by Dan Raviv
Yet the project would require raw materials, know-how, and the right technology and equipment.
Entrusted with nurturing, protecting, and zealously hiding a weapon that Israel was intent on developing—but hoped never to use—Binyamin Blumberg continued toiling in anonymity. And he toiled even harder.
His Science Liaison Bureau, Lakam, moved out of the Defense Ministry compound, where it might have been noticed. He opened his office in an ordinary civilian building on Tel Aviv’s Carlebach Street, very close to the large Ma’ariv building, but no one at that newspaper seemed to know about him and his unmentionable mission.
Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s desire for a nuclear option, to put tiny Israel in the big league with the United States and other great powers, remained strong in the hearts of top Israeli leaders. Shimon Peres made sure that funding and facilities were always available, as needed; their budgets usually were hidden in those of other defense projects.
Blumberg in 1957 had begun to procure everything Israel needed to build a nuclear bomb, and all through the 1960s he stepped up the effort. He correctly believed that official French assistance could not be counted on forever, and he realized that no open source of help would be found.
President John F. Kennedy, and even his friendly successor, Lyndon Johnson, would never provide supplies for this project. Other Western governments either danced to the American tune or feared the reactions of Arab countries.
Blumberg concluded that Lakam would have to operate outside the borders of Israel, effectively on a worldwide scale, so he knew he would need help from other secret agencies.
First, he would have to make the effort to heal old wounds and rivalries within the Israeli intelligence community.
“I was suspicious of Blumberg and his people,” Meir Amit admitted—unknowingly echoing the words of his own rival, Isser Harel, who a few years earlier held almost identical sentiments about Lakam. Still, a project that the nation’s leaders saw as a high priority demanded the attention of the secret agencies. Although suspicions never fully evaporated, amicable cooperation developed between Lakam and Amit’s Mossad.
Blumberg also managed to overcome a bureaucratic battle with the Foreign Ministry and got authorization to send his own scientific attachés to Israeli embassies abroad. Carefully selected from a pool of engineers, physicists, and chemists with security clearance, many of them had worked at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission or in military-related research. They were ordered to pay close attention to any new scientific development, to buy all the journals and professional publications, and to establish friendly contacts with scientists in their countries of residence.
Lakam officers also mapped the wide terrain of Israeli academia, pinpointing professors and researchers who were heading abroad for exchange programs and major conferences. If they were considered trustworthy, they were approached and were asked to do the government some favors. Very few refused.
The requests were usually tiny, involving technical information from open sources such as magazines. There were, however, cases in which academics were asked to steal scientific materials—including blueprints and studies—from research centers where they were spending sabbaticals.
At times, the scientific attachés at embassies abroad were clearly not professional spy handlers. They were protected, however, by diplomatic immunity, so at least they would not end up in prison.
One senior Israeli scientist, who was studying at a prestigious German institute, secretly photocopied various documents on a regular basis. He brought the copies home, and once a week the science attaché of the Israeli embassy would come to pick them up. The attaché, a Lakam man, displayed an unconscionable lack of responsibility, however. He often arrived late for meetings and sometimes did not show up at all. The two Israelis were lucky that the host country suspected nothing.
It was actually harder for Israelis to commit such deeds in America. From the late 1960s onward, America’s intelligence community kept tabs on nearly every Israeli scientist who visited the United States. The Federal Bureau of Investigation simply assumed that Israel, as a young and ambitious country, was engaged in espionage ceaselessly and everywhere.
Professor Yuval Ne’eman, who had developed a host of useful gadgets and technical systems for Aman and also served as a senior member of the IAEC, saw the suspicion up close in the 1960s after arriving at Caltech in Pasadena for a semester of physics research.
“Professor, I am from the department,” an unfamiliar voice on the telephone announced. “Can we meet?”
Ne’eman assumed that the person speaking was a member of the university faculty. To his consternation, the man who arrived for the appointment introduced himself instead as an investigator for the U.S. Department of Justice. “Are you Colonel Ne’eman?” the American asked.
“Yes,” Ne’eman replied, somewhat surprised to be addressed by his military rank and realizing that the investigator was in fact an FBI special agent. The Israeli explained that he was no longer in his country’s military intelligence; he had left, and now worked at Tel Aviv University.
“But we know that you are still involved in spying,” said the American. “I’d advise you to stop immediately.”
Ne’eman vehemently denied the allegation, and the conversation ended abruptly. This had obviously been an attempt to intimidate him, probably in reaction to a visit Ne’eman had just made to the federal nuclear research center in Livermore, east of San Francisco. Considering what the United States was starting to figure out about Israel’s Dimona facilities, a tour of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seemed important.
A few weeks later, Ne’eman moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where another Justice Department official paid a visit—this time demanding that Ne’eman register as a “foreign agent” of the Israeli government.
Doing so would have harmed Ne’eman’s reputation as a physicist, and his travel would have been restricted by U.S. authorities; but the U.S.-Israel intelligence connection was able to help him. The liaison officer representing Mossad’s Tevel department in Washington lodged a direct appeal with the CIA, which was able to cancel the requirement that the Israeli register as an agent.
These incidents should have alarmed Blumberg and his assistants, yet the Israeli fishing expeditions in America continued. Years later, in the 1980s, such sloppiness would lead to exposure and a life sentence for Jonathan Pollard, an American naval analyst spying for Israel, who was run by Lakam. (See Chapter 18.)
The entirely anonymous agency also turned, in the 1960s, to a small but growing network of Israelis who did business overseas. One of the pillars of Lakam’s risky operation was Eliyahu Sakharov, a successful businessman with a strong streak of patriotism.
Born in Jerusalem in 1914 to a wealthy family of Jewish traders, he joined the Haganah during the pre-state years and became a personal assistant to Shaul Avigur, the head of the illegal immigration agency Aliya B.
When Israel declared its independence, Sakharov was sent by the organization to Czechoslovakia to arrange the purchase of German-made warplanes. The sale by a Communist country was approved by Stalin, as a way of helping Israel so that it, too, would become a Soviet satellite.
Sakharov would be dispatched later to the United States to arrange more weapons smuggling from America, Mexico, and Latin American countries—on occasion with the help of gangsters, including notorious Jews such as Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel.
After reaching the rank of lieutenant general in the IDF, Sakharov joined the family business as a leading importer of lumber and timber for the furniture industry. One day in the early 1960s, he was on a flight home from West Germany, on one of his frequent business trips to buy machinery, and was seated next to one of his old friends, Amos Manor.
Sakharov mentioned to the Shin Bet chief that he had just met with German industrialists involved in the chemicals trade. Manor was highly interested and said that he would get in touch with him soon about something.
Instead, it was Binyamin Blumberg who phoned Sakharov a few days later. They met at Blumberg’s office. The security chief asked Sakharov if he would volunteer to approach the German businessmen and try to cajole them into procuring materials that Israel needed for a sensitive and secret project. Sakharov said he would try.
Though offered reimbursement for his expenses, Sakharov declined and paid for his travel and efforts out of his own pocket.
It turned out that the West Germans he would approach were former Nazis. On several occasions and on disparate subjects, Israeli intelligence showed no inhibitions or bad conscience about working with men of such background.
The West Germans had a company, Asmara Chemie, named for the capital of Eritrea, then part of Ethiopia, where one of the partners had gotten his post-war start in business. The company was wheeling and dealing in chemicals, weapons, and most anything it could buy and sell for cash. Its main office was in Wiesbaden, West Germany.
Sakharov’s principal contact there was Herbert Schulzen, a veteran of the Nazi air force who was wounded when he crashed his plane in Denmark. Schulzen was a colorful extrovert, as well as a shrewd businessman, and had close contacts with West Germany’s army and atomic energy commission.
Sakharov made a point of purchasing glues from Asmara for his timber business and then invited Schulzen to Israel. The ex-Luftwaffe officer, still convalescing from his wartime injuries, decided to come—attracted by the prospect of great medical care. He had a lot of time for socializing, too.
Sakharov introduced him to Blumberg and other officials of the defense ministry. The Israelis referred to him as “the Nazi pilot,” and they went out drinking together in Tel Aviv. Schulzen enjoyed the feeling that the Jews did not hate him and in fact needed him. He decided to help them.
An Israeli who was close to the operation, when asked why former Nazis would help a Jewish state, pondered before replying: “Some of them did it out of sympathy for Israel; others, for financial gain. In any case, we knew how to play on their guilt feeling, as Germans, toward us Jews. We took advantage of it.”
The Blumberg-Sakharov project needed calcium, a material used in treating sensitive metals. It is also used on “yellowcake”—uranium hexafluoride—a material necessary for the production of a nuclear bomb. At that time, the appropriate form of calcium was produced by Degussa, a German company that made gold bars and industrial metals. Degussa had profiteered during the war from gold teeth and other metal items stolen from murdered Jews.
Before long, Sakharov was unofficially Lakam’s “case officer,” running a network of agents whom he and Bloomberg dubbed with Biblical code names: Giv’on, Ayalon, Shemesh, and Yare’ach (the latter two being the Hebrew words for sun and moon, alluding to the tale of Joshua stopping the sun over a place called Giv’on and the moon in the valley of Ayalon).
Schulzen’s Asmara served as a front for the purchases by Israel, in exchange for hefty commissions. Shipments of chemicals, metals, and other materials for the Dimona nuclear project began to arrive from Degussa, usually via other European ports, disguised as cargo for Sakharov’s lumber and wood-processing businesses.
Schulzen probably did not know this had anything to do with nuclear weapons, but he had to know he was part of something clandestine and important to the Jewish state.
The acquisition chain almost came to an abrupt end in 1966. A shipment of calcium was loaded in barrels aboard an Israeli vessel named Tsefat, owned by Zim—then Israel’s government-run shipping company.
The Tsefat sailed from West Germany to Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, to pick up more cargo. While anchored at Europe’s busiest port, a fire broke out aboard the ship. The local Dutch fire department extinguished the blaze by flooding the storage spaces of the Tsefat. The contact between water and the calcium caused an effervescent chemical reaction, and the falsely labeled barrels jumped into the air. Television crews and photographers took plenty of pictures of a wondrous scene of smoke, steam, and leaping barrels.
The cargo calmed itself, but the crew of the ship fled, and other ships refused to tie up near the Israeli vessel. Confusion, embarrassment, and attention compounded.
Sakharov flew from Tel Aviv to Rotterdam, via Paris, to see how he could help. While in Paris, he heard from Blumberg that atomic energy experts believed the situation could be dangerous—that perhaps they should advise the mayor of Rotterdam to evacuate residential neighborhoods near the port.
Sakharov refused to follow that advice, deciding that he would do everything he could to save the precious cargo for Israel. After all, a lot of clandestine efforts had been invested in obtaining those chemicals.
When he got to the port, he introduced himself as the cargo owner and insisted that it was not hazardous. He said the contents were needed for special glue for his furniture factory’s planks and boards in Israel, but he declined to identify the precise chemicals. He claimed that the formula was an industrial secret.
Sakharov boarded the Tsefat to show that it was not dangerous.
Finally, after he mollified the port officials by paying extra fees, everyone was persuaded to forget about the furor. He managed to summon another Israeli ship to pick up the cargo. Everything was taken away, including empty barrels and some material that spilled into the harbor.
The most important and precious element for Dimona was uranium, the fuel to run the reactor. France did keep its promise to deliver uranium, but when relations became strained Israel’s atomic energy officials feared they would run out of fuel. Blumberg was instructed to find alternative sources.
In the almost six decades after the construction of the reactor, Israeli scientists and Lakam’s acquisition teams secured four providers. France was first, then came some European and American companies, followed by South Africa in the 1970s. The fourth source was Israel itself, as rich reservoirs of chemicals were mined and extracted from the Negev desert.
There was an American man in the nuclear business who clearly helped Israel, but in ways that no one was willing to explain fully. Zalman Shapiro was the founder of Numec—the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation—in Apollo, Pennsylvania, a tiny town northeast of Pittsburgh
Born in Ohio in 1921, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, Shapiro lost many relatives in the Holocaust and himself faced anti-Semitism even while earning his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1948. The founding of the State of Israel that same year clearly inspired him, as he joined Zionist organizations including Friends of the Technion, which raised funds for Israel’s top technological university.
His company supplied uranium to nuclear reactors in the United States, but in the early 1960s, Numec seemed to have an inordinate number of foreign visitors. They came mainly from France and Israel.
America’s Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC, also noticed that Numec’s records showed significant quantities of enriched uranium missing. No proof of any crime was found, but in 15 years of investigations, the AEC reported that 587 pounds of uranium had mysteriously vanished—enough, in theory, to make at least 11 atomic bombs.
FBI investigators focused on Shapiro’s ties with Israel, but could not arrive at any clear conclusion. They tapped his phone calls and questioned him, yet he denied ever diverting anything to anyone. Still, the FBI and the CIA believed that he had somehow gotten weapons-grade uranium to Israel.
Investigators said that Shapiro did admit to having meetings with Avraham Hermoni, the scientific counselor at the Israeli embassy in Washington. Hermoni, in secret, was the Lakam station chief.
While the CIA was not aware of the existence of Lakam within the Defense Ministry, it did know that Israeli intelligence was deeply involved in industrial espionage aimed at helping military projects. A classified booklet written by the CIA in 1976, Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services Survey, makes no mention of Lakam or of Binyamin Blumberg.
Investigations of Shapiro and Numec, as well as probes into other nuclear-related matters, caused a great deal of concern in Israel. The
Mossad’s best friend in the CIA, James Angleton, had shielded Israeli projects from scrutiny, but his influence diminished by the late 1960s. A new CIA director, Richard Helms, was notably suspicious about Israeli motives and actions.
To explore the situation in Washington and in Pennsylvania, four Israelis—including Hermoni; the Mossad’s kidnapping expert, Rafi Eitan; and future Shin Bet director Avraham Bendor (who later changed his surname to Shalom)—dropped in on Shapiro’s Numec plant in September 1968. Although Eitan and Bendor were certainly not scientists by vocation, they listed themselves as “chemists for the Defense Ministry” in an application for U.S. government clearance to visit the nuclear facility.
When they returned home from their damage assessment mission, Eitan and Bendor/Shalom reported that Israel was still enjoying the benefit of any doubt and could get away with quiet uranium procurement.
By 1976, American suspicions grew with a further twist.
The CIA’s deputy director for science and technology, Carl Duckett, told selected members of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission what he had concluded—largely based on consultations with Edward Teller, a Hungarian Jew who grew up to be hailed as “the father of America’s hydrogen bomb” and visited Israeli atomic scientists as Yuval Ne’eman’s guest. The conventional understanding among researchers is that Duckett told the meeting that Israel at that point, in 1976, already had possessed nuclear bombs for about eight years.
Yet, one of the members of the NRC who heard Duckett gave a completely different account in 2004. Victor Gilinsky wrote that the CIA science chief’s purpose had been “to deal with rumors about a deeper secret in the CIA reports, one that had an even bigger potential for political disaster, and one that I believe was the real reason for the hyper-secrecy.”
Gilinsky continued: “What Duckett confirmed, to everyone’s astonishment, was that the CIA believed that the nuclear explosives in Israel’s first several bombs, about 100 kilograms of bomb-grade uranium in all, came from material that was missing” from Numec, which “had exceptionally close and suspicious ties to Israel. The firm’s sloppy material accounting could have masked the removal of the bomb-grade uranium. After numerous investigations and reinvestigations, the facts remain unclear.”