“…About the same time that NUMEC sustained unaccountable losses of HEU-235, the FBI notes, NUMEC was developing and manufacturing food irradiators for Israel. According to Smith there is no single smoking gun that Shapiro diverted HEU-235 to Israel � but many smoking shell-casings. They include:
In 1965 a NUMEC employee walked near the NUMEC loading dock and encountered people he could not identify loading cans about the size of HEU-235 canisters onto a ship that was headed to Israel. The employee detailed the event in 1980 when interviewed by FBI agents. Based on the number of reported canisters, Smith estimates up to 346 lbs of U-235 could have been shipped to Israel in this single incident.
In 1968 NUMEC invited and received Israel’s elite nuclear weapons development officials and its top spy under the cover of being “thermo electric generator specialists.” They included Avraham Hermoni (technical director of Israel’s nuclear bomb project), Ephraim Biegun (head of the Israeli technical department of Israel’s Secret Service from 1960-70) and Rafael Eitan (long-time Mossad and LAKAM operative who later directed spy Jonathan Pollard’s spy program against the U.S.).
In June 1978 Department of Energy investigators told former Atomic Energy Commissioner (AEC) Glenn T. Seaborg that traces of Portsmouth U-235 � the government-owned material primarily delivered to NUMEC for processing into fuel � had been picked up in Israel. Seaborg, who frequently defended Shapiro during his time as AEC chief, later refused to be interviewed by FBI investigators…” More