After hearing from Gromberg, the U.S. intelligence community undertook searching self-examination to discover why it failed to heed earlier indications of the French and Israeli collaboration. The U.S. Intelligence Board (created in 1957 by Eisenhower as the forum for intelligence chiefs to provide advice to the president on intelligence activities) ordered the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (an interagency body formed in 1948 and chaired by CIA to coordinate monitoring of foreign nuclear weapons programs) to conduct the self-assessment. The committee’s January 1961 report criticized most elements of the atomic energy intelligence community (i.e., AEC, CIA, FBI, Defense, and State). The report identified poor communications within that community as the reason officials had not realized earlier the importance of the Israeli program. The report detailed how Israel had purchased a reactor and natural uranium from France in 1957, acquired 20 metric tons of heavy water from Norway and begun construction of a reactor in the Negev desert in 1959, near Dimona. It also listed the foregoing examples and others of when the United States should have known earlier about Israel’s intentions.91 There was no mention in the report of Brugioni’s discovery of Dimona, based on U-2 photography of excavations at the site in early 1959, or Eisenhower’s lack of interest in that discovery.
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In order to protect the secrecy of his decision to build nuclear weapons, Ben-Gurion decided that Dimona should be financed with a combination of internal, off-budget defense funds and private funds raised outside the country. The private effort included direct appeals by Ben-Gurion and Peres to wealthy friends of Israel around the world. Ben-Gurion noted in his diary in 1958 that the cost of Dimona would be $25 million. Peres wrote in his memoirs that Dimona cost $80 million. In December 1960, President Eisenhower received estimates ranging from $100 to $200 million in 1960 dollars.92 A month later, the State Department told James Ramey, Executive Director of the Joint Committee, that Dimona had entirely peaceful purposes, Israel would return any plutonium that it produced to France, and the overall facility was expected to cost $34 Million of which $17.8 million would be “foreign exchange.” State went on to say it would “take any feasible measures to damp down speculation on this matter and in particular to avoid giving occasion for renewed suspicions and possible undesirable reactions in the Arab world.”93 John Hadden, CIA station chief in Tel Aviv from 1963 to 1967, estimated that the bomb cost Israel $100 million and its Jericho missile delivery system cost another $100 million.94 These amounts were about 10 percent of Israel’s gross domestic product in the early 1960s.
Ironically, a number of prominent Americans learned of Dimona and its mission before the U.S. intelligence community because wealthy Zionists and Jewish charities helped to pay for the project. Abraham “Abe” Feinberg led the fund raising. He was a New York philanthropist, wealthy businessman, talented lobbyist and major Democratic Party fundraiser. He started out in the garment industry, later becoming chairman of apparel manufacturer Kayser-Roth Corporation and then chairman of American Bank and Trust Company. He invested in businesses based in the United States and Israel and was involved in the construction of buildings in Manhattan and Israel. At the time of his death in 1998, he was chief executive of Central Bottling Corporation, a Coca-Cola-bottling business in Israel. His fund-raising drives for the Democratic Party included President Truman’s election campaign in 1948. He was with Chaim Weizmann in the Plaza Hotel in New York on November 29, 1947 when the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition Palestine to provide a Jewish homeland.95
Some twenty-five millionaires were said to have contributed around $40 million for Dimona. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. assisted Feinberg by coordinating donors from the Sonneborn Institute. Feinberg was the youngest contributor. Other donors included Samuel Zacks, head of the Canadian Zionist Organization, Louis Bloomfield, Canadian member of OSS during World War II and later legal counsel to another Dimona contributor, Samuel Bronfman, founder of Seagram Whiskey. Europeans that were said to have contributed included Baron Edmund de Rothschild of the English banking family, Baron Isaac Wolfson, founder of a successful mail order business in Britain, and Baron Marcus Sieff, son of Israel Sieff who founded the Sieff Institute, chair of a large British retailer and later chancellor of the Weizmann Institute.96 A French citizen, Gustave Leven, was another Dimona donor. His fortune came from the mineral-water company Perrier, which he founded.97 It took a while, but President Eisenhower eventually learned that these wealthy members of the international Jewish community were providing large sums of money to finance Dimona’s construction. The U.S.-based Israeli journalist Meir Doron and American consultant Joseph Gelman, in their biography of Arnon Milchan said 18 of the 25 wealthy individuals that contributed to Dimona were Americans.98
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The communications blunders blamed by the intelligence community for America’s late recognition of the fledgling Israeli nuclear weapons program may not have been accidental. James Angleton may have purposely withheld information gained by CIA about the startup of the Israeli nuclear program to avoid antagonizing his connections in Mossad. His primary interest was in using Israel to further his knowledge of the Soviet Union, not in preventing Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons. He was a spy, not an enforcer of nonproliferation policies.
Hersh offered a different explanation for the U.S. government’s intelligence blunder. He opined that CIA’s institutional memory about Dimona’s origins was lost to the Agency when Dino Brugioni moved on to new assignments in the mid 1960s and Carl E. Duckett, an expert on Soviet missile systems, came between the raw data on Dimona and the data interpreters at Livermore and Los Alamos.99 Duckett, who later played an important part in interpreting intelligence information about the Israeli weapons program and participated in the unveiling of intelligence information about NUMEC, joined CIA in 1963, four years after Brugioni told President Eisenhower about Dimona. Duckett became CIA’s Deputy Director and head of its Science and Technology Directorate in 1966.
Whether it was poor communications by or within CIA in the late 1950s when construction of Dimona was getting underway or Eisenhower’s reluctance to hear what CIA was telling him because of the importance of the Jewish vote in presidential elections, by 1960 the AEC, the CIA, and the White House knew what was happening. Then, in December 1960, in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, AEC Chairman John McCone made the news public. On December 13, 1960, Time magazine broke the story without naming Israel as the location, saying only “A small power which is neither Communist nor a member of NATO is developing a nuclear option.” On December 16, the London Daily Express reported that Israel was building an experimental bomb. On December 18, McCone discussed the Israeli reactor on the CBS program “Meet the Press.” A day later the New York Times carried a detailed account of what AEC knew at the time, and a response by Bergmann that the report was “flattering but untrue.” McCone said he decided to go public about the Dimona reactor because he had grown weary of “constant Israeli lying.”100
On December 19, President Eisenhower summoned McCone, along with the secretaries of state, defense, and treasury and others to the White House to discuss the breaking news that Israel was constructing a plutonium-producing reactor. Secretary of State Christian Herter said it was clear the Israelis “have constructed the plant through diversions from private and public aid to Israel.” The president was frustrated by Israeli claims that the reactor was for peaceful purposes, “we do not conceal our plants are for weapons material production, nor do we make any claim that such production is peaceful.” As the meeting broke up, the president admonished the attendees that “no one else [except the secretary of state] is to make any statement that has not been cleared through the State Department.”101
On Christmas day 1960, the New York Times published an article by William L. Laurence that discussed concern in Washington for the possibility that Israel was making a run at joining the nuclear club. Laurence was a Lithuanian-born journalist who
won two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of the Manhattan Project.6 He was an eyewitness to detonations of the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs. In his December 1960 article, Laurence downplayed the statement by McCone on “Meet the Press.” McCone had said, “all nuclear reactors do breed plutonium and plutonium is a weapon material.” Laurence called McCone’s statement a “half truth” and went on to opine that the amount of plutonium produced in a 24,000 kilowatt reactor “is very small indeed.” Laurence faulted McCone for not mentioning that refining the plutonium from such a reactor required a chemical plant at a cost of millions of dollars, which was “at present beyond the capacity of any small nation such as Israel. . . .” Laurence quoted statements by Premier Ben-Gurion to the Israeli Knesset that the reactor would “serve the needs of industry, agriculture, health and science.” Laurence also reported the Israeli government had officially denied that it was developing the capacity to produce nuclear weapons.102
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President Kennedy took office in January 1961 with nuclear nonproliferation at the center of his foreign policy. He took a more personal interest in proliferation and a tougher stance against it than his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, or his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Consistent with the urgency he attached to these matters, Kennedy soon nominated his own choice, Dr. Glenn Theodore Seaborg, to chair the AEC. The Senate approved Seaborg’s nomination on March 1, and he soon moved into his third floor suite in the A wing of AEC’s headquarters in Germantown, Maryland.
Those were the dark days of the Cold War: The Soviet Union and the U.S. were cranking out hundreds of thermonuclear weapons per year while Americans dug bomb shelters and ran practice drills to prepare for a possible nuclear war. The sprawling complex of interconnected three-story rectangular office buildings that constituted AEC headquarters was situated in Maryland farm country north of Washington, DC, well clear of the blast zone of a one megaton nuclear weapon targeted on the White House. The basement of the AEC complex was a hardened bomb shelter.
Seaborg was fated to be chairman of the AEC. He was born in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1912, the son of a second generation Swedish American, Herman Theodore Seaborg, and Selma Erickson, a recent Swedish immigrant. He said his family moved to southern California in 1922 in search of opportunity, but they found only depression-era poverty. He was valedictorian of his high school class in the Watts area of Los Angeles. He worked his way through UCLA as a stevedore, fruit-packer and laboratory assistant, while gaining Phi Beta Kappa honors. He went to Berkeley for graduate school where he earned a Ph.D. in chemistry. He said he “loved physics foremost, but studied chemistry because chemists could find jobs.”
Glenn T. Seaborg
AEC Chairman
1961-1971
Seaborg became an instructor at Berkeley in 1939, assistant professor in 1941 and full professor in 1945. In 1940, he and Edwin M. McMillan were the first to identify and produce minute amounts of the man-made element plutonium. During his chemistry career, Seaborg was co-discoverer of ten other transuranic elements, including the element that bears his name, Seaborgium. In addition, he and his colleagues identified more than 100 isotopes of elements in the Periodic Table. In 1951, Seaborg and McMillan were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry for the discovery of plutonium.
During World War II Seaborg headed the plutonium work of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory. In four years, the project extracted enough plutonium from reactors it commissioned at the Hanford site in Washington to fuel the atom bombs detonated at Trinity and Nagasaki. In June 1945, Seaborg joined a committee of Manhattan Project participants to develop a plan known as the Frank Report. They recommended that Secretary of War Stinson demonstrate the a-bomb at a remote site to convince Japanese leaders to surrender before the U.S. bombed their cities.
After the war, Seaborg directed nuclear chemical research at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (LRL). From 1946 to 1950, he was a charter member of AEC’s General Advisory Committee. From 1954 to 1961, he was Associate Director of LRL. In 1958, he became Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. In 1972, after completing an unparalleled ten-year tenure as chairman of the AEC, Seaborg assumed the presidency of the 138,000-member American Association for the Advancement of Science, and, in 1976, he became president of the 150,000-member American Chemical Society. He authored more than 50 books and 500 journal articles. He was an advocate of increased federal funding of basic research and improvements in education. Historian J. Samuel Walker said that Seaborg was calm, deliberate and thoughtful, a conciliator “who sought to find solutions acceptable to opposing sides on an issue; he had a rare ability to mediate controversial questions without losing his composure or making enemies.”103 Others doubted his ability to control the AEC’s bureaucrats.
Seaborg said “Kennedy was a steely cold warrior, but after the Cuban Missile Crisis led him to the brink of nuclear holocaust he displayed a commitment that has not received the attention it deserves. He was more passionately devoted to arms control than any president I have known.”104 Seaborg also described nuclear proliferation as Kennedy’s “private nightmare.” Kennedy supported the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that the U.S., the Soviet Union and Britain ratified in 1963 to prohibit nuclear testing in the atmosphere, outer space and under water. Kennedy considered Israel to be the prime example of where binding agreements were needed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Kennedy attached a sense of urgency to this goal because President Eisenhower told him privately on the day before his inauguration that Dimona would be producing weapons-grade plutonium by 1963.105
Kennedy named his former legislative aide in the Senate, Myer Feldman, a lawyer from Philadelphia, to take the lead on policy issues in the Middle East. Feldman had helped Ted Sorensen plan Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Feldman assisted Kennedy’s preparations for news conferences, was a principal adviser on domestic policy and channeled business requests to the attention of the president, such as tariffs and air routes.106
Feldman made secret trips to Israel on behalf of President Kennedy, including one with Abe Feinberg in March 1961 concerning Dimona.107 Feinberg was by then serving as a senior advisor on Israeli affairs for his third consecutive U.S. president.108 The irony of the 1961 trip was palpable: Feinberg went to convince Ben-Gurion, at Kennedy’s request, to allow Americans to inspect Dimona to ensure its peaceful nature while he had personally and secretly organized international funding of Dimona, at Ben-Gurion’s request, to advance Israel’s clandestine quest for the bomb. When the role of Feinberg and other Americans in financing Dimona came to the attention of President Eisenhower just four months earlier, Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson worried that Jewish charities “have been sending money out without control over the purposes for which it is intended. For this reason there is a real question as to whether these contributions qualify as tax-deductible.”109 Feinberg accepted and implemented a presidential commission to deter a cause that he secretly and unlawfully financed and claimed as a tax deduction. Said differently, American taxpayers helped to finance Israel’s nuclear weapons without their consent or that of their government.
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Even though Kennedy garnered about 80 percent of the Jewish vote in his election to the presidency, he argued strongly against Israel’s development of nuclear weapons. He insisted that American scientists be allowed to inspect Dimona to ensure that it was being developed for peaceful purposes. Finally, in exchange for a personal meeting with Kennedy, as negotiated by Feldman and Feinberg, Ben-Gurion allowed the first American visit to Dimona. The AEC selected the two scientists to visit Dimona and other Israeli nuclear facilities from May 17 to 20, 1961. They were Ulysses Staebler, assistant director of the AEC Reactor Development Division, and Jesse Croach, a heavy water expert employed by DuPont at AEC’s Savannah River Plant.
The two scientists reported to Kennedy’s National Security Advisor that nothing was hidden in their tour, and the reactor “is of the scope and peac
eful character previously described to the United States.” They also noted that the 26-MW reactor was intended to be operational by 1964, and its primary purpose was to prepare technicians to operate power reactors that the Israelis intend to build in the future.110
Reed and Stillman reported that two other American scientists visited Dimona in April 1961.111 They were both Nobel laureates and veterans of the Manhattan Project, Eugene Wigner and Isidor Isaac Rabi. Wigner was teaching in Israel in 1961 and told the U.S. government in December that he was driven by the Dimona site that summer and told it was a power reactor. Rabi was on the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Two other American scientists reportedly made an impromptu, 45-minute visit to Dimona on September 26, 1962, escorted by Yuval Ne’eman, then research director at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center. It was a hasty affair conducted with no advance warning to the U.S., apparently intended to ease political pressure being brought by President Kennedy.112
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When Kennedy met with Ben-Gurion in New York on May 30, 1961, they talked about Dimona. Minutes of the meeting reflect that Kennedy “was glad the two Americans had had the opportunity to visit the reactor and had given him a good report of it.” The President also expressed the idea that some nations are disturbed by the construction in Israel of a large reactor with plutonium producing capability. He suggested “on the theory that a woman should not only be virtuous but also have the appearance of virtue,” the problem is how to disseminate information about the nature of the reactor so as to remove any doubts other nations might have about Israel’s peaceful purposes.
Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel Page 6