Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel

by Roger Mattson

  •Three months later, CIA’s Associate Deputy Director of Operations, Ted Shackley, provided those same DOE officials with the technical details that underpinned CIA’s conclusions; and

  •In the summer of 1977, Shackley took the same briefing to numerous Congressmen, staff and the NSC.

  In 1991, Duckett granted a wide-ranging interview to Seymour Hersh. He told Hersh that Edward Teller’s conclusion in the late 1960s that the Israelis had the bomb but did not intend to test it “was the single most convincing piece of evidence I got the whole time I was in CIA.” Duckett also said he told Congressional investigators that NUMEC was formed in 1957 by Shapiro as part of a long-range Israeli intelligence scheme to divert uranium. Hersh reported that Duckett, Helms and CIA’s station chief in Israel, John Hadden, shared the view that Shapiro had to have been the source for the Israeli progress in nuclear weapons.

  Although Duckett acknowledged to Hersh that CIA operatives in Israel had found “traces of enriched uranium” near Dimona in 1968 that was similar to the enriched products that had been delivered for processing to Shapiro’s plant, he told Hersh that such a correlation was not meaningful. On that latter score, either Duckett erred or Hersh misunderstood. If the uranium found near Dimona was 97.7 percent enriched, it had to have come from Portsmouth. The science for determining radiological signatures of environmental samples of nuclear materials (nuclear forensics) was well established by 1968. Duckett surely knew that science, while Hersh evidently did not.

  Hersh also said that Duckett, in the 1991 interview, recanted many of his previous assertions. Hersh quoted him as saying “With all the grief I’ve caused, I know of nothing at all to indicate that Shapiro was guilty. There’s circumstantial information, but I have never attempted to make a judgment on this. At no point did I have any vested interest in this whole process. It was a matter of trying to be sure when you had information that you passed it along. Ultimately, you have no control over the information. I never met Shapiro and at no point was I interested in peddling the story.”628 The interview with Hersh was Duckett’s last public word on the matter.39 Clearly in his interview with Hersh, Duckett contradicted some of what he said on the national broadcast of the ABC Closeup program 10 years earlier. Another way to interpret what Duckett told Hersh, which resolves some of the contradictions, is that Duckett was sure that a diversion occurred (as confirmed by finding the Portsmouth HEU near Dimona), but he was less certain that Shapiro was directly involved.

  In 1991, CIA named one of its headquarters office buildings at Langley the Dirks-Duckett Wing after Duckett and Leslie C. Dirks, the man who succeeded him as Deputy Director of CIA for Science and Technology.629 Duckett died in 1992. Four years later, on September 18, 1997, his colleagues selected him as one of 50 Trailblazers to be recognized at the Agency’s 50th anniversary. The CIA-50 Steering Committee, comprised of officers from across the Agency, created the Trailblazer Award as a way to recognize CIA employees, from OSS days to 1997, whose action, example, innovation or initiative had taken CIA in important new directions and helped shape the Agency’s history.630

  In a 2002 interview with a reporter from a Pittsburgh area newspaper, former Congressional staffer Henry Myers opined on Duckett’s role in the NUMEC affair. “Why would Duckett lie? Why was he going public on television? He was a very conservative bureaucrat. All this did was get him in trouble in life. The thing about Duckett is he had no reason to lie.”631

  John Lloyd Hadden

  John Hadden was born on August 30, 1923 in New York City.632 His father was Gavin Hadden, a structural engineer, civilian employee of the Army Corps of Engineers, confidant of General Leslie Groves and the official historian of the Manhattan project.633 His mother was the daughter of an Episcopal bishop of New York. His family remembers John as a charmer and good with languages. He studied engineering for a year at Harvard and then graduated from West Point in 1945 with a civil engineering degree.

  Hadden attained an officer’s commission with the Army Corps of Engineers and was assigned to rebuild bridges and roads in post-war Germany. He also built an airstrip in Frankfurt for Air Force General Curtis LeMay.

  His father introduced John to General Groves who wanted John to go back to school for an advanced degree and then serve as a scientific spy on the Soviet Union. John demurred and left the army to join the fledgling CIA. He took an assignment in Berlin, a city he had grown to love during the war. He met his future wife Kathryn Falck in the CIA office in Berlin. John and Kathryn’s first child, John Jr., was born in Berlin in 1953.

  After assignments in Hamburg and Salzburg, Hadden served as CIA station chief in the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv from 1963 to 1967. He transferred to CIA headquarters in 1968 but returned to Israel frequently and was there most of 1969. After 1969, he worked directly for James Angleton, CIA’s chief of counterterrorism. He retired from the CIA in 1973.634

  John L. Hadden

  CIA Officer

  1948-1973

  Tel Aviv Station Chief

  1963-1967

  Hadden’s office in Tel Aviv was the source of intelligence information upon which CIA based its advice to President Johnson in early 1967 about the looming crisis between Israel and neighboring Arab states and the likelihood that Israel would quickly prevail if the crisis came to war. Hadden may have been the conduit for the information that preserved Angleton’s reputation and career for another seven years. In the ensuing Six-Day War, Hadden provided daily, first-hand battle accounts to CIA headquarters. Those accounts owed to his close working relationship with Mossad that afforded access to reports from the field.

  Hadden’s duties as station chief included keeping an eye on Dimona and Israel’s development of nuclear weapons. He was unable to confirm as late as 1966 that the Dimona site included a reprocessing plant for extracting plutonium from the reactor’s spent fuel. However, by 1967 he concluded that Israel had made progress in fabricating an atom bomb.635

  Hadden reported the twists and turns of the Israeli nuclear weapons program to anxious ears in Washington. For example, he detected that Prime Minister Eshkol reduced the country’s spending on nuclear weapons and that Minister of Defense Moshe Dyan had a nonchalant attitude toward the secret project, referring to it as “just another weapon.”636 Hadden also helped other U.S. embassy personnel monitor the environment near Dimona, looking for the first telltales of plutonium production, only to find HEU from Portsmouth.

  In 1977, four years after retiring from CIA, Hadden cooperated with various investigations of NUMEC. He suggested that the Israeli government had a mole inside AEC who protected Shapiro during the early investigations of a possible diversion from Apollo.637 He appeared to agree with Duckett when he told Congressional investigators, “NUMEC had been an Israeli operation from the beginning but the CIA had not been able to follow the money trail. The Agency thought NUMEC had been financed by the owner of Apollo steel mill, Israeli War of Independence veteran David Lowenthal.” Hadden said that any suggestion that Angleton had actually helped the Israelis with the NUMEC operation was “totally without foundation. But on the other hand, he [Angleton] had no interest in stopping” the Israeli operation. Hadden, who knew Angleton well, put it bluntly, “Why would someone whose whole life was dedicated to fighting communism have any interest in preventing a fiercely anti-communist nation getting the means to defend itself?”638

  Henry Myers interviewed Hadden in May 1978 and reported his impressions to Congressman Udall.639 Myers said that although Hadden “was elliptical in manner, I inferred there is little doubt in his mind that a diversion did occur. . . . In recent weeks, he has met with Dingell and Glenn. In addition he talked to Dingell staff for more than 20 hours. . . . Dingell staff says that Hadden is authentic and that discussion with him is essential to gain an understanding of the affair.” Subsequently, Congressman Udall met with Hadden.

  On June 26, 1979, the British Broadcast Corporation aired a TV program discussing Israel’s acquisition of the atom bomb.640 The
program reviewed in some detail both the NUMEC affair and the Plumbat affair. In the broadcast, BBC reporter Tom Bower introduced John Hadden as a former CIA political officer in Tel Aviv who began investigating Israel’s nuclear weapons program in 1960. Bower summarized eight factors that convinced Hadden that Israel had embarked on a nuclear program, as follows:

  1.The construction of facilities to produce and handle nuclear materials, like Dimona;

  2.The development of weapons technology, especially the type which can carry tactical nuclear warheads;

  3.The flow of key personnel, especially the number specializing in nuclear physics that had been trained in areas necessary for a weapons program;

  4.The attitude of the leadership to the nuclear question—General Dayan has hinted that Israel should declare it has the bomb;

  5.The armed forces had bought and developed a vehicle—the Jericho missile—that can deliver an atom bomb;

  6.Existing planes have been specially adapted to carry atom bombs;

  7.The delivery pattern of bombers on training runs—a plane’s flight on a nuclear attack varies from a conventional attack; and

  8.Analysis of the air and water near nuclear installations for traces of bomb-grade uranium.

  Hadden went on to say, “If I were an Israeli I would want the bomb. I think the Israelis would want to take out an insurance policy so that if the Arabs got it [the bomb] and if the Arabs used it they [the Israelis] would have something in their sling.” The BBC reporter then summarized some inadvertently released, classified information indicating that Israel’s first bombs were constructed of uranium obtained “partly by clandestine means,” to which Hadden commented, “I think the publication of highly classified documents is a mistake.”

  Hadden contributed to Avner Cohen’s 1998 seminal account of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Cohen identified Hadden as being among those “who helped beyond the call of duty. . . . Among those people—I am honored to consider them friends—are . . . Avraham Hermoni. . . Yuval Ne’eman . . . John Hadden . . . Paul Warnke.” Hadden was surely the unnamed source for a statement attributed by Cohen to “the CIA Station Chief in Tel Aviv” who said he never met with nor shared his insights with the U.S. inspection teams that periodically inspected Dimona.641 Even though Hadden was strong in his conviction that Shapiro had aided the Israeli program, and Cohen was strong in his praise of Hadden, Cohen made no mention of NUMEC in his 1998 book.

  Hadden told the Cockburns that John Kennedy was the last president to try to do something about the Israeli bomb.642 “Kennedy really wanted to stop it, and he offered them conventional weapons (e.g., the Hawks [antiaircraft missiles]) as an inducement. But the Israelis were way ahead of us. They saw that if we were going to offer them arms to go easy on the bomb, once they had it, we were going to send them a lot more, for fear that they would use it.”

  Hadden also appreciated the irony of Shapiro’s involvement with the Israeli superspies (Biegun and Eitan). In the BBC’s Panorama TV show in 1979 he noted, “Just imagine to yourself how much easier it would be to remove a pound or two of this or that at any one time . . . as opposed to removing all at one blow 150 pounds of shouting and kicking Eichmann. You see, they are pretty good at removing things.”643

  Peter Stockton said he met Hadden at a CIA safe house in Georgetown during the Dingell investigation of NUMEC. He quoted Hadden as saying, “Angleton was a big leaker” on NUMEC information. Stockton went on to describe a Hadden memo he saw at CIA, which said, “They did it.” The memo was in a binder of stuff, “one particular memo by Hadden, all taped together.”644 Stockton also told this story to journalist Scott Johnson in 2015. “[Hadden] would pull out a 2.5-foot makeshift scroll of paper that contained his case against NUMEC. This was before computers, and the thing was long and pasted together, and that was his evidence,” Stockton said. “We’d sit there in the safe house, and he’d read me portions of it.”645

  Although the CIA has refused to acknowledge that a report of the type mentioned by Stockton ever existed, much less declassify it under the FOIA, Hadden told his son that there was such a report. On October 7, 2014, I met John Jr. in Vermont to discuss Hadden’s knowledge of the NUMEC affair and to review several boxes of documents that Hadden left when he died in May 2013. Included in the boxes was an envelope lettered “Washington Trip” in Hadden’s hand. Inside was a September 1, 1978 invitation from the DOE Inspector General asking him to come to the Germantown, Maryland office of DOE. He wanted Hadden “to meet with representatives of my office to discuss freely and in complete detail your knowledge of matters relating to your knowledge of Israel’s nuclear power capability. . . .”

  The envelope also included a September 1, 1978 letter from DCI Stansfield Turner stating, “The scope of the Inspector General’s inquiry may encompass information which you have pledged not to reveal pursuant to the terms of the secrecy agreement which you executed when you entered on duty with the Central Intelligence Agency. You are hereby released from the terms of that secrecy agreement, for the purpose of the Inspector General’s inquiry, within the limitations set out below. . . . You may disclose classified information pertinent to specific intelligence sources or operational methods only with the express approval of my personal representative.”

  The envelope included handwritten notes on a three by five card and five sheets of yellow legal paper. The notes apparently were an outline of what Hadden told the Congressional investigators and the DOE Inspector General. A telephone number on the three by five card was for the private office of former DCI Richard Helms.

  The information in Hadden’s notes included the eight points he summarized for the BBC reporter in 1979 plus the following.

  1.Hadden recounted the history of the Israeli nuclear program beginning in 1956 under the leadership of Ernst David Bergmann and Shimon Peres, including the 1957 resignation of the other members of the Israeli AEC due to Bergmann’s policy on nuclear weapons.

  2.He mentioned an overt “California Group” under the direction of the Israeli Scientific Attaché, Avraham Hermoni.

  3.He mentioned one person from the AEC, James Ramey, a lawyer, who worked for the AEC and the Joint Committee and later served as an AEC commissioner. Hadden’s notes contained no details about Ramey. Separately it is known that when Seaborg failed to convince the Nixon administration to approve an upgraded security clearance for Shapiro, Ramey secured a job for Shapiro at Westinghouse that did not require a clearance.

  4.Basic training of Israeli nuclear scientists occurred at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the U.S. and other facilities abroad.

  5.French President Charles de Gaulle was fully aware of the nuclear weapons production mission of the Dimona reactor.

  6.French industrialist Marcel Dassault aided the Israelis in developing the Jericho missile for delivering nuclear weapons.

  7.The Israelis diversified their approach to nuclear weapons to include both a plutonium-fueled weapon supplied by Dimona, with the aid of the French, and a weapon using HEU stolen from the United States.

  8.Shapiro was recruited and NUMEC was established to provide the alternative path to weapons grade material [HEU] for the Israeli weapons program.

  9.Just as the Israelis used the Sonneborn Institute in the 1940s and 1950s to coordinate military aid from America to the fledgling nation of Israel, so they coordinated in the 1960s a network of sources in the U.S. to aid Israel’s nuclear weapons project.

  10.The material stolen from Apollo was taken in small lots over a period of years.

  11.An Israeli physicist working at NUMEC engineered the losses of HEU.

  12.The essential features of the MUF [ID] experience at Apollo centered on who paid to set up NUMEC and who paid for the HEU that went missing.

  13.Shapiro grew nervous in 1971 and left NUMEC when investigators grew closer.

  14.Shapiro’s “reinsurance agent” inside AEC and his wife were members of the communist party in their youth and were recruited by Soviet intelli
gence. [It is not clear what Hadden intended by this analogy to the insurance business wherein insurers pass some of their risk along to reinsurers.]

  15.Key technicians (including one named Raymond Fox from Livermore National Laboratory) were recruited in the U.S. and sent to Israel to work on select aspects of the bomb and missile programs.40

  16.Israel began to develop a gas-centrifuge, uranium enrichment facility, had an accident that ruptured cylinders, and sent some urine samples from exposed workers to the U.S. for evaluation. AEC discovered the enrichment project and covered it up.

  17.The Plumbat affair.

  18.Israel established Institute Number IV near Haifa as the center for nuclear weapons development. In 1965, Yosef Tulipman, the general manager of Dimona, secretly transferred to Institute No. IV. Minister of Defense Dayan later presented Tulipman with Israel’s highest award for his service to the bomb project.

  19.Israel invested $100 Million each in its atom bomb project and its Jericho missile project.

  20.Hadden opined that the U.S. government should “consider using [the NUMEC] case as exercise in preventing proliferation as opposed to obtaining conviction.”

  21.Hadden wanted to know who quashed the investigation of Raymond Fox and the official reports of the urine samples from Israel associated with the gas centrifuge accident.

  Hadden’s notes contained no mention of CIA’s discovery of HEU near Dimona, although he mentioned the subject briefly in his BBC interview. His notes outline the basis for his conclusion that NUMEC was part of a broader Israeli-American conspiracy to support the Israeli nuclear weapons program.

  Richard McGarrah Helms

  Richard Helms was born in Philadelphia in 1913. He spent two of his high school years in Europe where he learned French and German. He graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts and took a job as a reporter for United Press in London. He covered the Berlin Olympics where he met Adolph Hitler. He later worked in advertising for the Indianapolis Times and as a newspaper reporter before joining the Navy after Pearl Harbor. He transferred to the OSS in 1943. He stayed in Germany after the war to interview suspected Nazi war criminals headed for trial at Nuremberg. In 1946, he controlled intelligence and counter-intelligence activities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.