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One of the last documents in the FBI files on NUMEC is a May 19, 1982 letter from NRC to FBI transmitting a summation of the uranium found during decommissioning of Apollo. It notes that NRC provided the same information to reporter Thomas O’Toole of the Washington Post. The attachment says that processing of highly enriched uranium by NUMEC at Apollo began in 1957 and ceased in 1978. It notes that decommissioning began in 1978 and had no fixed date for its completion. The attachment says the cumulative inventory difference for the operating period from 1957 to 1978 was 463 kilograms of U-235. It concludes,
The total amount of material accounted for [recovered] to date as a result of the decommissioning effort is 95 kilograms U-235. . . . Additionally, licensee measurements indicate that approximately 31 kilograms of U-235 are held up in the walls and floors. The resulting total cumulative ID for the period from 1957 to present is 368 kilograms U-235.
That is, NRC told FBI to expect that 337 kilograms (368 minus 31) of U-235 would remain missing from the uranium plant at Apollo when B&W completed the decommissioning.689
The estimate that the NRC provided to the FBI was in close agreement with the aforementioned 2001 DOE report (declassified in 2006), which tabulated the cumulative inventory difference at U.S. commercial sites that handled HEU from 1952 to 1996. The DOE reported the cumulative HEU inventory difference at Apollo as 269 kilograms of U-235 through 1968 and 76 kilograms thereafter, for a total cumulative inventory difference over the life of the plant of 345 kilograms, in close agreement with NRC’s 1982 estimate of 337 kilograms.690 The following table summarizes inventory differences from the beginning of operations to the end of decommissioning of the Apollo uranium plant.
Seaborg and Hersh argued in their separately published books in 1991 that uranium found during decommissioning of Apollo would make up for the amount alleged to have been diverted to Israel.691 They apparently did not know of NRC, B&W and DOE’s conclusions to the contrary. That is, the fact that about 100 kilograms of U-235 in the form of HEU was found during decommissioning of Apollo does not eliminate the possibility that the 93.8 kilograms that the AEC could not account for in its 1965 inventory, or the larger amount that went missing between 1966 and 1968, were stolen. Said more simply, even after taking into account the recoveries made during decommissioning, approximately 340 kilograms of U-235 in the form of HEU were still missing after the plant had been turned into a green field. Much of this amount went missing before late 1970 while Shapiro led NUMEC and before the higher throughputs occurred at Apollo in later years.
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As to the second hypothesis, several NUMEC employees told AEC interviewers in 1966 that it was impossible to steal uranium from Apollo without someone seeing it happen and either preventing it or reporting it. Seaborg agreed,692
If you thought Shapiro could slip into the plant at night and fill a suitcase with uranium, you could give some credence to the smuggling charges. But that was preposterous. He would have needed the cooperation of quite a few of his employees (if not the whole workforce) to divert enriched uranium to Israel, and such a conspiracy would certainly leave some tracks.
Counter to Seaborg’s intimation, there were many tracks. They included records of HEU gone missing over a series of contracts, recollections of an employee ordered off the loading dock at Apollo one night in 1965 by an armed guard that didn’t belong there, subsequent intimidation of that employee, HEU with a Portsmouth signature found near Dimona, trips to Israel at auspicious times, and suspicious meetings with Israeli spies.
The Congressional investigations in 1977 and 1978 cut away many of the veils that had hidden the NUMEC affair. By then it was obvious that LAKAM, with or without Shapiro’s help, could have stolen HEU and shipped it to Israel without detection. The Israeli’s modus operandi was to involve any local assistants as little as possible in their clandestine operations, as they did in the Eichmann and Plumbat cases. They probably would have gone to similar lengths to protect Shapiro.
As early as 1966 the AEC concluded the material could have been diverted even if it could not find proof. NRC Chairman Hendrie reached the same conclusion in late 1977, i.e., someone could have done it so NRC should protect against that eventuality in the future. However, just to make sure, in 1979 Congressman Udall asked NRC for a study of whether it was feasible for a diversion to have occurred. Udall asked NRC to “provide a brief description of requirements, put into effect since 1965, that corrected deficiencies in the ability to protect against diversion of strategic special nuclear material by sophisticated conspirators.”
The NRC staff divided Udall’s task into two parts. First the NRC analysts characterized AEC’s safeguards requirements in place at Apollo in 1964 and then they listed the deficiencies in those safeguards requirements compared to NRC’s requirements in 1979. The primary purpose of the study was to ensure that safeguards requirements in place by 1979 would prevent such a diversion, but a secondary purpose was to shed light on the question of whether it would have been possible to divert a significant quantity of HEU from Apollo in the early 1960s without being detected. The NRC’s top vulnerability analyst, John Hockert, led the analysis team. The team reviewed several thousand documents pertaining to the places and times of interest, including all of DOE’s documents pertaining to NUMEC, culled nearly one thousand documents as potentially relevant and relied on 130 of them in its final report.
The NRC team looked at three levels of safeguards, namely, those that met AEC’s standards in the mid-1960s, those in place at the uranium plant in the mid-1960s, and those that met NRC’s standards in 1979. NRC concluded,693
It is possible that significant quantities of high enriched uranium could have been removed from the NUMEC Apollo facility during the mid-1960s, by a knowledgeable insider or an outside group with assistance of an insider, without detection. It is of course possible that no such removal occurred. Our review did not develop any information to indicate that a theft did or did not occur, only that the system would not have been able to detect a theft.”
William Dircks, when he was serving as director of NRC’s Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards, described the NRC staff report to Congressman Udall. He said Hockert’s analysis shows that, “a knowledgeable insider could quite easily have obtained the material in that plant . . . [and it] would have been very, very difficult to detect. . . . There is circumstantial evidence that points one way, but nothing concrete enough that we could go out and indict somebody.”694
This conclusion by NRC safeguards experts differs sharply with the conclusion that Seaborg reached in his 2001 memoir.695 Remarkably, in his 1993 memoir, Seaborg referenced this same NRC study for, “much of the detailed information herein about the materials losses at NUMEC and the AEC’s materials safeguards system.”696
Chapter 18
Apollo Sunset
This chapter summarizes what people and organizations have concluded about the NUMEC affair. It is somewhat but not completely repetitive of conclusory statements in preceding chapters.
To paraphrase Peter Wright, in the penultimate page of his autobiography Spycatcher: One person might have faith in a man’s innocence while another has faith in his treachery, as another might have faith in God or Mammon. One person’s view, in the end, is worthless. Only facts will ever clear up the eternal mystery.
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J. Edgar Hoover in 1969 said the FBI “developed information clearly pointing to Shapiro’s pronounced pro-Israeli sympathies. . . . It is believed most unlikely that further investigation will develop any stronger facts in connection with the subject’s association with Israeli officials. The basis of the security risk posed by the subject lies in his continuing access to sensitive information and material and it is believed the only effective way to counter this risk would be to preclude Shapiro from such access, specifically by terminating his classified contracts and lifting his security clearances.”697 Seaborg said Hoover made it clear that the suspected offenses
included not only diversion of material but also divulging of classified information to representatives of Israel.698
However, AEC Director of Security William Riley wrote to J. Edgar Hoover.699
The investigation, however, did not produce evidence which would provide AEC a sufficient basis either to revoke Dr. Shapiro’s security clearances under our established personnel clearance procedures or to bar him from further classified contract activity. . . . In this regard, the Attorney General, in his letter to the Chairman, AEC, on April 4, 1969, advised that the Department has no evidence which would support any action by the Department.
In 1971, when Shapiro applied for a Sigma security clearance after leaving NUMEC, Attorney General Mitchell said the charges against Shapiro “were serious enough so that the man should not have access to sensitive weapons information and he thought the case should be settled by the courts.”700
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In 1982, the Department of Justice decided, for the last time, not to prosecute Zalman Shapiro. This decision surely was made because there was insufficient or inadmissible evidence to do so. Collaterally, the Justice Department decided not to prosecute anyone in government for covering up the NUMEC affair. There is proof that Justice considered this possibility, not just at the AEC and its successors but also at the CIA. On March 22, 1979, an article by David Burnham in the New York Times referred to the fact that FBI and CIA had refused to allow GAO access to their classified files pertinent to the NUMEC investigation. Reacting to that article, Frederick D. Baron43 wrote to Attorney General Griffin Bell, with a copy to Jack Davitt, long time head of the internal security section,
The Internal Security Section has now completed a detailed review of thousands of CIA documents [about NUMEC] and is preparing a report. On the basis of this document review, some further investigation by the FBI will be necessary. . . . Jack Keeney44 believes that upon completion of the review, we should give serious consideration to making the materials available to an appropriate committee of Congress.
The attorney general scribbled “Noted GBB 4/23/79” on his copy of the memo.701 The materials to which the memo referred have not been made available outside the CIA and the Justice Department. A November 14, 1980 memorandum from Henry Myers to Congressman Udall contains another reference to the Justice Department review of the CIA documents.702 Myers noted,
The Department of Justice (apart from the FBI and apparently for the first time) has undertaken a comprehensive review of CIA documents. Three lawyers from the Criminal Division spent months examining documents, and a report on their findings exists, but they are resisting showing it to us.
The FBI knew about the Justice review of CIA documentation for several years. In December 1978, FBI’s legal counsel wrote to the FBI director, “Mr. [John L.] Martin advised that he is leading a three-man Task Force organized by the Criminal Division pertaining to allegations of coverups by Governmental agencies in the NUMEC case.”703
An important conclusion can be drawn from the fact that no indictments resulted from this Department of Justice investigation. Attorney General Levi initiated it to determine if any governmental agency had covered up the NUMEC affair. Since the investigation was broad, including the CIA, it is likely that Justice found no prosecutable wrongdoing on the part of the agencies involved, that is, FBI, AEC, ERDA, NRC, DOE and CIA. The Justice Department’s declassification and release of the prosecution memorandum that it prepared for the attorney general could confirm this conjecture. Investigative journalists Howard Kohn and Barbara Newman said Levi “personally decided not to seek indictments in the case because he felt the evidence was not admissible in court.” They said Robert Barrett, an aide to President Ford, confirmed this account.704 Neither Justice nor FBI have admitted the existence of a prosecution memorandum prepared for either Attorney General Levi or Attorney General Bell, let alone released it.
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The AEC and its successor organizations (ERDA, DOE and NRC) never changed their interpretation of the facts surrounding NUMEC. That is, the U.S. government’s atomic energy establishment has maintained to this day that it is impossible to tell if the 93.8 kilograms or more of U-235 in the form of HEU lost from Apollo was stolen or not. If AEC had been more candid in 1965, it would have said that a full accounting of all the uranium at Apollo and all the known loss mechanisms, including poor accounting practices and careless operations, failed to find the missing 93.8 kilograms of U-235 and left one possibility—it had been stolen. Had AEC been candid, later published reports could have been equally candid. However, AEC would have failed to fulfill one of its important mandates at the time, namely, to promote nuclear power. Thus, in 1992, twenty-seven years after AEC told the Joint Committee about its Apollo investigation, NRC’s historian J. Samuel Walker summarized the facts as he knew them. That is, the 93.8-kilogram MUF [unexplained portion of the 178 kilogram inventory difference] at Apollo for the years 1957 to 1965 was caused by “poor accounting practices and careless operating procedures on the part of NUMEC . . . but [AEC] could not dismiss the possibility that the missing material, which was enough to make six atomic bombs, had been diverted to a foreign nation.”705
As for the future, NRC Chairman Hendrie said it best in 1977, soon after becoming NRC chairman. He told congress that people within NRC had legitimate differences among them on the meaning of the term “no evidence” of a diversion from Apollo. He said “no conclusive evidence” was a better way of describing the situation, and “for regulatory purposes we must assume the circumstances were such that a diversion could have occurred, and must construct our safeguards requirements accordingly.”706
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In January 1979, John Fialka, writing for the Washington Monthly, summarized the knowledge about the missing uranium. “After factoring in reasonable estimates for all possible ways in which material could have been lost or wasted in various plant processes, the [AEC] inspection team concluded that the loss of 200 pounds could not be explained, including the missing uranium from the Westinghouse contract. No similar plant had ever reported losses of that magnitude.”707
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That same year Henry Myers summarized the case for Congressman Udall.708
Israel possessed nuclear weapons, probably fabricated from uranium. While the source of uranium is uncertain, NUMEC would be high on the list of potential candidates. Safeguards at NUMEC were insufficient to protect against relatively sophisticated diversion schemes. . . . The 93.8 kilograms disappeared either via unknown mechanisms or it was diverted. (Since a major and unsuccessful effort was made in the mid-1960s to explain how the 93.8 kilograms might have been lost in the course of processing, it is unlikely that a convincing explanation will emerge at this date. On the other hand, in the absence of hard evidence of a diversion (i.e., a believable statement by a person who knows), it is unlikely that more than a circumstantial case will be made in support of the diversion theory.)
In 2007, Meyer said, “Israel had the motive, the opportunity, and the capability to obtain HEU from NUMEC.”709
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James Connor, onetime AEC staff member and then Secretary of President Ford’s cabinet in 1976 when the third FBI investigation was commissioned, told John Fialka “You could look at all the documents and ask yourself whether something had happened here. The answer was probably yes. Then the question was whether you could do anything about it, and the answer was no.”710
The CIA maintained from 1968 to at least 1977 that Shapiro aided the Israeli nuclear weapons program. Confirmation of CIA’s conclusion is provided by the testimony of the NRC employees who attended Carl Duckett’s briefing in February 1976. Their recollections of that briefing, as related to NRC investigators in January 1978, are provided below.711
Former NRC Chairman William Anders said, “he reminded [newly elevated NRC Chairman] Rowden that the commission should be careful not to make flat statements on the question of theft or diversion and that Rowden agreed with him.”
Marcus Rowden,
the former AEC general counsel and then NRC commissioner and chairman, said, “There were those who held views, based on the circumstantial evidence, that there was a possibility of diversion, and ... others disagreed.”
Commissioner Richard Kennedy, a former NSC staffer, said that if he were asked about the evidence of a diversion, he would say, “I have no conclusive evidence of any diversion; that does not suggest I have evidence. There are surmises, rumors and speculations that there have been diversions.”
Commissioner Victor Gilinsky, a former Rand Corporation analyst, when asked why the commission could not say there was no evidence of diversion or theft, responded, “Because there is evidence.”
Commissioner Edward Mason, the former chairman of nuclear engineering at MIT, said, “While he was not personally persuaded that such a theft/diversion had taken place, the CIA briefing did suggest to him that it might have happened.”
General Kenneth Chapman, the former director of NRC’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, said, “after the briefing . . . he had no evidence of diversion. If the subject of ‘conclusive’ or ‘hard’ evidence was ever discussed, he was not party to it.” He added that he and Builder discussed the relevance of the briefing. “Essentially their position was (based on what they heard) if there had been a diversion they thought it must have been done under sanction by U.S. Government officials at a very high level . . . and would not be relevant to the development of a safeguards security system.” Later, Chapman told Barbara Newman, when interviewed on National Public Radio, “Duckett simply said having investigated it, they [CIA] had been unable to find hard evidence that would be useful in prosecuting the people involved.”
Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel Page 38