Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel

by Roger Mattson

  The chronicle includes contextual information about the history of nuclear weapons, international espionage and nuclear arms diplomacy to aid understanding of the characters and policies that figured in the NUMEC affair. A Bibliography lists the books written by others that served as sources, while Endnotes identify insights and facts gained from those books and other sources.

  I prepared this Second Edition of the book to provide a better Index and to correct minor typographical errors.

  Roger J. Mattson

  Golden, Colorado

  July 2016

  STEALING THE ATOM BOMB

  HOW DENIAL AND DECEPTION ARMED ISRAEL

  Part One: Prelude to Nuclear Espionage

  Chapter 1

  CIA, FBI and AEC from 1945 to 1965

  Human memory is the ladder on which a country and a people advance.1

  This chapter summarizes the character and general operating principles of three government agencies that figured importantly in this account of nuclear espionage. It also introduces some of the key players in the drama that unfolds.

  Two intelligence agencies figured importantly in the NUMEC affair—the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The FBI originated as the Bureau of Investigation in the Justice Department in 1908 and acquired its current name in 1935. The U.S. Congress did not create the CIA until the late 1940s, after World War II.

  Although the FBI’s operations and organization were well established by the end of the World War, the CIA did not find its niche for several more years. The Agency’s mission and its organization changed almost continuously during its first decade as Congress and the president reacted to the growing Soviet threat in the deepening Cold War. CIA’s competitive relationship with FBI started out poorly and deteriorated during that same period. One CIA veteran recalled that CIA was “an untrammeled, anything-goes monolith that did whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, regardless of the law ... in the ‘50s and ‘60s.”2

  Richard Helms participated in the creation of CIA and was serving as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) when concerns about NUMEC first arose in the CIA. He opined in his autobiography that the reasons to establish CIA were broader than the onset of the Cold War. He said the need for a permanent foreign intelligence agency arose during World War II and was heightened by the advent of the atom bomb.3

  Congress and the executive branch debated for nearly two years about CIA’s powers and its placement within the federal bureaucracy because opinions varied about its mission. The debate began in 1944 when President Franklin Roosevelt solicited a proposal “for an intelligence service for the postwar period.” He tasked General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to draft a plan.

  Donovan recommended a central agency to coordinate and collect foreign intelligence. J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, fought Donovan’s plan and leaked it to the press, causing such uproar in Congress that Roosevelt put the plan on hold. Hoover then persuaded President Harry Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt in April 1945, to abolish OSS without creating a replacement, saying such an agency would become an “American Gestapo.”

  At the time, Helms was still with OSS in Europe where Germany had surrendered on May 8, 1945. He recalled, “Those of us in Germany were taken completely by surprise on September 20, 1945, when President Harry Truman abruptly issued the executive order terminating the Office of Strategic Services ten days hence.” Helms thought Truman’s actions were “more punitive than rational to expect an organization that stretched from Washington across Europe, with elements in the Near East, Africa, China, Burma, India, and Vietnam to fold its tents, abandon its properties, and rid itself of some 11,500 employees in ten days.”4 Thus, by October 1945, just a month and a half after Japan surrendered and ended World War II, only a small remnant of OSS remained. Its successor, a nondescript Strategic Services Unit, was nearly invisible in the backwaters of the War Department.

  J. Edgar Hoover

  FBI Director

  1935-1972

  Hoover persisted with his own plan for foreign intelligence. His recommendations carried great weight because Congressional leaders respected his strong anti-communist record. In addition, Hoover launched what journalism professor and best-selling author Evan Thomas called “a campaign of leaks and innuendo” to discredit Donovan and to encourage Congress and the president to accept the idea that “foreign and domestic intelligence are inseparable and constitute one field of operation.”5

  By mid November 1945, policy makers in Washington could see that Hoover’s crime-buster mentality was costing the country important information about the Soviet Union’s post-war intentions. For example, he nixed the idea of a government-sanctioned exchange of intelligence operatives with the Soviets, missing the opportunity for both countries to learn what the other was doing, thus missing the opportunity to counter negative fantasies with facts.

  Truman had different concerns. He thought that the Strategic Services Unit was not strong enough to satisfy the need for intelligence information about the Soviets. He convinced the chiefs of the armed services to vest the Unit with authority to coordinate intelligence gathering by all parts of the federal government. In January 1946, as a step in that direction, He named Rear Admiral Sidney Souers as the first Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and told him to coordinate America’s spying activities. Souers’ qualifications were meager, and he had no real power to coordinate anything. He soon left.

  Truman replaced Souers with Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg, a pilot and war hero. Although Vandenberg was allowed only to coordinate and not manage the efforts of America’s various intelligence organizations, he increased his power by recruiting a group of Colonels from the Pentagon to take over the intelligence budgets of Army, Navy and State Department.6 Although Hoover resisted Vandenberg’s strengthening of the DCI position, Truman eventually overruled him on the grounds that law enforcement and intelligence work were separate functions.

  To bring a permanent settlement to the controversy, Truman, Vandenberg and White House counsel Clark Clifford drafted a CIA charter that Congress added to pending legislation called the National Security Act. The president signed it in July 1947, signaling the birth of CIA.7 Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner said that Allen Dulles played a significant role in creating CIA in secret testimony to a Congressional subcommittee. Dulles called for “a relatively small but elite corps of men with a passion for anonymity.”8

  Besides providing a charter for the CIA, the National Security Act of 1947 formally ordained, “a Director of Central Intelligence who shall ... serve as head of the United States intelligence community ... act as the principal adviser to the President for intelligence matters related to the national security; and . . . serve as head of the Central Intelligence Agency.” The Act gave CIA control over espionage and covert actions abroad. Although covert actions, such as sabotage, subversion or propaganda, were acceptable in wartime, they were controversial in peace-time and did not begin immediately.

  In December 1947, the National Security Council (NSC) ordered CIA to execute “covert psychological operations designed to counter Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities.”9 Eventually, DCIs began to interpret the “other functions and duties” clause of the National Security Act to include covert actions of other kinds and against other targets.1

  By Executive Order, NSC was to approve all covert actions undertaken by CIA, but its effectiveness in doing so varied over the years and with different presidents. History reveals that 81 major covert actions were undertaken during Truman’s second term, 170 during President Eisenhower’s eight-year presidency and 163 in less than three years under President John Kennedy.10 In the mid 1970s, after public revelations of abuses of covert action by both FBI and CIA, Congress required the president to approve all future covert actions.11

  Eventually, armed with authority to collect and analyze intelligence information and to con
duct covert action, DCIs managed their human and technical resources to provide a range of services, including covert action, strategic warning, clandestine collection, independent analysis, overhead reconnaissance, support to war fighters and peace keepers, arms control verification, encouragement of democracy and counter-terrorism.

  ***

  Hoover gained several important concessions during the debate over creation of CIA. One concession was that the 1947 Act did not obligate FBI to share any information with CIA unless it was essential to national security. The Act also assured that CIA would have no police, subpoena or law enforcement powers or other internal (inside the U.S.) security functions. Importantly for understanding the NUMEC affair, Hoover extracted an agreement from Vandenberg that an FBI special agent, not a CIA officer, would conduct liaison between FBI and CIA. For the next fifty years, FBI special agents exclusively handled the liaison function.12

  The National Security Act of 1947 gave the DCI power to take any actions necessary for protecting intelligence sources and methods from disclosure. Despite passage of open-government laws, such as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966, the DCI’s power to withhold information has grown. In 1984, Congress amended the 1947 Act to relieve the Agency from searching its operations files because those files “almost invariably prove not to be releasable under the FOIA.”13 The 1984 amendment placed beyond public reach most of the files of the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate for Science and Technology that could reveal the means by which foreign intelligence and counterintelligence are conducted. Exemption 3 in the Freedom of Information Act enables CIA to deny that documents exist (the so-called “Glomar” response), to withhold entire documents from public release and to black out (redact) information contained in documents that are released to the public, even documents that are a half-century-old. In addition, this power enables CIA to require FBI and other agencies to redact documents in which CIA holds equity, i.e., documents in which CIA has contributed information or has special interests or knowledge. The CIA’s authority to decide what information to withhold from public disclosure still enshrouds the history of NUMEC. Only recently has the CIA released any of its equity about NUMEC under FOIA requests and Mandatory Declassification Reviews and then only in highly redacted form. Some of the most revealing information was released only recently during the course of a Federal FOIA lawsuit filed by Grant F. Smith in 2015 and still underway as this book goes to press.

  The principal FBI-CIA interface issues not addressed in the 1947 Act that remained divisive for decades include limitations on activities that CIA conducts inside U.S. borders or with regard to U.S. citizens traveling abroad and the sharing of counterintelligence information between FBI and CIA. These issues created inefficiency and occasionally led to tragic consequences.

  ***

  In 1948, the National Security Council formalized CIA’s authority to carry out covert operations “against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and conducted that any U.S. Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons.” The NSC also authorized a strike force called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) to undertake covert operations to attack the Soviet Union around the world. Frank Wisner, a hard drinking, hard charging forty-year old New York lawyer and former OSS operative, became the first head of OPC.14

  In 1949, the Central Intelligence Agency Act authorized the CIA to use confidential fiscal and administrative procedures and exempted it from certain limitations on the use of Federal funds. It also freed CIA from disclosing its organization, functions, officials, titles, salaries or number of personnel employed. The Act created a program to handle defectors and other “essential aliens” who fall outside normal immigration procedures. It gave CIA authority to provide such persons with cover stories and economic support.15

  In 1950, President Truman appointed the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, General Walter Bedell Smith to become DCI. Smith had been General Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff during World War II. Smith’s most important qualifications for DCI were gained during the four years after the war when he served in Moscow under the tutelage of America’s leading Kremlinologist, George Kennan, architect of the postwar strategy to contain Soviet expansionism.

  During Smith’s tenure, the CIA created an advisory board to produce National Intelligence Estimates based on information gathered by CIA and other government agencies. Creation of the board fulfilled a primary mission of CIA to interpret intelligence information for use by policy officials and decision makers.16 Such Estimates were eventually issued concerning Israel’s nuclear weapons program and evidence that materials for that program were “obtained by clandestine means,” a phrase that came to have relevance in the investigations of NUMEC.

  In January 1951, Smith appointed Allen Dulles as CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, the office in charge of covert operations that had been headed by Frank Wisner. Allen’s brother, John Foster Dulles, soon became Secretary of State under President Eisenhower.17

  ***

  One of the biggest spy cases in American history erupted on Smith’s watch. The FBI had been concerned since the founding of CIA that communists had infiltrated the Agency. FBI agents often cited this possibility as a basis for their reluctance to share sensitive information with their CIA counterparts. The tables turned in 1951. Two years earlier, Hoover had befriended Harold “Kim” Philby, a senior member of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, and its newly appointed representative in Washington. Hoover courted Philby in an attempt to upstage CIA in international espionage because Philby likely would become the director of MI6. Hoover even shared secret information with Philby that he didn’t share with CIA, information derived from FBI intercepts of Soviet cable traffic between Moscow and the United States, the so-called “Venona” information that indicated the existence of a Soviet agent in the British embassy in Washington.18

  Philby, meanwhile, was extracting every secret he could from other senior American officials, including intelligence he gained from lunches with James Jesus Angleton, CIA’s head of counterintelligence. Philby had been Angleton’s mentor in London in the early days of OSS. “Once I met Philby, the world of intelligence that had once interested me consumed me,” Angleton admitted.19

  Philby’s generosity extended broadly and his liquor flowed freely. He threw parties for CIA officers and FBI special agents at his home on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, DC to promote camaraderie and show good will.2

  When two British associates of Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, defected from the United States to Moscow, Frank Wisner and William Harvey of CIA suspected that Philby might also be a Soviet spy. At the time, Wisner was CIA’s chief of covert action, and Harvey was an ex-FBI special agent who had become one of CIA’s most aggressive counterintelligence specialists, “taking the battle to the Soviets wherever possible.”20 They found that Philby had communist ties dating to the Spanish Civil War and links to various failed operations of CIA and MI6. Hoover was convinced of Philby’s guilt, while Angleton defended Philby’s innocence. In June 1951, DCI Smith threw Philby out of the country. Philby fought the charges but soon retired from British intelligence. An inquiry by British authorities failed to generate enough evidence to prosecute him. His friends eventually reinstated him to a junior post in MI6 in Beirut, but his drinking and the mounting evidence of his disloyalty eventually caught up with him. In 1963, Philby fled to Moscow. He died there in 1988. Angleton never fully recovered from Philby’s treachery. Having to admit that his British friend, hero, and mentor had been a senior KGB agent was said to have contributed to Angleton’s downward spiral that ended in his leaving CIA.21

  ***

  An important lesson from the Philby case was that gamesmanship between CIA and FBI over possible communist infiltration caused both agencies to not share important information. The consequences were severe. Philby and his associates reportedly provided information lea
ding to the deaths of scores of western agents in the Soviet Union.

  Government leaders have long recognized that FBI and CIA have inherent difficulties in sharing information. The main difference between them is that CIA finds and keeps secrets so America can gain strategic advantage over its enemies, while FBI finds secrets so that it can arrest and the Justice Department can prosecute people that break the law. Despite these differences, the two branches of government have to stay out of each other’s way and not interfere with one another’s cases, where possible.

  This cultural divide also afflicted British intelligence agencies. In the words of Philby’s biographer, Ben Macintyre,

  The conflicting attitudes toward Philby between the sister services of British intelligence would expose a cultural fault line that predated this crisis, long outlasted it and persists today. MI5 and MI6—the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, broadly equivalent to the FBI and CIA—overlapped in many respects but were fundamentally dissimilar in outlook. MI5 tended to recruit former policemen and soldiers. . . . They enforced the law and defended the realm, caught spies and prosecuted them. MI6 was more public school and Oxbridge. . . . Its agents and officers frequently broke the laws of other countries in pursuit of secrets, and did so with a certain swagger . . . MI5 looked up at MI6 with resentment; MI6 looked down with a small but ill-hidden sneer.22