by Dan Raviv
In eastern Africa, Israel—along with American and British intelligence—found Ethiopia to be of prime strategic importance in the 1950s. The country overlooked the shipping routes leading into the Red Sea and northward toward Israel’s port of Eilat and Egypt’s Suez Canal.
Ethiopia also seemed pro-Western and fairly stable, under the rule of self-proclaimed emperor Haile Selassie. For over two decades he described himself as a descendant of the ancient Hebrew tribe of Judah. His royal emblem was Judah’s majestic lion, and Selassie warmly admired the modern Jewish state.
After an Israeli consulate was opened in Ethiopia, the diplomats were followed by agricultural advisers, by professors who helped establish the University of Addis Ababa, and by the inevitable military advisers and intelligence personnel. Israelis helped the emperor train his security forces. The Mossad was able to maintain a large station, an office fulfilling various covert roles, in the Ethiopian capital.
This corner of the Horn of Africa had a crucial advantage: its location. Just to the north were two Arab countries, Sudan and Egypt, and just across narrow sea lanes were Saudi Arabia and Yemen. For access to many kinds of people and information, Ethiopia and its immediate neighbors were excellent hunting grounds for Israeli intelligence.
The Israelis pioneered a presence in precisely the same locations where the United States would rush to create bases and listening posts after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Despite the mushrooming importance of the innovative, unofficial, and non-diplomatic network of connections that Shiloah created, he was quickly and totally forgotten after his death from a sudden heart attack in May 1959. Ironically, he had been preparing for yet another clandestine mission to Turkey and Iran.
No one went to the trouble of keeping Shiloah’s memory alive. He had few political allies, quite a few enemies, a tendency to work alone, and no taste for promoting his own importance.
A small group of intelligence operatives and scientists, meantime, worked on a totally secret project: creating a nuclear force for Israel. Their motivation was a belief that the Jewish people should never again be defenseless against armed and more numerous enemies.
Chapter Five
Nuclear Maturity
In a private villa in the Paris suburb of Sèvres, Israel took a small step—soon to be a giant leap—toward becoming a mature nuclear power.
There, on October 22, 1956, more than a dozen men from three countries were sitting around a large, impressive wooden table. Among them were two famous Israelis: David Ben-Gurion, in his twin posts as prime minister and minister of defense; and the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, General Moshe Dayan, who had lost his left eye in 1942 while serving with British troops against the pro-Nazi Vichy French forces in Syria.
Also in attendance was Ben-Gurion’s young, ambitious assistant who would go on to carve out his own place in history, Shimon Peres. He was joined, perhaps surprisingly, by the leader of the abortive Revolt of the Spies five years earlier, Asher Ben-Natan—an old hand at secret operations who would later be Israel’s first ambassador to Germany and then the ambassador to France.
The French hosts at Sèvres settled into their chairs: Prime Minister Guy Mollet, Defense Minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, Foreign Minister Christian Pineau, and various assistants and advisers. Some were wearing army uniforms and others civilian clothes. Facing them was Selwyn Lloyd, Great Britain’s foreign secretary, surrounded by his advisers.
The Sèvres conference was no idle chat. These men were planning a war, to be known in Israel as the Sinai campaign and worldwide simply as “Suez.”
France fervently wanted to reassert Anglo-French control of the Suez Canal, which Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized. The French were also hoping to stop the spread of Nasserism, because the fiery Egyptian was an inspiration to the FLN—the National Liberation Front in Algeria, which was fighting French occupying forces at the time.
Six months before the meeting at Sèvres, France had begun to arm Israel for the war to come. Starting in April, French cargo planes and ships arrived in the darkness of night and unloaded an abundance of weaponry: tanks, fighter planes, cannons, and ammunition.
Britain had its own war aims, motivated by a visceral hatred of Nasser. The prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, hoped to humiliate the Egyptian strongman so that he would be toppled from power. Eliminating a radical icon could enable the British to keep their bases at and beyond the Suez Canal. In truth, of course, the sun had begun to set on the British Empire.
As for Israeli goals, the most immediate was to avoid strangulation. Nasser had declared a blockade of the Red Sea, preventing shipping to and from Israel’s southern port of Eilat. Israel’s wider aim was to eliminate a regional rival—and assistance from big outsiders would be vital in destroying Nasser’s Soviet-equipped army.
At the end of the three-day conference, after cementing the war plan, the British delegation left for London. Only then did some French and Israeli officials gather for yet another meeting—even more secretive than the trilateral conspiracy they had just launched.
Now, they were discussing the Israeli wish to acquire a nuclear reactor from France.
No immediate deal was struck. There was no clear memorandum declaring that the Suez war was quid pro quo for an atomic delivery, but that transaction was in the back of everyone’s mind. At the end of the meeting, wine glasses were raised. Peres, fluent in French, proposed a toast “to assuring Israel’s security forever!” The Gallic hosts clinked glasses with their Jewish guests.
The war plans required close intelligence cooperation. Aman’s chief, General Yehoshafat Harkabi, was frequently in Paris for talks with his counterparts in French military and civilian intelligence. To institutionalize the liaison, a permanent Aman representative was stationed in France. Even though Isser Harel insisted that his Mossad should have a monopoly over contacts with civilian intelligence agencies abroad, the Memuneh had to take a back seat while the blueprints for a tripartite invasion were prepared.
A week later, on October 29, Israeli paratroops and ground forces began moving across Egypt’s Sinai and toward the Suez Canal. In accordance with the Sèvres plan, France and Britain then issued an ultimatum to the armies of Israel and Egypt, instructing them to freeze their forces in place, several miles from the canal. As prearranged, Israel accepted; Egypt refused. The French and British used the excuse to drop paratroops into the Canal Zone on November 5, taking over the strategic waterway.
The Israeli army, meanwhile, had conquered the Sinai in only four days. It appeared that the Sèvres conference’s goal had been achieved, and the many months of planning by military men and intelligence services had borne fruit.
As a military operation, the Sinai campaign—particularly Israel’s part—was brilliantly executed. Within days, the entire peninsula, where Jewish former slaves wandered for 40 years and Moses received the Ten Commandments, was captured by Israel. Just as the French and the British had hoped, their forces held the Suez Canal. Nasser’s nationalization was negated.
As a political maneuver, however, the campaign was a failure. Israeli, French, and British intelligence had believed that the United States would naturally take their side. That would almost surely have meant the end of Nasser. Instead, President Dwight Eisenhower displayed total contempt for the invasion of Suez and forced the three aggressors to pull back. That proved once and for all that America was a superpower, while France and Britain barely qualified even for the old title of “great powers.”
In November, Israeli forces began to withdraw, and the final portions of captured land—Sharm el-Sheikh and Gaza—were handed back to Egypt in March 1957.
Severe damage had been done to Israel’s image as a progressive, socialist nation seeking peace. Most of the world judged that Israel had taken part in an ill-advised imperialist plot.
The country’s top leaders, in fact, knew precisely what they were doing. They had joined the three-sided S
uez conspiracy, above all, because of Ben-Gurion’s burning desire to go nuclear. The relationship with France could bring the Israelis nearly everything they needed for this top-priority project.
Nuclear power was a goal cherished by Ben-Gurion from the start of statehood. It would represent true independence in the modern world. Generating electricity without relying on imported coal and oil could be valuable, but developing a nuclear potential was even more important: It would make Israel an unrivaled force in the Middle East. It could be the ultimate guarantee of the Jewish state’s continued existence.
Ben-Gurion’s cabinet had formed the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, the IAEC, in 1952. Its chairman was Ernst David Bergman, a brilliant chemist born in Germany in 1903, who moved to Palestine in the early 1930s and founded the science corps of Israel’s military. While researching cancer and other matters, Bergman was director of the Defense Ministry’s Science Department and a leading supporter of the nuclear option.
At almost every opportunity, Ben-Gurion and his scientific, defense, and political advisers considered the possibilities of purchasing a nuclear reactor—and then the United States sent one for free. In 1955, Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program provided a small research reactor that was installed at Nahal Sorek, 10 miles south of Tel Aviv. The facility was subject to American inspections, and it was too diminutive to produce anything of potential military use.
That same year, Peres made a series of trips to Paris, where he found that France’s socialist government was very sympathetic toward Israel’s socialist-led coalition. He started asking about the possibility of purchasing a nuclear reactor, and the answer became affirmative after the collusion of the Suez-Sinai campaign in 1956.
Though just in his 30s and holding only the post of deputy defense minister, Peres had the added clout of being trusted by and close to Ben-Gurion. In October 1957, Peres and top French government ministers signed two top-secret documents: a political pact outlining bilateral scientific cooperation, and a technical agreement to deliver a large, 24-megawatt reactor, with the necessary technicians and know-how. France would construct the reactor in Israel’s Negev desert, near the small immigrant town of Dimona.
Ben-Gurion, Peres, and a few senior Israeli scientists were determined from the start that their nation would be far ahead of its Arab neighbors in science and technology. They seriously believed that Israel could be among the top tech powers on Earth, which would guarantee its military supremacy over the much larger nations surrounding it.
Implicit in Ben-Gurion’s vision was an Israeli monopoly. Wherever and whenever deemed necessary, Israel would do what was necessary to be the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East. That unique and unspoken mission would be at the core of crises more than half a century later.
Ben-Gurion’s cabinet displayed hardly any enthusiasm, with nearly all ministers considering the project too expensive and diplomatically risky.
Most of the prime minister’s scientific advisers also feared that Israel could trigger a dangerous nuclear arms race. They loved research, but not weaponry.
Seven of the eight IAEC members resigned in protest in late 1957. They claimed there was too much emphasis on the possible military side of Israel’s budding nuclear potential, and they formed the Committee for the Denuclearization of the Middle East Conflict. There were heated debates behind closed doors, but the subject was shrouded in secrecy so opaque that the arguments never burst into the open. The Israeli press said nothing.
The resignations and dissent did not seem to disturb Ben-Gurion and Peres. They still had Professor Bergman as a one-man IAEC, and they put him in charge of the reactor project’s scientific aspects.
If anything, they were pleased that fewer people would now know what Israel was doing. The nuclear program was the ultimate secret of the Jewish state, subject to more security measures than anything in the history of a country where secrecy already abounded.
Peres considered this his own, darling project. He did not ask the intelligence community—as might be expected—to take care of the security and secrecy aspects of the reactor. Instead, he believed that Israel, as a nuclear power, would need a nuclear intelligence agency.
Until then, responsibility for obtaining technical and scientific information from abroad lay with Aman and the Mossad. Peres, however, decided to create a secret agency for nuclear matters in 1957, putting a former Defense Ministry colleague, Binyamin Blumberg, in charge.
“Very little was known about our nuclear program,” Peres said almost 50 years later. “And I wanted that even less would be known. I felt that if I were exposed, the press would destroy me and the project. I was politically controversial, known as an unstoppable fantasist. And the program itself looked like a fantasy.”
Why Blumberg? “He knew how to keep a secret, so I promoted him,” Peres explained. “I trusted him. I believed in him. And he did not disappoint. He did his job in an outstanding way.”
When he started his new job, Blumberg moved to a modest office in the Defense Ministry. To conceal his work, he named his new unit the Office of Special Assignments.
He soon renamed the unit Lakam—an acronym for Lishka le-Kishrei Mada, Hebrew for Science Liaison Bureau. It would accomplish huge things, but Lakam would also cause one of the worst crises between Israel and the United States.
As the French construction project at Dimona began, fences were erected and roads meant only for crews building the reactor were paved. Israel soldiers manned patrols and easily denoted a secure perimeter.
While physical protection was no special challenge, constructing a conspiracy of silence around the reactor was much more difficult. Thousands of French engineers and technicians were being housed in Dimona and the larger city of Beersheba, 30 miles northwest of the nuclear site. When the construction crews first broke ground, Blumberg and his Israeli security officers delivered group briefings there on what should not be said. They were assisted by some security men from the French companies and the French atomic energy commission.
The major challenge was the foreign workers, living in houses specially built for them in Beersheba. An entire joie de vivre industry developed to meet their needs: French-accented restaurants, bars, and brothels. To Blumberg and his lieutenants, those public places were the obvious weak links in a secure chain.
Blumberg and his team would drive from Tel Aviv—about 90 miles each way, several times a week—to the construction site and the residential areas. They felt they had to keep an eye on the entertainment spots; and occasionally they would pull aside individuals who looked like they might be too talkative, if only because their tongues were loosened by liquor. Those men were warned that they might lose their lucrative jobs. In rare cases, the less disciplined were sent home.
The French work contracts spoke of “a warm climate and desert conditions,” which did little to mask the location of the nuclear project. Blumberg and French intelligence became concerned about security in the Negev. The French did not fully trust the Israelis, known for their chatty nature, and sent their own agents to preserve secrecy and hunt for leaks.
One spy from Paris posed as a priest and tested the mayor of Beersheba by asking how development was going in the Negev. Proud of how his desert was blooming, in more ways than one, the mayor told the visiting clergyman about the French nuclear reactor being built nearby. The spy-priest, recognizing the original sin of faulty security, sent a highly critical cable back to his headquarters.
Blumberg always felt he had to be on the scene, to make sure that his orders were carried out. He would personally accompany the most important, unmarked shipments of material and equipment that arrived at Israel’s main seaport, Haifa, on ships from France or by plane at the international airport near Tel Aviv.
Binyamin Blumberg was born in 1923 at pre-state Palestine’s first agricultural school, Mikve Israel. Then, the school was in a rural tract, but now it is a mere six miles east of suburbanized Tel Aviv. It was established late in the 1
9th century to encourage Jewish pioneers to dirty their hands and cultivate the land. His parents lived and worked there.
After his school years, Blumberg enlisted in the Haganah, the main Jewish underground militia in the decade before Palestine’s British rulers departed in 1948. He was assigned to Shai, the Haganah’s intelligence wing.
When the fighting was over in 1949, Blumberg joined Shin Bet. The agency’s officers were in uniform at the time, and Blumberg was commissioned instantly as a major.
Shin Bet’s main office was in an abandoned Arab building near the port of Jaffa, alongside Tel Aviv, very close to a large, old flea market. Shin Bet was divided into eight departments, as an early indicator of the various roles the agency would fulfill.
Blumberg was assigned to Department 5, responsible for security at government ministries, and he was sent specifically to the Ministry of Defense.
“The definition of Blumberg’s role sounds very impressive,” said Baruch Nir, one of his Shin Bet colleagues of the time, “but all in all, it was a small job. He had two assistants and a secretary, and that’s it. What did he have to keep an eye on at the Defense Ministry?”
In 1949 and the early 1950s, not much. The ministry’s compound in Tel Aviv contained but a few huts, along with some workshops that much later grew into military industries.
When those larger military enterprises were set up, Blumberg’s responsibilities instantly widened. He became the chief security officer at the ministry compound and at new locations constantly being created. As dictated by the times, he Hebraized his family name to Vered for his personal life. At work, he was still known as Blumberg.