Special Report
By Grant F. Smith
On Sept. 10, 1968 an elite Israeli covert operations team visited the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, PA at the invitation of its president, Zalman Mordecai Shapiro. Rafael Eitan was a Mossad operative who later ran convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Avraham Bendor (aka Shalom) was a long-time Shin Bet (internal Israeli intelligence) operative. Ephraim Biegun was head of Mossad’s Technical Department.
The three men used their real names, but presented false credentials as scientists and engineers to the Atomic Energy Agency in order to be allowed to enter the plant. Accompanying them was Avraham Hermoni, scientific attaché at the Israeli Embassy. At the time it was generally unknown that Hermoni not only was a spy, but was also head of Israel’s nuclear bomb program at RAFAEL, the Israeli armaments development authority.
Between 1957 and 1978 NUMEC “lost” 337 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium. Two percent of NUMEC’s total throughput—the uranium NUMEC received from the government and the fuel pellets into which it was converted for Navy reactors—disappeared before Shapiro was forced out. Only then did plant losses return to the industry norm of .2 percent or less. This was the amount of material unaccounted for (MUF) even after the plant was decommissioned in 1992 and material was recovered from walls, flooring and accounting for heavy environmental losses. It represented the largest MUF of any nuclear processing plant in U.S. history, according to a 2001 Energy Department report.
Officials at the Central Intelligence Agency were unequivocal about what had happened. John Hadden, CIA’s Tel Aviv station chief, oversaw collection of samples outside Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons facility. The samples matched the specialized signature of the government-owned enriched uranium provided to NUMEC. Hadden later told members of Congress that NUMEC was “an Israeli operation from the beginning.” He believed that small amounts were removed from the plant over time and disguised in sloppy bookkeeping. Hadden’s analysis was bolstered by the fact that NUMEC’s key financial backer was David Lowenthal, who worked as a smuggler during Israel’s war of independence and was a close confidant of top Israeli intelligence officials.
Carl Duckett, chief of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, also was unequivocal about NUMEC, telling a Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s safeguards group in 1976 that the CIA believed NUMEC diverted the material to Israel. However, efforts by the Justice Department, CIA, FBI and congressional committees to generate criminal prosecutions under the Atomic Energy Act and hold Israel accountable were stymied by a series of White House cover-ups.
When in 1968 CIA Director Richard Helms told President Lyndon B. Johnson that the CIA believed Israel had assembled an arsenal with NUMEC material, LBJ replied, “Don’t tell anyone else, even [Secretary of State] Dean Rusk and [Defense Secretary] Robert McNamara.”
Nixon administration National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, referring to NUMEC, stated, “There is circumstantial evidence that some fissionable material available for Israel’s weapons development was illegally obtained from the United States about 1965…This is one program on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us…and may even have stolen from us.”
This did not keep Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon from beginning a policy of “ambiguity” under which neither the U.S. nor Israel would officially confirm the existence of Israel’s arsenal. Recently declassified files reveal that Nixon’s main motivation was to avoid a “Zionist campaign to try to undermine” him, rather than national security issues.
The Gerald Ford administration reopened a criminal investigation into NUMEC violations of the Atomic Energy Act—and possible government cover-up—only to have it buried by the administration of Ford’s successor, President Jimmy Carter. According to records from the National Archives and Records Administration, the Justice Department reviewed “thousands” of CIA files on NUMEC during its investigation. Members of Carter’s National Security Council fretted that the president “did not have deniability” over the NUMEC diversion given the strength of CIA’s classified information. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, thwarted Senate access to intelligence on the diversion. When asked by The Wall Street Journal in 2014 why he covered up NUMEC, Brzezinski was dismissive: “What are we going to say to the Israelis, ‘Give it back?’”
The federal government—not to mention Israel—has presumably been content to see NUMEC’s diversion secrets bottled up forever. But now the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will begin a cleanup of NUMEC’s waste dump estimated to cost a half-billion dollars, to be paid by American taxpayers. It is this insult to injury that triggered IRmep’s second major lawsuit in federal court.
Based largely on research compiled for the book Divert! (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More), the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit asks the court to compel release of sufficient classified CIA material on the diversion to allow subsequent lawsuits against the Israeli government for cleanup and heath-related costs.
Although the initial CIA lawsuit may seem like a long shot, late in February IRmep’s separate court action against the Department of Defense (DoD) produced a stunning report that officially confirms—for the very first time—the advanced state of Israel’s nuclear weapons program (see Jan./Feb. 2015 Washington Report, p. 28). A major premise of the DoD lawsuit was that U.S. taxpayers were being forced to pay for aid packages to a state that is simply not eligible. Amendments made in 1976 to the Foreign Aid Act of 1961 prohibit U.S. foreign aid to states with nuclear programs operating outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Because the 1987 report is unequivocal that Israel is a nuclear weapons power, under the Symington and Glenn amendments it is ineligible for U.S. foreign aid.
Publicly known U.S. aid to Israel since 1976 amounts to, adjusted for inflation, $234 billion. This means America’s 122 million taxpayers are currently owed $1909.54 each if the aid were to be properly “clawed back” and redistributed. While each taxpayer’s projected share of the NUMEC cleanup (but not health-related costs) would be only $4.10, the court battle for the evidence that can shift liability to Israel is worthwhile. The public education of high-profile court action is also highly beneficial.
The optics of three highly-paid Justice and Defense Department lawyers with unlimited resources fighting a solitary pro se (not represented by an attorney) litigant in the DoD lawsuit were terrible. In the case of the CIA they will be even worse. The Justice Department and CIA lawyers must explain to a judge why damning, ancient files of toxic crimes against Americans by foreign agents must be withheld forever. They must make that argument one year after a National Archives declassification authority (the ISCAP) swatted aside CIA intransigence and compelled the release of damning evidence of the above-cited LBJ and Carter administration NUMEC cover-up actions. All while backhoes driven by workers in biohazard suits will be converging on Apollo and Parks Township in Pennsylvania to commence the cleanup.
The timing also is not favorable for the defendants since the court action is taking place while nuclear-tipped Israel continues to lobby for military action and sanctions against NPT signatory Iran. Americans’ need for a more accurate assessment of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East—and the heist that jumpstarted it—could not be more obvious and urgent.
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>.