By Grant F. Smith
In 1958 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion designated super-lobbyist Abraham Feinberg as the North American coordinator to raise funds for Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program. Feinberg was a natural choice. He bundled Israel lobby funds for Democratic presidential campaigns from Harry S Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson. In the 1940s he led the charge to successfully beat back Justice Department attempts to prosecute a huge network of false front organizations illicitly smuggling surplus U.S. WW II weapons and equipment to Jewish fighters in Palestine for Israel’s “War of Independence.” On the atomic front, Feinberg chaperoned U.S. charities channeling hundreds of millions of tax-exempt donations into Israeli research organizations—such as the Weizmann Institute of Science—working on the bomb.
The Israel lobby’s biggest obstacle in furthering Israel’s drive for the bomb was John F. Kennedy. After being elected president in 1960, Kennedy not only insisted on inspections of Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant, but began subjecting key Israel lobby organizations to rigorous enforcement of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). After LBJ took over the White House, FARA enforcement largely ended, and the Johnson administration mostly looked the other way, even ignoring CIA and FBI alerts that Israeli agents were diverting weapons-grade uranium from an Apollo, Pennsylvania plant of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) to Israel.
By the time Richard Nixon sat down with Prime Minister Golda Meir to discuss Israel’s de facto nuclear weapons, his main motivation was to avoid a “Zionist campaign to try to undermine” his administration, which he feared might result if U.S. officials threatened to withhold advanced conventional weapons transfers to Israel if it continued its clandestine nuclear weapons program. Rather than insist that Israel sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Nixon and Meir crafted the “ambiguity” policy that remains to this day—that neither the U.S. nor Israel ever officially acknowledge that Israel possesses a nuclear weapons arsenal.
The late White House correspondent Helen Thomas tried to make President Barack Obama admit that Israel had nuclear weapons. “Do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?” she asked him at a February 2009 White House press conference. Obama dodged the question, saying he did not want to “speculate” on that subject.
Congress has never debated or held open hearings on Israel’s nuclear weapons program. A 2008 congressional report on nuclear proliferation excludes Israel and simply does “not take a position on the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons.” The penalties for lower level government officials making even passing references to Israel as a nuclear weapons state are swift and harsh. Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear analyst James Doyle wrote candidly about Israel’s nuclear weapons for a magazine in 2013. After a congressional staffer read the article, which had passed a classification review, it was referred to classification officials for a second review. Doyle’s pay was then cut, his home computer searched, and he was fired.
Two gag rules are known to exist as a result of Doyle’s unsuccessful appeals to get his job back. GEN-16 is a “no-comment” policy on “classified information in the public domain” (which President Obama apparently invoked). The other is “DOE Classification Bulletin WPN-136 on Foreign Nuclear Capabilities,” which is secret but presumably forbids publicly stating that Israel is a nuclear power.
While it is difficult to deny that the “ambiguity” muzzle has greatly benefited Israel and its U.S. lobby, it is an ongoing and costly disaster for American taxpayers. According to a September Google Consumer Survey, 64 percent of Americans believe Israel has nuclear weapons, while 6 in 10 think U.S. foreign aid to Israel is “too much.” (See Nov./Dec. 2014 Washington Report, p. 32.) Yet because it is official U.S. policy to pretend the existence of Israel’s arsenal is unknown, a $3 billion-plus taxpayer giveaway of top-shelf American military aid, cash and intelligence support is delivered annually, despite Israel having long possessed the ultimate military deterrent. And researchers and historians have long been stymied by the withholding of key U.S. government documents locked securely away from the public in National Archives and Records Administration vaults.
In a crisis or time of increased tension, Israel can threaten to use its arsenal as a lever to coerce the transfer of U.S. military supplies and other support rather than pursue peaceful alternatives. The international community views the U.S. as hypocritical when it cites the NPT in reference to Iran or North Korea. Mainstream American media rarely engage in meaningful discussions of the actual nuclear situation in the Middle East, as the lobby works to focus all attention on Iran. Ambiguity is also a public corruption issue, since it means NPT-related restrictions on U.S. foreign aid to clandestine nuclear states are simply ignored. With Congress mostly in the pocket of the Israel lobby, and presidential administrations unwilling to reopen the historical can of worms that created “ambiguity,” the only meaningful venue for challenging it for what it is—an Israel-lobby-generated corruption-in-government issue—is the court system.
On Sept. 23, 2014 IRmep sued the Department of Defense, asking a federal court judge to review and release an unclassified 1987 report titled “Critical Technology Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations.” The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit cites public leaks of the report’s explosive contents. According to the Risk Report of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, this “Pentagon-sponsored study found that Technion University…was helping design Israel’s nuclear missile re-entry vehicle. U.S. officials say Technion’s physicists also worked in Israel’s secret weapon complex at Dimona, where an Israeli reactor makes plutonium for atomic bombs. In 1989, Cray was denied a license to sell a supercomputer to Technion because the university conducted research on nuclear-capable missiles. Hebrew University in Jerusalem also would be allowed to use the Cray supercomputer, even though the study said Hebrew University supplied physicists to Israel’s nuclear lab at Soreq, where scientists were ‘developing the kind of [computer] codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs.’ And the university network includes the Weizmann Institute, whose scientists, the study said, studied high energy physics and hydrodynamics needed for nuclear bomb design, and worked on lasers to enrich uranium, the most advanced method for making the material dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.”
The lawsuit details the two public interests IRmep believes outweigh the many FOIA exemptions and denial strategies the Department of Defense has used to block release. The first is that the “American Friends” branches of the Israeli entities engaged in nuclear weapons research and development raise approximately $170 million in tax-exempt contributions per year in the United States. The IRS has stated it doubts such activities have any tax-exempt social welfare purpose, thereby creating a “tax gap” that other Americans should not have to—but in fact do—make up.
The other public interest is compliance with the Symington and Glenn amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. These laws prohibit foreign assistance to countries trafficking in nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside international safeguards. The moment DoD verified that Israel was operating a clandestine weapons program outside the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1987, Israel should have become ineligible to receive any of the $82 billion in U.S. taxpayer-funded foreign aid that was subsequently delivered.
The Department of Defense has reached deep into a voluminous bag of FOIA exemption tricks before and during the case. Shortly before parties appeared in court on Nov. 20, it claimed that “non-disclosure agreements” were executed during production of the report, making it non-releasable in “perpetuity.” On Dec. 5, Laura Jennings from the U.S. Attorney’s Office declared that “DoD must contact the foreign government and they must request in writing that the info not be disclosed for an additional period stated in that written request. DoD is currently reaching out to Israel.”
If the scheduling order issued by presiding Judge Tanya Chutkan is met, the case should be resolved by Jan. 31, 2015. IRmep has challenged the “non-disclosure agreement” defense as “sock puppetry” and plans to challenge the notion that release of an unclassified U.S. taxpayer-funded report of immense public interest should be the sole prerogative of Israel. The DoD’s claimed subordination to Israel in releasing its own report is yet another affirmation of the core problem that led to “ambiguity” and many other foreign policy problems—that Israel, through its vast, lavishly funded and ubiquitous lobby, continues to force U.S. government compliance with secrecy policies that have gutted public accountability while bilking U.S. taxpayers for decades.
Grant F. Smith is director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Inc. (IRmep) in Washington, DC. Filings in this lawsuit and other actions may be found at IRmep’s Center for Policy and Law Enforcement page at <http://IRmep.org/CFL.htm>.