Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel

by Roger Mattson

  According to the book, right after the ‘switches’ fiasco Milchan called his friend Peres, then prime minister, and asked for his help in dealing with the Ronald Reagan administration. Milchan is quoted in the book as saying he never received money for his services, and that everything he did was for the state of Israel.

  More importantly, because it bears on the possible role of President Johnson in the NUMEC affair, Peres is quoted in the book as saying, soon after the switches fiasco,

  Arnon, what do you want me to do? Go public and explain how the president of the United States and I got together to use you to get things for Israel that can’t be obtained through regular channels?

  On March 30, 2012, on a blog site advertising their book, Doron and Gelman noted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres asked Milchan to avoid any public discussion of Confidential, asserting that the matter was “too sensitive at this time” (that was when Israel was lobbying the U.S. Congress to not deal with Iran on nuclear arms). Another reason to downplay the book was Netanyahu’s collaboration with Smyth’s smuggling operation. In the words of Smyth’s FBI interrogators,330

  Smyth and [Netanyahu] would meet in restaurants in Tel Aviv and in [Netanyahu’s] home and/or business. It was not uncommon for [Netanyahu] to ask Smyth for unclassified material.

  Undeterred by such political advice and apparently proud of his role as a nuclear spy, Milchan spoke with an Israeli investigative journalist, in November 2013, in the company of Robert DeNiro,331

  He [Milchan] used at least one big-name actor’s star quality to lure U.S. scientist Arthur Biehl—an expert on nuclear weapons and a co-developer of the hydrogen bomb—to a meeting. According to the report, Milchan invited Biehl to the actor’s home under the pretense that the actor was seeking scientific advice for a project he was working on. Milchan said he thought Biehl would cooperate because, “Anyone who lives in California is a ‘star-fucker.’ . . . They hear star ... they come running.”

  Despite these admissions, Milchan continues to thrive, having produced more than 150 motion pictures, including recently acclaimed films such as “The Revenant,” “Gone Girl” and “Birdman.” In its 2015 listing of the world’s wealthiest people, Forbes magazine reported that Milchan had a net worth of $5 Billion. He was the 301st wealthiest person in the world, third in Israel, and owned seven homes around the world.332

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  Milchan’s story resembles Shapiro’s in several ways. For starters, they both got away with their questionable activities in the United States on behalf of Israel. They also both started out as representatives of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in its dealings with American companies. Furthermore, Blumberg and Eitan’s running of Pollard, Milchan and Smyth in America as spies for Israel raises the possibility that Blumberg and Eitan did the same with their friend and acquaintance, Zalman Shapiro. A CIA report released in late 2012 provided insight to LAKAM’S recruitment methods. “The Israelis are prepared to capitalize on nearly every kind of agent motivation. A substantial effort is made to appeal to Jewish racial or religious proclivities, pro-Zionism, dislike of anti-Semitism, anti-Soviet feelings (if applicable) and humanitarian instincts. Blackmail is also used. Other recruiting techniques include the proffer of money, business opportunities, or release from prison.”333

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  NUMEC Office in Apollo

  Thus, in September 1968, Shapiro sat down in NUMEC’s offices in Apollo, across the street from the uranium plant, with elite senior operatives of arguably the best intelligence service in the world. Two of them were on special assignment to LAKAM, the most secret of Israeli intelligence organizations whose primary mission was to advance Israel’s nuclear weapons program in any way it saw fit. One of them, the scientific counselor, was the LAKAM liaison in Washington.

  After the meeting, NUMEC told the AEC that the four Israelis had asked to buy thermo-electric generator systems of 5 and 50-milliwatt power levels fueled by 2 and 20 grams of plutonium, respectively. NUMEC did not indicate the intended use of the generators, other than to say, “The generators are of the terrestrial type.” NUMEC also told AEC that the four Israelis had visited other nuclear organizations in the U.S. to develop proposals on these items.334

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  In light of LAKAM’s mission and the fact that Dimona’s fuel reprocessing plant was producing plutonium by 1968, the four Israeli visitors may have been looking for advice from as many metallurgists as they could find that were willing to talk about the fabrication of plutonium components. Clearly, Shapiro and other NUMEC employees were experts in that area. In fact, this type of information had been passing from NUMEC to Israel for several years.

  In the early 1960s, Shapiro hired an Israeli nuclear scientist to work at NUMEC. The AEC told the FBI that the scientist was Baruch Cinai. Shapiro said the scientist’s name was Dr. Bernard Cinai and that he worked at the Parks Township facility. Shapiro said that NUMEC had permission from AEC for Cinai to work at Parks under the Atoms for Peace program and that Cinai worked on mixed oxide (plutonium and uranium dioxide) fuel design for nuclear power plants. Investigative journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn cite an AEC report saying Cinai was granted unescorted access to security areas.335 At the Parks Township site, Cinai was working with NUMEC scientists, including Shapiro, who knew as much about uranium and plutonium metallurgy as anyone, including experts working in America’s nuclear weapons plants.

  Thus, by September 1968, Israeli scientists had the opportunity to have known everything Shapiro and his staff could teach them about plutonium metallurgy, or small plutonium-powered electrical generators for that matter. Furthermore, with hindsight, it is not plausible that a technical discussion of plutonium generators and plutonium metallurgy at the NUMEC office in Apollo in September 1968 would require attendance by intelligence officers with the seniority and meager technical background of Bendor and Eitan. There must have been another agenda for the September meeting.

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  There have been several explanations advanced for why the senior LAKAM operatives visited NUMEC in 1968, other than the cover story that they were there to procure plutonium-powered electricity generators. One explanation is that their trip was “damage assessment” to learn how much progress had been made in FBI’s investigation of NUMEC. That explanation is flawed because they surely would not have held a meeting that confirmed the existence of a conspiracy at the same time that U.S. authorities were closing in on the conspiracy. The FBI had another explanation, i.e., the Bureau thought Shapiro was divulging classified or sensitive nuclear information to his visitors through his own actions and by soliciting other sympathetic experts to whom the LAKAM visitors were introduced. CIA station chief John Hadden apparently agreed with this assessment. Shapiro provided another explanation—the meeting with other scientists included a secret project to protect Israeli water supplies. Shapiro is not the only U.S. scientist to say that Israel asked him to help protect water supplies. Edward Teller said he provided aid of this kind during his 1965 trip to Israel.336 It is difficult to imagine why Israel would ask Dr. Edward Teller, distinguished physicist and father of the hydrogen bomb, or Dr. Zalman Shapiro, distinguished metallurgist, to opine on the security of water supplies.

  Another possible reason for the 1968 meeting was for Shapiro to give the four Israelis his best advice on how to use HEU diverted to Israel from Apollo. However, by 1968 some of the HEU stolen from Apollo surely would have been converted to fuel for atom bombs or booster rods for Dimona.

  Still another possibility is that the four visitors were well along in their planning for the Plumbat affair that would be consummated within weeks of their visit to Apollo. The material they were about to steal was yellowcake (uranium oxide) and the Israeli intelligence agents might have been seeking Shapiro’s assistance in designing equipment for processing that material into fuel for the Dimona reactor. The facts that Shapiro was a leading expert in such technical matters, that NUMEC routinely processed
uranium hexafluoride into uranium dioxide for reactor fuel and that Shapiro traveled to Israel in late November and early December, shortly after the stolen yellowcake arrived, lend credence to this “technical assistance” explanation for the strange visit to Apollo.

  Another possible explanation for Shapiro’s meeting with the spies is that the relationship between NUMEC and Israel had to change if HEU was to continue to be diverted from Apollo, which by then was owned by ARCO. That is, the LAKAM agents might have been at Apollo to view the plant first hand to see how to remove more HEU and transport it to Israel now that the plant had new owners. United Press International advanced this idea when it relied on the opinion of Anthony H. Cordesman, a former Pentagon official, in the aftermath of the Jonathan Pollard case.16 He opined that Eitan’s participation in the 1968 meeting with Shapiro was “extremely hard evidence that he [Shapiro] has been operating with Israeli intelligence in the United States. . . . There is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone (to the Apollo plant) but for the nuclear material.”337 A variation of this idea is the possibility that there was an off-inventory stash of HEU still at the plant and the Israeli agents were there to pick it up and take it to Israel. As officials of the Israeli government, albeit different agencies than they claimed, the visitors probably were there on diplomatic passports, which may have provided some degree of diplomatic immunity.

  The four spies probably would have run the risk of coming to Apollo as a group only because they needed to see or do something themselves.

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  On November 3, 1968, Shapiro hosted a meeting at his home with eleven scientific and technical people, some associated with AEC programs, and Avraham Hermoni.338 It took another 9 months for the AEC and the FBI to learn more about this meeting. The AEC interviewed Shapiro on August 14, 1969 and learned of Hermoni’s request that each of the individuals at the meeting undertake certain information gathering assignments on behalf of Israel.

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  In late November 1968, just two months after Hermoni, Biegun, Bendor and Eitan visited NUMEC and met in an office across the street from the most advanced facility in America for converting uranium into nuclear reactor fuel, Mossad and LAKAM accomplished an extraordinary coup for Dimona. The Israelis diverted 200 tons of natural uranium in the form of yellowcake from Europe to Israel. A West German firm acting as a cutout for Mossad purchased the uranium from a Belgian firm and shipped it from Antwerp to Milan on the cargo ship Scheersberg A. The uranium was packaged in 560 barrels bearing the codename for the operation, Plumbat, the Latin word for lead, stenciled in yellow on their lids. The ship was intercepted in the open seas between Cyprus and Turkey, and the yellowcake was offloaded to an Israeli freighter. Scheersberg A failed to arrive in Italy on schedule but showed up a few days later in a Turkish port, absent the yellowcake and its original crew. Although the Israeli government denied any involvement in the disappearance of the uranium, the complex operation was executed with the skill of an expert covert-action apparatus that had exercised great care in planning and execution.

  The 200 tons of natural uranium, enough to fuel Dimona for a decade, arrived in Israel in early December. Zalman Shapiro arrived in Israel about the same time.339

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  The European Atomic Energy Commission (Euratom) informed the AEC about the Plumbat affair, but neither Euratom nor AEC told the public. On July 7, 1970 DCI Helms told a secret session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Plumbat uranium was being used at Dimona to develop nuclear weapons. If Israel did not yet have the bomb, he said, she was “seven and a half months pregnant.”340

  Euratom, CIA and AEC sat on the story until a former newspaperman and aid to Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), Paul Leventhal, revealed it at an April 1977 anti-nuclear conference in Salzburg, Austria.17 David Burnham of the New York Times reported on the text of Leventhal’s speech the day before it was delivered. The government of Israel refused to comment on the article, but three U.S. State Department officials told the Times that they had heard stories about the missing uranium. “I never saw the actual report,” one said, “but I heard about it from four or five colleagues and I am certain it occurred.” Burnham went on to say, “In another development, a formerly high-ranking United States intelligence official said that he had seen intelligence reports several years ago that Israel had obtained some quantities of uranium in the United States by ‘surreptitious and illegal means.’”341 Thus, Burnham linked the NUMEC affair in the United States with the Plumbat affair in Europe.

  The clues to the audacious theft of yellowcake on the high seas had spread by word of mouth until Leventhal heard them in the cocktail circuit in Washington, DC. He got some of the details wrong, but he was correct on the essential sequence of events. The ensuing publicity forced Euratom to reveal what it knew.

  The truth of the Plumbat affair might never have come to light but for an amateurish secret agent named Dan Aerbel. Norwegian authorities captured and imprisoned Aerbel for his part in a botched Mossad operation to assassinate an Arab terrorist. The Mossad assassins killed the wrong man, and Norwegian authorities apprehended most of them. To gain better treatment for his role in the assassination, Aerbel let slip some clues about the planning and execution of the Plumbat affair. He also told the Norwegians that he had acquired the cargo ship Scheersberg A for Mossad.342

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  Thus, in late 1968, within two months of visiting NUMEC and talking to Shapiro about miniature plutonium-powered electricity generators, Rafi Eitan and his fellows pulled off the largest uranium heist in history. Interesting circumstances surrounded these events:

  •Israel had not yet fabricated fuel for Dimona (the French manufactured the original fuel);

  •Israel was about to acquire 200 tons of natural uranium in the form of yellowcake;

  •The Plumbat affair required months of planning; and

  •NUMEC was America’s leading uranium fuel manufacturer.

  Knowing these circumstances, in retrospect, Eitan’s agenda at Apollo might have included the transfer of technology on uranium fuel fabrication to Israel. Shapiro’s fortuitous arrival in Israel just after the 200 tons of yellowcake supports this hypothesis. So did an FBI wiretap. On February 20, 1969, a month after Shapiro’s return from Israel, the FBI recorded a conversation, which confirmed that nuclear fuel design and testing were of mutual interest to Shapiro and the Israelis.343

  [Redacted] who was at the Israeli Embassy, Washington, DC, told Shapiro that he was sorry about ‘the cables back and forth’ regarding tests and in the future he would come to the United States and have Shapiro’s firm conduct the ‘tests.’ [Redacted] told Shapiro he would like to send Shapiro drawings and specifications of the ‘fuel elements’ and desired an estimate of the costs per element. [Four lines redacted.]

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  Ken Follett rendered the Plumbat affair in fictional form in his novel Triple, published in 1979, two years after Leventhal broke the true story. Set in the Middle East and Europe in 1968, the novel reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list. In Follett’s fictionalized account, the Palestinian Fatah and the Soviet KGB discover Mossad’s plans for diverting 200 tons of yellowcake on the high seas between Antwerp and Genoa. Tense encounters ensue when the operation is blown and an aging Mossad operative, whose handler bore a physical resemblance to Rafi Eitan, wins the final shootout and the hand of the nubile half-Palestinian daughter of an Oxford professor. In a postscript to the novel, Follett cited a story in the London Daily Telegraph of May 7, 1977, “Israel is believed to have been behind the disappearance from the high seas nine years ago of a uranium shipment large enough to build 30 nuclear weapons, it was disclosed yesterday. Officials say that the incident was ‘a real James Bond affair’ and that although intelligence agencies in four countries investigated the mystery, it was never determined what actually happened to the 200 tons of uranium ore that vanished.” More precisely, the diverted material was yellowcake, which is processed uranium ore.<
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  Shapiro was involved with other Israeli intelligence agents besides the four visitors to NUMEC in September 1968. That same month, FBI wiretaps revealed that Colonel Avraham Eylonie, a senior official of Israel’s Military Intelligence Service, was in the United States and had several meetings with Shapiro in Apollo and Washington, DC.344 Shapiro also met a number of times with Israel’s science attaches/intelligence agents, Avraham Hermoni and Jeruham Kafkafi. The FBI’s wiretap transcripts and Shapiro’s statements to Congressman Udall disclosed meetings with high-ranking representatives of Israeli military intelligence in Israel. Shapiro also acknowledged to Seymour Hersh that he knew Binyamin Blumberg, the Director of LAKAM, saying, ‘“I never said I didn’t know him.’ But he denied revealing any American secrets or diverting any materials. ‘I worked my butt off to assure the security of this country [presumably the United States]—do you think for a moment I’d do anything to impair its security?’”345 Although Shapiro may have thought it was ok to give nuclear secrets to Israel, an ally of America, it was and still is a criminal offense under several federal laws, including the Atomic Energy Act. A court took a strict view of this matter in the Pollard case. After his conviction for treason for providing defense and espionage secrets to Israel, the judge sent Pollard to jail for life and his wife to jail for five years.346 As noted before, Pollard was paroled in November 2015.

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  It is worth digressing to examine the arguments that Pollard presented to defend his stealing from America for the benefit of Israel for they were similar to Shapiro’s statements to Congressman Udall in December 1978 and AEC Security Director Riley in August 1969. In Pollard’s words:347

  For years our family took quiet pride in my late uncle’s decision to provide the fledgling Israeli Army in 1948 with military boots and medical supplies “liberated” from the American Hospital in Paris, which he commanded at the time. . . . All the time growing up, all I heard was stories of individuals we knew—very close friends—who had performed what I call their racist obligation to Israel in 1948. This is the term which I grew up with. [Sometimes it meant] shot gunning a trainload of illegal dynamite through San Antonio, stevedoring a covert Israeli arms shipment at night in Galveston, spiriting a stripped down aircraft out of an Air Force Reserve park in the desert—all these things. . . . In addition, many of the leading members of the local Jewish community I met while growing up in Texas . . . participated in other types of activities that were of critical importance to Israel during the War of Independence, which ranged from the organization of munitions shipments to the acquisition of surplus bombers. . . . [These people also faced] a situation in which something less overt and probably of a confidential nature would be expected of [them]. For example, Jewish homes were expected to be made available for visiting Israelis, who were not to be disturbed for days on end. While Jewish businessmen were routinely used to quietly broker the transfer of sensitive material or processes needed by the Israeli armaments industry.