PART 1:THE SAMSON OPTION

Seeing that they are trying to start WW III over a supposed nuclear issue with Iran.It begs the damn question as to why Israel gets to blackmail the world with their nukes(which they will not admit having OR let let anyone look at their program) while the rest of the world adheres to existing treaties? The People need to stop putting up with this bullshit,and start pushing back.Leave Iran alone already,you imbecile's have been screwing them over now 65 years! Enough already...  

THE SAMSON OPTION 

Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and 

American Foreign Policy

By Seymour M. Hersh

Author's Note 

This is a book about how Israel became a nuclear power in secret. It also tells how that secret was shared, sanctioned, and, at times, willfully ignored by the top political and military officials of the United States since the Eisenhower years. 

In it, you will find many senior American officials being quoted—most of them for the first time—about what they knew and when they knew it. These officials spoke to me not because of animosity toward the Israeli government, but be cause they realized the hypocrisy of the American policy of publicly pretending that Israel's nuclear arsenal does not exist. That policy remains in effect as this is written. 

I chose not to go to Israel while doing research for this book. For one thing, those Israelis who were willing to talk to me were far more accessible and open when interviewed in Washington, New York, or, in some cases, Europe. Furthermore, Israel subjects all journalists, domestic and foreign, to censor ship. Under Israeli rules, all material produced by journalists in Israel must be submitted to military censors, who have the right to make changes and deletions if they perceive a threat to Israeli national security. I could not, for obvious reasons, submit to Israeli censorship. Those in the past who have broken the rules have been refused reentry to Israel. 

Those Israelis who talked were not critics of Israel's nuclear capability, nor would they feel secure without the bomb. They spoke because they believe that a full and open discussion of the Israeli nuclear arsenal and of the consequences of its deployment—is essential in a democratic society. 

Seymour M. Hersh 

August 1991 

Washington, D.C.

1 

A Secret Agreement 

America's most important military secret in 1979 was in orbit, whirling effortlessly around the world every ninety six minutes, taking uncanny and invaluable reconnaissance photographs of all that lay hundreds of miles below. The satellite, known as KH-11, was an astonishing leap in technology: its images were capable of being digitally relayed to ground stations where they were picked up—in "real time"—for instant analysis by the intelligence community. There would be no more Pearl Harbors. 

The first KH-11 had been launched on December 19, 1976, after Jimmy Carter's defeat of President Gerald R. Ford in the November elections. The Carter administration followed Ford's precedent by tightly restricting access to the high-quality imagery: even Great Britain, America's closest ally in the intelligence world, was limited to seeing photographs on a case-by-case basis. 

The intensive security system was given a jolt in March 1979, when President Carter decided to provide Israel with KH-11 photographs. The agreement gave Israel access to any satellite intelligence dealing with troop movements or other potentially threatening activities as deep as one hundred miles inside the borders of neighboring Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. The Israelis were to get the real thing: the raw and spectacular first-generation imagery as captured by the KH-11, some of it three-dimensional—and not the deliberately fuzzed and dulled photographs that were invariably distributed by the American intelligence community to the bureaucracy and to overseas allies in an effort to shield the superb resolution of the KH-11's optics.* 

 * The KH-11 was at the time known to be the most significant advance in outerspace reconnaissance. The key element of the sixty-four-foot-long satellite was a down ward-looking mirror in front of the camera that rotated from side to side, like a peri scope, enabling the satellite to track a single location as it moved across the atmosphere. The result was a stereoscopic image of unusually high quality that could be even further enhanced by computer.

It was a significant triumph for the Israeli government, which had been seeking access to the KH-11 since the moment of launch three years before. Jimmy Carter's decision to provide that high-tech imagery was suspected by some American intelligence officials as being a reward for Prime Minister Menachem Begin's successful Camp David summit with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat the year before. These officials understood what many in the White House did not: adding an Israeli dimension to the system was a major commitment—and one that would interfere with the KH-11's ability to collect the intelligence its managers wanted. The KH-11 was the most important advance of its time, explained a former official of the National Security Agency (NSA), the unit responsible for all communications intelligence, and every military and civilian intelligence agency in the government seemed to have an urgent requirement for it. The goal of the KH-11's managers was to carefully plan and "prioritize" the satellite's schedule to get it to the right place at the right time, while avoiding any abrupt shifts in its flight path or any sudden maneuver that would burn excess fuel. With good management, the multi-million-dollar satellite, with its limited fuel supply, would be able to stay longer in orbit, provide more intelligence, and be more cost efficient. Carter's decision to give Israel direct access to the KH-11 completely disrupted the careful scheduling for the satellite's future use; it also meant that some American intelligence agencies were going to have less access to the satellite. "It was an unpopular decision in many, many ways," said the former NSA official. 

There were no official protests inside the administration, however: those few who were distressed by the KH-11 agreement understood that any disquiet, or even second-guessing, could jeopardize their own access to such information and thus reduce their status as insiders. 

The Israelis, not surprisingly, viewed the KH-11 agreement as a reaffirmation of respect and support from the Carter ad ministration, whose director of central intelligence, retired Admiral Stansfield Turner, had abruptly cut back intelligence liaison with Israel and other friendly nations as part of a re structuring of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Israelis, accustomed to far warmer treatment by Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, saw the men running the Carter administration as naive and anti-Semitic; as men who perhaps did not fully understand how entwined Israel's primary foreign intelligence service, Mossad, had become with the CIA during the Cold War. The 1979 agreement on the KH-11 was no less than the twenty-eighth in a series of formal Israeli-American cooperative ventures in strategic intelligence since the 1950's. 

Nothing has ever been officially disclosed about these arrangements, many of which were financed off-the-books—that is, from a special contingency fund personally maintained by the director of central intelligence. Through the 1960's, for example, one of the most sensitive operations in the Agency was code-named k.k mountain (k.k being the CIA's internal digraph, or designation, for messages and documents dealing with Israel) and provided for untold millions in annual cash payments to Mossad. In return, Mossad authorized its agents to act, in essence, as American surrogates throughout North Africa and in such countries as Kenya, Tanzania, and the Congo. Other intelligence agreements with Mossad revolved around the most sensitive of Israeli activities in the Middle East, where American dollars were being used to finance operations in Syria, and inside the Soviet Union, where the CIA's men and women found it difficult to spy. Some of the Soviet activities apparently were financed by regular Agency disbursements— and thus cleared through the appropriate CIA congressional oversight committees—but the complex amalgamation of American financing and Israeli operations remains one of the great secrets of the Cold War. 

The Israelis had responded to Admiral Turner's 1977 cutback in liaison—in essence, his refusal to pay for the continuing operations in Africa and elsewhere—by sharply reducing their flow of intelligence back to Washington. In the Israeli view, the KH-11 agreement in March 1979 was made inevitable not by the success of Camp David but by the CIA's failure to anticipate the steadily increasing Soviet pressure on Afghanistan in 1978 and the continuing upheavals in Iran. There were large Jewish communities in both nations—many shopkeepers in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, were Jewish—and Mossad's information was far superior to the CIA's. Most galling to the President and his top aides was the CIA's embarrassingly inept reporting on Iran, where Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a U.S. ally of long standing, had been overthrown in February 1979 in a popular uprising—despite a year-long series of upbeat CIA predictions that he would manage to cling to power.* The CIA had rejected the Israeli view, provided in a trenchant analysis in 1978 by Uri Lubrani, a former Israeli ambassador to Iran, that the shah would not survive. The CIA had failed the President and forced the American leadership to turn once again to Israeli help in trying to anticipate world events. It was no accident that Lubrani was attached to the Israeli delegation that negotiated the March 1979 KH-11 agreement in Washington. 

In August 1977, for example, the CIA produced a sixty-page study for the Presi dent, entitled "Iran in the 1980s," that was predicated on the assumption that the shah would "be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s." Five months later, Carter, to his everlasting embarrassment, publicly toasted Iran at a 1977 New Year's Eve state dinner in Tehran as "an island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world."

The KH-11 imagery provided Israel—depicting any military activity inside the border of Israel's four neighbors—is known as I&W, for intelligence and warning, and carries the highest classification marking in the American intelligence community. The photographs, once processed, were to be picked up by Israeli military attaches at a special Pentagon office controlled by the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A), the military's joint intelligence service. There was one significant caveat in all this: Israelis were not to be given any intelligence that could help them plan preemptive strikes on their neighbors. 

"I set up the rules," one senior American intelligence official recalled. "The system was designed to provide the Israelis with everything they could possibly use within the one-hundred-mile striking distance. If it was inside Syria or Egypt, they got it all. If it was Iraq, Pakistan, or Libya, they didn't." 

The official added, however, that he and his colleagues anticipated from the outset that the Israelis would do everything possible to get around the restrictions of the agreement. One of the immediate Israeli arguments was that the limitations should not apply to the joint enemy of the United States and Israel—the Soviet Union. In the months ahead, there would be constant Israeli pressure for access to satellite intelligence on the Soviet supply lines to Syria and the Soviet involvement in the training of Iraqi combat divisions in western Iraq. Those requests were flatly turned down by the Carter administration. 

None the less, Israel was once again an essential ally, and even if it could not get unfettered access to KH-11 imagery, the 1979 agreement did include language permitting Israel to make specific requests for satellite intelligence. Each request would be handled on a case-by-case basis. 

The package was too much for British intelligence officials, involved Americans recalled, who were described as "mad as hell" about Israel's being provided with the chance to obtain intelligence that they—World War II allies and fellow members of NATO—could not get.* 

* The British were denied full access, American officials explained, in part because of concern about what turned out to be a major leak inside the British communications intelligence establishment, known as G.C.H.Q.J for Government Communications Head quarters). American intelligence officials had learned by the end of the Carter administration that the existence and capability of the KH-11 system were known to the Soviets, and there were suspicions that someone in a senior position in British intelligence was funneling vast amounts of technical information to Moscow. In the fall of 1982, a former high-level G.C.H.Q employee named Geoffrey A. Prime, of Cheltenham, was arrested on sex charges, and he subsequently confessed to spying for the Soviets. Prime, who was sentenced to a thirty-five-year jail term, was said by British authorities to have had access to "matters of the utmost secrecy." There were British newspaper reports that senior British officials had known of Prime's betrayal for two years before the arrest but had not told their American counterparts. The incident led to inevitable tension between the intelligence services of the two allies. "We were holding back the Brits for a definite reason," one American said. "We knew they had a real problem there and we were very, very sensitive about what we gave them." The stern American position was more than a little offset by the fact that a junior CIA clerk named William T. Kampiles had been sentenced to forty years in jail in 1978 after his conviction for the sale of a top-secret KH-11 technical manual to the Soviets. Kampiles received $3,000 for the manual, which included no KH-11 photographs—and thus presumably did not reveal just how good the satellite's optics could be. The trial of Kampiles raised a * number of embarrassing questions about security at CIA headquarters, where Kampiles worked; at least sixteen other KH-11 technical manuals were missing, and there was testimony to the effect that Kampiles—and others, if they wished—were able to leave the premises without any security check.

Israel, as the British may have suspected, did have a secret agenda in its constant maneuvering for KH-11 access, but that agenda only became clear to a few top Reagan administration policymakers in the fall of 1981. The unraveling began with a bombing raid in Iraq. 

It was a Sunday afternoon in early June 1981, and Richard V. Allen, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, was taking it easy, sipping iced tea on the sundeck of his suburban Virginia home and shuffling through a week's worth of unread cables, many of them highly classified. 

An aide in the White House situation room, which is staffed around the clock, telephoned to report that the Israelis had informed Washington that they had successfully bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, twelve miles southeast of Bagh dad. Allen immediately telephoned Reagan, who was spending the weekend at the presidential retreat at Camp David, in the nearby Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. 

The President, he was told, had just boarded his helicopter for the trip back to the White House. "Get him off," Allen ordered. It was, after all, the new administration's first Middle East crisis. The President took the telephone call amid the background thumping of the helicopter blades. 

"Mr. President, the Israelis just took out a nuclear reactor in Iraq with F-16's." Israel, aided by long-term, low-interest American credits, had been authorized in 1975 to begin the purchase of seventy-five F-16's "for defensive purposes only." 

"What do you know about it?" 

"Nothing, sir. I'm waiting for a report." 

"Why do you suppose they did it?" 

The President let his rhetorical question hang for a moment, Allen recalled, and then added: 

"Well. Boys will be boys."*

*Moments later, Allen added, Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr., who had competed from inauguration day with all senior officials for influence in the administration, telephoned and excitedly demanded to know where the then-airborne President was: "Dick, Fve got to talk to him right away." Allen asked why. "I've just got to talk to him." "Is it about the reactor?" Haig said yes. Allen said he was too late: he had just briefed Reagan. "What?" exclaimed Haig. "How did you find out?" Allen laughed at the recollection and added that Haig wouldn't know it, but he had wasted his time in rushing to tell Reagan: "The fact is you couldn't score brownie points that way. Ronald Reagan never remembered who told him first."

The next morning, according to Allen, there was a meeting of Reagan's high command at which Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger proposed canceling the F-16 aircraft sale. Others at the meeting, including Vice President George Bush and Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, agreed that some sanctions against Israel were essential. Reagan glanced at Allen at one point and with a gesture made it clear he had no intention of taking any such step: "He rolled his eyes at me," Allen said. 

The President's private acceptance of the raid was not reflected in the administration's public actions. That afternoon the State Department issued a statement, said to have been cleared by the President and Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr., formally condemning the bombing, "which cannot but seriously add to the already tense situation in the area." Nonetheless, recalled Allen, "Reagan was delighted . . . very satisfied" by the attack on the reactor at Osirak. "It showed that the Israelis had claws, a sense of strategy, and were able to take care of problems before they developed. Anyway, what did Israel hurt?" Haig similarly was forbearing in private. 

The Israeli bombing triggered worldwide protest, and a few days later the White House announced the suspension of a scheduled delivery of four more F-16's, a continuation of the 1975 sale. Two months later, with little fanfare, the administration's real policy emerged: the suspension was lifted and the aircraft were delivered without incident. 

There was controversy inside Israel, too, over the bombing, which had been debated at the highest levels of the Israeli government since late 1979. Yitzhak Hofi, the director of Mossad, and Major General Yehoshua Saguy, chief of military intelligence, both opposed the attack, primarily because there was no evidence that Iraq was as yet capable of building a bomb.* 

*That issue also was hotly debated inside the American intelligence community, whose experts on nonproliferation did not have "complete information"—as one involved official put it—about Iraq's capabilities. After the Israeli strike, the American experts concluded that Israel had bombed only one of two major targets at the site; it had destroyed the reactor as planned but left the nearby reprocessing plant untouched. It was in the reprocessing facility that plutonium could be chemically recovered from spent reactor fuel rods. 

They  were joined in futile dissent by Yigael Yadin, the deputy prime minister. At a late-1980 planning session, Saguy continued to inveigh against the mission, arguing that the adverse reaction in Washington would be a more serious national security threat to Israel than was the Iraqi reactor.* He took exception to the view that any Israeli military steps to avoid a "second Holocaust" were permissible. Saguy suffered for his dissent; the chief of military intelligence was not told of the mission until June 4, three days before it was scheduled to take place. Saguy responded by renouncing any responsibility for the raid and threatening—briefly—to withhold intelligence.

* Many in the Israeli military also were glad to see Iraq sink hundreds of millions of dollars into the reactor rather than purchasing more tanks, planes, and other conventional arms.

The mission planners, anxious to avoid international protest, had gone to extremes to mask the operation: it was hoped that Iraq and the rest of the world would be unable to fix blame for the bombing on the unmarked Israeli Air Force planes. The attack had been carried out, as planned, in two minutes, and the likelihood of any detection was slight. But Menachem Be gin, buoyed by the success, stunned his colleagues on June 8 by unilaterally announcing the Israeli coup. On the next day, as Israel was besieged with protests, the prime minister defended the operation and vowed that Israel was ready to strike again, if necessary, to prevent an enemy from developing the atomic bomb. "If the nuclear reactor had not been destroyed," Begin said, "another Holocaust would have happened in the history of the Jewish people. There will never be another Holocaust. . . . Never again! Never again!" 

Two days later, at a British diplomatic reception, Begin again shocked the senior officials of his government, as well as the intelligence community, by bragging that the Israeli planes also had destroyed a secret facility buried forty meters—130 feet —below the reactor at Osirak that was to serve as the assembly point for the manufacture of Iraqi nuclear bombs. The appalled Israeli officials knew that Begin's remarks were descriptive not of the nonexistent underground weapons facility at Osirak, but of one that did exist in Israel. Begin also told news men at the reception that the Iraqi government had hidden the facility from the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A), which had inspected the reactor at Osirak in January 1981, under provisions of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to which Iraq was a party. 

Israeli government spokesmen attempted to recoup the next day by telling newsmen that Begin had misspoken; the under ground facility was only four meters, not forty, below the surface. The government's worst fears, however, were not publicly realized in the subsequent days and weeks: Israel's biggest secret remained a secret.* 

* Some American intelligence analysts instantly understood that Begin had made a mistake, but their reports were highly classified and never reached the public. 

By 1981, Israeli scientists and engineers had been manufacturing nuclear bombs for thirteen years at a remote site known as Dimona, located in the barren Negev region south of Jerusalem. Aided by the French, Israel had constructed a nuclear reactor as well as a separate facility—hidden underground—for the complex process of chemically separating the reactor's most important by-product: weapons-grade plutonium. Begin had visited the underground facility at Dimona at least once since becoming prime minister in 1977 and, Israeli officials told me, had been provided in the days before the raid at Osirak with a detailed memorandum about it. The officials suggested that Begin, in his public remarks, had simply transferred what he had seen and read about Dimona to Osirak. "He confused one with the other," said one Israeli, acknowledging that his interpretation was a charitable one. 

Yitzhak Hofi, the Mossad chief, was not as charitable. Two weeks after the Osirak bombing, he gave an unprecedented newspaper interview—Hofi was cited only by title in the article, under the rules of Israeli censorship—to complain about politicians who were compromising secret intelligence. There was no doubt in the Israeli intelligence community about which politician Hofi was criticizing. 

The secrets of Dimona may have been safe from the Western press, but Dimona itself was facing a much more immediate threat. Israeli officials acknowledged that their intelligence services saw evidence in the days after the June 7 raid that Iraq, obviously seeking revenge, had begun moving some of its So viet-supplied Scud missiles closer to the Iraq-Jordan border. If the Scuds were to be moved farther west into Jordan, Dimona would be in range of a retaliatory strike by the Iraqis. Unlike the reactor at Osirak, which had not yet begun full-scale operation, Dimona had operated around the clock for eight months a year to produce and reprocess weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear weapons. An Iraqi strike could scatter deadly radioactive contamination for dozens of miles. 

Well before the bombing at Osirak, however, Israeli officials had ordered the dome-shaped reactor and underground reprocessing plant at Dimona to cease all operations; both were kept out of service through the end of the year. The Israeli Air Force was also instructed to keep intelligence aircraft in the sky on a twenty-four-hour alert. There is no evidence that Washington saw or understood any of the Israeli defensive actions. 

A few British intelligence officials immediately suspected that Israel had used the high-resolution KH-11 photography to target Osirak, and they complained to their American counter parts about it. In essence, one involved American recalled, they were saying, "We told you so." The brilliant reputation of the KH-11 system was reinforced, ironically, by Israel's successful raid: high-resolution satellite photographs of the destroyed re search reactor were on the desks of Washington decision-makers within a few hours of the mission. 

The British were right, as a subsequent highly secret investigation showed: Israel had gotten much valuable intelligence from the KH-11. There was evidence that William J. Casey, Ronald Reagan's director of central intelligence, had inadvertently played a key role. 

Casey was an enthusiastic supporter of the imagery-sharing program from the moment he took office, and early in his tenure he ordered that the Israeli liaison officers be provided with a private office near CIA headquarters. The goal, apparently, was to give the Israelis direct access to the American intelligence officers who processed the KH-11 imagery to make sure that all essential intelligence was turned over. Only Israelis, so the reasoning went, would know what was important to Israel. "Casey was prepared to show them a little thigh," one high ranking American official explained. "But he didn't roll over and play dead for the Israelis." 

The CIA director, suddenly confronted after Osirak with serious questions about Israel's abuse of the KH-11 intelligence sharing agreement, authorized a small, ad hoc committee of experts to review the matter.* The group was ordered to operate with the heightened security that always surrounded Israeli intelligence issues.. 

*Casey had made his first secret trip to Israel as CIA director a few months earlier and, according to Israelis, put in motion an ambitious list of joint intelligence operations aimed at rolling back Communism—actions, Casey believed, that had all but ceased during the Carter years. These included renewed espionage activities inside the Soviet Union, aid for the anti-Communist Solidarity movement in Poland, and economic and military support—in violation of a congressional ban—for Jonas Savimbi's UNITA resistance movement in Angola. Casey also insisted upon and apparently received Israeli promises of support for what emerged in the early 1980's as one of his near-obsessions—covert aid to the anti-Communist Renamo insurgency in Mozambique. (A 1988 State Department study placed the number of civilians murdered by Renamo at more than 100,000, with an estimated one million Mozambicans forced into refugee status.) Despite the successful visit, Casey was embarrassed and rankled by the fact that his newfound colleagues in Israel had not seen fit to inform him in advance of the planned attack on Osirak. His CIA thus had failed to anticipate the first serious foreign policy crisis in the Reagan administration. 

What the review group found was stunning. 

In little more than two years, the Israelis had expanded what had been a limited agreement to the point where they were able to extract virtually any photograph they wished from the system. Most surprisingly, the Israelis had requested and received extensive KH-11 coverage of western Russia, including Moscow. "The Israelis did everything except task [target] the bird," one disturbed military man acknowledges. There was anger at the senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency for what some officials considered their "very lax" management of the liaison agreement: "We set up the system and we didn't bother to monitor what they [the Israelis] were doing," the military man said.** William B. Bader, who was serving in 1979 as assistant deputy under secretary of defense for policy, recalled his frustration at knowing that the Israelis were "edging deeper into the over head" and not knowing how to stop it. "You didn't know where to complain," Bader said. "We knew that these guys [the Israelis] had access that went around the colonels and the deputy assistant secretaries." If a complaint got to the wrong office, he explained, "you might get your head handed back to you." 

** Adding to the dismay, surely, was the fact that President Carter, as a security measure, had, shortly after taking office, ordered a freeze on the number of code work clearances in the government. The freeze led to enormous complications throughout the intelligence world, because many analysts were not permitted access to the information—such as that collected by the KH-11—they needed to do their job.

A former high-ranking NSA official recalled his anger upon subsequently learning early in the Reagan administration that Israeli military officers were permitted to attend Pentagon meetings at which future missions and orbital flight paths for the KH-11 were discussed. "People who knew about it wanted to puke," the former official said. "With the care this [the KH11] got everywhere else, this blew our minds." However, an other senior American intelligence officer, agreeing that "a lot of guys were shocked and dismayed," explained that he was less troubled by the Israeli encroachment: "It was in our national interest to make sure in 1981 that the Israelis were going to survive." This officer depicted the direct access provided to Israel as "a compromise. Israel wanted to make sure that nothing important was passed by. It needed to make sure it got all it needed." The Israeli officer assigned to the Pentagon, the intelligence officer said, was only relaying Israel's intelligence needs to the men in charge of the KH-11 program. The Israeli, in return, was allowed to "stand by" as the KH-11 funneled its real-time imagery back to Washington. 

A State Department official who was involved said he and Secretary Haig viewed the arguments about Israeli access as "an intelligence community theological debate. Why have a fight? Give them the pictures. It's a confidence builder." It was a zero-sum issue for the Israelis, this official added: if the Reagan administration refused them access to the KH-11, they would turn to Congress "and get the money [inserted into the foreign aid budget] for a satellite, launching pad, and down link." 

To Richard Allen as well, Israel's manipulation of the KH-11 agreement was no big deal: "I figured they had friends" in the Pentagon who informally had provided the expanded access. 

It was finally agreed in the White House after the ad hoc review that the photographs could continue to flow to Israel, but with the initial 1979 restrictions emphatically back in force. "We were going to narrow the aperture," Allen said; Israel would no longer be permitted to get KH-11 imagery of the Soviet Union or any other country outside the hundred-mile limit. Allen personally relayed that message in the fall of 1981 to Ariel Sharon, the controversial and hard-line Israeli general and war hero who had been named defense minister in August by the newly reelected Begin government. 

Begin and Sharon were in Washington in September to lobby the White House in support of a far-reaching Israeli plan for a U.S.-Israeli strategic cooperation against a shared enemy: the Soviet Union. An Israeli memorandum for Washington argued that the two nations needed to cooperate "against the threat to peace and security of the region caused by the Soviet Union or Soviet-controlled forces from outside the region introduced into the region." To meet that need, the Israelis sought Reagan's approval for the pre-positioning of American military forces, joint use of airfields, joint planning for military and political contingencies in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, and the U.S. financing of a receiving station, or down link, for the KH-11 satellite imagery, to be located in Tel Aviv. 

The Israeli proposals were understandably viewed as excessive and were much watered down during negotiations over the next few months, to Sharon's dismay. Sharon pushed especially hard on the down link issue, also insisting that the receiving station be "dedicated"—meaning that the encoded signals to and from the satellite to the down link could be read only by Israel. The United States thus would be in the untenable position of not being able to know what intelligence the Israelis were obtaining from its own satellite system. 

It was a preposterous suggestion, and Allen privately told Sharon so. "It was rough," Allen recalled. "He started bitching about American aid being Band-Aids and mustard plaster. He kept on saying, 'You want to give us Band-Aids. If that's what you mean by strategic alliance, we're not interested.' " Allen, a strong supporter of Israel, said he wasn't intimidated: "I saw Sharon as a big tough swashbuckler who did a lot of bellowing." 

The bombing at Osirak led to no significant changes in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, nor were any serious questions raised about Israel's need for so many KH-11 photographs from so many places—a need that risked a breach in Israel's relations with the United States. Despite the brief flap over Israeli access, there were no lessons learned and KH-11 photographs continued to flow to Israel. Some far-reaching changes were triggered, however, for Israel. 

The French, who had also been the chief suppliers of nuclear materials and expertise to Iraq in return for oil, were embarrassed as well as outraged by the Israeli attack. There were a few officials in Paris who sought revenge by breaking long-held vows of silence, and they began to tell about an earlier French nuclear relationship in the Middle East: as secret partners in the making of the Israeli bomb. 

Ariel Sharon concluded after the cabinet room meeting that the United States was not a reliable strategic ally. He turned to a clandestine Israeli intelligence agency controlled by his defense ministry, whose operations at the time were not fully understood by Washington, and stood by as it intercepted intelligence on the Middle East and Soviet Union from the most sensitive agencies in America—the kind of intelligence that Israel had been told it would no longer be able to get. An American Jew working in the U.S. intelligence community had volunteered his services to the agency several years earlier; he would soon be put to work spying on his country for Israel. 

It's almost certain that no one in Ronald Reagan's White House considered Sharon's request for a KH-11 down link in Tel Aviv in terms of Israel's nuclear ambitions. Similarly, the ad hoc review group that William Casey had set up after Osirak to monitor compliance with the 1979 intelligence-sharing agreement blithely accepted Israel's explanation for its violation of the rules: it had obtained the off-limits KH-11 imagery of the Soviet Union solely to monitor the ongoing supply links be tween Russia and its allies in Syria and Iraq. 

Indeed, there were not many, even in the American intelligence community, who understood in 1981 why Israel had collected satellite imagery of the Soviet Union and why Sharon was so insistent on continued access to that intelligence: Israel was itself a nuclear power that was targeting the Soviet Union with its warheads and missiles.

2 

The Scientist

 

The scientific father of the Israeli bomb, its J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a slight, pale, chain-smoking scientist named Ernst David Bergmann, a rabbi's son who was a refugee from Nazi Germany. 

The international scientific community came to know Bergmann after Israel's successful War of Independence in 1948— the first Arab-Israeli War—as a brilliant organic chemist and director of the chemistry division at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel's preeminent research facility. He was chairman of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, set up in 1952, and, on those few occasions when he appeared in public, an outspoken advocate of nuclear research for peaceful purposes. Cigarette constantly in hand, Bergmann was a picture of charm and wit at international conferences on nuclear science. His high intelligence seemed obvious. So did Israel's need for nuclear power: there would be no oil available for purchase from Arab neighbors. 

By 1947, Bergmann was telling friends that the large phosphate fields in the Negev desert contained meager, but recover able, traces of natural uranium. Within two years, a department of isotope research was established at the Weizmann Institute and young Israeli scientists were being sent abroad to study the new fields of nuclear energy and nu clear chemistry. A joint research program also was begun with the nascent French Atomic Energy Commission. By 1953, Israeli researchers at Weizmann had pioneered a new process for creating heavy water, needed to modulate a nuclear chain reaction, as well as devising a more efficient means of extracting uranium from phosphate fields. 

In November 1954, Bergmann introduced himself to the Israeli citizenry in a radio address and reported on Israel's progress in peaceful nuclear research. He announced—two years after the fact—that an Israeli Atomic Energy Commission had been established. The next year Israel signed an agreement with the United States, under the Eisenhower administration's Atoms for Peace program, for cooperation in the civilian uses of atomic energy. Washington helped finance and fuel a small nuclear reactor for research, located at Nahal Soreq, south of Tel Aviv. The agreement called for the United States to have inspection rights to the small reactor under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which provided for an Israeli guarantee, to be verified by inspections, that the nuclear materials would not be diverted to weapons research. 

These were years in which David Ben-Gurion—Israel's white-maned "Old Man," who served, with one brief interlude, as prime minister and defense minister from 1948 to 1963—repeatedly bragged to visitors that Israel would build its own atomic reactor, utilizing its own natural uranium and locally manufactured heavy water. Nuclear energy, Ben-Gurion promised, would soon be producing the electricity and creating the desalinated water needed to make the Negev desert bloom. 

Bergmann's dream of nuclear power plants was sincere, but it also amounted to a totally effective cover for his drive to develop the bomb. Ben-Gurion was the man in charge of all of this, with the aid of his brilliant young protege Shimon Peres, who was thirty years old when Ben-Gurion appointed him director general of the ministry of defense in late 1953. Bergmann's Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, as the public was not told in the radio address, was under the direct jurisdiction of Peres and the defense ministry. Nuclear power was not Ben-Gurion's first priority; the desert would glow before it bloomed. 

These three men would find an international ally to help create the bomb and, equally important, would accept from the beginning that the bomb would have to be privately financed by wealthy American and European Jews who shared their dream of an ultimate deterrent for Israel. Any other approach would make the bomb impossible to keep secret.  

Israel's nuclear bomb ambitions in the early 1950's were not foreseen in Cold War Washington. The United States was pre-occupied with the Korean War, economic and social conditions in Europe, the strength of the Communist Party in France and Italy, fears of internal Communist subversion, and the continuing political battle with the Soviet Union. 

There were crises in the Middle East, too. Egypt's corrupt King Farouk was overthrown in a coup in 1952, and a radical new leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, emerged in 1954 as premier. British troops, after a stay of more than seventy years in Egypt, were on their way out of North Africa. So were the French. By 1955 the French government was facing insurrection from three former colonies, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Morocco and Tunisia would gain their independence by 1956, but Algeria, whose opposition National Liberation Front (F.L.N) was strongly supported by Nasser, became the main event. The bloody war, with its 250,000 dead, came close to destroying France over the next five years and provided inspiration to Arab revolutionaries throughout the Middle East. 

Nasser, with his talk of Pan-Arabism, also rattled the Israelis, who instinctively turned to the United States. American Jews were Israel's lifeline: hundreds of millions of American dollars were pouring in every year. Ben-Gurion had tried for years to join in a regional security pact with Washington—to somehow be included under the American nuclear umbrella—with no success. Israel had publicly supported the American position in the Korean War and secretly went a step further: Ben-Gurion offered to send Israeli troops to fight alongside the United Nations' forces in South Korea.* President Harry S. Truman said no, apparently in fear of backing into a security arrangement with Israel. The United States, England, and France had agreed in their 1950 Tripartite Agreement that all three nations would maintain the status quo in the Middle East by not providing any significant quantity of military equipment to Arabs or Israelis. The Eisenhower administration came into office in 1953 with no intention of changing the policy. 

* Israel's position on the Korean War enraged Moscow and led to a rupture in diplomatic relations. The Soviet Union, which had been the first nation to recognize the State of Israel in 1948, would for the  next thirty years castigate Israel for its "racist and discriminatory" treatment of Palestinians and ties to American "imperialism."

Israel tried, nonetheless, to establish some kind of a special relationship with President Eisenhower, with no luck. In the mid-1950's, a year-long series of renewed talks on a mutual security treaty with Washington went nowhere. At one point, as Ben-Gurion told his biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, he considered offering Eisenhower American bases in Israel in return for a security commitment. That idea was dropped when the talks faltered. There were equally unsuccessful strategems to purchase fighter planes and other weapons, but Eisenhower essentially maintained the 1950 embargo on arms sales to Israel throughout the eight years of his presidency. The effect was to limit America's influence in the Middle East and deny Washington a chance to have an impact on Israeli foreign policy. The policy suited the men around Eisenhower, many of them Wall Street lawyers who thought that America's oil supply would be jeopardized by arms trafficking with Israel. 

Ben-Gurion's private nightmare in these years—as his close aides knew—was of a second Holocaust, this time at the hands of the Arabs. Israel's only security, Ben-Gurion repeatedly warned, would come through self-defense and self-reliance. "What is Israel?" he was quoted by an aide as asking. ". . . Only a small spot. One dot! How can it survive in this Arab world?" Ben-Gurion believed that he understood Arab character and was persuaded that as long as Arabs thought they could destroy the Jewish state, there would be no peace and no recognition of Israel. Many Israelis, survivors of the Holocaust, came to believe in ein brera, or "no alternative," the doctrine that Israel was surrounded by implacable enemies and there fore had no choice but to strike out. In their view, Hitler and Nasser were interchangeable. 

For these Israelis, a nuclear arsenal was essential to the survival of the state. In public speeches throughout the 1950's, BenGurion repeatedly linked Israel's security to its progress in science. "Our security and independence require that more young people devote themselves to science and research, atomic and electronic research, research of solar energy . . . and the like," he told the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in November 1955. Ernst Bergmann explicitly articulated the ein brera fears in a letter two years later: "I am convinced . . . that the State of Israel needs a defense research program of its own, so that we shall never again be as lambs led to the slaughter." 

Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, and Ernst Bergmann believed that Israel's independent arsenal finally could provide what President Eisenhower would not—the nuclear umbrella. 

No outsider—not the international scientific community, the Israeli public, nor American intelligence—could understand the significance of Bergmann's two other government portfolios in the early 1950's: as scientific adviser to the minister of defense and as director of research and planning for the defense ministry. The Israelis in charge of those posts knew Bergmann to be the most uncompromising and effective advocate for nuclear weapons, the man most directly responsible—along with the French—for Israel's status by the end of the 1960's as a nuclear-weapons state. Bergmann and the French not only got it done in the Negev desert, but they kept it secret, just as J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues had kept the Manhattan Project undiscovered in the desert at Los Alamos. 

The young Bergmann had been introduced in the early 1920's to the world of the atom as a student of organic chemistry at the Emil Fischer Institute of the University of Berlin. He was on the fringe of a circle of eminent scientists, including Ernest Rutherford in England and Marie Curie of France, who were the cutting edge of what would become an international race in the prewar years to unravel the mystery of nuclear fission. Bergmann's colleagues in Berlin included Herman F. Mark, an Austrian who later became an eminent chemist and dean of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (and whose son, Hans M., served as secretary of the Air Force in the Carter administration).* "We were not theoreticians," recalled Mark, who during his career published twenty books and more than five hundred papers on polymer science. "We were interested in making things. The important thing for us was synthetics. First you have to make something nobody else has—and then you can use it." While in Berlin, Bergmann and Mark worked together and published joint papers on the chemical structure of rubber, paint, and adhesives. 

* Herman Mark was ninety-five years old when interviewed in 1990 at his son's home in Austin, Texas. Hans Mark, then chancellor of the University of Texas, was himself no stranger to the world of intelligence and nuclear weapons. As Air Force secretary, he also wore what is known in the government as the "black hat": he was head of the executive committee, or Ex-Com, of the National Reconnaissance Office (N.R.O), a most-secret unit that is responsible for the  development, procurement, and targeting of America's intelligence satellites. As a nuclear physicist, Hans Mark had worked for twelve years beginning in 1955 for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, one of America's main nuclear weapons facilities. For four of those years he served as a division leader in experimental physics.

Bergmann's father was one of the most eminent rabbis in Berlin and a close friend of Chaim Weizmann, the Russian-Jewish biochemist and Zionist then living in England. In 1933, when a series of sweeping Nazi decrees made it impossible for Bergmann or any other Jew to continue in an academic job in Germany, Weizmann arranged for young Bergmann to join him on the faculty at Manchester University in England, where he continued his research on synthetics and his close association with those scientists racing to split the atom. Like Weizmann, Bergmann came to the attention of Frederick A. Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, a German-born Oxford scientist who became Winston Churchill's chief science adviser in the years before World War II. 

Little is known of Bergmann's defense work for the British before the war; it is in those years that he first became involved with the defense of Palestine. One of the Weizmann biographies reports that the Hagannah, the military arm of the Zionist movement in Palestine, asked Weizmann in 1936 for a chemist to help produce an effective high explosive for use in the under ground war against the Arabs and the British. Dynamite was far too dangerous to handle in the climate of the Middle East. Weizmann assigned the mission to Bergmann, who got it done and then signed on as a member of the Hagannah's technical committee. In 1939, the biography adds, Bergmann traveled to Paris on behalf of the Hagannah and shared his findings with the French, whose army was then operating in North Africa. 

Bergmann left England shortly after Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939. Weizmann had intervened once again and found him a job with old friends who owned a chemistry laboratory in Philadelphia. It didn't work out, and another old friend from Germany, Herman Mark, came to his rescue: "He had no space. So we invited him to come to Brooklyn." Mark had been driven out of Europe in 1938 and ended up doing research for a Canadian paper company in Ontario. By 1940 he was running a laboratory at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn; two years later he became dean of faculty and turned the institute into a haven for Jewish refugees, including Chaim Weizmann. "The whole gang came to America," said Mark, who, when interviewed for this book, was the sole known survivor of that period. 

With the defeat of Hitler, there was one final migration for Bergmann: to Palestine to help establish what would become the Weizmann Institute of Science at Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv. Israeli ambitions seemed unlimited. Oppenheimer and his colleagues in the Manhattan Project, including John von Neumann, the mathematician and early computer theoretician, were being wooed—unsuccessfully—by Weizmann as early as 1947, and were repeatedly asked to spend time doing research in Israel.* 

* Oppenheimer's personal papers, on file at the Library of Congress, show that he went to Israel in May 1958 to participate in ceremonies marking the opening of the Institute of Nuclear Science in Rehovot. He also took a military flight with Bergmann and Shimon Peres to visit the port city of Elat at the southern reach of the Negev, according to newspaper reports at the time. Israeli officials who worked in 1958 at Dimona, then in the early stages of construction, recall no visit then or in later years by Oppenheimer. 

Bergmann was Weizmann's first choice to become director of the institute, but Weizmann's wife, Vera, successfully objected on the oldest of grounds: she was offended at Bergmann's long standing affair with Hani, her husband's private secretary (whom Bergmann eventually married).** Bergmann instead was named head of the organic chemistry division. He could take solace, if needed, at the eminence of his colleagues. Amos Deshalit, who headed the physics division, subsequently was considered a quantum researcher in a class with Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr, the Danish Nobel Prize winner. Inorganic chemistry was directed by Aharon Katchalsky, later Katzir, who was a specialist in the electrolytic properties of chain mol ecules and a pioneer researcher in the related field of musclepowered robotics. (Like Bergmann, Katzir had a secret life: at his death in 1972, he was one of the driving forces in the then flourishing Israeli nuclear weapons program.) 

** It was Bergmann's second missed opportunity to direct a Weizmann research institute. Weizmann had been instrumental in the 1930s in setting up Palestine's first research facility, the Daniel Sieff Institute. According to Shimon Peres, Weizmann approached Albert Einstein, then teaching at Princeton, and asked him to recommend one of his students to run the institute. Einstein instead suggested Bergmann, who didn't get the job for reasons not known. 

There was one final move for Bergmann, at Ben-Gurion's request, after Is rael's Independence in 1948—to the ministry of defense, where, under Shimon Peres, Bergmann established the nation's first institute for defense research. More than forty years later, Peres would tell an Israeli newspaper reporter that Bergmann, even in 1948, was constantly speaking about a missile capability for Israel. "I might be ready to tell the full truth about him in one hundred years, maybe," Peres added. "We worked thirteen years together, perhaps the best years of my life." 

Without Bergmann, insisted Herman Mark, there would have been no Israeli bomb: "He was in charge of every kind of nu clear activity in Israel. He was the man who completely under stood it [nuclear fission], and then he explained it to other people." Mark became a constant commuter between Brooklyn and Israel after World War II, serving on planning boards and as a scientific adviser to the fledgling Weizmann Institute. He remained close to Bergmann and shared his view of the inevitability of Israeli nuclear weapons research: "We were both of the same opinion—that eventually Israel has to be in full cognizance and knowledge of what happens in nuclear physics. Look, a new type of chemical reaction was discovered at Los Alamos. Whether it's desalination, a power plant, or a bomb makes no difference—it's still fission." 

Bergmann had made the same point in a 1966 interview— after he was forced out of government service—with an Israeli newspaper: "It's very important to understand that by developing atomic energy for peaceful uses, you reach the nuclear option. There are no two atomic energies." That interview, nine years before his death, was as close as Bergmann ever came to publicly discussing the bomb. "Bergmann was anxious, rightly so," said Mark, "that there shouldn't be too much talk. It was super-secret—just like the Manhattan Project." 

There was at least one early occasion, however, when Bergmann couldn't resist sharing what he knew. Abraham Feinberg, a wealthy New York businessman and ardent advocate of statehood for Israel, was one of Ben-Gurion's most important and trusted allies in the United States. By 1947, Feinberg was playing a major—and highly discreet—role in fund-raising and White House lobbying for Israel as well as for the Democratic Party. He would operate at the highest levels between Washington and Jerusalem for the next two decades. Bergmann was in New York that fall and, as usual, joined Abe Feinberg and his family at Friday-night synagogue services; the group would later return to Feinberg's apartment. "Bergmann was always hungry," recalled Feinberg. "He loved my wife's scrambled eggs." One night over dinner, added Feinberg, "Bergmann's eyes lit up and he said, 'There's uranium in the desert.' " There was no question about the message—that a path was now cleared for Israel to develop the atomic bomb. Feinberg was astonished at such indiscreet talk: "I shushed him up." 

Israel's needs in the late 1940's and early 1950's coincided perfectly with France's. Both nations were far from having any technical capacity to build a bomb, nor was there any internal consensus that a bomb was desirable. 

Ben-Gurion, Peres, and Bergmann would spend much of their careers engaged in a bitter fight inside the Israeli government over their dreams of a nuclear weapons program. Most senior members of the ruling Mapai (Israel Workers') Party viewed an Israeli bomb as suicidal, too expensive, and too reminiscent of the horrors that had been inflicted on the Jews in World War II. 

The French debate revolved around the Cold War. France's high commissioner for nuclear matters, Frederic Joliot-Curie, a Nobel laureate who had done important research in nuclear physics before the war, was a member of the Communist Party who was opposed to a French role in NATO and any French link to nuclear weapons. In 1950, he was the first to sign the Stockholm Appeal, a Soviet-backed petition calling for a ban on all nuclear weapons. French scientists, despite extensive involvement in prewar nuclear fission research, had been excluded from a major role in the American and British bomb programs of World War II, and Joliot-Curie's politics kept France isolated. Joliot-Curie was dismissed after signing the Stockholm Appeal, and he was eventually replaced by Pierre Guillaumat, who had served during the war with the French secret intelligence service, and Francis Perrin, a Joliot associate who in 1939 had been the first to publish a formula for calculating the critical mass of uranium—the amount needed to sustain a chain reaction. The French plowed ahead with no help from the United States, which viewed France's Atomic Energy Com mission as being riddled with Soviet agents. 

Perrin also was important to the Israeli connection. A socialist who fled to England in 1940 at the fall of France, he became friendly with Bergmann—how the two met is not known—and traveled to Tel Aviv in 1949. It was after that visit that some Israeli scientists were permitted to attend Saclay, the newly set up French national atomic research center near Versailles, and participate in the construction of Saclay's small experimental reactor. It was a learning experience for the nuclear scientists of both countries. 

In an unpublished interview with an American graduate student in 1969, Bergmann spoke elliptically of the ambitions he shared with Ben-Gurion and Peres for the French-Israeli connection: "We felt that Israel . . . needed to collaborate with a country close to its own technical level. First it was important to train Israeli experts. Then we would decide exactly what sort of collaboration to seek and what kind of contribution could be made in a joint endeavor, considering Israel's capacities and resources. Every effort was to be made to keep cooperation from being entirely one-directional." 

A critical decision for France, and thus Israel, came in 1951 when, over the objections of Perrin, Guillaumat authorized the construction of a natural uranium-fueled reactor capable of producing, after chemical reprocessing, about twenty-two pounds of weapons-grade plutonium a year. The chain reaction would be moderated by graphite, a technique used by the United States and the Soviet Union in their huge plutonium producing reactors. 

Surveyors had found large deposits of natural uranium a few years earlier near Limoges, in central France, and that discovery made it easy for Guillaumat and Perrin to discard an alternative method for powering the reactor—using uranium that had been artificially enriched. Enriched fuel, if available at all, would have to be imported, since French technicians did not yet know how to enrich natural uranium. But relying on foreign suppliers—and inevitable international controls—would rob France of any chance to achieve its basic goal of atomic independence. "France," Charles de Gaulle wrote in his World War II memoirs, "cannot be France without greatness." The decision to produce weapons-grade plutonium would irrevocably propel France down the road to a nuclear bomb, as Guillaumat, Perrin, and the Israelis had to know—but the French public and its military leaders did not. 

Construction began the next year at Marcoule, in the southern Rhone Valley. Saint-Gobain Techniques Nouvelles (S.G.N), a large chemical company, subsequently was granted a contract to build a chemical reprocessing plant on the grounds at Marcoule. Such plants are the critical element in the making of a bomb. The natural uranium, once burned, or irradiated, in the reactor, breaks down into uranium, plutonium, and highly toxic wastes. The irradiated fuel needs to be transported, cooled, and then treated before the plutonium can be separated and purified. These steps can be accomplished only by remote control and in a specially built separate facility—the reprocessing plant—containing elaborate and very expensive physical protection for the work force. 

Bergmann's men were able to contribute to all of this. There was renewed controversy inside Israel over the constantly expanding Israeli presence in France, but Ben-Gurion held firm. "In 1952," Shimon Peres told an Israeli interviewer, "I was alone as favoring the building of an Israeli nuclear option. I . . . felt terrible. Everyone was opposed—only Ben-Gurion said, 'You'll see, it will be okay.' There were people who went to Ben-Gurion and told him, 'Don't listen to Shimon; he and Bergmann are spinning tales. Israel won't be able to launch a project like this.' They said, 'Buy from the Canadians, from the Americans.' But I wanted the French, because Bergmann was well known among the community of French atomic scientists." 

French officials reciprocated the Israeli trust: Israeli scientists were the only foreigners allowed access throughout the secret French nuclear complex at Marcoule. Israelis were said to be able to roam "at will." One obvious reason for the carte blanche was the sheer brilliance of the Israeli scientists and their expertise, even then, in computer technology. The French would remain dependent for the next decade—the first French nuclear test took place in 1960—on Israeli computer skills. A second reason for the Israeli presence at Marcoule was emotional: many French officials and scientists had served in the resistance and maintained intense feelings about the Holocaust. And many of France's leading nuclear scientists were Jewish and strong supporters of the new Jewish state, which was emerging—to the delight of these men—as France's closest ally in the Middle East. 

No Frenchman had stronger emotional ties to Israel than Bertrand Goldschmidt, a nuclear chemist who had served during World War II with the handful of French scientists who were permitted—despite being foreigners—to work directly with the Americans doing nuclear research. He had become an expert in the chemistry of plutonium and plutonium extraction. He also had helped build an experimental reactor fueled with natural uranium and moderated by heavy water. As a first-rate chemist, he had been offered a chance to stay in the American bomb program after the war, but instead chose to return to France and join its Atomic Energy Commission. After intense negotiations, American security officials permitted him to do so, but refused to release him from his wartime pledge of secrecy. "It was tacitly understood," Goldschmidt subsequently wrote, "that we could use our knowledge to benefit France by giving information to our research teams, but without publishing and only to the extent necessary for the progress of our work. That was a reasonable compromise"— and one that was quickly disregarded. 

Goldschmidt was a Jew whose family had suffered, as had most Jewish families in Europe, during the war. His ties to Israel were heightened by marriage; his wife was a member of the eminent Rothschild banking family, whose contributions to Israel and Jewish causes were measured in the tens of millions of dollars. Goldschmidt and his wife had made the pilgrimage to Israel in the early 1950's and been taken by Ernst Bergmann for a memorable meeting with Ben-Gurion at his frame home in the Negev.* By then, Goldschmidt was serving as director of chemistry for France's Atomic Energy Commission; in the 1970's he would become a widely respected French spokesman on nonproliferation and other international atomic energy is sues. He also was among the few outsiders permitted to visit the completed reactor at Dimona in the 1960's—then a classic example of illicit proliferation. 

* "We had a long discussion about atomic energy," Goldschmidt recalls. "Ben-Gurion asked me how long would it take for nuclear desalinization to make the Negev desert bloom?"—a favorite Ben-Gurion question. "I said fifteen years. He started scolding me and said if we brought in all the Jewish scientists we could do it much faster." 

"We weren't really helping them [the Israelis]," Goldschmidt explained years later. "We were just letting them know what we knew—without knowing where it would lead. We didn't know ourselves how difficult it would be." The important fact to understand, he added, with some discomfort, is that "in the fifties and sixties having a nuclear weapon was considered a good thing—something to be congratulated for. Not like the stigma it is now." 

By 1953, the scientific team at the Weizmann Institute had developed the improved ion exchange mechanism for producing heavy water and a more efficient method for mining uranium.** Both concepts were sold to the French; the sales led to a formal agreement for cooperation in nuclear research that was signed by the two nations. Goldschmidt recalled that Bergmann him self came to France to negotiate the mining sale with Pierre Guillaumat. He demanded 100 million francs for the new process, but refused to describe it fully in advance, claiming that if he did so it would lose half its value. There was an impasse. Finally, said Goldschmidt, "Guillaumat told me, 'I have the greatest respect for those people,' and we bargained." Bergmann settled for sixty million francs. Israel would remain on a cash-and-carry basis with the French in its nuclear dealings.

** Israel's much-ballyhooed breakthrough in heavy-water production, which involved distillation rather than the previously used electrolysis method, was a disappointment, however. The procedure did produce heavy water far more easily and much more cheaply than other methods, as advertised, but also much more slowly. 

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The French Connection