The agents attending Brown’s briefing indicated that FBI would not undertake an investigation of Shapiro based on what AEC had concluded about NUMEC’s sloppy accounting being the reason for the missing HEU.218 Two weeks after Brown’s briefing, Hoover wrote to the AEC to confirm that FBI would not “assume any investigative responsibility” for the uranium missing from NUMEC.219
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On May 23, Justice advised FBI that information provided about Shapiro and his Israeli ventures “is insufficient to establish the requisite agency relationship required to bring the subject within the purview of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”220 Hoover was not satisfied with the answer, so a month later he authorized his Pittsburgh office to interview Shapiro “at the request of the Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice.”221
The internal security division had been pursuing Israeli intelligence operations against the U.S. since 1948.222 John Davitt, longtime head of the division, told the Washington Post after his retirement that during his 30 years of federal service Israeli intelligence agencies were “more active in the U.S. than anyone but the KGB. . . . They were targeted on the United States about half the time and on Arab countries about half the time.” Davitt also confirmed that there had been a handful of cases in the 1950s and 1960s in which Israeli diplomats suspected of espionage were asked to leave the country. The Post also cited a CIA report that Israel’s intelligence priorities were the collection of information about U.S. policies detrimental to Israel and the collection of scientific intelligence in the U.S. and other developed countries.223 John Davitt figured in a Justice Department investigation of NUMEC in the 1970s.
The FBI’s Pittsburgh Office interviewed Shapiro on June 15, 1966. After being advised of his rights to not make a statement and to consult with an attorney, and being told that anything he said could be used against him in a court of law, Shapiro “appeared to be extremely cooperative and friendly to Bureau Agents.” He said that NUMEC “and the Israeli government” formed ISORAD about a year earlier following “lengthy negotiations.” Each partner owned 50 percent of the company and each had four members on the board. Shapiro identified the members of the Board of Directors of ISORAD, including the chairman of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Ernst David Bergmann. Neither he nor the FBI agents gave any indication in the interview that they knew of Bergmann’s role in the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
Shapiro said that he and three others were the U.S. directors of ISORAD. The three others were also directors of NUMEC, namely, Leon Falk, Director of Duquesne Light Company, Benjamin Rosen, Pittsburgh attorney and realtor, and Phillip Powers, former president of Western Pennsylvania Power Company. Shapiro described meetings with the U.S. Ambassador to Israel and with Joseph Eyal, science attache of the Israeli embassy, in connection with the formation of ISORAD. He said he made every effort to comply with the law in connection with his business in Israel, but he desired to immediately review the statutes concerning the Registration Act to determine if he or his company were violating the law in any manner whatsoever.224
On September 14, after reviewing the results of Shapiro’s interview, the Justice Department advised Hoover that the actions of Shapiro and NUMEC did not constitute those of an “agent of a foreign principal” under the Registration Act.225 A month later FBI advised AEC of this decision.226 No record has been found to show whether Shapiro was informed of the outcome of the investigation.
A few weeks later, AEC told Hoover that the Joint Committee wanted to know if the Justice Department’s decision applied to Shapiro’s activities with respect to countries other than Israel, including France, Sweden, Italy, Japan, Canada, Australia, Belgium and Germany.227 Hoover told Justice there was no reason to believe that Shapiro was an agent of these other countries, as that term was defined in the Registration Act.228 Justice responded that it did not have enough information to make such a determination.229 Apparently, the matter was left there, thus ending this FBI investigation of Shapiro.
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About the time Shapiro told AEC of his relationship with Bergmann in connection with ISORAD, Bergmann resigned from the Israeli AEC. The new Prime Minister Levi Eshkol forced him out as part of a deemphasis of nuclear weapons. After leaving IAEC, Bergmann enjoyed a brief appointment to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, arranged by Lewis Strauss, former chairman of the AEC. Strauss had met Bergmann at the Geneva Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955.230 The director of the Princeton Institute found Bergmann to be very open about his work on the atom bomb. Furthermore, “it was a jolt to realize that Strauss—seemingly so ambivalent about his Jewishness and so opposed to any spread of nuclear weapons technology—privately was in favor of a nuclear-armed Israel.”231 There is no obvious reason to believe that Bergmann would have been any less open about his interest in the bomb in discussions with his business partner Shapiro than he was with the director of the Institute.
Chapter 6
Ambiguous Membership (1967)
In April 1967, Atlantic Richfield Corporation (ARCO) surprised the nuclear industry by purchasing NUMEC. ARCO was a large petroleum company that formed a year earlier through the merger of Atlantic Refining and Richfield Petroleum. Although ARCO’s prior business strategy was simple—sell as much low-priced gasoline as possible—its purchase of NUMEC apparently signaled an effort to diversify its energy mix to include nuclear power. Shapiro stayed on as president of the NUMEC subsidiary of ARCO.
The purchase of NUMEC was not ARCO’s only venture into the nuclear field. By September 1967, ARCO formed another subsidiary, Atlantic Richfield Hanford Company, and took over operations of a portion of AEC’s Hanford Site in Washington State. ARCO’s scope of work included chemical processing operations (plutonium separation from spent reactor fuel). These initiatives did not go well for ARCO. Within a decade it was out of the nuclear business altogether.
In a proxy statement in 1966, just before the ARCO buyout, NUMEC stated that its net worth and working capital “were reduced below the levels required in various agreements with lenders, and a condition of technical default arose.” The company said it had no alternative but to arrange for a merger.232
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the April 14, 1967 meeting of NUMEC shareholders where the sale to ARCO was approved. ARCO agreed to convert each share of NUMEC stock to 0.255 share of ARCO stock, making NUMEC stock worth $23.05 on the day of the sale.13 There were 322,000 shares of NUMEC outstanding at the time, indicating that ARCO paid $7.4 million to NUMEC’s shareholders. ARCO also assumed NUMEC’s debts amounting to another $6.3 million. Thus, ARCO paid nearly $14 million. Shapiro said NUMEC’s backlog at the time was $7 million. Thirty shareholders showed up for the meeting, which “was punctuated by some bitter comments over the fact that a $2 million loss on a federal government contract broke the back of the 10-year-old local firm. . . . Dr. Shapiro said the loss contract involved production of new nuclear fuel for the Shippingport power plant.”233 If Shapiro mentioned the Astronuclear contract, the reporter missed it.
In later years, people talked as if Shapiro made a lot of money when ARCO bought NUMEC. He did make some money but not as much as some people would have thought. Shapiro owned only about six percent of NUMEC’s stock at the time of the ARCO purchase, meaning he made about $450,000 pre-tax.234 An FBI document said that in March 1969, while presiding over NUMEC as an ARCO employee, Shapiro’s annual salary was $50,000.235
Grant Smith cast a more disquieting light on ARCO’s purchase of NUMEC. His research suggests that ARCO was given special consideration by the AEC in awarding the contract for operating the 200 Area at the Hanford reservation of the AEC over firms that were more qualified (including the incumbent contractor) because ARCO had purchased NUMEC. Smith noted that AEC announced the competitive procurement for the Hanford contract on February 27, 1967, a month or so before the sale of NUMEC to ARCO. He then cited records to show that the AEC commissioners were involved in reviewing the b
ids that were received in May 1967 for the Hanford contract. Direct involvement of the commissioners in the selection of the winner in a competitive contract was unusual for the AEC. Moreover, in minutes of its discussions leading to the award of the Hanford contract in July 1967, it is clear that the commission considered ARCO’s April 1967 purchase of NUMEC. Adding weight to Smith’s argument that something was amiss, AEC’s announcement of ARCO’s selection for the Hanford contract mentioned a subsidiary non-nuclear operation of NUMEC, not the facilities in Apollo and Parks Township, as the basis for the selection. The AEC said, “The technical ability of Atlantic Richfield is considered outstanding and satisfies the requirements of the contract.” But for its recent acquisition of NUMEC, ARCO had no technical ability in nuclear technology. The AEC paid ARCO $30.4 M in the first year of the cost-plus fixed fee contract to operate the 200 Area at Hanford.236
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In May 1967, Egypt expelled the UN emergency force in the Sinai Peninsula that had served as a buffer with Israel since the Suez Canal Crisis. Then Egypt brought nearly 1000 tanks and 100,000 soldiers to its border with Israel, boycotted all ships flying the Israeli flag, and called for unified Arab action against Israel. Before the other Arab states could muster, on June 5, 1967, Israel attacked and quickly defeated Egypt’s air force and gained early superiority over the Egyptian army in the Sinai. The Israeli forces then wheeled to meet attacks by Jordan and Syria from the west. Six days later, at the war’s end, Israel had defeated all three of its Arab attackers and won a convincing victory that expanded its occupied lands several fold by gaining control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the West Bank.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Walworth Barbour, surmised that the Israelis had a rudimentary, perhaps unassembled, nuclear weapon on the eve of that Six-Day War.237 He based his conclusion on reports from people who worked in the embassy and followed developments at Dimona, including CIA’s station chief, John Hadden.238
The CIA also concluded that Israel had a bomb by 1967 based on information supplied by Edward Teller about Dimona. Teller made six visits to Israel between 1964 and 1967. His first visit was at the invitation of physicist Yuval Ne’eman. Teller met Ne’eman in 1964 when Ne’eman was a visiting professor in theoretical physics at Berkeley. During his visits to Israel, Teller met with Israeli nuclear scientists and his sister. He gave a series of ten lectures at Tel Aviv University where Ne’eman was vice president. Teller also met with military leader Moshe Dyan and Prime Ministers Ben-Gurion, Eshkol and Meir.239
In 1967, shortly after the Six-Day War, Teller told Ne’eman “I think that you are not idiots, and I am impressed by your high level, and I think that you have already finished, and the thing is now behind you. I do not think that the cat and mouse game with the Americans is healthy, and it will cause problems in the future, so I am going to tell the CIA of my impressions, and I’ll explain that it is justified on the background of the Six-Day War.” Teller spent the next year persuading Duckett at CIA that Israel had attained a nuclear weapons capability.240
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If Israel had a rudimentary atomic bomb in 1967, it could have been fueled by either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. Sufficient plutonium might have come from the first reprocessing operations at Dimona, while HEU had to come from outside the country because Israel did not have a uranium enrichment capability at that time. The general characteristics of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki show what Israel’s first weapons might have looked like.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was fueled by highly enriched uranium. Bearing the nickname “Little Boy,” it was ten feet long, twenty-eight inches in diameter and weighed about 4,000 kilograms. It was of the so-called gun-assembled design that used two charges of chemical explosives to drive two subcritical masses of HEU towards one another, down a gun-barrel-like cylinder, jamming them together in a total mass that became rapidly super critical and promptly detonated. Little Boy had the destructive energy of fifteen thousand tons of high explosive. The Japanese correctly interpreted the data from Hiroshima to indicate that the bomb had been fueled by uranium and that the U.S. probably did not have a backup uranium device because of the lead-time required for enrichment. Three days later the Japanese were astounded when a plutonium-fueled bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Since the U.S. could be churning out plutonium at a high rate, the Japanese judged that there were or soon would be many backups to the Nagasaki weapon. They surrendered within a week.241
The Nagasaki bomb was fueled by plutonium-239, a more efficient fuel than HEU because less Pu-239 is needed for a critical mass and, if the weapon is of an implosion design, more explosive yield results from a particular mass. Bearing the nickname “Fat Man,” the Nagasaki bomb was ten feet eight inches long, five feet in diameter, and weighed 4,500 kilograms. It was an implosion weapon wherein a subcritical sphere of plutonium weighing less than 10 kilograms was surrounded by high explosives. Symmetrical, simultaneous detonation of the high explosives forced the sphere to collapse and form a super critical mass, resulting in superheated plasma producing a nuclear explosion. Fat Man had the destructive energy of twenty-one thousand tons of high explosive.242 Later research decreased the size of such bombs.
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It is unclear whether the Israelis could have fabricated a plutonium bomb by 1967. Historians, diplomats, inspectors, scientists and journalists have said a range of things on the subject. Hersh said the Israelis completed construction of the reprocessing plant at Dimona in 1965.243 The AEC’s inspectors of Dimona in 1961 did not learn of the reprocessing facility and opined that the reactor would not be operational until 1964. Seaborg said he knew with “near certainty” that the Israelis had a secret reprocessing facility to extract plutonium from Dimona’s spent fuel when he visited Israel in 1966.244 The science attache at the U.S. embassy in Israel concluded in a 1965 study that the reprocessing plant to extract plutonium from uranium irradiated at Dimona could be put into operation by 1967 and a bomb fueled by plutonium could be assembled and tested by 1968.245 The U.S. Army said that the first plutonium extraction took place at Dimona during the second half of 1965 and that Israel had enough plutonium to manufacture an atom bomb during 1966 or early 1967, at the latest.246
Hersh said the Israelis conducted a low-yield nuclear test in the mid 1960s.247 Cohen surmised that it was a hydronuclear test conducted underground on November 2, 1966.248 Reed and Stillman said that the 1966 test was a hydrodynamic test to confirm detonation, implosion and initiation aspects of Israel’s first atomic bomb design.249 Hydrodynamic tests use high explosives to compress subcritical quantities of plutonium or uranium metal into superheated plasma. The tests typically occur inside rugged containment structures for safety purposes and are highly instrumented to provide information about the metallurgy and thermal-hydraulics of the material being tested. The explosion in a hydrodynamic test lasts only a fraction of a millisecond. Test ban treaties between the U.S. and Russia require that such tests produce zero atomic yield, i.e., no nuclear fissions.
If Israel fueled its 1966 hydrodynamic test with plutonium, then the reprocessing plant at Dimona had made rapid progress between startup in 1965 (two years ahead of when the U.S. embassy said it was possible) and the production of significant quantities of plutonium.
Cohen later found additional information that sheds light on the status of Israel’s atom bomb in the days leading to the Six-Day War.250
Some bits and pieces of additional historical information have emerged in recent years that permit a more comprehensive and daring reconstruction of the nuclear aspect of the 1967 war, at least on the Israeli side. This new evidence indicates that prior to that war, Israeli leaders were still unsure about their ultimate goals for the program and deeply concerned about world reaction if they were to move forward. The May 1967 crisis, however, also was a critical turning point in Israel’s nuclear history. It was then, in a crash and improvised initiative, that Israel assembled nuclear devices to be ready for
the unthinkable. . . . In the year prior to the 1967 war, Israel was moving fast toward wrapping up separate research and development efforts on fissile material production and weapons design and nearing a complete nuclear option. This convergence brought the Israeli nuclear project to a major junction that required a new set of political decisions. . . . Israel was in a position to conduct a full-yield nuclear test in the second half of 1966, had its leaders so chosen. Had Israel conducted a test that year, even a so-called peaceful nuclear explosion, it could have declared itself the world’s sixth nuclear state, and subsequently, it could have joined the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as a declared nuclear-weapon state. . . . In December 1966, a major industrial accident occurred in one of the “hottest” areas in the Dimona complex. An employee was killed, and a sensitive working area was contaminated. It took weeks of cleanup to decontaminate the area. The accident left Israel’s nuclear chiefs shaken, including Eshkol. Three months later, in a cable to Washington, U.S. Ambassador Walworth Barbour reported that he never saw Eshkol so uncertain about the future of the nuclear project, suggesting that it was time for innovative diplomacy on the nuclear issue. In correspondence in March 1967, Barbour dismissed U.S. intelligence reports that asserted Israel was only weeks from the bomb and noted that Dimona was “not running at full blast.” . . . Then came the crisis of May 1967, which dramatically changed the nuclear situation in the Middle East. As the likelihood of war intensified . . . Israel did something it never had done previously. Israeli teams assembled virtually all the components, including the handful of nuclear cores it had, into improvised but operational explosive devices. Preliminary contingency plans were even drawn up for how such improvised devices could be used in a manner that would demonstrate nuclear capability short of a military use. An unpopulated site was even chosen. The idea behind it was highly indicative of Israel’s anxious state of mind in those days of May and June 1967. If all else failed and Israel’s national existence would be in peril, the state would still have its doomsday capability.
Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel Page 13