Spies Against Armageddon

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Spies Against Armageddon Page 24

by Dan Raviv


  It may be mere coincidence, but in the 1990s the philanthropic Shapiro was listed as a prominent contributor to the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center, a non-profit group hoping to build a museum in Israel, closely linked with the intelligence community. Its founder and first president was Meir Amit, succeeded by another former Mossad director, Efraim Halevy. Considered a brilliant inventor, Shapiro clearly knew a lot and made friends with some of the most important people in Israel’s clandestine defense system.

  Blumberg’s Lakam certainly kept working with the Mossad and Sakharov’s German network, executing stunningly innovative missions to acquire materials for Israel’s secret weapon. One of the most complicated, successful, and daring capers—stretching from Africa to Europe, to the high seas of the Mediterranean—became known as the Plumbat Affair.

  This imaginative gem of spycraft would be the inspiration for a thriller by Ken Follett, Triple, and in real life a reminder to authorities of the kind of smuggling that could deceive customs officials and nuclear inspectors everywhere and anytime.

  In essence, Israel managed in 1968 to purchase a huge quantity of radioactive “yellowcake” in sealed oil drums mislabeled “plumbat”—meaning that they contained lead. The sale was made by a Belgian company, and the cargo was shipped illegally under the nose of Euratom—the nuclear regulatory body for Europe—and then vanished, as far as official shipping records were concerned.

  It all began in December 1965, when Sakharov wrote a letter to top officials at Israel’s defense ministry. He said that one of his business acquaintances in Belgium had told him about a surplus of uranium simply waiting for a buyer. Most ministry officials were skeptical, but Blumberg had high faith in Sakharov’s ability and asked the clever volunteer to coordinate the entire effort.

  It would take nearly three years to design the almost perfect plot. When all seemed ready, Sakharov asked his German friend Schulzen—always happy to earn fat commissions—to have the Asmara company place the order to purchase the uranium.

  It had been mined in the former Belgian Congo, the same African source that provided uranium for the first American atomic bombs. A company in Belgium, Société Générale de Minerais (SGM), had been sitting on the material for years and was happy to sell it—around 200 tons of yellowcake—for a total of four million dollars.

  Asmara’s office in Germany told SGM and Euratom that the uranium would be part of a chemical process for producing colored fabrics. The end user was to be Saica, an Italian company in Milan specializing in textile dyes. Saica’s chief executive was a good friend of Schulzen. Euratom approved the transaction, as the radioactive materials would simply be going from one European country to another for an industrial purpose—and the regulators did not even think about the absurdity of Saica, practically bankrupt and lacking any proper facilities, using uranium.

  Meantime, Sakharov worked with Rafi Eitan, then head of Mossad operations in Europe, to register a shipping company in Switzerland by the name of Biscayne Trading Corporation. Using a mysterious Turkish maritime intermediary and a Norwegian ship broker, the corporation purchased a small and unimpressive cargo ship called Scheersberg A, built in Germany and flying Liberia’s flag of convenience.

  The owner of the corporation was Dan Ert-Aerbel, who five years later would be arrested in Norway for his involvement in the Mossad’s mistaken assassination of a waiter. The Danish-born Israeli had been working for the Mossad, on and off, since 1962. In 1973, after mistakenly revealing his claustrophobia, he told Norwegian interrogators everything: not only about the murder in Lillehammer, but also, “I was the owner of the uranium ship.”

  The Plumbat plot, though complicated, went off without a hitch. The uranium was packed into 560 drums by the Belgian vendor in November 1968, then transported by train to the port of Antwerp and loaded onto the Scheersberg A. The ship’s captain, a trusted officer in the Israeli navy, wrote in its log book that the destination would be Genoa, but it never got to Italy.

  He changed course in the Mediterranean and rendezvoused with another Israeli merchant vessel that was being guarded by two missile boats. Eitan and Sakharov had also purchased this ship, and its captain was Itai Be’eri—a neat bit of historical irony, as his late father Isser had been the first commander of military intelligence, fired for ordering a wrongful execution in 1948 and for being too rough on other suspects. The young Be’eri now got to restore some family honor.

  Within a few hours, the drums containing radioactive yellowcake were winched from one ship to the other, which then sailed to the new Israeli port of Ashdod. Blumberg and Sakharov waited for it on the piers and witnessed the unloading of the cargo. Trucks then took the drums to the nuclear bomb factory in Dimona.

  The Scheersberg A, two weeks after it was due in Italy, instead docked at a port in eastern Turkey. The ship was empty, and the captain and crew immediately disappeared. Several books were written about this controversial, impressive, and never acknowledged achievement by Israeli intelligence. But neither Blumberg nor Sakharov was mentioned at all.

  Israel pulled off another coup on the water on Christmas Eve in 1969, when navy personnel—with the tacit cooperation of some French officers—took control of five missile boats that Israel had purchased from France and sailed them out of the harbor at Cherbourg. President de Gaulle, punishing Israel for the 1967 war, had imposed an arms embargo. He was livid that the Israelis now, as he saw it, were behaving like thieves in the night.

  Lakam and the Mossad helped the navy by providing yet another cargo vessel—purchased by phony companies in Norway and Panama—to refuel the missile boats on their voyage to Israel. Those small but potent attack vessels would become very important to Israel, first in the October 1973 war and even beyond that, as government-owned Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) was able to adapt the French model and built even better missile boats.

  Sakharov’s friendships proved valuable again, when the entire network built around Asmara Chemie came under scrutiny. Germany’s domestic security service started investigating illegal activities by Asmara. Prime Minister Golda Meir was made aware of the threat, and she was concerned. Sakharov rushed to Germany to coordinate cover stories with Schulzen, but the probe continued.

  He then went to see another former Nazi pilot, now an industrialist in Zurich, Switzerland. Their bond was not business, but a shared passion for music. The industrialist had another friend, Horst Ehmke, who was the West German cabinet minister overseeing his country’s intelligence agencies. Sakharov pointed out that the German government could fall if everything about Asmara were revealed. The ex-pilot contacted Ehmke, and the investigation was dropped.

  Lakam’s next coup was in Switzerland. Israeli operatives penetrated a company that manufactured engines for France’s Mirage warplane, using the classic intelligence technique of looking for a weak link in the staff. They identified a Swiss engineer, Alfred Frauenknecht, who had several promising attributes: his resentment of the company, his need for cash to afford having a mistress, and his positive feelings for Israel after the Six-Day War.

  He was rather easy to persuade to provide something of immense value to Israel: a complete set of blueprints for the Mirage jet. Frauenknecht accepted cash, but made sure to point out that he was acting mainly out of personal commitment.

  The engineer got his nephew to help him make copies and deliver them to a truck driver. The documents were then driven to the Israeli military attaché in Rome.

  Swiss authorities became suspicious and tried to arrest the driver, but he managed to escape and called his Israeli controller for instructions. The controller told him to drive to Germany, and one of the Asmara Chemie executives then helped get the precious documents to the Israeli embassy in Bonn.

  The driver was then smuggled to Belgium, where Eitan sheltered him for a while and then sent him safely to Israel. The driver was not Israeli, but he was safe.

  Frauenknecht, however, was arrested; and Swiss interrogators persuaded h
im to confess. He said the Israelis had promised him a million dollars for the Mirage plans, and so far he had received $200,000. A Swiss court in 1971 found him guilty of espionage, but the judges seemed to respect his motives—as he still stressed his affection toward Israel, rather than greed—and the convicted spy spent only one year in prison.

  That same year, Israel’s air force started flying a new, domestically-produced warplane: the Nesher (Eagle). It was obviously a copy of France’s Mirage 5.

  IAI added modifications to make an even better jet fighter, the Kfir (Cub), which was proudly unveiled in April 1975. The Kfir also bore an uncanny resemblance to the Mirage, and the man responsible for that—Frauenknecht—made his first visit to Israel to see the inaugural flight, looking up and knowing he had something to do with that silver streak across the Mediterranean sky.

  Israeli intelligence chiefs were ambivalent, however, in their attitude toward the man who was caught and served time. The Israeli government did not even pay his airfare from Switzerland, and he felt abandoned by his operators.

  While the Swiss spy was bitter, Blumberg’s reputation within the intelligence community grew to mythic proportions. Few knew exactly what he did, but senior operatives and defense staffers knew he was good at it. Only the highest officials linked Blumberg with Dimona and atomic weapons.

  Another pillar supporting the nuclear project and working closely with Blumberg was a young, ambitious Israeli—Arnon Milchan—who, years later, would be one of Hollywood’s wealthiest movie producers.

  Born in 1945, Milchan inherited a small chemical and fertilizers business from his father and expanded it in the 1960s and ‘70s by winning licenses to represent such global giants as America’s DuPont. He also brokered deals for defense contractors and was paid sizeable fees.

  In the late 1960s, Milchan had a key role in doing the CIA a favor in pre-revolutionary Iran. The Americans were hoping to build a large listening post there. The Shah was among the regional players extremely impressed by Israel’s swift victory over Nasser and Arab nationalism in 1967. Thus, he was receptive to a request by Milchan and other Israelis to allow the CIA to build its listening post on Iranian soil: a billion-dollar collection of dishes, antennas, and computers to harvest electronic intelligence (elint) from the nearby Soviet Union. As part of the deal, the facility would occasionally help the Shah by turning its “ears” toward Iran’s neighbors—Pakistan and Iraq.

  Milchan, who was in his early 20s, also earned commissions from American companies providing the elint equipment.

  His “recruiter” for Israel’s nuclear project was Peres, who introduced Milchan to Blumberg. Despite a generation gap between the latter two and their different personalities—Milchan was funny and talkative, while Blumberg was quiet and monkish—they struck up a friendship. “The only times I have ever seen Blumberg smile,” said another Lakam operative, “was when he was with Milchan.”

  They also got a lot of secret business done. In 1972, guided precisely by Blumberg and Israel’s atomic commission, Milchan was tasked with purchasing blueprints for centrifuges. Israeli scientists wanted to build their own devices for spinning uranium to weapons-grade potency.

  That would give Israel another avenue, enriching uranium—and not only the reactor route—for making nuclear arms.

  The Dimona project was mostly based around the reactor, which Israeli engineers had made much more powerful since the French initially built it. The reactor turned uranium in fuel rods into more radioactive and volatile plutonium. Plutonium bombs were typically smaller—requiring less than five kilograms of fissile material each, compared with over 25 kilograms for enriched uranium bombs. Plutonium devices were more apt to be miniaturized, to be the warheads on missiles.

  Milchan was instructed to befriend a corrupt scientist at Urenco, a joint British-Dutch-German consortium that produced the centrifuges. With his charm and a lavish offer of $250,000, Milchan was successful.

  As agreed, the scientist brought the blueprints to his home for a weekend and left his back door unlocked. Israelis from the Caesarea operations department subtly surrounded the house, and Mossad photographers copied the thousands of documents in a matter of hours. The scientist and his wife returned home, and on Monday he returned the documents to his office without arousing any suspicions.

  Based on the drawings, Israel was able to design and build gas centrifuges. They were installed in Dimona and soon started enriching gaseous uranium hexafluoride, to produce fissile material for bombs.

  Only two years later, Abdul Qader Khan would steal the very same blueprints. He was a Pakistani nuclear scientist, carrying out research at the Urenco consortium. A.Q. Khan returned home, built centrifuges, plotted the procurement of uranium, and was hailed there as “the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb.” He is even more notorious as the driving force behind notions of “an Islamic bomb,” and Khan rightly became known as the world’s biggest nuclear proliferator. He sold his knowledge to Iran, Libya, and perhaps other countries in the late 1990s.

  Israel, in the meantime, kept upgrading and improving the centrifuges at Dimona to make them more efficient.

  Yet, the old ones also proved to be of great value. In 2008, they would serve as a test bed for the computer worm invented by a joint Mossad-Aman-CIA operation: the malicious Stuxnet virus planted inside Iran’s computers, which were controlling a Urenco-type centrifuge array. The Iranian machinery would be severely damaged, and that would be a significant setback to an enemy’s program seen as highly threatening. (See Chapter 1.)

  In appreciation of Milchan’s success in getting Israel its own centrifuges, he was one of the very few Israelis—outside a tight circle of cabinet ministers, selected members of parliament, and senior military personnel—to be honored with a tour of the Dimona facility.

  In 1973, Milchan launched a chain of business decisions that would bring Israel sophisticated triggers for nuclear bombs. These were krytrons: a type of high-speed switch, resembling the kind of cathode tubes old radios had, costing only $75 each but requiring a U.S. government license to be exported.

  Milchan persuaded an engineer at Rockwell, the American defense contractor, to start a company in California. Milchan promised Richard Smyth that the new firm, Milco, would get plenty of orders. Milchan and his friends in Tel Aviv would see to that. For years, Lakam sent Milco lists—often using codewords for nuclear-related items—and Smyth was earning handsome commissions for shipping the parts to Israel.

  In 1985, federal agents raided Milco and charged Smyth with illegally exporting more than 800 krytrons to Israel. Milchan, despite obvious ties to Milco, was not charged; apparently, that was because Peres, his longtime patron, persuaded Reagan administration officials not to prosecute Milchan.

  Milchan told two authors, writing a book about him, that he had not violated any American laws. He added that he had been “ordered” to cut off all contact with Smyth, who fled to Europe and could never get Milchan or Lakam to return his phone calls. Israel’s defense ministry did send Smyth money for several years.

  Smyth, after almost 15 years, was located by U.S. authorities and extradited from Spain. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison, and in 2010—when he was 80—the two authors found him, practically broke, living in a trailer park in California.

  Milchan continued to do very well. He produced many hit movies, dividing his time between Los Angeles and Tel Aviv and unceasingly helping Israel with its secret intelligence and defense requirements.

  Similar to Sakharov, he refused to accept any payment from Israel for his assignments on behalf of Lakam, but many of his missions were indirectly rewarding. Peres, Blumberg, and Moshe Dayan introduced Milchan to international leaders and key security officials, and he was able to make highly profitable deals with monarchist Iran, the isolated government of Taiwan, and the doomed apartheid regime of South Africa. He invested in various enterprises in Iran, which he wisely sold about a year before the Shah’s downfall in 1979.

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sp; When deals involved products delivered to Israel, Milchan put the commissions into a huge slush fund: millions in cash that Israeli intelligence could use for special assignments. Milchan controlled the checkbook.

  Patriots who donated their time and energies to the cause, such as Milchan and Sakharov, helped Israel acquire what it needed to be an undeclared nuclear power.

  The scientific and technical breakthroughs that made it possible for Israel to build an atomic bomb came—by coincidence—just before the Six-Day War of June 1967. Only a few people knew that the Jewish state became the sixth country to achieve nuclear weapons capability, joining the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Britain, and China in that exclusive club.

  Israel’s undeclared status nearly came into play during the three-week crisis that led up to the outbreak of war on June 5.

  Israeli political leaders and military chiefs were very concerned by the expulsion of United Nations peacekeepers from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. It was also impossible to dismiss Cairo’s raucous psychological campaign that claimed Arab armies would smash Israel and throw the Jews into the sea. Fears of another Holocaust were fueled by the fact that Egypt’s military had just used chemical weapons in Yemen’s civil war.

  Against that background, some defense ministry officials and scientists in Tel Aviv deliberated over nuclear strategy. Ben-Gurion had insisted on developing the world’s most dangerous weapons, but no one had clearly decided when they might be used. Forty-five years later, the results of these discussions continue to be secret and, according to sources close to the participants, surprisingly ambiguous.

  The emerging picture is that Rafael, the official Israeli company for developing armaments, mobilized all of its top engineers and technicians during the weeks of crisis in 1967. According to Lt. General Tzvi Tzur, a former IDF chief of staff who was then a special adviser to the defense ministry, those men and women “worked around the clock and neared total collapse” to assemble Israel’s first nuclear device.

 

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