by Dan Raviv
“Binyamin was impeccably well-mannered,” said one of his former associates. “He never raised his voice, even when he got angry. And he was likeable. But he had no special qualities. He did not have a wide or rich education. Modest. All in all, a typical security officer, effective and hardworking.”
More than anything, he was the silent type.
“I remember how he often would walk into my office, drink tea, and say nothing,” said another colleague. “There was no small talk with him.”
With only two colleagues did he seem comfortable: Amos Manor, who headed Shin Bet under Harel, the boss of all intelligence bosses; and Peres. Blumberg, Manor, and Peres were around the same age, which made it easier for them to find some common ground.
In and around the Dimona project, Blumberg could only hope that everyone would be as silent as he. Quarantining information became increasingly difficult as the months wore on. The last French company departed in 1965, but most of the workers had returned to Europe upon completion of the physical construction of the reactor in 1960. The rumors that had been at a very low level started spreading far and wide.
Questions were going to be asked. Blumberg conceived two cover stories to explain the huge movement of workers, trucks, bulldozers, and heavy equipment. One, that Israel was building a water distillation plant, seemed very odd because those facilities are usually on the edge of a salty sea. The second, more plausible, was that Israel was constructing a huge textile complex to provide employment to the thousands of new immigrants being moved into the Negev.
Supported fully by Peres, Blumberg tried to conceal his agency’s existence even from the other branches of the intelligence community—and from Harel.
“Lakam was established behind my back and without my knowledge,” Harel recalled angrily. “I had my suspicions. I knew that someone was running around the Ministry of Defense dealing with various matters, and that when he saw anyone from the Mossad he would make a point of crossing to the other side of the street. It was a mysterious body, formed in a conspiratorial manner. Deceptively. Even Ben-Gurion did not know.”
Peres felt that he did not need Harel’s permission, even though the Memuneh was Ben-Gurion’s trusted head of the security services, to set up the special agency for nuclear security. The new reactor from France was, after all, even more secret than any previous hush-hush topics.
Blumberg was not bothered by others’ envy or complaints.
While the Lakam chief protected the secret on the ground, a gathering storm came in by air. On a reconnaissance mission in 1960, an American U-2 jet photographed the facility, and U.S. intelligence analysts had no trouble identifying its true purpose. From that moment, American spies sniffed around Dimona, and U.S. political leaders became concerned.
Based on a tip from sources in Washington, the American and British press reported that Israel was developing an atomic bomb.
The United States government demanded the whole truth from the Israelis. The CIA director, Allen Dulles, argued in a meeting with President Eisenhower that Dimona was a “plutonium production plant,” and Defense Secretary Thomas Gates went even further: “Our information is that the plant is not for peaceful purposes.”
There was also pressure from President Charles de Gaulle in Paris. He decided in May 1960 that France would supply no more uranium to Dimona. The president did not want Israel to produce plutonium at its reactor, because this would be a step toward building an atomic bomb. Peres, the Francophile, continued to be optimistic, for several weeks refusing to admit that the alliance he had built with Paris was becoming very shaky.
The danger to Israel’s most clandestine defense project was finally recognized, and Ben-Gurion flew to Paris on short notice to see de Gaulle on June 13, 1960. In his Élysée Palace, the French president asked bluntly, “Why does Israel need a nuclear reactor at all?”
Ben-Gurion answered that it was not a military project, and that no facility for removing weapons-grade plutonium would be added at Dimona. Countries working on nuclear potential have been known to ignore any principle of veracity. As Peres did all he could to leverage his longtime friendships with key officials in France, Israel managed to obtain more nuclear materials.
Before long, the 24-megawatt heavy-water reactor at Dimona—its capacity reportedly expanded with French assistance to 75 megawatts—could produce enough plutonium for at least one Hiroshima-sized 20-kiloton bomb each year.
Foreign pressure kept growing and could not be ignored. Ben-Gurion had no choice but to say something: the first public confirmation that Israel had joined the nuclear age. From the podium of the Knesset on December 21, 1960, he announced that Israel was building a second nuclear research reactor—“designed exclusively for peaceful purposes” such as the needs of “industry, agriculture, health, and science.” The prime minister said that Israel would eventually generate electricity, using the atomic facility, and he called reports of a program aimed at building bombs “a deliberate or unwitting untruth.”
Ben-Gurion himself, however, engaged in a witting untruth. This was for the sake of a higher cause: ensuring his country’s existence in a hostile world, as he saw it, by adding the ultimate defense known in the world as a nuclear arsenal.
A visit to the Dimona reactor by two American physicists helped ease Washington’s inquisitiveness, although they were afforded only a superficial view by charming Israeli hosts. They detected no sign of a weapons program at the reactor site, and that greatly mollified the new president, John F. Kennedy, in 1961.
Ben-Gurion, from time to time, confirmed publicly his belief that Israel needed to “build up a deterrent force” to ensure that Egypt would not try to crush the tiny Jewish state. Israeli officials told American counterparts—without saying that his country had a nuclear weapons program—that a priority had to be preventing another Holocaust from ever occurring.
The CIA naturally concluded that Israel had a bomb-making project at Dimona. President Kennedy again started asking questions, and by a wonderful coincidence he found himself quizzing one of the founders of the Israeli nuclear enterprise.
It was April 2, 1963, and Shimon Peres was visiting Washington in his capacity as director-general of the Defense Ministry. Invited by Myer (Mike) Feldman, Kennedy’s advisor on Jewish affairs, Peres was strolling through some White House hallways with Feldman. The main subject was to be Israel’s purchase of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, the first significant weapons deal between the two countries.
Apparently just by chance, the president walked by and suggested that they meet in the Oval Office. That conversation lasted 20 minutes, devoted almost entirely to Israel’s intentions at Dimona.
According to documents in the JFK Library in Boston, Kennedy told Peres that day that the United States was closely following the development of Israel’s nuclear potential. The president wondered what Peres might care to add.
Peres was taken by surprise, but he responded with a policy declaration: “I can tell you clearly that we shall not be the ones to introduce nuclear weapons into the area. We will not be the first to do so.”
That was a rhetorical stroke of genius designed to divert Kennedy’s pressure and any deterioration of bilateral relations. Israel, at that time, was searching for a new grand ally, because de Gaulle made it clear that he was ending France’s special relationship with the Jewish state.
For half a century, successive Israeli governments would continue to use the phrase Peres invented during his chat with Kennedy: They will not be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons. Some analysts called that an out-and-out falsehood; others posited that Israel might have left all of its nuclear warheads and bombs slightly unfinished, with just a “turn of the screw” needed to make them operational.
Still taking an interest in the subject, right up until his assassination in November 1963, Kennedy insisted that Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, permit visits to Dimona by American inspectors once or twice a year. It was agreed that the resu
lts would be shown to Egypt, to allay Arab concerns about Israel’s scientific power.
Blumberg’s agency, Lakam, responded with what was reported to be a sophisticated deception and concealment program. The American visitors were escorted at all times, and the Israelis tried to keep close tabs on them.
Because the dates of the visits were set months in advance, the hosts at Dimona had time to build double walls, remove doors, and construct new entrances and control panels—all aimed at fooling the foreigners into believing that only research and industrial projects were underway.
Information that leaked out later indicated that Israel cleverly built the separation plant—where plutonium was produced, to be used in the cores of bombs—deep underground, without leaving any signs on the surface.
The Americans thus saw no evidence of weapons work, but some of them were suspicious and peeled away from their Israeli minders long enough to collect samples of soil, rock, and vegetation from the Dimona area. When they returned to the United States, lab tests on the samples could indicate the telltale radiation of high-level enrichment.
Israeli security chiefs tried to make the sample-collecting process difficult.
John Hadden served as the CIA’s station chief in the Tel Aviv embassy through most of the 1960s. He developed a fondness for Israelis but constantly believed that they were lying to him on many issues.
Hadden felt that while politicians described the United States and Israel as friends, that was nothing like true, old chums who played together and went to school together.
The CIA man observed, with admiration, that the founders of the Jewish state could outwit just about anyone. Like other U.S. servicemen in Europe at the end of World War II, he had seen Holocaust survivors as the cleverest refugees: smuggling goods and smuggling themselves to Mediterranean ports to sail to the future state of Israel.
When he arrived in Tel Aviv and settled in, Hadden found that official liaison meetings for the purpose of exchanging intelligence—supposedly a hallmark of cooperation—were unsettling and “crazed.”
His prior experiences in such meetings had been in West Germany, where the two sides traded and shared intelligence in a dignified and fairly clear way.
Israeli intelligence men, according to Hadden, would come in “stiff-necked and clutching their files.” Instead of offering some data and placing it on the table, “they would stage a parachute drop 20 miles behind our lines”—in the form of 45-minute diatribes on all the terrible challenges to Israel’s security, listing all the intelligence and military material they needed for their survival.
“Christ! There you were in your chair,” Hadden recalled, “and they were shouting way over behind you. Absolutely outrageous! They were asking for the goddamned moon!”
Eventually, both sides brought their mutual interests into focus and achieved a high degree of sharing.
Hadden also remembered a diplomatic dinner in a private Israeli home in 1963, his first year in Tel Aviv. He was seated across from Colonel David Carmon, the number-two man at Aman. Hadden had started taking private lessons in Hebrew, and he thought he overheard the hostess murmuring something to Carmon about hoping that the American would drink too much and then talk too much.
According to Hadden, he turned to Carmon with a smile and said, “Nichnas yayin, yotzeh sod!”—Hebrew for “Wine goes in, a secret comes out!” He enjoyed the look of horror on the colonel’s face. The next day, Carmon ordered everyone at Aman not to speak Hebrew around Hadden.
Naturally, the CIA station chief was active in trying to keep up with Israel’s most secret project. He traveled to the Negev on occasion, as the CIA wanted photographs and soil samples. He knew that he was under surveillance. Once, when he was driving on a road near the nuclear facility, a military helicopter landed near his car. Security personnel—from Lakam, although Hadden did not know that agency’s name—demanded to see his identification. After flashing his U.S. diplomatic passport, he drove off, fully convinced that there was a lot more going on in Dimona than Israel ever admitted.
He believed in “going native,” to the extent of dabbling in some of his host country’s passions. He developed an interest in archeology, seeing how Israelis were obsessed with their ties to the ancient land. “When you’re in Israel,” Hadden said, “you dig.”
Digging, in the literal sense, led the CIA man to an extraordinary fortnight of private conversations with none other than Ben-Gurion, now retired. This stroke of luck for U.S. intelligence came in 1965, when Hadden’s wife was working on a dig—with some other “embassy wives”—at an ancient Jewish site near the Dead Sea.
Hadden drove three hours from Tel Aviv to visit, which provided a fine pretext to drive fairly close to Dimona.
That night, sitting around a campfire, Mrs. Hadden suffered severe stomach pain. He rushed his wife to a hospital in the Negev desert’s largest city, Beersheba, and she underwent surgery on her colon. She was treated very well, and received an unexpected bonus: The lady sharing her semi-private hospital room was none other than Paula Ben-Gurion, the Old Man’s wife.
Hadden made a point of driving to the hospital every afternoon, because those were also David Ben-Gurion’s visiting hours. The spy and the legendary politician had a lot of long chats during the 14 days that their wives were roommates.
The American did not learn any nuclear secrets from the man who launched the secret Dimona project, but he did understand Zionism and Israeli motivations a lot better. “Imagine two weeks with Churchill!” Hadden enthused, years later. “That’s what it was like!”
The visits to Dimona by American nuclear inspectors continued until 1969. They found no incriminating evidence of weapons work. That year, the two governments reached a secret understanding that stopped the visits.
Both capitals, Jerusalem and Washington, had new leaders. Golda Meir had been selected by the Labor Party to replace Eshkol, who had died of illness in February. A month before that, Richard Nixon was sworn in as president and brought in Henry Kissinger as national security advisor.
Kissinger, although not actively Jewish, was always aware that his parents had brought him to America from Germany to escape the Nazi system which took the lives of many of his relatives. He could be tough when negotiating with or lecturing Israeli politicians, but he did feel a strong commitment to the existence of a nation that provided shelter to Jews.
The trio—Golda, Nixon, and Kissinger—agreed that no more inspections of Dimona would be required. The CIA already concluded that Israel had built a few nuclear devices, and fruitless inspections now seemed superfluous. Moreover, the new White House team had apparently concluded that an unquestionably strong Israel would be good for American interests: pushing the Arab countries to negotiate peace by dispelling their dreams that they could, with Soviet assistance, wipe out the Jewish state.
Under Nixon, who did not seem alarmed by or opposed to Israel being a nuclear power, the U.S. government accepted a new formula. It was intended to update and clarify Israel’s pledge not to be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East.
As drafted by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Yitzhak Rabin, according to officials who spoke about it many years later, it was now understood that nuclear weapons would be perceived as such only if and when they become operational. The key threshold would be a nuclear test explosion.
In effect, Israel was agreeing not to conduct a nuclear test. In return, it was freed from the burden of inconvenient American inspection visits.
Israel, by standing firm but explaining very little, had won the right to be a unique exception to United States policy favoring nuclear non-proliferation. Israeli leaders never agreed to sign international treaties on the subject, yet they continued—time and again—to hope, and even expect, that America would support the unspoken Israeli nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.
Chapter Six
Harel the Crusader
Although Isser Harel was mostly excluded from the nu
clear project that Israeli leaders viewed as the nation’s ultimate defense, he wielded tremendous authority over all other security matters. After heading Shin Bet from 1948 to 1952, Harel added the Mossad directorship to his responsibilities from 1952 to 1963, a longer tenure than any intelligence chief has had in Israel.
Harel spent a lot of his time and energy unmasking men who were spying on Israel—working either for the Soviet bloc or for an Arab government. He was an excellent detector of disloyalty. His naturally suspicious nature seemed perfect for that part of his job.
Yet he failed, for several years, to discover a Communist-bloc mole buried inside Shin Bet. The man was Levi Levi: a simple name, but one of the most daring spies to penetrate Israeli society.
He was born as Lucjan Levi in Poland in September 1922. Levi was an activist in a Zionist youth movement, and he survived the Holocaust by escaping to the Soviet Union. In 1948 he would move to Israel, which seemed perfectly natural.
Many years later, documents found in Poland’s national archives showed that Russian secret police had recruited him during the war, and then he served the Polish authorities by spying on fellow Jews.
“During the period of his collaboration on home territory,” one declassified file revealed, “he delivered a lot of valuable and verified information about Zionist activities in Poland.”
The Communist government in Warsaw expected Levi to spy inside Israel. Indeed, by showing he had a talent for security work, he got a job at Shin Bet. After a few weeks, he was placed in the Special Unit—the predecessor of what would become the operations team for Shin Bet and the Mossad. The unit had no more than 20 staffers, most veterans of the pre-state Haganah.
Levi was different from his colleagues. His manners and sense of dress, including bow ties, did not match theirs. While they smoked cheap, unfiltered cigarettes, he was smoking American cigarettes, such as Kent. When they would drink inferior rough liquor, he would offer them foreign brand-name brandies and whiskey—certainly a treat in mid-1950s Israel.