Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel

by Roger Mattson

  That same day, Anthony A. Lapham, CIA’s General Counsel, sent a note on a routing slip to Shackley.

  I do not disagree with the proposal to offer a separate briefing to Dr. Brzezinski rather than to participate in the ERDA presentation. But at the same time I think we should review the decision not to discuss our intelligence information with the FBI or ERDA. As I understand it, the investigations of NUMEC are related to the possibility that nuclear material may have been diverted, and apparently at least ERDA has concluded there is no evidence of diversion. However, that conclusion is difficult to square with our intelligence information, and while one can argue about the probative value of that information from an investigative or legal standpoint, I doubt we are in a position to say that it has no value (half line redacted).

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  The Conran task force did not know of these discussions among NRC, NSC, ERDA and CIA. It only learned by chance remarks of people it interviewed that the NRC commissioners knew more about AEC’s prior investigation of NUMEC than the task force had been told. As a result, the task force posed a set of questions concerning what the commissioners knew about prior investigations by CIA, AEC and the Justice Department. In response, the commission sent Bryan Eagle and NRC General Counsel Peter Strauss to brief the task force. In doing so, the commissioners decided that the task force could not know what they had been told by Justice, CIA and ERDA; it could only know what the commissioners had done after they were told. Despite this hedge by the commission, the task force labored on, searching for a way to say whether the commissioners had addressed the issue raised by Conran.

  The task force met with Eagle and Strauss on Saturday April 23 in secure facilities at the commission’s H Street offices in Washington. They told the task force that the information to be conveyed was classified as Secret, National Security Information. They said that ERDA and CIA had given separate briefings to the NRC commissioners in February 1976 about the earlier investigations of Shapiro and NUMEC by AEC and CIA, and that the commissioners had generally accepted what they were told. Later, the task force learned that a man named Duckett had provided the CIA briefing.489

  Eagle and Strauss said that the briefings in 1976 did not include the FBI. The task force knew that FBI had investigated Shapiro years before to determine if he should have registered as an agent of a foreign country. However, the task force did not know that AEC told FBI that the circumstances surrounding the missing HEU discovered in 1965 did not warrant an FBI investigation.490 Likewise, the task force did not know that CIA caused a second FBI investigation to begin in 1968 or that the investigation led to FBI Director Hoover’s recommendation that AEC cancel NUMEC’s classified contracts and Shapiro’s security clearance. The task force also was not privy to the episode that occurred during the Nixon administration when the AEC commissioners finessed Shapiro’s request for a Sigma clearance to work at Kawecki Berylco by their finding him a new job at Westinghouse. The task force was told in vague terms that there had been a recent FBI investigation and that President Ford had been briefed on the NUMEC situation. The task force was not told that the FBI investigation was still ongoing in parallel with the task force effort and that other NRC staff and the Joint Committee were interacting with the FBI investigators.491

  Either the NRC commissioners judged that the task force did not have a need to know details about FBI’s involvement or they too did not know these details. In retrospect, to have not involved NRC with FBI’s ongoing investigation was a mistake. For one thing, the FBI investigators did not understand the technical details of the matters they were investigating. Carefully selected and security-cleared subject matter experts from NRC could have helped FBI agents overcome that limitation. In addition, the people who relied on what the task force said in its final report, including the two Congressional committees that were overseeing NRC at the time, probably assumed the task force was informed of what FBI knew. This historical account, at least in part, atones for NRC’s mistake—better late than never.

  Strauss and Eagle went on to tell the task force that CIA and ERDA briefings of NRC in February 1976 probably occurred because of Conran’s efforts. His open letter in 1977 noted that he had meetings with most of the commissioners. Eagle begrudgingly admitted Conran’s persistence with the commissioners might have been one of the factors leading to the briefings by CIA and ERDA. Rowden, who was one of the original commissioners of NRC and succeeded Bill Anders as chairman, later agreed with this assessment. He told the FBI that Anders arranged for the February 1976 briefings by CIA and ERDA and that Conran was making allegations about the importance of the NUMEC information at the time.492 Rowden did not share this information with the Conran task force.

  In summary, it is clear today that Conran raised the NUMEC issue with the commissioners and others, that Anders and Kennedy arranged for CIA and ERDA briefings and that Anders was concerned by what he heard in the briefings. Since he was about to leave NRC, Anders briefed James Connor, secretary to the cabinet, who informed President Ford who, in turn, initiated new inquiries by Justice, FBI and the Joint Committee.493

  Thomas O’Toole of the Washington Post said as much, “The matter surfaced again last year [1976] when the Ford White House asked the Energy Research and Development Administration to turn over its files on the case. The White House did so at the suggestion of former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman William Anders who had been briefed by the CIA on its suspicions in the matter.”494

  Strauss and Eagle also told the Conran task force, “These briefings [by ERDA and CIA] raised serious questions, but did not provide conclusive answers. However, the Commission and other senior officials had the benefit of this information in reaching their conclusions on our current safeguards program.” Furthermore, the “classification of the briefings was top secret [National Security Information] including unidentified compartmented intelligence classifications.” They also said that the commissioners had stopped making unqualified “no evidence” statements about diversions of bomb-making materials after those briefings.495

  Victor Gilinsky was one of the commissioners that attended the CIA briefing in 1976. More than twenty years after the fact, he recalled, “What Duckett confirmed, to everyone’s astonishment, was that the CIA believed that the nuclear explosives in Israel’s first several bombs, about 100 kilograms of bomb-grade uranium in all, came from material that was missing at a U.S. naval nuclear fuel plant operated by NUMEC in Apollo, Pennsylvania. NUMEC had exceptionally close and suspicious ties to Israel. The firm’s sloppy material accounting could have masked the removal of the bomb-grade uranium.”496

  Kenneth Chapman (Major General, USAF retired), director of the NRC Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards, remembered Duckett’s remarks quite differently.497 Chapman told the Conran task force, “There was no hard evidence described in the briefings by the intelligence community that material either had or had not been stolen in the past.”498

  The task force did not learn of the commissioners’ personal impressions of the CIA briefing. However, it surmised from what little it was told that CIA and ERDA held differing views on the matter. That is, ERDA thought that a thorough investigation had been done by AEC, and, although significant quantities of HEU were missing, AEC found no proof of a diversion. Conversely, some other evidence suggested to the CIA that a diversion had occurred. The task force inferred that CIA would not have been involved if the information conveyed to NRC concerned only the earlier AEC investigation. Moreover, since CIA’s jurisdiction is outside the U.S., it was reasonable to suppose, as the task force did at the time, that CIA told NRC about indications from foreign intelligence sources that pointed to the possibility of a diversion. The task force did not know whether such intelligence was human, physical or both.

  The task force also did not learn what ERDA disclosed about NUMEC in its briefing of the commission and its senior staff in February 1976. NRC attendees at that meeting later disclosed to another internal NRC investigati
on that Harvey Lyon of ERDA asserted that his briefing covered all the NUMEC information in ERDA’s files. He described AEC’s investigation of the missing HEU and its conclusion that there was no diversion. He specifically mentioned “the FBI investigation,” Shapiro’s foreign associations, the sloppiness of plant operations, NUMEC’s payment for the MUF [inventory difference], the continued problems under ARCO ownership and the fact that Apollo was a problem plant.499 The DOE representatives did not share such details with the Conran task force.

  The task force delivered its final report on Conran’s allegations to the NRC commissioners on April 29.500 It briefed the commissioners on May 3. The commissioners allowed no other NRC staff members to attend the briefing, not one.

  The task force confirmed the validity of some but not all of Conran’s concerns. It found no conclusive evidence on the NUMEC matter, although it could not rule out a diversion and it could not prove that one occurred with the information it was provided. At that time, the task force members had no substantive information about FBI investigations, and they were not privy to the information provided by CIA and ERDA briefings, all of which, with the benefit of hindsight, included additional clues as to whether a diversion occurred.

  The task force reported what others had said about learning appropriate lessons from studies of the alleged diversion at Apollo and that these lessons had been or were being incorporated into NRC’s safeguards program. The task force also pointed out several weaknesses in the nation’s safeguarding of bomb-making materials, some of which derived from Conran’s concerns, and offered recommendations on how to correct them. Important among the recommendations was the need to specify the size and other characteristics of adversary groups committed to the theft of such materials, i.e., to define credible internal and external threat levels and to adjust those threat levels as circumstances changed with time, including the threat posed by insiders in positions of authority.

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  On May 9, 1977, two agents of the FBI visited CIA’s Associate Deputy Director for Operations Ted Shackley in his Langley office.501 One supervised the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division in charge of the ongoing NUMEC investigation. Shackley briefed them from a talking paper based on “a recent review of our files.” He did not give them a copy of the paper. The agents said they had come up with no hard evidence of a diversion and the material Shackley provided was not new to them. The talking paper was attached to the memo describing the meeting. The CIA redacted about two-thirds of the talking paper upon its release in September 2015.

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  On May 13, just 10 days after the Conran task force briefed the NRC commissioners, Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti wrote to FBI Director Kelley stating that his department had no objection to FBI conducting a lie detector test of Shapiro.502 Ten days later Kelley directed the Washington Field Office to interview Shapiro and then decide if there should be a polygraph examination.503

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  On May 25, 1977, Rowden and I took the report of the Conran task force to Congressman Udall’s office to brief him and a member of his subcommittee staff, Henry Myers, on its findings and recommendations. Rowden apologized for NRC’s delay in giving the report to Udall because of the need for the National Security Council to review it for classification. So much for NRC’s independence—CIA monitored the progress of the task force and NSC vetted its report.

  I briefed Udall and Myers on the work of the task force. Udall expressed support for our recommendations on how to improve safeguards, but he was not satisfied with our inconclusiveness regarding NUMEC. Rowden told Udall and Myers that CIA briefed NRC about its findings. He also said there were diverse views within NRC, based on CIA’s circumstantial evidence, about the possibility of a diversion.504 Then, without missing a beat, Rowden told Udall that if he wanted to learn more he should consult with the National Security Council and “talk to Rick,” an apparent but uncommon reference to Admiral Rickover.

  Rowden’s suggestions surprised me because no one told the task force that Rickover or the National Security Council might have information of value to its investigation. It was told only that NSC would review its report for classification and that Rickover had an interest in the Conran allegations and had sent his Assistant Director Robert Brodsky to talk to Chapman soon after the task force was chartered. The task force also knew that Shapiro was no stranger to Rickover having worked at the Navy’s Bettis Laboratory before founding NUMEC. Udall did not follow up on Rowden’s recommendation to check with Rickover, perhaps missing a chance to learn more about the enrichment of navy fuel.505

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  Rowden’s referral of Udall to the NSC is interesting. Today, more is known about the relationship between NRC and NSC than when Conran blew the whistle. Richard Kennedy was one of the first five commissioners of the NRC, beginning his tenure in January 1975. He served on the NSC staff from 1969 to 1974 under the leadership of National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration and Brent Scowcroft during the Ford administration. Kennedy told NRC investigators that he requested the CIA briefing provided by Carl Duckett. He also said that the day after he heard Duckett’s briefing he told General Scowcroft “that NRC had received the briefing, that at the time of the events there were differing views, that the highest government officials had been informed in 1966 and that it had now surfaced again through the [CIA] briefing.” Kennedy “felt that it might be something they [NSC] were interested in.”506 Kennedy probably had a particular sensitivity to nuclear weapons in Israel in that he was a member of the NSC staff when Kissinger created National Security Memorandum 40, a formal process to address how the U.S. government should respond to the emergence of a nuclear Israel.507

  Years later, former NRC Commissioner Victor Gilinsky recalled, “William Colby was DCI until Jan 30, 1976 (at which point Bush senior took over). As I recall, the NRC briefing [by Duckett] took place in February. It was set up I believe while Colby was still at the CIA. I remember Dick Kennedy saying to Bill Anders in a discussion over Conran and the trouble he was making that he would contact Colby to set up a briefing. I think Anders asked if there was any way we could learn the truth, settle this thing once and for all. Kennedy would have known Colby, at least from Kennedy’s tenure as Haig’s right hand man under Kissinger at the NSC.” Since it was possible that Kennedy saw Kissinger’s memo to Nixon saying there was circumstantial evidence the Israelis swiped the HEU, Gilinsky continued, “I assume Kennedy would have expected that the CIA would come in and say there was no theft, regardless of what they really believed. (When Ed Mason complained about someone in DOE lying to him about the story, Kennedy burst out with ‘Don’t you understand, it was his duty to lie to you.’)”508 Carl Duckett later told Congressman Udall that Commissioner Kennedy of NRC called in 1976 to invite him to tell the commissioners about NUMEC.

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  On June 6, Ted Shackley briefed two FBI officials involved in the NUMEC investigation. He described the general basis for CIA’s conclusions about NUMEC’s connection to Israel.509 The FBI officials once again said there was nothing new in the briefing and if CIA learned something new to let them know.

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  On June 27, 1977 two special agents of the FBI interviewed Shapiro in Pittsburgh. They spent the first hour of the interview discussing a “Waiver of Rights” that the agents asked Shapiro to sign. After consulting with his attorney by phone, Shapiro agreed “to be interviewed relative to the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) and his tenure with NUMEC as its President.” Shapiro said, to his knowledge “there was never any diversion of enriched uranium from the NUMEC facility and he termed the chances of any individual or group of individuals successfully diverting such material as miniscule. He denied emphatically that he was in any way connected with or responsible for any diversion.” He said losses of material in a plant like Apollo were inevitable due to the manufacturing processes involved. He used the Astronuclear contract to illustrate those process
es. The agents were apparently unaware that much of the HEU went missing before that contract and involved different material processing steps. Shapiro admitted that NUMEC blended scrap and waste among contracts and, insofar as possible, recovered uranium at the conclusion of “campaigns.” He volunteered that AEC “officials had, in fact, assured him personally that NUMEC MUF [inventory difference] compared favorably with MUF experienced throughout the rest of the industry.” He said he was never responsible or in any way connected with “release of restricted or classified material.” Shapiro also said, “At no time was [he] aware of being in contact with foreign intelligence officers or organizations.” The special agents did not challenge his assertion, apparently unaware of the background or even the names of Hillel Aldag, Avraham Bendor, Ephraim Biegun, Binyamin Blumberg, Rafi Eitan, Joseph Eyal, Avraham Eylonie, Avraham Hermoni, and Jeruham Kafkafi, all prior contacts of Shapiro and all intelligence officers of Israel, representing at least four different intelligence organizations.510