu story was "Revealed: The Secrets of Israel's Nuclear Arsenal," London Sunday Times, October 5, 1986. The story was written by the newspaper's "Insight" team, led by Peter Hounam. For an extensive analysis of Vanunu, with additional information from his interviews with the Sunday Times, see The Invisible Bomb, by Frank Barnaby (I. B. Tauris, London, 1989). For details on Vanunu's life and his travails while being interviewed by the Sunday Times in London, see Triple Cross, by Louis Toscano (Birch Lane Press, New York, 1990). The use of robotics in the nuclear weapons production process is briefly described in "Machining Hemispherical Shells," in the 1988 edition of Research Highlights, published by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. George Cowan was interviewed by telephone from New Mexico on September 9, 1990; Hans Bethe was interviewed at his office at the California Institute of Technology on January 21, 1991.

16. Prelude to War

Nixon's comments about the NPT were made September 8, 1968, in Pittsburg and September 11, 1968, in Charlotte, North Carolina. NSDM 6, apparently still classified, is in the author's possession. Morton Halperin was interviewed in Washington on June 10, 1991. Charles Van Doren was interviewed in Washington on May 29, 1989. NSDM 32 also is in the author's possession. Hedrick Smith's New York Times story was "U.S. Assumes the Israelis Have A-Bomb or Its Parts," July 19, 1970, page I. Smith was interviewed about the story on May 9, 1991. Glenn Cella was interviewed March 31, 1989, and thereafter. David Long was interviewed by telephone on January 18, 1991; Curtis Jones was interviewed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on September 6, 1990. The Norris, Cochran, and Arkin essay is "History of the Nuclear Stockpile," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 1985. There have been many published accounts of Gerald Bull; a good one is "The Guns of Saddam," by William Scott Malone, David Halevy. and Sam Hemingway, Washington Post, Outlook Section, February 10, 1991. Israel's progress in laser-separated uranium was first reported by Robert Gillette in Science Magazine, March 22, 1974, "Uranium Enrichment: Rumors of Israeli Progress with Lasers." Nicholas Veliotes was first interviewed on June 20, 1989, in Washington. The Moshe Dayan quote about the end of the Third Temple can be found in the previously cited Time magazine article of April 12, 1976; it is also cited in Pry.

17. Nuclear Blackmail

There have been scores of analyses of the Yom Kippur War, besides the memoirs of the participants. For differing points of view, see "Kissinger and the Yom Kippur War," by Edward N. Luttwak and Walter Laqueur, Commentary, September 1974; "Arab-Israeli Conflict: Implications of Mass Destruction Weapons," by Avigdor Haselkorn, Global Affairs, Winter 1988; "The Relevance and Irrelevance of Nuclear Options in Conventional Wars: The 1973 October War," by Yair Evron, Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, Vol. 7, Nos. 1-2, 1984; and "The Soviet Nuclear Threat Toward the Close of the Yom Kippur War," by Yona Bandmann and Yishai Cordova, Jerusalem journal of International Relations, Vol. 5, No. I, 1980. Also see the works cited above by Shai Feldman and Shlomo Aronson. Mohammed Heikal was interviewed by telephone from his office in Cairo on July 3, 1991. Henry Kissinger describes his meeting with Ambassador Dinitz on page 493 in Chapter 11 of Years of Upheaval (Little, Brown, Boston, 1982). Despite many calls to his office and to his former colleagues in the U.S. government, Kissinger would not be interviewed about the 1973 war. Hermann Eilts was interviewed on July 10, 1991, by telephone from Boston. James Schlesinger was interviewed on April 25, 1989, in Washington; William Colby was interviewed on January 10, 1991, also in Washington. The Kalb brothers published the gist of their material on the 1973 war from Kissinger (Little, Brown, Boston, 1974) in the New York Times Magazine, June 23, 1974; "Twenty Days in October." Patrick Parker was interviewed in Washington in early December 1990. Orwin Talbott was interviewed by telephone from Annapolis, Maryland, his retirement home, on December 10, 1990, and again on June 20, 1991. Bruce Williams was interviewed in Washington on November 28, 1990. Kissinger's request for a CIA report on the Israeli nuclear arsenal was first reported by Benjamin Welles in the Christian Science Monitor for December 6, 1973, "Kissinger Orders CIA Study of Israel's A-weapons Capability." Duckett's problems with the 1974 estimate have been widely reported; see "How Israel Got the Bomb," by John Fialka, Washington Monthly, January 1979.

18. Injustice

John Fialka, then with the Washington Star, and David Burnham, then with the New York Times, have written extensively about the Zalman Shapiro case; see Burnham's "The Case of the Missing Uranium," Atlantic, April 1979. Both reporters, while raising repeated questions about Shapiro's actions, were careful to note that he had not been formally accused of any wrongdoing. For a different and more careless approach, see The Unnatural Alliance, by James Adams (Quartet Books, London, 1984), beginning at page 152 (Adams assumes that Shapiro was a Mossad asset). Dangerous Liaison doesn't do much better; see Chapter 4. "A Sword for Damocles." The documents and reports cited herein are available under the Freedom of Information Act; many thousands of them on NUMEC and its problems have been released. Zalman Shapiro was interviewed repeatedly by telephone from Pittsburgh, beginning on April 12, 1991. George Murphy was interviewed by telephone on May 30, 1989, and thereafter. James Lovett was interviewed on July 11, 1991. James Conran was interviewed on July 16, 1991. Victor Gilinsky was interviewed on June 12, 1989, in suburban Maryland, and thereafter by telephone. Cynthia Virostek was interviewed by telephone on July 17, 1991; she has assembled extensive files on NUMEC, and the author wishes to thank her for her generous help. Jody Powell's cited denial was published in the New York Times for October 26, 1977, "White House Discounts Allegations About Israeli Theft of Uranium," by Charles Mohr. Duckett's television appearance was on "Near Armageddon: The Spread of Nuvlear Weapons in the Middle East," an ABC News Closeup, April 27, 1981. Henry Myers first discussed NUMEC and Shapiro with the author on November 17, 1980, and many times thereafter. Peter Stockton's first conversation with the author about Shapiro took place on January 26, 1988. Congressional funding for the cleanup of NUMEC was reported by United Press International, October 28, 1990, "Congress OKs Money for Cleanup of Nuclear Site." The estimate of more than one hundred kilograms of recovered uranium ("inventory gain") was provided by a senior technical official of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who reviewed Babcock & Wilcox inventory reports to the NRC; such reports are available under the Freedom of Information Act.

19. The Carter Malaise

Ari Ben-Menashe initially contacted the author in August 1990 and was first interviewed in Cincinnati, Ohio, on April 11, 1991. He was subsequently interviewed in Washington and many more times by telephone. For a definitive account of the character of Menachem Begin, see The Life and Times of Menachem Begin, by Amos Perlmutter (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1987). Malcolm Toon was interviewed by telephone on May 20, 1991; his cable to Washington about the senatorial visit was made available under the Freedom of Information Act. The footnote about Vanunu and the senators' rebuff was reported in Triple Cross. George Rathjens was interviewed by telephone on March 25, 1989, and thereafter. Bergmann's speech in South Africa is cited in The Unnatural Alliance, among other places. Vorster's visit to Israel created a minor stir at the time: see "Vorster Visit to Israel Arouses Criticism," by Terence Smith, New York Times, April 18, 1976. The best account of the Carter administration's diplomacy on the 1977 Kalahari test was written by Murrey Marder and Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post,. see their story as syndicated in the Philadelphia Inquirer for September 4, 1977. "How the Powers Stopped a Test," page I. The CIA's assessment of the attempted 1977 test was provided under the Freedom of Information Act to the Natural Resources Defense Council and made available to the press by the council on September 26, 1990. Harold Brown discussed the Israeli joint targeting request by telephone on April 26, 1991; he was previously interviewed in Washington on October 20, 1989.

20. An Israeli Test

There have been some excellent critiques of the White House's attempt, through the Ruina panel, to wish away the Israeli-South African test. See "The September 22, 1979, Mystery Flash: Did South Africa Detonate a Nuclear Bomb?" unpublished study by the Washington Office on Africa Educational Fund, May 21, 1985. The study was written by Ronald Walters of Howard University. See also an unpublished study by Gary Milhollin (available through the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control): "The Vela Sighting in 1979." Stephen Green, in Living by the Sword (Amana Books, Brattleboro, Vt., 1988), dissects the Ruina report beginning at page III. Gerald Oplinger was interviewed at his suburban Virginia home on January 9, 1991. Spurgeon Keeny was interviewed on March 24, 1989, in Washington and many times by telephone thereafter. Hooding Carter was interviewed by telephone on August 2, 1991. See Gary Sick (cited above) for details on the shah's visit to the United States. Jack Ruina was interviewed by telephone on August 2, 1991. John Scali was interviewed by telephone on August 6, 1991. Admiral Walters's bizarre explanation can be found in "Pretoria Suggests Cause of 'Explosion,'" by John F. Burns, New York Times, October 28, 1979. The cited P. W. Botha remark was on page 2 of the Rand Daily Mail for September 26, 1979: "SA Could Have Secret Weapon, Hints PW." The July 15, 1979, Ruina report was released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House and blandly entitled: "Ad Hoc Panel Report on the September 22 Event." Harold Agnew was interviewed by telephone on September 7, 1990. Louis Roddis was interviewed on May 7, 1991, and Donald Kerr was interviewed in Washington on February 13, 1991. Joseph Nye was briefly interviewed by telephone on January 2, 1991.

21. Israel's Nuclear Spy

The only book-length study of the Pollard affair is Territory of Lies, by Wolf Blitzer (Harper & Row, New York, 1989), which professionally summarizes all of the known and published information about the case. Blitzer, however, accepts far too much of Pollard's account at face value. Many of the essential details of Pollard's early life come from Blitzer and the press accounts at the time. Samuel Lewis was interviewed about the White House meeting on February 22, 1991. Sharon's strategic vision behind the Israeli invasion of Lebanon -- and its folly -- is most clearly spelled out in Israel's Lebanon War, by Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari (Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, New York, 1984. Sharon's December 15, 1981, speech is available in abridged form from the Israeli embassy in Washington; it initially was issued as an embassy press bulletin. For more on the Stern Gang, see Wanted, by Mordechai Schreiber (Shengold Publishers, New York, 1984), beginning at page 142.

22. An Israeli Asset

Peter Hounam was interviewed on July 30, 1991, by telephone from London, and thereafter. The cited Sunday Mirror article prominently featured a photograph of Vanunu next to an external photograph of the reactor at Dimona; the story itself, although vividly displayed, was buried deep inside the newspaper. Robert Watters was interviewed September 3, 1991, by telephone from Suva, Fiji, where he was on assignment as an electronics technician for the South Pacific Commission. Nicholas Davies (no relation to Nick Davies, a former reporter for the Independent) was interviewed by telephone from his home in London on July 26, 1991. Janet Fielding was interviewed by telephone from London on August 5, 1991. Peter Miller was interviewed by telephone from London on August 21 and 22, 1991, John Parker was interviewed in Washington on August 9, 1991, Tony Frost was interviewed by telephone from Newcastle, England, on August 6 and thereafter. The footnoted material about the Miller and Frost complaints against Maxwell came from the U.K. Press Gazette for April 29, 1991, "Sacked Mirror Man Finds Place in Sun," by Jean Morgan. Michael Malloy was interviewed by telephone on September 2, 1991, from the Passford House Hotel in Lymington, Hampshire, England, where he was on vacation.
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Re: The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American

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Index

Abrams, Creighton W., 237
Achdut Avodah (Unity of Labor)
Party, 38n, 179n
Acheson, Dean, 151n
Adenauer, Konrad, 123
Afghanistan, 6
A-4E Skyhawk, 139, 153, 183-84
Africa:
CIA-Mossad operations in, 5, 6
as nuclear-free zone, 152
Palestinian sympathies in, 264
proposed Jewish homeland in, 87
see also North Africa
African National Congress, 266
Agnew, Harold M., 280
Agnew, Spiro T., 232
Air Force, U.S., 51n, 53, 57, 88n,
162, 205
Air Force Technical Applications
Center (AFTAC), 272
Al-Abram, 227, 231
Alba, Carmelo V., 163-64, 20ln
Algeria, 21, 36, 59, 68
Allen, Richard V., 8-9, 14-15, 287
Allon, Yigal, 38n, 67, 138, 173-74,
179, 225, t61
Aman, 163
American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), 292
American Jewish Committee, 87
American Technion Society, 242
Anderson, Jack, 236
Angleton, James Jesus, 144-47, 163,
185n, 238, 250
Angola, 13n, 266
anti-Semitism, 60, 76, 91, 95, 264
Aqudas Achim synagogue, 127
Arab Federation, 121
Arab-Israeli conflicts:
Lebanon War, 259, 288, 294
Six-Day Wat, 131n, 156, 160, 16667, 174, 175, 177-
78, 184-85,
222, 291
Suez War, 38, 39, 40-44, 175, 176,
178
War of Attrition, 212n, 237
War of Independence, 19, 113, 141
Yom Kippur War, 179, 217, 222-
23, 225-40, 264
Arab League, 108, 265n
Arab nations:
anti-U.S. oil embargo by, 232
international bias for, 133
Soviet military aid to, 7, 12, 35,
65, 103, 128, 135, 136, 138, 139,
153, 167, 170, 175-76, 183, 231,
237, 294
"three no's" of, 176
Arens, Moshe, 295
Argentina, 156
Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency (ACDA), 272
arms control talks, 74, 274, 275
see also Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty
Arms Export Control Act (1976),
260n, 262
Army, U.S., 83, 162, 163
Aronson, Shlomo, 177
Arthur D. Little Company, 216n
Atlantic Richfield Company
(ARCO), 248
Atomic Energy Act (1946), 125n
Atomic Energy Act (1954), 20, 243
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC),
U.S., 71, 87, 89, 92, 169
dissolution of, 251
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC),
U.S. (conf.)
formation and responsibilities of,
83-84
Livermore Laboratory and, 91
NUMEC and, 242, 244, 245-48,
253, 254
uranium processing safeguards of,
244, 251
U-2 intelligence and, 54-55
Atomic Energy Commission
(France), 19, 28, 30, 31, 36, 37,
39, 60, 64
Atomic Energy Commission (Israel),
19, 20, 57, 79, 86, 88, 104, 109,
141-42, 173n
Atoms for Peace, 20, 132n, 242
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 88n
Ayalon Museum, 196

Babcock & Wilcox, 252, 253n, 256-
57
Bader, William B., 13-14
Baker, James A., Ill, 9
Baku, 216
Balfour Declaration, 35n
Ball, George, 101
Bandung Conference (1955), 15
Bank Leumi, 171
Barbour, Walworth, 164, 165, 178,
184, 189
as Bank Leumi board member,
171
Dimona reconnaissance curtailed
by, 160, 168, 169, 170
Israeli sympathies of, 159, 161,
163, 167, 171
Johnson's assignment to, 160, 161
length of ambassadorship of, 159
physical appearance of, 159
Barnaby, Frank, 199n
Barnet, Richard J., 75n
Bar-on, Hanan, 304
Bartlett, Charles L., 96-97, 99, 117
Baruch, Bernard, 87
Bar-Zohar, Michael, 22, 45, 55, 78n,
141n
B 'chia Ledorot, 140
Begin, Menachem, 4, 15, 38n, 185,
275, 293, 298n
anti-Communism of, 260
background of, 260
election of, 259, 269, 299
in Eshkol's government, 167
Israeli nuclear weapons program
and, 260
militarism of, 259
resignation of, 296
Sadat's summit with, 4, 269
strategic cooperation proposal to
U.S. by, 287-88
Beirut, 288
Belgium, 180, 181
Ben, Max, 165, 180
Ben-Gurion, David, 26, 45, 146, 167,
185, 195, 259, 298n
Adenauer's secret negotiations
with, 123
Begin and, 275
as defense minister, 34-35
de Gaulle and, 68-69, 77
Dimona cover-up and, 78, 93,
108-11
ein brera fears of, 22, 37
end of public role of, 141
Israeli nuclear weapons program
and, 20, 22, 23, 27, 29, 31, 3334,
39, 44, 45, 59, 66, 67-70,
129-30, 135-36, 275-76
Kennedy and, 100-104, 106, 114,
117, 120-21, 124
Mapai Party controlled by, 33
political scandals and resignations
of, 117, 121-24
Rafi Party founded by, 139
second term of, 37, 39
Suez War and, 38, 41, 42, 43
temporary retirement of, 33-34
U.S. and, 21, 22, 27, 41, 55
Ben-Menashe, Ari, 260, 264, 265,
275-76, 292, 295, 297-99
Vanunu case and, 309-15
Bentov, Cindy Hanin (pseudonym),
193, 315
Bergmann, Ernst David, 165, 180
background and early career of,
19, 23-25
Dimona cover-up and, 79, 103-4
forced government resignation of,
26, 86, 141
government positions held by, 19,
23, 26
Israeli nuclear weapons program
and, 19-32, 34, 36, 37, 39, 44-45,
59, 61, 93, 104, 135-36, 154, 174,
264
as Rafi Party founding member,
140
Shapiro and, 243, 248-49
Strauss's secret friendship with,
85-86, 88, 142
Bergmann, Rani, 25
Berlin tunnel, 56
Bethe, Hans, 206
"black" squadrons, 301
Blake, George, 56n
Blumberg, Binyamin, 62, 131, 138,
205, 243, 250, 288
B'nai B'rith, 146
"boosted" fission weapons, 200
"Bor," 225
Border Patrol, U.S., 310
Botha, P. W., 278n, 279
Braderman, Eugene M., 166
Bradlee, Benjamin C., Jr., 96n
Brandeis University, 101
Brezhnev, Leonid, 232, 267
Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, 23,
25
Brown, Harold, 270, 278
Brugioni, Dino A" 50, 63, B8n, 91,
157
background of, 47
U-2 Dimona reconnaissance and,
52-53, 55-58, 72, 73, 90, 100,
132n, 143, 147
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 272, 273, 278
Buchwald, Art, 72n
Bulganin, Nikolai, 41
Bull, Gerald, 216
Bundy, McGeorge, 99, 105, 125-26,
133, 134, 149, 150, 152, 185n
Bush, George, 9, 239-40

Camp David summit (1978), 4, 6,
269, 275
Canada, 37, 39, 164, 168
cannons, long-range, 216-17
Cape National Party (South Africa),
279
Carter, Hodding, III, 274
Carter, Jimmy, S8n, 278n
codework clearances frozen by,
13n-14n
election of, 3
Iran toasted by, 6, 274
Israeli-U.S. intelligence liaison
agreement and, 3-4, Un
nuclear fuel reprocessing ban
upheld by, 273"
South African nuclear weapons
program protested by, 267-68
Carter administration, 23
Israeli nuclear weapons policy of,
260-63, 266-70
Israeli view of, 5
Israel-U.S. intelligence liaison
agreement and, 3-7
nuclear nonproliferation stance
of, 261-63, 268
South African-Israeli nuclear test
cover-up by, 271-83
Casey, William J., 12-13, 16
Cella, Glenn R., 213-14
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
120
covert financing by, 5, 145
Dimona reconnaissance by, 50,
51, 52-58, 63, 72, 73, 76, 90, 99n,
100, 106-7, 112, 132n, 143, 14748,
156-57, 162-63, 186-89, 198-.
99, 212, 213, 231, 235
disconnects in intelligence
processing by, 157, 237, 291
domestic operations by, 250
government coups and, 42n
inaccurate predictions by, 6, 13n
intelligence leaks from, 7n-8n, 16,
Inn
Israeli bombing raid reviewed by,
13, 16
Jews in, 89, 145-46
Mossad's joint ventures with, 5-6,
13n
National Photo Interpretation
Center of, 107, 156, 283
nuclear intelligence shifted from,
155
NUMEC uranium alleged
diversion and, 187, 241, 243,
247, 252, 254
Office of National Estimates
(ONE) of, 147-48
Office of Science and Technology
of, 156-57, 187, 235
Photographic Intelligence
Division of, 47, 50, 51, 54
proprietary companies of, 146
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
(cont.)
Six-Day War and Israeli
operations of, 168n
South African-Israeli nuclear test
and, 272, 273
Special National Intelligence
Estimate (SNIE) by, 282
trash analyzed by, 146
chain reactions, 28, 201
at Dimona, 119, 164
CHAOS, Operation, 144n, 145, 146,
250
chemical and biological weapons
(CBW), 63-64, 136, 216, 260n
chemical reprocessing plants:
at Dimona, 37.43, 56-57, 61, 69,
106, 111, 118, 120, 130, 131, 163,
180n, 188, 196-97, 198, 200, 201,
202, 247, 254, 282
at Marcoule, 29, 56-57
nuclear weapons manufacturing
role of, 29, 37, 56, 120
CHESS U-2 photographs, 48
China, People's Republic of, 153,
155, 216n
Egypt and, 35, 138
IAEA and, 133
McCone's proposed air strike
against, 150-51
nuclear weapons program of,
148-49, 246, 271
Chou En-lai, 35
Clifford, Clark, 95, 168n, 189, 190-91
Cockburn, Andrew, 256
Cockburn, Leslie, 256
codework clearances, 13n-14n
Colby, William, 230, 233n
Cold War, 21, 27, 128, 215
CIA-Mossad joint ventures as
secret in, 5
Middle East and, 139, 145, 175-76
Commentary, 137n
Commerce Department, U.S., 242,
250
Committee for the Denuclearization
of the Middle East, 109
Committee of Thirty, 66
computer industry, computers, 13 7,
214
Congregation Emanu-El, 86
Congress, U.S., 125n, 169, 212, 233,
256, 262, 263
Conran, James H., 251
"Consequences of Israeli
Acquisition of Nuclear
Capability, " 148
CORONA reconnaissance satellite,
156
Cosmos reconnaissance satellite, 267
Counsel to the President (Clifford), 191
Couve de Murville, Maurice, 68, 69,
75
Cowan, George A., 206
Crawford, William R., 100-101, 106
Critchfield, James, 185n
Cuba, 275
Cuban missile crisis, 50n, 126n
Culler, Floyd L., Jr., Dimona
inspections by, 112-13, HI, 133,
140n, 151, 154, 196, 210, 215
Cytex Corporation, 312

Dachau, 127
Daily Express (London), 76
Dale, William N., 161, 164, 165-66,
168, 169, 170, 189
Daily Mirror (London), 309, 311, 313
Danger and Survival (Bundy), 150n
Dangerous Liaison (Cockburn and
Cockburn), 256
Daniel Sieff Institute, 25n
Dassault Company, 120, 143, 173,
175
Davies, Nicholas, 309-10, 315
Dayan, Moshe, 34, 39, 117, 220, 221,
262n
antiquities appropriated by, 218
on Arab military strength, 220,
222
as army chief of staff, 33
Israeli nuclear weapons program
and, 67n, 129, 141, 174-75, 17677, 178, 179-
80, 189
Lavon Affair and, 122-23
in Rafi Party, 139
secret South African trip of, 264-
65
as security risk, 218
Six-Day War and, 167, 174, 185
Suez War and, 38
Yom Kippur War and, 222, 223,
225, 226, 227
Defense Department, U.S., 125,
143, 183, 186, 211, 214, 256-57
Advanced Research Project
Agency (ARPA) of, 276
Institute for Defense Analysis
(IDA) of, 276
National Military Command
Center of, 272
Office of Net Assessments of,
269-70, 278
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA),
6, 13, 143-44, 198, 272-73
de Gaulle, Charles, 29, 75n, 77,
126n, 175
Dimona opposed by, 59-60, 61,
68, 69-70, 120, 263
demarches, 75
Democratic Party, 27, 93, 95, 96, 192
desalinated water, 20, 63, 64, 85,
154, 211n-12n, 249
Desert Storm, Operation, 201n
Deshalit, Amos, 25-26, 79, 102, 144;
147, 180
Deshalit, Meir (Meme), 144, 147
Detachment 515, 219
see also Unit 8200
deuterium, 49, 200
Deux Bombes, Les (Pean), 64n, 263
diGenova, Joseph E., 305
Dimona nuclear weapons facility,
25n, 31, 91: 195-207
chemical reprocessing plant at,
37, 43, 56-57, 61, 69, 106, 111,
118, 120, 130, 131, 163, 180n,
188, 196-97, 198, 200, 201, 202,
247, 254, 282
CIA reconnaissance of, 50, 51, 5258,
63, 72, 73, 76, 90, 99n, 100,
106-7, 112, 132n, 143, 147-48,
156-57, 162-63, 186-89, 198-99,
212, 213, 231, 235
cooling capacity of, 199, 282
cost and financing of, 65-67, 93,
124, 136, 192n
cover-up stories on, 63, 72, 78,
119, 130
economic effects of, 59, 67-68, 137
ethnic and national tensions in
construction of, 60-61
false control room of, 111
first bomb assembled at, 179-80
formal authorization for, 43n
France's role at, 11, 16, 43n, 56,
59-65, 68-70, 72, 75, 76, 106,
119n, 130, 145, 211, 307
fuel for, 156
governmental ignorance of, 206-7
heavy water used for, 77, 103,
104, 111
institutes (Machons) of, 201-2, 219
international inspections sought
for, 69, 80, 100-101, 106, 108,
117, 124, 128, 129, 132, 135, 136,
153, 154-55, 186, 212
location of, 11, 33, 45
Norway's inspection of, 77, 103
objections to, 59, 65, 67, 78, 79,
93, 109, 137-38
planes shot down over, 131n
production capability of, 45, 11920,
156, 202, 203-4, 282
secrecy of, 11, 37, 46, 57, 61, 6263,
64-65, 66, 79, 91, 93, 103-4,
108-15, 131-32, 148
security precautions at, 62, 13031,
197
staff of, 68, 197
sustained chain reaction achieved
at, 119, 164
temporary closure of, 11
U.S. embassy intelligence on, 57,
160, 162, 163-64, 165-66, 16869,
184, 247
U.S. given inside photos of, 29091
U.S. inspections of, 94, 98, 102,
104, 109-15, 131, 133, 140n, 143,
151, 153, 154, 169, 196, 210-11,
215, 262
Vanunu's revelations about, 196,
205
Dinitz, Simcha, 228-29, 236
downlinks, 14, 15, 16
"dual loyalty, " 89-92, 241
Duckett, Carl E., 189, 214, 237
Israeli nuclear intelligence
reports by, 156-57, 186-87, 212,
231, 235, 240, 282
NUMEC uranium alleged
diversion and, 188, 241, 247,
250, 251-56
public revelations by, 239-40, 261
suppression of intelligence
reports by, 212, 213
Duckett, Carl E. (conc.)
Teller and, 186-87, 250, 254
Dulles, Allen, 50, 51, 54, 58, 76, 105,
151n
Dulles, John Foster, 50, 54, 74, 75

Eastern Europe:
Israeli diplomatic relations
severed by, 175
emigration to Israel from, 145,
163
Eban, Abba, 38n, 191
Edelman, Peter B., 98n
Eden, Anthony, 41
Egypt, 3, 34, 110, 121, 154, 194, 296
in Arab Federation, 121
guerrilla warfare between Israel
and, 35, 36
Kennedy and, 102-3, 107-8
military spending by, 65
Nasser's coup in, 21, 104
nuclear weapons and, 67, 69, 101,
129-30, 133, 138, 152, 153n
secret negotiations between Israel
and, 33, 34, 35
Six-Day War and, 166, 167, 175
Soviet military aid to, 35, 65, 103,
139, 167, 170, 175, 183, 231, 237
Soviets ousted from, 221
Suez War and, 38, 39, 40
in United Arab Republic, 51, 53,
133, 135
War of Attrition and, 212n, 237
West Germany military aid to,
123
Yom Kippur War and, 222, 225,
227, 229, 231-32, 233, 235n
Eichmann, Adolf, 289
82nd Airborne Division, U.S., 233
Eilts, Hermann F., 229, 230
ein brera, 22-23, 37
Einstein, Albert, 25n, 102n
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 23, 73, 84,
118
Atomic Energy Act amended by,
125n
Dimona denial accepted by, 80
Israeli arms embargo maintained
by, 22
Kennedy advised by, 106
Peres on, 41-42
Powers incident and, 74
Strait of Tiran commitment of,
178
Strauss supported by, 84, 85, 87,
89
Suez War and, 38, 41-43
U-2 Dimona reconnaissance and,
54, 58, 76
U-2 program initiated and ended
by, 47, 76
U-2 Soviet reconnaissance and,
47, 48, 50, 51
Eisenhower administration:
Dimona leak and, 73, 79-80
Israeli nuclear weapons
development and, 20, 53-58, 64,
93
Suez War and, 40-44
Tripartite Agreement and, 22
Eisenhower Library, 53n, 55n
Eitan, Rafael (Rafi), 288-89, 292,
294-95, 296, 297, 300, 301
Elazar, David, 225, 226, 236-37
Elder, Walter N., 73, 105-6, 107,
126n, 150, 151
elections, U.S.:
of 1948, 93, 94-95
of 1952, 95
of 1956, 95
of 1960, 95-98
of 1964, 149, 193
of 1968, 189, 191
of 1976, 3
of 1980, 274, 275
11-38 intelligence review, 286
el-Gamasy, Mohammed Abdel
Ghany, 227
Ellsberg, Daniel, 125, 126, 150-51
El 2 nuclear reactor, 39
El 102 nuclear reactor, see Dimona
nuclear weapons facility
Energy Department, U.S., 84, 281
Eniwetok nuclear test site, 49
Eshkol, Levi, 38n, 125, 173n, 192n,
200
Johnson and, 86, 130, 132, 134-35,
136, 139, 154, 166, 183, 186
Lavon Affair and, 122
nuclear weapons objections of, 37,
65, 79, 86, 124, 136
nuclear weapons policy of, 129,
130, 133-42, 162, 180n
on occupied territories, 185
political reforms of, 124
as prime minister, 37, 124
Six-Day War and, 166-67
Euratom, 180-81
Evron, Ephraim, 186

Farley, Philip J., 75
Fatah, El, 249
Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), 85, 243, 247, 248, 250,
252, 253
Feinberg, Abraham, 160, 185
background of, 93
Bergmann and, 27, 93
Coca-Cola franchise of, 192
Dimona cover-up and, 108-9, 111
Dimona fund-raising by, 66, 93,
95
Hagannah fund-raising by, 195-96
Johnson and, 98., 126, 190-91,
192, 193, 194
Kennedy and, 93, 94, 95-98, 100,
101-2, 103, 111
Truman and, 93, 94-95, 126
Feinberg, Wilfred, 98
Feldman, Myer (Mike), 98-100, 108,
141., 192-93
FA Phantom, 183-84, 186, 189, 190,
191, 192, 194, 211, 213, 216, 222,
225
F-15 Eagle, 294
F-16 Fighting Falcon, 8-9, 294, 301
Fielding, Janet, 311
Finney, John W.:
on Dimona inspections, 140n, 154
Dimona story leaked to, 71-73,
74, 77.
fission vs. fusion, in nuclear
weapons, 48-49
Flapan, Simha, 138
force de frappe, 44, 60, 75n, 126n, 152,
176
Ford, Gerald R., 3, 5, 239, 273n
Ford administration, 252, 261, 269
Fortas, Abe, 126
Fox, Raymond, 91
France, 24, 133
arms sales to Israel by, 36, 65, 69,
175
Communist Party in, 21, 27
decolonization by, 21, 36
Dimona role of, 11, 16, 43n. 56,
59-65, 68-70, 72, 75, 76, 106,
119., 130, 145, 211, 307
elections in, 43n
heavy water sales of, III
Israeli arms embargo by U.S.
and, 183
joint anti-Soviet nuclear targeting
proposed to U.S. by, 270n
military deals between Iraq and,
16, 64n
NATO and, 27, 36, 44, 126.
nuclear deterrent of, 44, 60, 75n,
126n, 152, 176
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
and, 209
in Nuclear Suppliers Group, 267
nuclear weapons program of, 28-31,
63, 66, 125, 145, 271
nuclear weapons program of
Israel and, 11, 16, 23, 27-46, 5965, 68-
70, 118-19, 155, 263
Suez War and, 38, 40-43
in Tripartite Agreement, 21-22
Frankfurter Allgemeine, 175
Freedom of Information Act (I974),
80, 253.
Freier, Shalheveth, 218-19, 226
French Air Force, 64
Frost, Tony, 313-14
fusion vs. fission, in nuclear
weapons, 48-49

Gahal Party, 38.
Galili, Yisrael, 38n, 225
Gallois, Pierre, 44
GAMBIT reconnaissance satellite,
156
Garment, Leonard, 3Q3-5
Garment, Suzanne, 304
Gates, Robert M., 260n
Gaza Strip, 35, 113, 115, 118, 167,
218.
General Accounting Office (GAO),
253, 256
General Zionist Party, 38n
Germany, Federal Republic of
(West), 48, 123, 133, 152, 209-10,
267
Germany, Nazi, 24, 88n, 123, 127,
265
Germany, occupied, 47
Gilinsky, Victor, 251-52, 262n, 287-
79n
Gilpatric, Roswell L., 151-52, 153
Gilpatric report, 151-52, 153
Golan, Matti, 45
Golan Heights, 167, 184, 231, 238n,
312
Goldschmidt, Bertrand, 30-32, 39-
40, 68, 119
Gomolak, Louis S., 127n
Goodpaster, Andrew J., 55n
Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) 7n
Graham, Thomas W., 65-66
Great Britain, 164, 168
Balfour Declaration and, 35n
decolonization by, 21
intelligence leak in, 7n
Israeli guerrilla war against, 19596,
259, 298n
in Nuclear Suppliers Group, 267
nuclear weapons program of, 28,
125n-26n
Suez War and, 38, 40-42
in Tripartite Agreement, 21-22
U.S. intelligence relationship
with, 3, 7
Guatemala, 42n
Guerrero, Oscar E., 309, 311
Guillaumat, Pierre, 28, 29, 31-32, 39
Gur, Mordecai, 228, 295n

ha 'anoseh ha 'adin, 140
Hadden, John L., 161-62, 164, 247,
253, 254, 256
Hagannah, 24, 141, 195-96
Haifa, 130, 177, 203, 223
Haig, Alexander M., Jr., 8n-9n, 14,
287
Halevy, David, 180n
Halperin, Morton H" 210
Halpern, Samuel, 146
Harman, Avraham, 74, 75-76, 77
Hawk missiles, 103, 109-10, 118, 119
heavy water, 19, 30, 31, 39, 64, 77,
103, 104, 111, 200, 201
Heikal, Mohammed, 227, 229, 23D31, 235n
Helms, Richard M., 186, 188-89,
212, 214, 241, 247, 250, 255
Herter, Christian A., 74-75, 80
Herut Party, 38n, 299
Herzog, Chaim, 264
Hickenlooper, Bourke R, 80-81
Hirbat Zachariah, 173, 216, 225, 231
Hiroshima, 46, 48
Histadrut, 122
Hitler, Adolf, 22, 139, 221
Hod, Mordecai, 190
Hofi, Yitzhak, 9, 11, 295
Holocaust, 195
Jewish consciousness of, 10, 2223, 27,
30, 37, 42, 136, 138, 226
reparations paid to Israel for,
123n
Strauss's feelings about, 83, 86-87,
89, 91
Hoover, J. Edgar, 250
Hounam, Peter, 308, 309
House Subcommittee on Oversight
and Investigations, 253
HUMINT, 147
Humphrey, Hubert H., 209
Hussein, King of Jordan, 185n, 289
hydrogen bombs, 49-50, 84, 200
Hyland, William G., 229

I.G. Farben, 88n
India, 37, 39, 65, 67n, 149, 150n,
153n, 267n
Institute for Advanced Studies, 86,
142
Institute of Nuclear Science, 25n
Intelligence Advisory. Committee,
U.S., 73
intelligence and warning (I&W), 6
intelligence community:
Israel-France relationship in, 36,
145
Israeli scandals in, 34, 61-62
Israel-U.S. relationship in, 3-17,
90, 162, 292
leaks in, 7n-8n, 16, 177n
passing unwanted information in,
5In-52n, 143-44, 238, 239-40
International Assembly on Nuclear
Weapons (1966), 155n
International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), 11, 266
Dimona inspections and, 69, 80,
100-101, 106, 108, 110, 117, 124,
128, 129, 131, 132, 133-34, 135,
136, 153, 154-55, 186, 212
uranium ore shipments
monitored by, 156
International Institute for Strategic
Studies (!ISS), 155n
Iran, 6, 42n, 220n, 260n, 274n
Israeli arms sales to, 298, 309-10
Iran-Iraq War, 309
Iraq, 175
in Arab Federation, 121
Israeli bombing raid in, 8-10, 11,
12, 13, 16, 64n, 259, 286
military deals between France
and, 16, 64n
nuclear capability of, 9-10
Persian Gulf War and, 20ln
Qassem's coup in, 51
Soviet military aid to, 7, 12
"supergun" of, 216n
U.S. arms sales to, 260n
Irgun, 259, 298n
Israel:
business deals awarded in, 192
Carter administration as viewed
by, 5
censorship in, 11, I80n, 223
CIA leaks to, 16
creation of, 89, 146
denial of nuclear weapons
intentions by, 69
diplomatic recognition of, 21n, 94
"dual loyalty" and, 89-92
elections in, 37, 38n, 104, 123n,
139-40, 141, 259, 269, 296
espionage activities in U.S. by,
90, 162, 292
first nuclear missile field of, 173
French arms sales to, 36, 65, 69,
175
F-16 deal between U.S. and, 8-9
Greater (Eretz), 38n, 185
guerrilla warfare between Egypt
and, 35, 36
heavy water purchased from
Norway by, 77
intelligence service of, see Mossad
Iranian arms purchases from, 298,
309-10
Iraqi nuclear reactor bombed by,
8-10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 64n, 259,
286
isolation felt by, 175, 264
joint anti-Soviet nuclear targeting
proposed to U.S. by, 269-70,
278
Kennedy's defense commitment
to, 117-18
KGB penetration of, 219-20
KH-l1 reconnaissance
photographs given to, 3-17
labor union strength in, 66, 122,
197
military budget of, 136, 174, 179,
221
military intelligence service of,
163
national security doctrine of, 301
nonespionage agreement between
U.S. and, 90
nuclear blackmail by, 223, 225-40
nuclear weapons program of
France and, 11, 16, 23, 27-46,
59-65, 68-70, 118-19, 155, 263
nuclear weapons program of
South Africa and, 155, 263-68,
270, 271-83
nuclear weapons spending by, 67
nuclear weapons strategy of, 16-
17, 66, 91-92, 217
occupied territories and, 167, 18486,
259, 264
parliament of, see Knesset
party politics of, 38n, 139-40,
179n, 259, 296
public debate on nuclear weapons
policy in, 129-30, 131, 138, 142
rocket program of, 104, 120
secret nuclear weapons
conferences in, 136, 138-39
South African uranium ore
purchases by, 156, 264, 266
Soviet and East European
emigration to, 145, 163
Soviet nuclear targeting of, 177
Soviet Union as nuclear target of,
16-17, 66, 139, 174-75, 176-77,
214, 216, 220-21, 260, 261, 270,
285, 287, 301
Soviet Union's relationship with,
21n, 61, 175
Suez War and, 38, 39, 40-44
tourism in, 178
U.S. arms sales to, 8-9, 103, 10810,
118, 119, 133, 135, 139, 153,
183-84, 186, 189-92, 211, 213,
216, 221
U.S. commitments to, 176, 177,
178, 183
U.S.-French arms embargo
against, 183
U.S. Jewish aid to, 20, 21, 58, 66,
90, 93, 178
U.S. Jewish emigration to, 58, 91
U.S. lobby of, 27, 74, 96-97, 178
U.S. nuclear umbrella sought by,
21-23, 38, 44, 55, 113
West German arms deals with,
123, 133
Israel and Nuclear Weapons (Jabber),
155n
Israel Bond Organization, 93
Israel Chemicals Company, 300
Israeli Air Force, 10, 12, 131, 167,
188, 216, 217, 288, 294
Israeli Army, 40-41, 78n
Israeli Defense Force, 61, 131, 156,
201, 216, 232, 271, 276n, 289
External Relations Department
of, 260n, 276, 292, 295
Israeli Navy, 293
Italy, 21, 159n, 298n

Jabber, Fuad, 155n
Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 185
Japan, 47, 137, 210, 218
Jenkins, Walter W., 192-94
Jericho I missiles, 120, 125, 143, 173,
175, 212, 216, 301
Jerusalem, 167, 184-85, 259
Jessup, Peter c., 163, 238
Jews:
in Afghanistan and Iran, 6
African homeland proposed for,
87
in France's science community,
30
Johnson's aid to, 127-28
Kennedy and, 96-98, 103
in North Africa, 36, 60-61
in South Africa, 264
Jews, U.S., 42n
Angleton's index on, 145-46
Ben-Gurion's loss of faith in, 41
in CIA, 89, 145-46
"dual loyalty" and, 89-92, 241
emigration to Israel by, 58, 91
financial aid to Israel from, 20,
21, 58, 66, 90, 93
Johnson and, 127-28, 151, 191
as lobbyists, 27, 74, 96-97
as refugees, 127-28
Vietnam War opposed by, 191
John F. Kennedy, USS, 233
John F. Kennedy Library, 99, 148
Johnson, Lady Bird, 127, 128
Johnson, Lyndon B., 178, 183-94,
247
Barbour's assignment from, 160,
161
Bundy's misleading of, 133
cash contributions and, 194
Dimona intelligence reports
suppressed by, 188-89, 212
election of, 149
Eshkol pressured by, 86, 130, 132,
134-35, 136, 139, 154, 166, 183,
186
Feinberg and, 98n, 126, 190-91,
192, 193, 194
Jewish refugees aided by, 127-28
Kennedy's exclusion of, 126
nuclear nonproliferation policy
of, 128, 149, 151-53, 191, 209
Vietnam War and, 99, 128, 151,
153, 191
Johnson administration:
Israeli nuclear weapons policy of,
143-57, 183-94
public vs. private nuclear
proliferation stance of, 148-53
Joint Atomic Energy Commission,
214n, 242-43, 246
Joint Chiefs of Staff, 84
Joint Committee on Atomic
Energy, 76, 81
Joliot-Curie, Frederic, 27-28
Jones, Curtis F., 215
Jordan, 3, 167, 175, 184, 201n, 289,
296
Justice Department, U.S., 285, 303,
310

Kafkafi, Jeruham, 255
Ka1b, Bernard, 234
Kalb, Marvin, 234
Kampiles, William T., 7n-8n
Katzenbach, Nicholas D., 185n
Katzir, Aharon (Aharon
Katchalsky), 26, 205, 218
Kaysen, Carl, 86, 98, 99
Keating, Kenneth B., 222
Keeny, Spurgeon M., Jr., 272-73,
277, 281-82
Kelly Field, 51n
Kennedy, John F., 50n, 150, 159, 275
assassination of, 126
Ben-Gurion and, 100-104, 106,
114, 117, 120-21, 124
Dimona inspection sought by, 76,
81, 98, 100-15, 110, 111
Egypt rapprochement sought by,
102-3, 107-8
Feinberg and, 93, 94, 95-98, 100,
101-2, 103, 111
Eisenhower's foreign affairs
advice to, 106
Meir and, 117-18, 115
Middle East policy of, 11l-14, Il 5
nuclear nonproliferation policy
of, 117, 118, 125, 163
Kennedy, Joseph P., 95, 96, 103
Kennedy, Robert F., 98n, 99-100,
152-53
Kennedy administration:
disharmony in, 99
Israeli nuclear weapons policy of,
93-115
non-espionage agreement between
Israel and, 90
nuclear test ban and, 85, 105
Kerr, Donald M., Jr., 280-81
KGB, 219-20, 299
Khartoum Arab summit (1967), 176
Khrushchev, Nikita, 74, 102
KH-11 reconnaissance satellite, 231,
283, 290, 292
description of, 4n
Hirbat Zachariah reconnaissance
by, 231
intelligence leaks about, 7n-8n
Israeli access to photographs by,
3-17
Israeli downlink sought for, 15,
16
Pollard spy case and, 296, 297
Soviet reconnaissance by, 13, 15,
16, 17
Kibbutzim, 140
Kibiya massacre, 78n
King David Hotel, bombing of, 259
Kissinger, Henry A.:
Israeli nuclear weapons policy of,
168-69, 209-12, 235
Middle East policy of, 177
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
undermined by, 209-10
on Sadat, 221
shuttle diplomacy of, 230, 236
Yom Kippur War and, 227-37
Kissinger (Kalb and Kalb), 234
KK Mountain, 5, 145
Knesset, 22, 37, 78-79, 122, 1l9, 141,
154, 155n, 179n, 288, 299
Kollek, Teddy, 141n, 184
Komer, Robert W., 99, 134, 135
Kosygin, Alexei N., 232
Kramish, Arnold, 169
Kratzer, Myron B., 77, 89
Kremlin, U-2 photos of, 48
Krock, Arthur, 71
krytrons, 213

Labor Party (Israel), 38n, 179, 259,
296, 301
Labour Party (Great Britain), 41
LAKAM, see Office of Special Tasks
laser uranium enrichment, 201, 219
Latin America, as nuclear-free zone,
152
Lavon, Pinhas, 33, 34, 79, 109, 122
Lavon Affair, 34, 121-22, 124, 139,
140
Lebanon, 3, 51
Lebanon War, 259, 288, 294
Leinsdorf, Erich, 127
Leor, Yisrael "Gingy, " 225, 226-27
Lewis, Samuel W., 286, 287-88, 295
Liberty, USS, 167-68
Likud Party, 38n, 259, 264, 296
Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963),
124-26
lithium, 52, 202
lithium deuteride, 49, 200
lithium 6, 200, 201
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory,
24n, 91, 145, 155, 156, 198, 206,
266, 291
Lockheed Aircraft Company, 47
Long, David E., 214-15
Los Alamos, 145, 199, 206
intelligence operations at, 155,
156, 266
VELA nuclear detection satellite
and, 273, 280
see also Manhattan Project
Lovett, James K, 248
Low Altitude Bombing System
(LABS), 194
Lowenthal, David, 247, 254-55
loyalty oaths, 84
Lucet, Charles, 118-19
Lundabl, Arthur C., 47, 50, 63, 74,
156-57
as NPIC head, 107
U-2 Dimona reconnaissance and,
53-56, 58, 72, 73, 100, 143, 147
Lyndon B. Johnson Library, 132,
135, 167, 168n, 178, 192

Maariv, 129, 142, 312
McCone, John A., 126n, 134
as AEC chairman, 71, 73
AEC resignation of, 72, 77
as CIA director, 73, 76, 93, 105,
150-51, 163
death of, 73
Dimona story leaked to Finney
by, 71-73, 74, 77n
Israeli nuclear weapons program
opposed by, 93, 118-19
Johnson and, 151
Kennedy and, 105-6, 150
Strauss and, 73, 83, 89, 91, 92
Machon 2, see Dimona nuclear
weapons facility, chemical
reprocessing plant at
Macmillan, Harold, 126n
McNamara, Robert S., 108-9, 126n,
149, 150, 188-89
McPherson, Harry c., 186
Malloy, Michael, 313-14
Manhattan Project, 23, 25, 27, 28,
30, 46, 49, 58, 63, 83-84, 102n
Mansfield, Mike J., 125n
"Man's First Robot with Muscles, "
205
Mapai (Israel Workers') Party, 27,
33, 34n, 37, 38n, 39, 65, 67, 104,
117, 121, 122, 123, 129, 139, 140,
141-42, 179n, 259
Mapam (United Workers') Party,
38n, 179n, 299
Marcoule nuclear reactor, 29, 30, 37,
43, 46, 56-57, 263
Marine Corps, U.s., 51
Mark, Hans M., 23
Mark, Herman F., 23-24, 25, 26, 27,
44
Marshall, Andrew W., 269-70
Masada complex, 137n
"material unaccounted for" (MUF),
244, 246
Maxwell, Robert, 312, 315
Mediterranean Allied Air Force,
88n
Meese, Edwin, III, 303
Meet the Press, 72, 74, 77
Meir, Golda, 121, 140, 162, 171, 202,
221
Kennedy and, 117-18, 135
Kissinger and; 230n, 236
Lavon Affair and, 122-23
as prime minister, 39
Suez War and, 42, 43
Yom Kippur War and, 225, 226,
228, 233
Mendes-France, Pierre, 35
Meyer, Armin, 74-75, 110, 113, 114
Middle East Task Force, 213
Midrasha conferences (1964-65),
136, 138-39
MiG-2l, 65, 103, 175, 183
Mirage III, 131n, 175
"missile gap, " 50
missiles:
Jericho I, 120, 125, 143, 173, 175,
212, 216, 301
Project 700 program of, 174, 216
satellite reconnaissance of, 231
Scud, 12, 234
surface-to-air, 286, 294, 298
TOW, 310
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Shah of
Iran, 6, 173, 274
Mollet, Guy, 36, 40-41, 42, 43
Morocco, 21
Moscow, reconnaissance
photographs of, 13, 48
Mossad, 76, 77, 163, 168n, 177, 181,
220, 236, 289, 298, 299
CIA's joint ventures with, 5-6,
13n
Vanunu kidnapped by, 198, 308,
315
Moyers, Bill, 193-94
Mozambique, 13n, 266
multilateral force (MLF), 152
Murphy, George F., Jr., 248
Myers, Henry R., 254-55
Mystere aircraft, 42n

Nagasaki, 46, 48, 138
Nahal Soreq nuclear reactor, 20, 67,
101, 103, 132n
Namibia, 266
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 36, 53, 101,
129-30, 135, 221, 227
Communist help sought by, 35
Israeli views of, 21, 22, 40, 42
Kennedy and, 102-3, 107-8
Pan-Arabism of, 21, 40, 55
"preventive war" threatened by,
138
rise to power of, 21, 104
Sharett's secret negotiations with,
33, 34, 35
Six-Day War and, 166, 178
Suez Canal nationalized by, 38
National Liberation Front (FLN),
21, 36
National Photo Interpretation
Center (NPIC), 107, 156, 283
National Reconnaissance Office
(NRO), 23n
National Security Agency (NSA), 4,
14, 51, 89, 188, 219, 220, 237,
278, 293
National Security Council (NSC),
75, 98, 99, 105, 134, 168n, 192,
239
National Security Decision
Memorandum (NSDM) No.6,
210
National Security Decision
Memorandum (NSDM) No. 32,
212n
National Water Carrier, 249-50
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization), 7, 27, 36, 44,
126n, 152 .
Naval Security Group, 89
Navy, U.S., 162, 233, 242, 256
Navy Intelligence, U.S., 285, 292-93
Nazis, 60, 88n
Neeman, Yuval, 121, 233
Netherlands, 265n
neutron bombs, 199-200
Newsweek, 309
New York Herald Tribune, 72n
New York Times, 71, 72, 77n, 129-30,
140n, 142, 144n, 153n, 154, 169,
212, 278, 307, 308
New York Times Index, 160
Nitze, Paul H., 108-9
Nixon, Richard M., 170, 221, 247
Israeli nuclear weapons policy of,
5, 55n, 168n, 209-12, 261
1960 defeat of, 97-98
1968 election of, 191
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
undermined by, 209-10
Watergate affair and, 232-33
Yom Kippur War and, 228, 232-33
Nixon administration, 177, 303,
305
Israeli nuclear weapons and,
209-12, 223, 225, 238
Mossad favored by, 168n
Nobel Prize, 27, 102n, 206
North Africa, 21, 24, 36
North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), 7, 27,
36, 44, 126n, 152
Norway, 39, 48, 64, 77. 103, III
Novy, James, 127-28
"nth" nations, 155
nuclear energy, 19, 154, 251, 273n
nuclear espionage:
death penalty for, 243
see also Pollard, Jonathan Jay;
Vanunu, Mordecai
nuclear-free zones, 152
Nuclear Intelligence Panel (NIP),
280
Nuclear Materials and
Equipment Corporation
(NUMEC):
corporate takeovers of, 248, 252
decontamination at, 253n, 256-57
"diverted" uranium recovered at,
257
uranium diversion allegations
and, 187-88, 242-57
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
(NPT) (1968):
Johnson administration pressure
on Israel and, 184, 186, 189,
190, 191, 194, 209-10, 211
signatories of, 11, 191, 209-10
Third World and, 267.
nuclear reactors:
Canada-to-India sale of, 37, 39
fast breeder, 251
in France, see Marcoule nuclear
reactor; Saclay nuclear reactor
fuel cycles in, 203.-4., 248, 273.
in Iraq, 8-10, 11, 12, 13, 16
in Israel, see Dimona nuclear
weapons facility; Nahal Soreq
nuclear reactor
in Soviet Union, 28-29
uranium fuel rods in, 10n, 29, 52,
201, 202
in U.S., 28-29, 45., 84, 203
see also chemical reprocessing
plants
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC), 251-52, 257, 263
Nuclear Suppliers Group, 267
nuclear test ban, 85, 274
nuclear weapons:
"boosted" fission for, 200
China's development of, 148-49,
246, 271
cost of, 66, 174, 179
"defensive, " 209
Egypt and, 67, 69, 101, 129-30,
133, 138, 152, 15J.
fission vs. fusion, 48-49
France's development of, 28-31,
63, 125, 145, 271
French-Israeli joint development
of, 11, 16, 23, 27-46, 59-65, 6870,
118-19, 155, 263
Great Britain's development of,
28, 125.-26.
Iraqi potential for, 9-10
Israeli stockpile of, 198-99, 21516,
225-26, 231, 235, 239, 240,
241, 261, 268, 276., 282-83, 29091
Low Altitude Bombing System
for, 194
low-yield, 216, 267, 268, 271, 276,
279-80
manufacturing tolerances for,
202-3
miniaturization of, 177, 216, 217,
220
NATO's European deployment
of, 152, 155
objections to, 59, 65, 67, 138,
see also Dimona nuclear
weapons facility, objections to
Pakistan's development of, 26263,
298
proliferation of, 31, 74, 76, 92,
128, 148-57, 163, 209-10
South African-Israeli joint
development of, 155, 263-68,
270
Soviet development of, 48, 49-50,
280
Soviet stockpile of, 49
Stockholm Appeal against, 27-28
"Temple" code-name for, 226
test ban treaty on, 74, 105, 124-25
test sites for, 49, 63, 120, 126, 131,
145, 214., 265, 267-68, 271, 272
U.S. development of, 23, 25, 27,
28, 30, 46, 49, 58, 63, 83-84,
102., 112, 138
U.S. stockpile of, 49, 215.
"zero-yield" detonations of, 131
see also hydrogen bombs; neutron
bombs
Nye, Joseph S., Jr., 283

Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
112
Office of International Strategic
Affairs, 125
Office of Special Tasks (LAKAM),
62, 131, 205, 288, 292, 295
oil, 106
Arab anti-U.S. embargo on, 232
arms deals and, 16, 22
nuclear energy and, 19
Soviet-Middle East policy and,
178
U.S.-Middle East policy and, 22,
168
see also pipelines
Oplinger, Gerald G., 272, 273, 308
Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 19, 23, 25,
83, 84-85, 91
Ora Limited, 309, 310
Organization of African States
(OAS), 265n
Osirak, Israeli bombing raid on, 810,
11, 12, 13, 16, 64n, 259, 286

Pakistan, 48, 262-63, 298
Palestine, 24, 35n, 87, 195, 298n
Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO), 249, 288, 302
Palestinian Arabs, 35, 38, 113-15,
118, 167, 184
Pan-Arabism, 21, 40, 55
Parker, John G, 313-14
Parker, Patrick J., 235
Pean, Pierre, 64n-65n, 263, 307
Peled, Elad, 177, 210
Peres, Shimon, 25n, 104n, 117, 299
Arab question and, 34, 38n
as Ben-Gurion favorite, 33
on Bergmann, 26, 45
in coalition government, 296
as defense minister, 265
Dimona denial and, 69, 77, 78,
118, 239
Dimona financing and, 65, 66-67,
94
on Eisenhower, 42-43
IAEA inspections of Dimona
opposed by, 134
Israeli nuclear weapons program
and, 20, 23, 27, 29-30, 36, 37,
39, 43, 45, 59, 93, 129, 135, 141,
154-55, 207, 265
Lavon Affair and, 122-23
Pollard spy case and, 286, 303
as Rafi Party leader, 139, 140
South African visit of, 265, 275
Suez War and, 38, 42
Vanunu case and, 198, 312
Perrin, Francis, 28, 29, 39-40
Persian Gulf War, 201n
Phalangists, 288
phosphate fields, uranium extracted
from, 19
Photographic Intelligence Division,
47, 50, 51, 54
Pincher, Chapman, 76, 77n
Pineau, Christian, 43n
pipelines:
Elat-Haifa, 192n
Iranian, 173
plutonium, 28-29, 30, 149n, 246, 247
at Dimona, 11, 45-46, 56, 57, 69,
72, 75, 120, 130, 156, 179, 201,
202, 203, 241, 282
in fission bombs, 48, 138, 200
French production of, 28-29, 43
reactor fuel rods as source for,
10n, 29, 52, 202
recycling of, 251
Podgorny, N. V., 175
Podhoretz, Norman, 137n
Poland, 13n, 298
Pollack, Herman, 164n
Pollard, Jonathan Jay, 62, 285-305,
307
background of, 291-92
Israeli official denial and cover-up
of, 285, 297, 30G-301, 303-5
Israeli recruitment of, 285, 292
life sentence of, 285, 297
Navy Intelligence career of, 285,
292-93
number and types of documents
provided to Israel by, 286, 29394,
295, 296
Power and Principle (Brzezinski), 273n
Powers, Gary Francis, 50, 51, 74
President's Commission on the
Holocaust, 88n
Press, Frank, 273, 276-77, 279, 282
Primakov, Yevgeni M., 299
Prime, Geoffrey A., 7n
Project 700 missile program, 174,
216
"Prologue: LBJ's Foreign Affairs
Background" (Gomolak), 127n

Rabi, I. I., 102, 104
Rabin, Yitzhak, 260, 265, 269, 299
as defense minister, 296
Dimona opposed by, 67, 137-38
government positions held by, 67,
189-90, 239
nuclear weapons denial by, 190,
194, 212-13
Pollard spy case and, 286, 303
Six-Day War and, 167, 178
Rafael research and manufacturing
agency, 203
Rafi (Israeli Workers' List) Party,
139, 140, 141, 167, 179n
Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Ali Akbar,
310
Rand Daily Mail (South Africa), 279
Rather, Dan, 183
Rathjens, George H., 263, 281
"rat lines, " 145
Raziel, David, 298n
Reagan, Ronald, 8-9, 15
Israeli strategic cooperation
proposal and, 287
Reagan administration:
Iranian arms sales and, 260n
Israeli strategic cooperation
proposal to, 286-88
Israeli-U.S. intelligence liaison
agreement and, 8-17
private vs. public reactions to
Israeli bombing raid by, 8-9
Reggane nuclear test site, 63
Republican Party, 275
Research Company for Financing
and Enterprise, 65
Reston, James A" 71
Ribicoff, Abraham, 96, 98, 261
Richard, Mark M., 305
Richardson, Elliot L., 232
robotics, 26, 202, 204, 205
Roddis, Louis H" Jr., 280
Rodman, Peter W., 228
Rosenne, Meir, 304
Rostow, Walt, 169, 176, 184, 190-91,
192
Rothschild, Baron Edmund de, 66,
192n
Rothschild, Victor, 160-61
Rothschild family, 31
Rubinstein, Elyakim, 304
Ruina, Jack P., 276-77, 281, 282
Ruina panel, 276-77, 279-82
Rusk, Dean, 149, 150, 152, 188-89

Saclay nuclear reactor, 28, 39, 43,
263
Sadat, Anwar, 227
Begin's summit with, 4, 269
Soviets ousted by, 221
Yom Kippur War and, 222, 229,
230-31, 232, 239
Saguy, Yehoshua, 9-10, 293, 294
Saint-Gobain Techniques Nouvelles
(SGN), 29, 45, 69
SALT II, 274, 275
"Samson Option, " explanation of,
137n
Sandia, 155, 156
Sapir, Pinhas, 38n, 65, 122, 179
satellite communication devices,
220n
satellites, reconnaissance, 260, 261
CORONA, 156
downlinks for, 14, 15, 16
GAMBIT, 156
National Reconnaissance Office
and, 23n
of Soviet Union, 231, 267
VELA nuclear detection, 271-72,
273, 274, 277, 278, 279, 281
see also KH-11 reconnaissance
satellite
Saturday Review, 205
Saudi Arabia, 296
Savannah River Plant, 203, 204
Scali, John, 277-78
Scheersberg A, 181
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 96n,
100, 105, 126n
Schlesinger, James R., 227, 230
Schwartz, Harry H., 190, 191, 194
Science Liaison Bureau (LAKAM),
205
Scud missiles, 12, 234
Seaborg, Glenn T., 149-50, 152, 153
Sella, Aviem, 286, 297, 300, 301-5
Senate, U.S., 95, 124, 126, 178, 186,
209, 275
Israeli fact-finding trip by, 261-62
Senate Commerce Committee, 85
Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, 80
Sephardim, 60-61
Sabra and Shatila massacre, 288,
293, 311
Shalom, Avraham, 295, 304
Shamir, Yitzhak, 298, 299-300
in coalition government, 296
Pollard spy case and, 286
Shapiro, Zalman Mordecai:
background of, 241-42
Bergmann and, 243, 248-49
innocence of, 243, 250, 252, 255-
56
Israeli mission conducted by, 243,
249-50
Israeli sympathies of, 188, 242,
243, 247
Q clearance of, 248
uranium diversion allegations
against, 188, 241-57, 261
Sharett, Moshe, 33-34, 35, 37-38, 39,
78., 88, 146
Sharon, Ariel, 35, 38., 67, 295
as defense minister, 287, 296
KH-11 downlink sought by, 15,
16, 17
strategic cooperation proposal of,
287-88
strategic goals of, 288-90
as trade and industry minister,
300
Shavit rockets, 104, 120
Shin Beth, 220, 304
Shlaim, Avi, 35
Sinai Peninsula:
in Six-Day War, 166, 167
in Suez War, 40, 41, 42, 43
in Yom Kippur War, 222, 231-32
Six-Day War, 131., 156, 160, 166-67,
174, 175, 177-78, 184-85, 222,
291
Smart, Ian, d3
Smith, Gerard C., 263
Smith, Hedrick, 212-13
Solel Bone, 65
Solidarity movement, 13n
Sorenson, Theodore c., 100
Sourassi, Abraham, 61
Souster, Mark, 313
South Africa, Republic of:
Bull and, 216.-17.
Israeli uranium ore purchases
from, 156, 264, 266
nuclear weapons program of
Israel and, 155, 263-68, 270,
271-83
social upheavals in, 266-67
Soviet Union, 21, 121, 155, 162, 265n
Afghanistan and, 6, 16
Arab military aid from, 7, 12, 35,
65, 103, 128, 135, 136, 138, 139,
153, 167, 170, 175-76, 183, 231,
237
CIA-Mossad operations in, 13n
defectors from, 54
emigration to Israel from, 145,
163
false alarm over Cuban-based
troops of, 275
as French nuclear target, 44
intelligence leaks to, 7n-8n
Israel as nuclear target of, 177
as Israeli nuclear target, 16-17,
66, 139, 174-75, 176-77, 214,
216, 220-21, 260, 261, 270, 278,
285, 287, 301
Israel's relationship with, 21n, 61,
175
KH-11 reconnaissance of, 13, 15,
16, 17
NATO's European nuclear
deployment opposed by, 152
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
signed by, 191
nuclear reactors in, 28-29
nuclear weapons program of, 48,
49-50, 280
Pollard material given to, 286,
297, 299, 300
Shamir's overtures to, 298, 299-
300
Stockholm Appeal backed by, 27
Suez War and, 41
Syria's military aid from, 294
Teller's fear of first strike by,
187n
U.S. annual review of arms
system of, 286
U-2 reconnaissance of, 47, 48, 50,
74
Yom Kippur War and, 226, 227,
229, 231-35
Space Research Corporation (SRC),
216n
SS-21 missiles, 294
State Department, U.S., 13n, 99,
113, 143, 164, 261, 262, 291
Barbour's snubbing of, 159, 161
Bureau of Intelligence and
Research (INR) of, 213
on conflict of interest, 171
Dimona intelligence and, 75, 76,
80, 100, 106
Eisenhower's commitment not
upheld by, 178
F-4 sale to Israel opposed by, 183,
211
Israeli nuclear weapons as issue
at, 214-15
Middle East military report of,
213
NUMEC and, 242
Osirak bombing condemned by, 9
Palestinian Arabs and, 114
Policy Planning Council of, 169
Stemming the Tide (Seaborg), 149-50
Stern, 308
Stern, Yair, 298n
Stern Gang, 297-98
Stevenson, Adlai E., 95
Stockholm Appeal (1950), 27-28
Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute (SIPRI),
199n
Stockton, Peter D., 254, 256
Stone, Dewey D., 96
Strategic Air Command, 48, 233
Strauss, Alice, 91
Strauss, Lewis (son), 85
Strauss, Lewis L., 54, 73, 83-92, 93
as AEC chairman, 54, 73, 83, 84
African homeland for Jews
proposed by, 87
anti-Zionism of, 88
background and character of, 83,
85-86, 88-89, 92
Bergmann's secret friendship
with, 85-86, 88, 142
Dimona briefings and, 54, 73, 83,
89, 90, 91, 92
"dual loyalty" and, 89-92
Eisenhower's support for, 84, 85,
87
Holocaust consciousness of, 83,
86-87, 89, 91
Israeli nuclear weapons program
supported by, 85-86, 91
McCone and, 73, 83, 89, 91, 92
Oppenheimer attacked by, 84-85,
91
Senate's rejection of, 85
Suez Canal, 38
Suez War, 38, 39, 40-44, 175, 176,
178
Sulzberger, C. L., 129-30
Sunday Mirror (London), 308-9, 31 315
Sunday Times (London), Vanunu
story and, 196-97, 198, 199n,
200, 202, 262n, 307, 308, 309,
312, 315
surface-to-air missiles, 286, 294,
298
Symington, Stuart, 95, 119, 212,
262-63
Symington Amendment, 262-63
Syria, 249
Six-Day War and, 167, 175, 184
Soviet military aid to, 7, 16, 175
in United Arab Republic, 51, 121
Yom Kippur War and, 222, 225,
227, 235n, 238n

Tahal, 173
Talbot, Phillips, 114n
Talbott, Orwin C., 236-37
Tamir, Avraham, 269-70
Task Force 157, 233, 234-35
Taylor, Theodore B., 131n
Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology, 242
telephone scrambler systems, 161
Teller, Edward, 49, 187, 188, 250,
254
Tel Nof fighter base, nuclear
weapons storage facility at, 130,
225
"Temple" nuclear weapons, 226
Thousand Days, A (Schlesinger), 125n
"three no's, " 176
Time, ISDn
Tiran, Strait of, 178
Toon, Malcolm, 261-{;2
TOW missiles, 310
Tricontinental Pipelines, '192n
Tripartite Agreement (1950), 21-22
tritium, 49, 52, 200
Truman, Harry S., 21, 93, 94, 126
Tuchman, Jessica, 273n
Tunisia, 21, 302
Tunnel, see Dimona nuclear
weapons facility, chemical
reprocessing plant at
Turkey, 48
Turner, Stansfield, 5

UNITA movement, 13n
United Arab Republic, 51, 53, 133,
135
United Nations, 33, 109, 133, 265
Resolution 194 of, 113-14
Resolution 242 of, 186
Security Council of, 186
Suez War and, 40-41, 42, 43
Yom Kippur War and, 233
Zionism denounced by, 264
United Nations Conference on the
Peaceful Uses of Atomic
Energy, 88
United States:
Great Britain's intelligence
relationship with, 3, 7
as heavy water producer, 39
Iranian arms purchases from,
260n
Iraqi arms purchases from, 260n
Israeli arms embargo by France
and, 183
Israeli arms purchases from, 8-9,
103, 108-10, 118, 119, 133, 135,
139, 153, 183-84, 186, 189-92,
211, 213, 216, 221
Israeli commitments of, 176, 177,
178, 183
Israeli espionage activities in, 90,
162, 292; see also Pollard,
Jonathan Jay
Israel recognized by, 94
in Nuclear Suppliers Group, 267
nuclear umbrella sought by Israel
from, 21-23, 38, 44, 55, 113
nuclear war plans of, 48n
Persian Gulf War and, 201n
in Tripartite Agreement, 21-22
Vietnam War and, 59, 142
United States Intelligence Board
(USIB), 254
Unit (Detachment) 8200, 229, 237,
293
uranium, 10n, 52, 202
in China's bomb, 149n
critical mass of, 28
for Dimona, 68, 156, 180-81
enriched, 29, 112, 132n, 149n, 188,
201, 219, 246, 266
as health hazard and pollutant,
243, 245, 253, 256
mining of, 31
natural, 19, 27, 29, 39, 201
NUMEC alleged diversion of,
187-88, 241-57, 261
oxide powder conversion of, 244
scrap recovery of, 243-44, 253
South African enriching
technique for, 266
South African sale to Israel of,
155, 264, 266
U.S. sale to Israel of, 132n
U-2 reconnaissance planes, 42n, 150
capabilities of, 47-48
Dimona reconnaissance by, 50,
51, 52-58, 63, 64, 72, 73, 90, 99n,
100, 106-7, 112, 132., 147, 156,
157
Israeli knowledge of, 56
Powers incident and, 73-74
secrecy on, 47, 53-54
Soviet knowledge of, 51
Soviet reconnaissance by, 47, 48,
50, 74

Valindaba uranium plant, 266
Vance, Cyrus R., 274, 278
Van Doren, Charles N., 211
Vanunu, Mordecai, 262n, 290, 307-
15
Dimona revelations of, 196-205,
219
Israeli disinformation campaign
against, 312-15
Mossad's kidnapping of, 198, 308,
315
VELA nuclear detection satellite,
271-72, 273, 274, 277, 278, 279,
281
Veliotes, Nicholas A., 222, 228,
274n-75.
Vietnam, People's Republic of
(North), 36, 150, 153
Vietnam War, 59, 99, 125, 128, 142,
151, 153, 189., 191, 250, 286
Virostek, Cynthia A., 253n
von Hentig, Otto, 298n
Vorster, John, 265, 266, 275

"walk-ins, " 290
Wall Street Journal, 308
Walters, J. C., 278.
Warnke, Paul c., 189-90, 191
War of Attrition, 212n
War of Independence, 19, 113, 141
Warsaw Pact, 155
Washington Post, 96n, 239, 307, 308
Watergate affair, 232-33
Walters, Robert D., 311
Webber, Robert T., 164, 165-66
Weinberger, Caspar, 9, 287, 302
Weisl, Edwin L., Sr., 126
Weizman, Ezer, 275-76
Weizmann, Chaim, 24, 25, 45, 87
Weizmann Institute of Science, 19,
25-26, 31, 64, 79, 99n, 132n, 205,
206, 214, 219
Wells, Algie A., 92
West Bank, 113, Jl5, Jl8, 167, 184-
85, 218n, 259
Westinghouse Electric, 242, 245, 251
Wheeler, Earle G., 178
Wiesner, Jerome B., 99n
Wigner, Eugene, 102, 104
Williams, Bruce, 237n
World War II, 60, 260, 265
aerial reconnaissance in, 47, 56,
88n

Yariv, Aharon, 162, 290
Years of Upheaval (Kissinger), 228
Yerdor, Reuven, 219, 293-95, 297
Yiftach, Shimon, 130
Yom Kippur War, 264
events of, 222-23, 231-32, 233-34
Israeli nuclear threat in, 179, 217,
223, 225-40
Soviet nuclear threat alleged in,
234-35

Zadok, Chaim Joseph, 303, 304
Zamir, Zvi, 185n
Z Division, 198, 291, 307
"zero-yield" detonations, 131
Zia ul-Haq, Mohammad, 263
Zionism, Zionists, 24, 35n, 38n, 87n,
88, 97, 124, 140, 146, 185-86,
259, 264
Zionist Organization of America,
242
Zurhellen, Joseph O., Jr., 170, 171,
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