Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel

by Roger Mattson

  The Newsweek story stimulated more Congressional interest in NUMEC and led to briefings by FBI and CIA to other congressman, including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.539

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  On February 2, 1978, Ted Shackley briefed officials of the NRC on CIA’s “role and position relating to the NUMEC case.”540 The briefing occurred in two settings so there were never more than two commissioners in attendance to avoid there being a requirement for a recording of the meeting pursuant to the Government in Sunshine Act. Two others from CIA, names redacted, accompanied Shackley. The NRC attendees were given the opportunity to read a Talking Paper that summarized the CIA information.541 The four-page Talking Paper was completely redacted when released by the CIA in September 2015. The summary of the meeting included the CIA statement,

  We agreed with [Commissioner Kennedy’s] assessment, confirmed that there was no legal evidence of diversion from NUMEC. (One and a half lines redacted) which prompted CIA interest in the nuclear material missing from NUMEC. . . . Mr. Hendrie concluded, as a result of this discussion, that the time frame of the MUF [ID]—mid ‘60’s—was compatible with the time phasing expressed in the Talking Paper.

  Gossick of NRC asked what CIA would say if confronted with the question “Do you have evidence of diversion?” The CIA response was summarized as, “we would say that there is no hard evidence, but a series of events and facts led to our intelligence conclusion that a diversion was a likely possibility.” The CIA representatives twice said they had no knowledge of the ongoing FBI investigation relating to NUMEC. The CIA redacted less than one page of the three-page memorandum of record before releasing it.

  In addition to the Talking Paper, the CIA also released an outline of the February 2 NRC briefing.542 The outline started with the notes that the briefer was not a scientist, was not a first hand participant in the case, but was supervising research of CIA documents on NUMEC. One entry in the outline read “Process of deductive reasoning to find out how uranium obtained.” This entry was followed by the subheadings “Results of Deductive Analysis, NUMEC, Shapiro, Centrifuge, (redacted).” The outline summarized the “Key Issues” with the following subheadings: “No Investigation of NUMEC by CIA, No Diversion by CIA, and No Hard Evidence.”

  The CIA also issued a “Spot Report” in connection with the NRC briefing.543 The Spot Report explained why the briefing occurred in two sessions. It also informed the DCI that the briefers told NRC that the CIA could not “take the position that a diversion in fact occurred . . . it was explained again that (two lines redacted) to the missing material from NUMEC.” The report noted that Commissioner Gilinsky said after the briefing he would like to prepare a brief statement on the issue of evidence of a diversion. The CIA officials agreed to look at the statement. However, they “seek [DCI] guidance on the proper CIA posture in this regard.”

  On February 28, Thomas O’Toole reported in the Washington Post on the CIA briefing of the NRC. He said unnamed officials from CIA informed NRC “there were still strong suspicions inside the CIA that weapons-grade uranium had been smuggled to Israel more than 10 years ago . . . NRC officials had come away from the second briefing unconvinced that the missing uranium had been smuggled to Israel.”544

  Lyle L. Miller, CIA’s Acting Legislative Counsel, wrote to the DCI on February 28 concerning the O’Toole report.545 He said NRC Inspector General Thomas McTiernan said the quotations were “not an official NRC release.” Miller summarized what Shackley told the NRC. “(2 lines redacted). . . . The DDO will confer with the NRC to preclude any discussions of the CIA position on NUMEC with the press in the future.”

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  Several Congressmen continued to pester NRC about Gossick’s testimony. On February 27, 1978, Udall chaired another hearing. In his remarks at the start of the hearing, Udall attacked Gossick’s prior testimony, “. . . we now know . . . from press reports that have not been denied . . . that high level government officials have believed for years that there was a significant likelihood that highly enriched uranium had been diverted from Apollo.” The press reported that same day that CIA was known to suspect that Israeli intelligence operatives might have diverted the material into Israel’s nuclear weapons program.546 In their testimony at Udall’s hearing, NRC Commissioners Gilinsky and Bradford criticized Gossick’s July and August 1977 testimony that there was no evidence of a diversion at Apollo. Gilinsky said, “The statement is not warranted by the facts,” while Bradford opined that Gossick’s statements “clearly did not pass muster.”547

  This hammering on General Gossick by Congress and the commissioners was misplaced. It kept them from dealing directly with the possibility of a diversion of enriched uranium from America to Israel and the failure of the U.S. government to deal with it. Gossick was an honest man and a good manager, sensitive to the people with whom he dealt. He had many significant accomplishments in service to his country before coming to NRC and would not have risked his reputation for those good deeds in order to cover up the NUMEC affair in which he had no stake. Because he was cut out of ERDA, CIA and Conran task force briefings on the affair, it is likely that he failed to appreciate the importance of his turn of phrase regarding the evidence of a diversion and was too stubborn to admit his mistake. Others argued he was part of a coverup. Still others said he did what Generals Giller and Starbird told him to do. His loyalty to the generals and their desire to protect the U.S. weapons program probably outweighed the need for patience in selecting his words about the evidence of a diversion.

  Benjamin Huberman, NRC’s director of policy evaluation from 1975 to 1977 and an attendee at Duckett’s briefing in February 1976, was outspoken in his criticism of the commission’s treatment of Gossick. “It was atrocious. . . . They treated him, Gossick, unconscionably. If he had been at the briefing, he would not have been so poorly informed.” He was excluded from sessions such as this because, in Huberman’s opinion, the commissioners could not resolve in their own minds, the role of the Executive Director for Operations.548

  The uproar that Udall, Tsongas and Dingell created over Gossick’s testimony says more about Congress than it does about Gossick. By attacking his testimony and character, the Congressmen vented their anger over being unable to resolve the NUMEC affair, one way or another. Gossick did not have the facts. Therefore, their vitriolic attacks on him diverted their attention from others who did have the facts, especially the CIA. In the end, the Congressional inquiries led to new information but no action to resolve suspicions about a diversion of bomb-making materials from Apollo to Israel. Congress apparently lacked or was reluctant to use the authority to subpoena Rickover, Seaborg, Helms, Clark, Shackley, Duckett and other senior officials of the Johnson administration to get official accounts of what occurred and who knew what in the 1960s. They also could have subpoenaed officials of the Nixon and Ford administrations to learn why Shapiro’s clearance was not renewed and what else the presidents learned about NUMEC in the 1970s. Perhaps the Congressmen could have brought the various FBI investigations into the light. In the end, their attitude was much like that of President Johnson when he told Secretary Clifford, “don’t bother me with this anymore.”

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  On December 7, Brzezinski recorded in his Evening Report that he “reviewed the 30 lengthy responses drafted by DOE to Congressman Dingell’s questions on the Apollo-NUMEC-Israel issue. Dingell’s pursuit of the question of whether CIA withheld information from other agencies strikes me as potentially dangerous.”549

  The next day, December 8, 1977, John Fialka scooped the rest of the Washington press corps with startling new information that appeared to prove that HEU from Apollo contributed to Israel’s first nuclear weapons. He reported that CIA officers in 1968 used sophisticated equipment to determine that Israel had enough highly enriched uranium to make several atom bombs.550

  The identification of the Israeli uranium was believed to be the first hard evidence that sizeable quantities of a bomb-grade material had so
mehow been diverted from one of the five nations in the nuclear “club.” According to several government sources, the CIA then brought the FBI into the case and a top-secret surveillance and wire-tapping effort was focused on what was believed to have been the most likely source of the diversion, a company in Apollo, Pa., called the Nuclear Materials Equipment Corp.

  On January 26, 1978, news of this incriminating evidence reached National Public Radio.551 Journalist Barbara Newman reported,

  It appears that the CIA learned Israel had enriched uranium from a high level Israeli based in Europe. According to these sources, the uranium was housed in Israel’s nuclear complex in Dimona. The CIA confirmed the presence of uranium by employing highly sophisticated technology: the CIA arranged for a source to douse a handkerchief in water in the vicinity of Dimona, then had the handkerchief analyzed in CIA laboratories. The tests showed the water was contaminated with highly enriched uranium.

  Thus ended the decade-old secret: In 1968, CIA used spectrographic analysis32 to prove an American origin for the HEU it found in the environment near Dimona. Before then, information about CIA’s discovery was limited to a small number of senior officials of the U.S. government who classified it as top-secret national security information because it confirmed American complicity in Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Whether it fueled atom bombs or Dimona was beside the point—it was in Israel, it came from America and it was priceless.

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  27 The ID report resulted from an FOIA request filed by David Burnham of the New York Times asking for “information about the MUF problem.”

  28 Enno Henry Knoche served as Deputy DCI from July 1976 to August 1977 and was acting DCI from January 20 to March 9, 1977, between the DCI tenures of George H. W. Bush and Admiral Stansfield Turner. Turner became DCI in March 1977 and, according to David Corn’s biography of Ted Shackley (p. 342), forced Knoche’s retirement to send a message that change was needed.

  29 The president’s diary records a discussion on NUMEC the same day. President Carter also noted, “The question of the lost uranium in the 1960s that may or may not have gone to Israel is a matter we’ve been discussing. It’s going to be a public issue when ERDA makes its report.”

  30 There is no indication in the memorandum as to where Brzezinski heard of 56 kilograms. That value differed from what AEC told Congress about the material that was missing at NUMEC before 1966 and could not be accounted for (93.8 kilograms) and the amount of the inventory difference at NUMEC attributed to the Astronuclear contract (61 kilograms).

  31 The Department of Energy replaced ERDA on August 4, 1977.

  32 The enrichment of a particular sample of uranium can be determined by gamma-ray spectrometry (i.e., spectrographic analysis). Such assay methods were available in 1968 when CIA found HEU in Israel that was associated with the Portsmouth enrichment facility. The AEC Regulatory Staff codified those methods in “Nondestructive Uranium-235 Enrichment Assays by Gamma-Ray Spectrometry,” AEC Regulatory Guide 5.21, April 1974.

  Chapter 13

  Emergent Theories (1978)

  Early in 1978, Congressman Dingell sent Michael Ward and Peter Stockton of his subcommittee staff to talk to the CIA about NUMEC. Shortly thereafter, Ward came to NRC’s offices in Bethesda, Maryland for an impromptu meeting with Edson Case, deputy director of NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. Case was my boss at the time and he asked me to attend the meeting. Ward described a possibility that had escaped the Conran task force. He said his discussions with CIA led him to think that a secret deal might have been reached at the highest level of government in the mid 1960s for the United States to furnish uranium to bolster Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Although the deal involved the diversion of uranium from NUMEC, the company could have been an unwitting accomplice to an unauthorized transfer in an otherwise legal shipment to Israel.552

  Ward had in his possession a CIA report that discussed this possibility. It may have been the same report that CIA carried to the briefing of NRC in February 1976. Ward let us see but not keep the report. It left little doubt that CIA concluded a diversion occurred.

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  In January 1978, NRC investigators interviewed Duckett and the eleven NRC people that attended his 1976 briefing of NRC officials. The interviews were part of an internal NRC inquiry into whether General Gossicklied to the Congressional committees in 1977.553 NRC Inspector and Auditor Thomas McTiernan and several NRC lawyers conducted the inquiry at the direction of NRC Chairman Hendrie. When McTiernan released his report in February 1978, he intended to classify the entire four-page summary of Duckett’s interview, but someone at NRC goofed and released the unredacted third page to the Udall committee, then to the NRDC and then to the press. That third page recorded Duckett’s recollections of his 1976 briefing of NRC in the following areas.

  •Israel’s bombing practice with its U.S.-supplied A-4 aircraft “that would not have made sense unless it was to deliver a nuclear bomb.”

  •The question of diversion of uranium from Apollo in the 1960s was irrelevant to CIA interests in Israel in 1976 because Israel’s nuclear weapons were then fueled by plutonium from Dimona.

  •The last U.S. inspection of Dimona in 1969 was less than adequate to determine if there was plutonium there at that time.

  •A shipment of 200 tons of non-enriched uranium from Argentina had been diverted to Israel through a West German cutout.33

  •The U.S. had not intentionally allowed material to go to Israel because he would have heard about it.

  •Richard Helms told him not to publish CIA’s 1968 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded the Israelis had nuclear weapons. Instead, Helms said he would take it up with President Johnson. Helms later related that he had spoken to the president, that the president was concerned, and that the president said, “Don’t tell anyone else, even Dean Rusk [Secretary of State] and Robert McNamara [Secretary of Defense].”

  •Chairman Anders apologized to Duckett for having so many people in the briefing and said that only he and Commissioner Kennedy would be involved in the future.

  •During the briefing, one commissioner, probably Dr. Mason, commented with mock jocularity “My God, I almost went to work for Zal Shapiro. I came close to taking a job with him.”

  •At the end, “It was a pretty somber group . . . it was not a formal briefing. It was more of a discussion for the whole session.”

  The ISCAP recently released a less redacted version of the McTiernan report. Approximately 40 lines of the four-page summary of the Duckett interview were still redacted. In the portions of the document revealed by ISCAP, there was little new information. Duckett recalled that NRC Commissioner Kennedy invited him to brief the NRC group in February 1976. He said he did not have to clear that briefing with anyone at CIA. He brought notes made for him by his staff to the briefing but did not leave them behind. He advised that he had been involved since 1964 with the NUMEC subject, i.e., about a year after he joined the Agency. Some of the material was redacted in the section of the summary where Duckett recounted the evidence surrounding the NUMEC affair. What was not redacted, in addition to the points listed above, included the following:

  •Shapiro had frequent contacts with Israeli officials;

  •NUMEC hired the AEC’s chief investigator of the MUF in 1965 while the AEC investigation was underway;34

  •The substantial variance in accounting records at NUMEC proves nothing;

  •He did not buy the view that all the MUF can be stuck in hundreds of miles of pipe;

  •He felt there was an undue amount of MUF at NUMEC;

  •He felt there was very clear circumstantial evidence that the NUMEC material went to Israel;

  •The attendees at the briefing could justifiably assume that what he said represented the Agency’s views;

  •He did not announce a classification level for the briefing, but he used the word “sensitive” half a dozen times;

  •He mentioned others that were inv
olved in inquiries about NUMEC, including George Murphy of the JCAE staff, Myers of the Udall staff and Senators Inouye, Glenn and Jackson.

  •He opined that Mr. Gossick was very quick to use less than ideal words to describe the NUMEC situation. Better words would have been “no direct evidence.”

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  Several media accounts and recollections of people who attended the February 1976 briefing referred to a CIA report on NUMEC. This is important because CIA has not been forthcoming with a report, if there was one. Rowden, for example, said that Duckett came with a file of papers that he scanned during the briefing and may have read from them.554 The Conran task force was told that the CIA briefer carried an “information package” when he met with the commission in February 1976. When Commissioner Gilinsky read the task force’s reference to an information package, he wrote to Congressman Dingell to say that he did not recall such a package and that he had been advised by Bryan Eagle “that the CIA material was not traceable as the official who had briefed the NRC had by then left the Agency.”555 Gilinsky also told NRC investigators that he did not recall Duckett having a package of papers at the briefing and volunteered that Duckett’s demeanor was nervous, “his hands were unsteady.”556 Senior people at DOE also denied the existence of a report on NUMEC by CIA. “If there is a CIA report, I have not seen it,” General Giller told the Washington Post. His boss, General Starbird, agreed, “My answer is the same as Ed’s.”557