Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel

by Roger Mattson

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  On June 7, 1973, President Nixon nominated a lawyer, Clarence M. Kelley, to be the director of FBI. Kelley had joined FBI as a Special Agent in 1940 and served in a variety of field offices, including Birmingham and Memphis where he was Special Agent in Charge. He retired from FBI in 1961 to become Chief of Police in Kansas City, Missouri. When he rejoined FBI in 1973, Kelley was the first person to become director through the normal process of presidential nomination and senate confirmation. He brought new thinking to the Bureau, including several steps to improve its relationship with CIA, such as naming a new FBI liaison officer William Cregar.432

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  In early 1974, Dr. David Rosenbaum led a Special Safeguards Study for the Regulatory Staff of the AEC. Rosenbaum recruited William C. Sullivan, former deputy director of FBI, to serve on the study group.21 Rosenbaum selected Robert M. Jefferson of Sandia National Laboratory to serve as the study’s radioactive materials handling expert, along with the chair of the mathematics department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Daniel J. Kleitman. The group inspected a number of licensed nuclear facilities, including several nuclear power plants and the Apollo plant. They found that AEC and its contractors did not guard weapons-grade nuclear materials well enough to successfully resist theft by terrorist groups. The group concluded, “The potential harm to the public from the explosion of an illicitly made nuclear weapon is greater than that from any plausible power plant accident, including one that involves a core meltdown.”433 The internal report of the study group leaked to the press and served to increase attention that Congress and the executive branch paid to the possibility of foreign states or sub-national organizations stealing weapons-grade uranium or plutonium within the United States to fabricate nuclear weapons. The NRC and DOE increased their safeguards against this possibility over the next several years.

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  In the summer of 1974, Congress passed the Energy Reorganization Act to eliminate the conflict of interest caused by AEC’s charter to both promote and regulate atomic energy. The Act disbanded AEC and replaced it with two new agencies, NRC and ERDA. All of AEC’s work related to nuclear weapons transferred to ERDA. The NRC inherited AEC’s regulatory responsibilities.

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  That same summer, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives used a taped conversation between Nixon and Haldeman as the primary basis for the first article of impeachment of the president—obstruction of justice and “endeavoring to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United States.” Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974 and Gerald Ford became president.434

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  On September 4, 1974, the CIA issued a Special National Intelligence Estimate, SNIE 4-1-74, “Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”435 In the estimate, CIA said, “We believe that Israel has already produced nuclear weapons. . . . Our judgment is based on Israeli acquisition of uranium, partly by clandestine means; the ambiguous nature of Israeli efforts in the field of uranium enrichment; and Israel’s large investment in a costly missile system designed to accommodate nuclear warheads.”

  The 1974 Estimate disclosed that CIA had told three commissioners of the AEC of its conclusion that Israel had stolen uranium for its bomb. CIA did not expect Israelis “to provide confirmation of widespread suspicions of their capability, either by nuclear testing or by threats of use, short of a grave threat to the nation’s existence.” CIA said it was

  theoretically possible for a country capable of developing a nuclear weapon to do so covertly up to the test of a first device, and a test is not absolutely necessary. . . . A country capable of developing and producing its own nuclear device is highly unlikely to steal weapons, but one might seek fissionable materials by theft or diversion. Competently done, diversion might go undetected.

  This highly guarded conclusion of the CIA was never intended for public disclosure, but it managed to avoid that fate for only four years before CIA committed an embarrassing FOIA faux pas by releasing the Estimate to the public in nearly unredacted form.436 It was the most definitive government statement ever made public in the United States about Israeli nuclear weapons capabilities. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) made the FOIA request. A classification review of the Estimate by CIA staff identified two paragraphs that were fit for release. Instead, the public release included the entire document but for those two paragraphs.437 As in other instances, CIA admitted error in disclosing classified information but did not deny its accuracy.

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  In late 1974, William Colby, Schlesinger’s successor as DCI, decided it was time for James Angleton to retire. Angleton’s severe anti-communist invectives were disturbing people in high places who were promoting detente with the Soviets, and his suspicions of a spy in every closet were driving the Soviet division of the Agency crazy. Angleton refused to go, so Colby decided to blame him for CIA’s past violations of its charter. Colby invited journalist Seymour Hersh, who had been reporting on illegal CIA surveillances, to a private meeting where he told Hersh about two of CIA’s most secret programs—the CHAOS program that assembled files on American political activists and the mail-opening program to discover and monitor Americans engaged in espionage. Angleton participated in both of these covert programs, both were illegal and both were conducted in the United States outside of CIA’s authorized charter. Colby also provided Hersh with evidence of other illegal activities that Angleton had undertaken in his capacity as director of counterintelligence. Angleton resigned on Christmas Eve, 1974, two days after Hersh’s story appeared on page one of the New York Times. Hersh wrote several newspaper accounts of what he called CIA’s “Family Jewels” based on the information Colby provided.438

  The Family Jewels were assembled in 1973 at Schlesinger’s direction. He tasked CIA staff to assemble a list of acts committed by the Agency in the past that “might be construed to be outside the legislative charter” of the Agency. Colby was subordinate to Schlesinger at the time and drafted the order after public disclosure that President Nixon’s staff obtained assistance from CIA without the DCI’s knowledge.

  After disclosing some of the Family Jewels to Hersh, Colby briefed President Ford.439 Colby later told the attorney general440 about eighteen items that he had reported to the president. Colby’s list did not include NUMEC or anything remotely connected. If CIA had participated in a diversion of highly enriched uranium at Apollo, the act would have been within the scope of Schlesinger’s request that CIA staff identify its embarrassing misdeeds. That is, the NUMEC affair, if it involved CIA covert action in the United States, would have been delicate information with flap potential because it would have been an act committed outside of CIA’s “legislative charter.” If CIA told the truth, then it did not participate in a diversion from NUMEC.

  The fact that news of NUMEC never reached President Ford in connection with the Family Jewels does not mean that CIA did not identify NUMEC when it assembled the list of misdeeds because CIA did not report the full extent of its illegal activities. Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Weiner says that Richard Helms, then ambassador to Iran, told President Ford that if they could not stop Colby from further disclosures, “A lot of dead cats will come out.” The example that Helms provided to Kissinger and Ford was the fact that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had personally managed CIA assassination plots against Fidel Castro, a fact that had not been provided to the Warren Commission and had not been disclosed in the Family Jewels.441

  In 2007, CIA released more than 700 pages of documents generated by the self-assessment that led to the identification of the Family Jewels. The 24 megabytes of documents were text-searchable on the Internet. There is no mention of Apollo, NUMEC, Israel or Zalman Shapiro in that documentation. Despite the fact that many of the 700 pages are completely redacted, it is unlikely that CIA admitted participation in a diversion of HEU from NUMEC. The only item in the Family Jewels that comes close to the circumstances surrounding NUMEC is a mention of CIA
funding of AEC laboratories, including Savannah River Laboratory, to develop sampling techniques and devices to detect radionuclides released to the environment from nuclear facilities.442 CIA relied on such techniques at Dimona in 1968 when it discovered traces of uniquely enriched uranium from Portsmouth, Ohio.

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  19 This time, Seaborg referred to “sensitive” information, not just classified information.

  20 This is one of the last correspondences about NUMEC involving Riley. On October 25, 1972, the Washington Post carried a story by UPI that the AEC had found no security violations by Riley “who was suspended as director of security after several AEC employees alleged he owed thousands of dollars in personal loans ... used in gambling at race tracks in the Washington area.”

  21 Hoover fired Sullivan on October 1, 1971 because he flaunted Hoover’s edict against cooperating with the CIA.

  Part Four: Need to Know

  Chapter 11

  Reprise (1976)

  In January 1975, soon after the Energy Reorganization Act created the NRC, the Division of Safeguards of the new agency assigned one of its senior engineers, Jim Conran, to assemble a history of safeguards measures applied to special nuclear materials (SNM) in the past.22 His task was part of a larger effort by the division to determine what would constitute adequate protection of SNM in commerce and the NRC-licensed facilities that housed it.

  Conran was forty something, six feet tall, sandy haired, dedicated to his work, smart and imbued with the tenacity of a bulldog. He had the requisite Q clearance that permitted access to classified nuclear weapons information and national security information. He started his assignment by digging into the safeguards records that NRC inherited from AEC. Then he went to the Energy Research and Development Administration with the same objective. ERDA had inherited the role and the documents of the former General Manager’s side of AEC. In ERDA’s files, Conran found reference to a classified file on Zalman Shapiro and NUMEC. ERDA denied him access to the file claiming he had no need to know. He went to his managers at NRC to seek support for his quest, but they refused to intervene on his behalf. Conran became a whistle-blower; he was certain that people were out to punish him for trying to do the right thing and convinced that the national interest required his perseverance. He was right on both counts.23

  Conran was not timid in voicing his concerns as he made his way up the management chain to the director of safeguards, then the director of the office of nuclear materials safety and safeguards, and finally to the offices of the individual commissioners. At each level, he sought the same thing, support for his need to access secret files on NUMEC.

  He complained that ERDA was denying access not only to him but also to the entire NRC, and it was not just the secrets about Shapiro and NUMEC that were being withheld, but a variety of other important information, such as the likelihood of success of terrorists in designing clandestine atom bombs. As he became more vocal, and surely more suspicious of people’s motives, Conran’s technical concerns were intertwined with personnel concerns that grew in proportion to the resistance exhibited by senior management. The whistleblower situation involves a never-ending series of Catch-22s. It is not a nice place.

  At the top of his NRC management chain, Conran found an attentive ear in Commissioner Edward Mason who took the matter to NRC Chairman William Anders.443 Anders had exhibited a willingness to apply fresh thinking to nuclear safeguards two years earlier when, as an AEC commissioner and acting chairman, he implemented my suggestion to turn an atom bomb threat in Boston, suspected by everyone to be a hoax, into an unplanned national exercise. The ensuing three days of on-the-job training improved interagency coordination on nuclear threat issues. Others besides Anders appreciated the need for the government to have a plan for handling such events in the future. Three years after the Boston hoax, and two years after Conran blew the whistle, an assistant attorney general said as much to Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). “The fact that the specter of a diversion of weapons-grade nuclear material from the NUMEC facility has lingered for 13 years and still remains unresolved should certainly remove any doubts as to the necessity for a coordinated interagency plan of action. . . .”444

  As NRC chairman, Anders asked for and received briefings by CIA and ERDA about NUMEC. The briefings occurred in February 1976. The CIA’s Deputy Director for Science and Technology, Carl Duckett, represented the CIA. The Director of ERDA’s Office of Security, Harvey Lyon, briefed the commission on AEC’s earlier investigation of NUMEC. Unfortunately, guided by the ubiquitous “need to know,” no one bothered to tell Conran that the briefings occurred or what the commissioners and senior staff of NRC were told. He was simply left to fret over why he was being denied access to secrets that had a bearing on his assignment. Conran was not alone: The commissioners and senior safeguards staff also failed to tell the NRC’s executive director for operations what they learned in the briefing. The EDO is NRC’s top staff official, responsible for overall management of the agency.

  At the time of the briefings, Anders was about to leave NRC to become U.S. Ambassador to Norway. To make certain the information provided to the commission by ERDA and CIA would not be overlooked after he left, and because the matter transcended NRC’s jurisdiction, he told James Connor of the White House staff what he had learned about NUMEC.

  Anders served both the AEC and the NRC with well-considered judgments on policy and regulatory matters. His courage was demonstrated before coming to AEC when he piloted the lunar module on Apollo 8, the first flight to circumnavigate the moon. It did so on Christmas Eve in 1968 as the crew read the Bible’s creation story to a spellbound world. A few orbits later, Anders took the first “earthrise” photo from the moon, a photo that has been called the most important environmental photo in history. After serving as U.S. Ambassador to Norway, he led General Electric’s nuclear and aircraft divisions before becoming Chairman and CEO of General Dynamics. Anders is not a frivolous person. He would not have taken CIA’s information about NUMEC to President Ford unless he thought it deserved serious attention.

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  On February 24, 1976, the same month that ERDA and CIA briefed NRC, Senator Howard Baker (R-TN), Chairman of the Joint Committee, wrote to Attorney General Edward H. Levi to ask for a briefing concerning the “alleged diversion of nuclear material from NUMEC.”445

  Levi referred Baker’s request to the FBI. The FBI’s office of Congressional affairs contacted George F. Murphy, who had assumed the post of executive director of the Joint Committee and had drafted the letter from Baker to Levi. Murphy advised that Baker’s letter had been purposely vague and that he would like to discuss the matter in detail in his office. Murphy had earlier expressed doubts about the AEC’s leniency with NUMEC, saying that the missing uranium could not have just disappeared.446 Now, in the waning days of the Joint Committee, Murphy had the power to satisfy his curiosity. Murphy had served with CIA from 1950 to 1958, was an investigator for the Joint Committee at the time AEC investigated the 1965 inventory difference at NUMEC, was deputy executive director of the Joint Committee from 1968 to 1975, and then served as executive director from 1975 until the committee disbanded in 1977, pursuant to a Senate reorganization. He went on to become head of the Senate Office of Classified National Security Information.

  Murphy met with a special agent of FBI on March 9, 1976, and recounted what he knew about NUMEC in the mid 1960s, noting that the company had paid about $800,000 that it owed to the government, despite its financial difficulties. In retrospect and reading between the lines, it appears Murphy was suggesting that someone paid the fine for NUMEC. He asked the FBI to brief Senator Baker on March 17. After the March 9 briefing, FBI Director Kelley wrote to Attorney General Levi to say that Murphy had asked FBI to turn over all of its files on Shapiro to the Joint Committee. Kelly said he told Murphy that a memorandum summarizing the FBI material would be provided if the attorney general approved the file transfer.447

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&nb
sp; In “off-the-cuff” remarks in mid-March 1976, just a month after he briefed the NRC, CIA’s Deputy Director for Science and Technology, Carl Duckett, told members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, at a meeting of its local chapter featuring cocktails and a light buffet for $6.50 a head, that Israel had ten to twenty nuclear weapons. Although the session with high-ranking CIA officials was not classified, CIA asked attendees not to take notes or quote the remarks of the CIA presenters. Nevertheless, one of the people in attendance at the briefing leaked Duckett’s remark about Israel to the press and it soon appeared in the Washington Post. The current DCI George H. W. Bush apologized publicly for the disclosure.24 Israel’s foreign minister protested Duckett’s remarks and denied their accuracy in a conversation with U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon. Senator Frank Church, then Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called Duckett’s remarks “the biggest goof in the history of leaks.” Church did not say that Duckett erred in his assessment, only that he goofed in leaking it. Although Israel’s policy of nuclear opacity survived Duckett’s career, there was no doubt by the late 1970s that the U.S. was complicit in the ruse.448

  Time magazine went a bit further in its disclosures following Duckett’s disclosure.449 In the April 12, 1976 edition, Time published a “Special Report” on how Israel got the bomb that included the following statement:

  For years there has been widespread speculation about Israel’s nuclear potential—speculation that has now been confirmed. At a briefing for a group of American space experts in Washington recently, an official of the Central Intelligence Agency estimated that Israel had between ten and 20 nuclear weapons “available for use.” In fact, TIME has learned, Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal of 13 atomic bombs, assembled, stored and ready to be dropped on enemy forces from specially equipped Kfir and Phantom fighters or Jericho missiles. These weapons have a 20-kiloton yield, roughly as powerful as those that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.