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 world can thank France for being held under nuclear blackmail,by Lucifer's children.These two chapters take us through the Eisenhower years.Readers should take take that at this time in the narrative,America as a nation was not yet getting mugged and sodomized financially,keep this in mind going forward,maybe,just maybe,that fall day long ago in Dallas will come into clearer focus,take care of yourselves all...
THE SAMSON OPTION
Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and
American Foreign Policy
By Seymour M. Hersh
5
💣💣💣Internal Wars 💣💣💣
Israel's nuclear bomb project was besieged with enemies—from within and without—in its early history. The vast
majority of those senior officials who knew what was going on
at Dimona thought it folly to waste such prodigious amounts of
money on a doomsday weapon that might or might not work
when conventional weapons such as tanks, guns, and aircraft
were desperately needed. The concept of underdeveloped and
underfinanced Israel as a superpower seemed ludicrous. By the
early 1960's, Dimona, with its huge manpower needs, had hired
many of the most skilled Israeli scientists and technicians away
from local research and manufacturing companies, resulting in
a much-criticized slowdown in the growth of the nation's industrial base. There also were moral objections from a few
members of the scientific and academic community, including
two of the original members of the Israeli Atomic Energy
Commission. By 1957, as construction began on the reactor,
four more members of the commission had resigned, essentially
because they had nothing to do. The only commission member
still on the job was its chairman, Ernst David Bergmann.
Bergmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Shimon Peres were waging what amounted to constant war—all in secret—to keep the
Israeli bomb project alive. The most threatening problem came
from Israel's partner in secrecy—the French. General Charles
de Gaulle had won a seven-year term as president of France's
newly constituted Fifth Republic in December 1958 by promising to find an acceptable compromise for ending the war in
Algeria. The war, which de Gaulle continued to prosecute, had
sharply divided the nation, as the Vietnam War would later
divide the United States; all other issues, such as the question of continued support for Israel, seemed secondary. De Gaulle
was known to be emphatically in favor of an independent nuclear deterrent for France, but it was not known how he might
react to the profound French commitment to Dimona. It was a
worrisome matter for those members of the French Atomic
Energy Commission who supported the Israeli bomb, and they
handled the issue in the time-honored way of the bureaucracy:
they did not tell de Gaulle what was going on. Contracts had
been signed and money paid, and the work was proceeding at
Dimona.
The French on the job at Dimona were also a source of turmoil.
Hundreds of French engineers and technicians had begun
pouring into the Negev in 1957, and Beersheba bustled with
construction as new apartment complexes and residential units
were thrown together. Housing also was made available to the
thousands of North African Jews (or Sephardim) who emigrated from Morocco and Algeria, hired to do the digging and
building of the reactor and reprocessing plant. European Jews
were slowly and carefully recruited from government and private businesses throughout Israel to serve as scientists and bureaucratic managers; they, too, were provided with housing in
Beersheba. There was a caste system in the desert, and the
French were on top, as they repeatedly made all too clear.
"The French were arrogant," said one Israeli who spent part
of his career at Dimona. "They thought Jews [in Israel] were
inferior. We weren't slick and we didn't dress well—but we
were bright." Some of the French officials were openly antisemitic,
the Israeli recalled, and one—eventually ordered out
of Israel—was found to have collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. The French treatment of the Jews from
North Africa who had been hired as laborers was even worse,
the Israeli added: "They would speak of Jews from Algeria and
Morocco like they were stones—inferior beings. It was Nazi
like."[Sort of how you jews(children of Lucifer) treat Palestinians now huh? DC]
Even those Frenchmen who were Jewish did little to ease
the tension; many considered themselves to be of a different
class and social standing than their less sophisticated Israeli
colleagues. Ironically, the Algerian and Moroccan Jews also
were mistreated by their Israeli employers. One standing rule was that the Moroccans and Algerians would be hired
only for fifty-nine days and then dismissed, a stratagem that
avoided paying any of the many benefits that came with tenure
(the Israeli economy was dominated by the labor movement),
which was reached after two months on the job. After a few
days off, the North African Jewish laborers would be rehired
for another fifty-nine days. "Some socialist government," said
the Israeli, with a caustic laugh. The North African Jews were
"treated like slaves" by French and Israelis alike.
By mid-1960, when there were rumors of a possible French
pullout, many Israelis couldn't have cared less: they'd had their
fill of the French. The Israeli scientists and technicians had
absorbed much of the French technical data by then—many
plans were modified extensively on the job—and the reaction
was, an Israeli recalled, "Go. We'll do it ourselves." Abraham
Sourassi, one of the senior Israelis at Dimona—he was responsible for building the reprocessing plant—endeared himself to
his countrymen by declaring, "Good riddance," upon hearing
of de Gaulle's disenchantment with Dimona. "It was the typical Israeli attitude—just show us," said the former Dimona official. "We'll copy it and do it better." [And their kids are still the same arrogant pricks to this day DC]
The long hours, hard work, and French smugness did not
diminish the excitement of being involved with Israel's most
important secret. "We felt great," said one of the first Israelis
hired to manage the construction in 1958. "We were pioneers."
The official recalled his initial interview with Ernst Bergmann:
"He tells me, 'We have a big project and we need the best
brains. It's going to be something remarkable that you'll never
forget.'" Bergmann also assured the young man that his new
job would be good for his career—as good as serving with the
Israeli Defense Force: "He said it'd be 'a feather in my cap. It's
going to be modern.' So I filled out the forms. Took me three
months to go through security." Those Israelis who had been
members of the Communist Party (as many had been before
immigrating to Israel) and those with relatives in Eastern Eu
rope were barred from employment because of growing Israeli
fears of Soviet penetration, fanned to no small degree by the
growing antagonism between Moscow and Jerusalem. Israel had
been racked by a series of spy scandals by the late 1950's, and the intelligence operatives in the sixty-man Soviet embassy in Tel
Aviv were believed to especially target the scientific community.
Providing security for the burgeoning nuclear operation was
a high priority and led Shimon Peres to insist on the creation
of a new intelligence agency, initially known as the Office of
Special Tasks. Its director, handpicked by Peres, was a tall,
quiet former military intelligence officer named Benyamin
Blumberg. The Office of Special Tasks, bureaucratically placed
inside the defense ministry, would become one of the most
successful intelligence agencies in modern history—and, after
Blumberg's resignation more than twenty years later, be responsible for one of Israel's worst mistakes, the recruitment of
Jonathan Pollard. Blumberg's sole mission in the late 1950s was
protecting Dimona, and he made it a point to be involved in the
details. One Israeli responsible for recruiting scientists told of
having an excellent prospect rejected by Dimona's security office because of distant relatives in Eastern Europe. He appealed
to Blumberg, who had the power to overturn any bureaucratic
rule: "I had to beg Blumberg to get him hired. We needed him
desperately. He did it—but he said it had to be 'on my life.' "
By early 1960, the reactor at Dimona was taking shape, and
many Israeli nuclear physicists and technicians were summoned back from France, where they had spent years in training at Saclay and Marcoule. The top scientists were provided
with double pay and subsidized seven-room apartments in
Beersheba, space unheard of in those years in Israel. Those
who stayed long enough eventually were given possession of
the apartments, worth at least $50,000, and permitted to sell
them at their leisure.
As the pace and intensity of construction grew, Beersheba
inevitably became an international city. The French presence
was palpable, as upward of 2,500 French men, women, and children made their life in the Negev. There were special French
schools for the children, and the streets were full of French
autos. All of this was duly reported by foreign diplomats and
military attaches assigned to various embassies in Tel Aviv.
There were constantly recurring rumors of the bomb, but the cover stories—usually revolving around seawater desalination or agricultural research—somehow held.
Ian Smart was a young British diplomat on his first foreign
assignment in the late 1950s, as third secretary of his country's
small embassy in Tel Aviv. He would go on to become an international expert in nonproliferation, but in those years he was
merely curious—and suspicious. "There was a lot of talk by the
end of 1960 about Dimona," he recalled years later, "prompted,
for one thing, by the sheer progress of the site. It was already
very apparent on the skyline. And from the road you could see
the cooling tower base of the reactor dome and the beginning
of the rib structure. Secondly, there was the French presence in
Beersheba. There was an apartment block they used with a lot
of Renault Dauphins about—all carrying French registration."
The Israeli government, when officially asked about the activities at Dimona, told the British embassy a series of stories. One
early claim, recalls Smart, was that the area was a desert grasslands research institute. Smart himself heard a second explanation while driving with a group of Israeli Defense Force troops
in the Negev. Smart pointed out the cooling tower and an officer replied, "Ah yes. That's the new manganese-processing
plant."
Throughout the last year of his stay, Smart adds, "I was reporting the 'suspicion' that this looked like a nuclear reactor.
But how do you get more than a suspicion without putting a
U-2 over it?"
The Eisenhower administration, as Smart could not know, was
in its third year of U-2 overflights of Dimona by 1960, and expanding its coverage. Art Lundahl, Dino Brugioni, and their
colleagues in the U-2 shop at the CIA were now requesting
systematic overflights of the French nuclear test site near Reggane,
Algeria, in the Sahara. The French had successfully
tested their first nuclear bomb in February 1960; it had a yield
of more than sixty kilotons, three times larger than the first
American test at Los Alamos. And the CIA knew that an Israeli
scientific team had been at the test site as observers. There was
another concern: Israeli scientists also had been tracked to a
nearby French chemical and biological weapons (CBW) testing area in the Sahara. "I wondered," Brugioni recalled, "were the
Israelis looking at CBW as a stopgap until they got the bomb?
We thought they may have a CBW capability." All of this was
immediately shared with the Eisenhower White House, Brugioni said.
The Israelis and French continued to monitor the U-2 over
flights, but they also continued to operate with the most stringent secrecy at Dimona—as if no outsider understood what was
going on.
French workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly
to relatives and friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to
a phony post office box in Latin America. Mail from France to
Israel was routed the same way. The sophisticated equipment
for the reactor and processing plant was assembled by the
French Atomic Energy Commission in a clandestine workshop
in a Paris suburb and transported by truck, rail, and ship.
The heaviest equipment, such as the reactor tank, was described to French customs officials as components of a seawater
desalinization plant bound for Latin America. Israel also
needed an illicit shipment of heavy water—it was impractical
to rely on the heavy-water process invented by the Weizmann
Institute, which was too slow—and turned, as did most of the
world's nuclear powers, to the Norwegians, who before World
War II had invented an electrolysis method for producing large
quantities of heavy water. Norway remained among the international leaders in the export of heavy water in the 1950's, and
its sales to the French Atomic Energy Commission had only
one condition—that the heavy water not be transferred to a
third country. That stipulation was ignored as the French Air
Force secretly flew as much as four tons of the water—stored in
oversized barrels—to Israel sometime in 1960.* A French cover firm, the Research Company for Financing and Enterprise, eventually was set up to handle the extensive contacts and negotiations with the Israeli government and various Israeli sub contractors who would actually build Dimona. There was no problem of security among the subcontractors; all contracts were funneled through Peres and his colleagues in Mapai. The largest Israeli engineering company at Dimona, Solel Bone Ltd., of Haifa, was closely associated with the Mapai Party; Israelis involved in the early stages of construction at Dimona acknowledged that there was an extensive, and traditional, system of diverting contract funds to the party.
* Details of this and many other areas of French cooperation with Israel were initially reported by Pierre Pean, a French journalist, in his richly documented 1982 book
LesDeuxBombes (Fayard), which was not published in the United States. The essential
facts in Pean's book were verified by the author of this book in subsequent interviews
with French and Israeli officials. Those officials raised questions, however, about the
motives of some of those who had aided Pean. Many of the French companies, they
said, that had been involved in the construction of Dimona in the early 1960s were
working under contract for Iraq, with the approval of the French Atomic Energy
Commission, at the time of the bombing of Osirak in 1981. It was the subsequent political and economic anger at the Israelis that led a few private and public officials to cooperate fully with Pean and provide him with documentation of the French role at Dimona.
All of this cost money, and the huge expense of Dimona was a
constant source of dissent inside the Israeli government, which
was in a struggle to match Egypt in the rapid arms buildup in
the Middle East. Egypt acquired its first Soviet advanced
fighter plane, the MiG-21, in 1960, and Israel continued to purchase the most advanced warplanes available from the French.
Both countries obtained bombers from their international pa
trons, and both were continuing research into ballistic missile
delivery systems. By 1961, however, Egypt's military expenditures had reached nearly $340 million, twice as much as Israel
was spending.
The perennial critics of Israel's nuclear program, who included Levi Eshkol, the finance minister, and Pinhas Sapir,
minister of commerce and industry—the two men dominated
the Israeli budget process for more than fifteen years—saw the
Egyptian arms buildup as the most compelling argument
against investing money at Dimona.
Just how much Israel was spending on the bomb in these
years is impossible to estimate accurately, and Israel's 1957 contract with the French for the construction at Dimona has never
been made public. One rough estimate, published by the Israeli
press in December 1960, put the cost of the reactor alone at $130
million. A detailed study of overall nuclear start-up costs was
published in 1983 by Thomas W. Graham, a nonproliferation
expert and former U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency (ACDA) official. Graham concluded that France had
spent between $10 billion and $15 billion to assemble its secure
strike capability, including thermonuclear weapons, with as
much as half spent on delivery systems. India similarly would
have to invest as much as 10 to 23 percent of its annual defense
budget in the nuclear area, Graham wrote, if it were to achieve
status as a full-scale nuclear power.
Israel's strategic goal was to achieve nothing less than a secure strike capacity, with thermonuclear weapons and missile
and aircraft delivery systems capable of reaching targets in the
Soviet Union. The cost of those ambitions was heightened by
the fact that so much of the facility at Dimona, including its
chemical reprocessing plant, was being built underground.
The difficulties of working below the surface could only sky
rocket the already high costs of ventilation, waste disposal, and
worker safety. Other significant cost factors included the obligation to pay workers well in union-dominated Israel, a reliance on foreign nationals such as the French, and the extensive
security needed to protect a secret facility. Israel's ultimate
commitment undoubtedly amounted to many billions of dollars.
Ben-Gurion understood that getting Dimona complete
would be possible only if it were not being financed out of the
Israeli budget. The solution was to begin secret fund-raising
for the bomb abroad. Israel already was receiving, according to
American intelligence estimates, hundreds of millions a year in
overall gifts and contributions from American Jews alone.
Sometime in 1960, Shimon Peres decided to form a special
group of trusted and discreet donors that became known, ac
cording to Israeli sources, as the Committee of Thirty. Certain
wealthy Jews around the world, including Baron Edmund de
Rothschild of Paris and Abraham Feinberg of New York, were
asked to quietly raise money for what Peres called the "special
weapons" program, and they did so. Years later, Peres would
brag to an interviewer that "not one penny for Dimona came
from the government budget. The project was financed from
contributions I raised from Jewish millionaires who understood the importance of the issue. We collected forty million dollars." Peres also said that he "brought Jewish millionaires to
Dimona. I told them what would be here." Former Israeli government officials confirmed that at least one group of foreign
contributors was permitted to visit Dimona in 1968, after its
completion.
The $40 million raised by Peres would not be nearly enough,
however. Israeli officials estimated that by the mid-1960s Israel
was spending not scores of millions but hundreds of millions
of dollars annually on its nuclear program, with the Peres
operation producing a small percentage of the funds and the
government underwriting the rest. Ben-Gurion's insistence on
continuing to invest that kind of money in the bomb remained
a severe source of conflict inside his cabinet and the Mapai
Party.
There were reasons other than financial for objecting to the
bomb. Old-fashioned military men such as Yigal Allon, who
had led troops during the War of Independence; Yitzhak Rabin,
the army chief of operations who was destined to be chief of
staff; and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli general and commando
leader, believed that Israel's essential advantage over the Arabs
was the quality and training of its military personnel. To these
men, nuclear weapons were nothing more than a great equalizer: an Egypt equipped with the bomb was far more dangerous to Israel than an Egypt limited to conventional arms, even
in huge quantities. If Israel possessed nuclear weapons, their
analysis continued, it would be impossible to deny them to
Egypt or other nations in the Middle East.*
* Moshe Dayan, as one of the few military men who supported the bomb in these early years, was an anomaly. American nonproliferation experts eventually came to understand that there was a correlation between the attitude of military officers toward the bomb and a national commitment to going nuclear. Many senior military officers in both Israel and India objected bitterly to the nuclear weapons arsenal in its early development. However, once the bomb joined the military arsenal, as it did in India in the late 1970's and in Israel a few years earlier, dissent ceased.
Another compelling argument against Dimona was made by
the nation's industrial managers throughout the early 1960s, as
the reactor and chemical reprocessing plant—nearing completion—continued to necessitate the recruitment of additional
scientists and technicians. Israel was, in essence, facing what
amounted to a domestic brain drain. By the late 1960s, senior
officials of the ministry of commerce and industry were publicly critical of the reduced level of industrial research in the
nation. Government funding for such research had been drastically cut back, and industry was lagging increasingly behind
science. Scientific innovations still took place, but there were
few engineering companies capable of turning those ideas into
profitable goods that manufacturers could put into production.
Officials who worked at Dimona in those years acknowledged the predatory hiring practices, with the nation's chemical industry being a prime target. "We raided every place in the
country," one former official recalled with pride. "We depleted
Israel's industrial system." The only facility off-limits was the
small research reactor at Nahal Soreq, near the Weizmann Institute. At its height, the former official said, fifteen hundred
Israeli scientists, many with doctorates, worked at Dimona.
The first overt sign of de Gaulle's unease over France's nuclear
commitment to Israel came in May 1960, when Maurice Couve
de Murville, the French foreign minister, informed the Israeli
ambassador that France wanted Israel to make a public announcement about the reactor at Dimona and also agree to submit it to international inspection, similar to the inspection of
Nahal Soreq. Without such acts, Couve de Murville said,
France would not supply raw uranium to the reactor. BenGurion
decided to fly to France for a summit meeting. The two
leaders got along well: de Gaulle would later characterize BenGurion
in his memoirs as "one of the greatest statesmen of our
time. . . . From the very first moment, I felt sympathetic admiration for this courageous fighter and champion. His personality symbolized Israel, which he has ruled since the day he
presided over her creation and struggle." Ben-Gurion, in turn,
found de Gaulle to be a "lively, humane man with a sense of
humor, very alert, and much kindness."
Bertrand Goldschmidt's personal notes of the meeting, provided to the author, show that de Gaulle, embroiled in Algeria,
was worried about the potential for international scandal if
France's involvement with Dimona became publicly known.
De Gaulle explained, according to the notes, that "if France
was the only country to help Israel, while neither the United States, Britain, or the Soviet Union has helped anyone else get
the bomb, she would put herself in an impossible international
situation." There was a second worry: "No doubt if Israel had
the atomic bomb, Egypt would be receiving one as well." [well it has not been allowed to happen yet and THAT is total bullshit,because it has allowed the jews to run around like the liars they are(after all,that is all Lucifer's children know to do) blackmailing the world with their nukes.Real swift move France,should have left you fools along with the mutts on that island to fend for yourselves back in the 40's DC]
The critical concern for de Gaulle was Dimona's underground chemical reprocessing plant, then being built according
to French specifications: he did not want to be responsible for
making the Israeli bomb inevitable. French help in building the
plant would have to cease. Ben-Gurion gave his view of the
Arab threat, but de Gaulle insisted that the Israeli prime minister was "exaggerating the danger of destruction that threatens
you. In no way will we allow you to be massacred. . . . We
will defend you. We will not let Israel fall." De Gaulle offered
to sell Israel more fighter aircraft.
De Gaulle came away from his meeting convinced, as he
wrote in his memoirs, that he had ordered all work to stop on
the reprocessing plant: "I put an end to abusive practices of
collaboration established on the military level, after the Suez
expedition, between Tel Aviv and Paris, and which introduced
Israelis permanently to all levels of staff and French services.
Thus in particular there was a stop to the aid provided by us
near Beersheba, for a plant to transform uranium into plutonium from which some fine day atom bombs could arise." De
Gaulle's order, if issued, was ignored. Saint-Gobain's work on
the underground reprocessing plant was delayed for more than
two years, but in 1962 a new French contractor arrived and
finished the job.
Ben-Gurion was pleased with de Gaulle's promises of continued military aid, but he was not willing to trade an Israeli bomb
for French warplanes. Over the next few months, Shimon
Peres was able to work out a compromise in talks with Couve
de Murville that centered on what amounted to an Israeli lie,
one that would dominate Israel's public stance on nuclear arms
for decades. The Israelis assured France that they had no intention of manufacturing an atomic bomb and would not do any
reprocessing of plutonium. A compromise of sorts was reached:
French companies would continue to supply the uranium ore
and reactor parts that already had been ordered and not demand any foreign inspection. Israel would make public the existence of its nuclear reactor and continue its construction at
Dimona without any official French government help.
With the friendly summit behind him, Ben-Gurion did nothing to change the status quo at Dimona. Neither did de Gaulle
or the French government. The privately owned French construction firms and their employees maintained a vigorous
presence at Dimona until 1966 and continued to be well paid
under the existing contracts.[And so it continues to this day with Lucifer's kids and their 'secret' abetted by our piece of shit government in little jerusal..I mean district of columbia DC]
6
💣💣💣Going Public 💣💣💣
By December 1960, John W. Finney had been a reporter for three years in the Washington bureau of the New
York Times, covering nuclear issues and the Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC). Finney, hired away from United Press International by bureau chief James A. Reston, was considered a
solid addition to the news staff—but he had yet to bust a big
one.
Finney's story came late that month and was, as Finney recalled, "handed to me on a platter."
The messenger was the Times's redoubtable Arthur Krock,
then the patriarch of Washington columnists, who approached
Finney's desk late one afternoon. Krock was known to young
bureau reporters such as Finney for his remoteness and for
his daily long lunches with senior government officials at
the private Metropolitan Club, a few blocks from the White
House.
"Mr. Finney," Krock said, "I think if you call John McCone,
he'll have a story for you." John A. McCone, a very wealthy
Republican businessman from California, was chairman of the
AEC, and Finney had established good rapport with him. Finney immediately understood the situation: "They were looking
to plant a story. I was the right person and Krock was the
intermediary." Finney made the call and was promptly invited
to McCone's office.
"McCone was mad, sputtering mad," Finney recalled. "He
started talking and saying, 'They lied to us.' "
Who?
"The Israelis. They told us it was a textile plant."* There was
new intelligence, McCone said, revealing that the Israelis had
secretly built a nuclear reactor in the Negev with French help;
McCone wanted Finney to take the story public. Finney's subsequent article, published December 19 on page one in the
Times, told the American people what Art Lundahl and Dino
Brugioni had been reporting to the White House for more than
two years: that Israel, with the aid of the French, was building
a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium. "Israel had made no
public announcement about the reactor, nor has she privately
informed the United States of her plan," Finney wrote, faith
fully reflecting what McCone told him. "There is an ill-concealed feeling of annoyance among officials that the United
States has been left in the dark by two of its international
friends, France and Israel."
* There is no evidence that the Israeli government ever claimed to Washington that the construction at Dimona was a textile plant. Those American and European diplomats who inquired invariably were informed that Dimona was a research facility (usually for agriculture) or a chemical plant. McCone's comment to Finney became widely accepted as fact, nonetheless, and prompted a whimsical column by Art Buchwald in the New York Herald Tribune on January 10,1961. Buchwald told of an Israeli cab driver who six months earlier had driven an American diplomat to Dimona in search of a suit, at wholesale prices, from the textile plant. The technicians at Dimona decided to let him in and pretend that "nothing was going on." When the diplomat inquired about buying a suit, he was told: " 'Perhaps you would like something in cobalt blue? Or maybe a nice uranium brown? How about a cosmic gray, double-breasted, with pin striped particles?'" The diplomat was measured for his suit behind a six-foot wall of lead. Another scientist "rushed in with a Geiger counter, a slide rule, and two robot arms. The head of the plant took a pad and said: 'Shimshon, call off the customer's measurements.' Shimshon yelled out: 'Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, oi!' " There were more measurements: " 'Waist U-235; relatively good chest; there is a hexagonal prism in the left shoulder; the right sleeve needs reactor.'" As the diplomat left, Buchwald wrote, he was told: " 'Please, kind sir, do not tell your friends about us because we have too much work now, and if we take any more orders the plant will explode.'"
Finney's story also noted that McCone had "questioned"
Israel about the new information but then added: "Mr.
McCone refused to go into details." It was standard operating
procedure for official Washington: Finney got the story and
McCone was able to duck responsibility for giving it to him.
McCone's leak to Finney would be his parting shot as AEC
commissioner; a few days later he announced his resignation
on Meet the Press, the NBC Sunday television interview show.
The Finney story was being written that same day. Finney was convinced, as McCone wanted him to be, that the commissioner's anger stemmed from recently acquired knowledge, some
new intelligence about the Israelis. "McCone left me with the
impression," Finney recalled, "that they'd suddenly appreciated that the Israelis were lying to them."
Finney paid a higher price than he realized for his big story;
the Eisenhower administration was using him and the New York
Times to accomplish what its senior officials were publicly apprehensive about doing themselves—taking on the Israelis over
Dimona. McCone, as he did not indicate to Finney, had been
briefed regularly on the Israeli nuclear program after replacing
Lewis Strauss as AEC commissioner in July 1958; there is no
evidence that Strauss, who also received regular briefings on
Dimona from Art Lundahl and Dino Brugioni, personally
shared his knowledge with McCone. But Lundahl and Brugioni did. McCone, as AEC chairman, was a member of the
U.S. Intelligence Advisory Committee, the top-level group at
the time, and was, according to Walter N. Elder, a former CIA
official who was McCone's long-time aide, "in on the action
from the beginning. He sat at the table."
What made McCone (who died in early 1991 after a long,
incapacitating illness) join the administration in suddenly reacting to intelligence that had been around for years? Walt
Elder, who wrote the still-classified history of McCone's CIA
tenure, described McCone as being committed to the concept
of nuclear nonproliferation and also aware of the convenient
fact that Eisenhower was a month away from ending his eight year
reign in the White House. There could be no better time
to act. "He figured, I'm through and this is my duty—to let the
public know about this,' " said Elder. Another issue, he added,
was McCone's frustration at the constant Israeli lying about
Dimona: "There was an impetus to do them in."
By December 1960, work at Dimona had progressed to the
point where the reactor dome had become visible from nearby
roads in the Negev, and thus was more susceptible to being
photographed by military attaches. By this time, too, the U-2
program was in disarray: its decline began in May 1960, when Gary Francis Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union.
Premier Nikita Khrushchev's rage at the incident, which
caught the White House in a series of lies, ruined Eisenhower's
Paris summit meeting scheduled for a few weeks later and led
him to order an end to all reconnaissance flights over Russia.
Arthur Lundahl recalled those months as being "full of finger pointing
and turbulence." The Powers fiasco did not diminish
the fact that Eisenhower and Khrushchev had made steady
progress over the previous year in drafting a comprehensive
treaty banning all nuclear tests; such testing was suspended by
both nations until September 1961. That success had led to an
overall heightened sensitivity about nuclear proliferation, and
also may have played a role in the sudden concern over
Dimona. Another factor may have been timing: with the administration coming to an end, there was no longer any compelling reason to worry about domestic pressure from Jewish
lobbying groups.
Whatever the reason, even before McCone's summoning of
John Finney, there was a coordinated effort at the top levels of
government to make Israel acknowledge what it was doing at
Dimona. Such unanimity of purpose and widespread access to
sensitive intelligence about Dimona wouldn't happen again—
ever.
By the date of McCone's appearance on Meet the Press, Washington had been awash for at least ten days with new information about Dimona and a new desire to do something about it.
Even Christian A. Herter, the usually detached and preoccupied secretary of state, was in on it. Armin H. Meyer, a senior
foreign service officer soon to be posted as ambassador to Lebanon, recalled his surprise in early December at finding Herter
seemingly upset upon being given a photograph of the reactor,
as taken from a highway. Herter, the under secretary who had
been given the top job after the death of John Foster Dulles in
May 1959, had gone so far as to call in Avraham Harman, the
Israeli ambassador, for an explanation. "I remember being
amazed that he felt he could take on the Israelis," Meyer said.
"It was the only time I really saw him burn. Something must have happened in the nuclear field that gave him the safety to
raise the issue. He felt he was on sacred ground."*
* Herter had stunned America's European allies during his April 1959 confirmation hearings by declaring that he could not "conceive of any President engaging in all-out nuclear war unless we were in danger of all-out devastation ourselves." The statement, while undoubtedly correct, played into the hands of de Gaulle's ambitions for the force defrappe. The historian Richard J. Barnet, writing about Herter's statement in 1983, commented: "In a sentence the new secretary had blown away the solemn assurances of a decade."
Herter, in fact, had done some independent checking of his
own. Shortly after receiving the intelligence, he asked an aide
to approach the French and find out whether they indeed were
helping the Israelis. The aide, Philip J. Farley, had been around
—he'd served since 1956 as a special assistant to John Foster
Dulles for arms control—and knew that a direct approach
would be "pointless." Farley quietly raised the issue with a
deputy to the French ambassador and came away convinced, as
he reported to Herter, that the fears about a French connection
were warranted. The ambassador's deputy "said all the right
things," Farley recalled, referring to his pro forma denials,
"but the way he acted . . ." The next step was a discussion
with the ambassador, who insisted that Dimona was "merely a
research reactor." Farley was enough of an expert to know that
the reactor at Dimona was obviously too large for pure re
search, and, after a discussion in the National Security Council,
Herter was instructed by the White House to give a formal
diplomatic protest (known as a demarche) to the French. As
luck would have it, Couve de Murville, the French foreign minister, was in Washington for a meeting. He was approached,
Farley recalled, but assured the State Department that the Israeli reactor was benign and that any plutonium generated in
its operation would be returned to France for safekeeping. "He
just plain lied to us," said Farley, still indignant in an interview
thirty years later. At the time, of course, Farley added, he and
his colleagues in the bureaucracy did not begin to realize the
extent of Couve de Murville's dissembling; they had no idea
that it was France that had made the Israeli bomb possible.
The summoning of Israeli Ambassador Harman had taken
place on December 9; within days, the administration had escalated the question of what was going on at Dimona to a near crisis
level. House and Senate members of the Joint Committee
on Atomic Energy were summoned urgently from Christmas
recess to a secret briefing on Dimona by CIA and State Department officials. CIA Director Allen Dulles also arranged for
President-elect John F. Kennedy be be briefed. It seems clear
that none of this—the demarche to the French, the briefing of
the joint committee, and the briefing of the President-elect—
could have taken place without the explicit approval of Dwight
Eisenhower.
Washington also was sharing its concern with its allies, and it
was that communication that moved the diplomatic concern
about Dimona onto the front pages. The story broke in the
world's press on December 16, when the London Daily Express,
a tabloid, published a major story saying that "British and
American intelligence authorities believe that the Israelis are
well on the way to building their first experimental nuclear
bomb." The dispatch was written by Chapman Pincher,
known for his close ties to the British intelligence and nuclear
communities. Pincher had indeed gotten a tip from a senior
figure in British atomic weapons research, whose concern was
that an Israeli bomb would necessarily be "dirty"—that is, gen
erate a lot of radioactive fallout. Pincher, in a telephone inter
view, said that his next step was to call an old contact in
Mossad and verify the story. "I had a very good connection to
Mossad," Pincher said. "I had good Jewish friends here [in
London]. They did make use of me for quite a long time—
feeding me anti-Palestinian information." Pincher's relationship with Mossad was predicated on the understanding that, as
he recalled, "if they ever fed me a bum steer, I'd blow them out
of the water."[Yeah sure it did Zionist shill DC]
McCone's leak to John Finney, his strong statements on Meet
the Press, and his later actions in the Kennedy administration—
he replaced Allen Dulles as CIA director in the fall of 1961—
would get him labeled by some as antisemitic. There was no
known basis for such allegations, however: McCone, as he
would demonstrate anew as CIA director, was dead set against
any nuclear proliferation and repeatedly railed against the French as well as the Israelis. He also was offended by the
Israeli and French lying about their collaboration in the Negev,
and he viewed Washington's acquiescence in those lies with
contempt. Myron B. Kratzer, the AEC's director of international affairs in December i960, recalled being telephoned a few
hours before McCone's farewell appearance on Meet the Press by
a State Department colleague and told to urge McCone to
downplay the Israeli issue. Kratzer relayed the request, and
McCone blew up. "He said to me," Kratzer recalls, " 'I haven't
lived all these years to go out of office telling anything less than
the truth.' "* One of McCone's goals, Kratzer says, was to force
the Israelis to accept international inspection of Dimona.
* McCone, perhaps anticipating a return to public life, did play the game nonetheless, saying on television that there was only "informal and unofficial information" about Dimona. He also said he did not know whether any of the nuclear powers (France, England, the United States, and the Soviet Union) had aided Israel. McCone's discretion was made easier, of course, by the knowledge of the Pincher dispatch and the fact that the New York Times was a day away from publishing John Finney's much more complete story.
In Israel, Deputy Minister of Defense Shimon Peres, fore
warned by Ambassador Harman and perhaps by Mossad, began working up the cover story. There was a widespread
suspicion in the prime minister's office that the truth about
Dimona had been leaked to the British press by some of
the men around de Gaulle; the French had continued to urge
the Israelis to make public the existence of the reactor since the
June summit meeting between de Gaulle and Ben-Gurion. Betrayal by an ally was, for the Israelis, always the expected; Peres's
immediate goal was to keep his and Ben-Gurion's dream
on track. The stakes were high: any extended publicity about
Dimona threatened one of Israel's most significant international successes—the purchase from Norway the year before of
twenty tons of heavy water, to be used, Israel had assured the
Norwegians, to fuel what was said to be an experimental nuclear power station at Dimona. Norway had been given a
pledge of peaceful use and the right to inspect the heavy water,
which it would do only once in the next thirty-two years. The
twenty-ton purchase of heavy water was obviously much more
than required to fuel a twenty-four-megawatt reactor; a Norwegian complaint, with its resulting publicity, would be devastating in the wake of the worldwide protests over Dimona.
On December 20, Peres met with those defense ministry staff
aides who knew of Dimona and summarized the various cover
stories that would become David Ben-Gurion's public stance
on the issue: the reactor at Dimona was part of a long-range
program for development of the Negev desert and existed only
for peaceful purposes. Those who called for inspection of the
reactor, Peres said, "are the same people who advocate the internationalization of Jerusalem."*
* Ben-Gurion and his immediate associates were prepared to say whatever was necessary for what they believed to be the good of the state. In his biography of BenGurion, Michael Bar-Zohar tells of the prime minister's determination to shield his and the Israeli Army's responsibility for the brutal 1953 slaying of seventy Jordanians in the border village of Kibiya. The retaliatory raid had been led by Ariel Sharon. A statement was issued in Ben-Gurion's name blaming the atrocity on the inhabitants of nearby Jewish border settlements. Asked by a confidant to explain his action, BenGurion cited a passage from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables in which a nun lies to a policeman about the whereabouts of an escaped prisoner. The nun committed no sin in lying, Ben-Gurion argued, "because her lie was designed to save human life. A lie like that is measured by a different yardstick." Moshe Sharett, Ben-Gurion's longtime rival, subsequently was depicted by Bar-Zohar as being "astounded" by the lie: "I would have resigned if it had fallen to me to step before a microphone and broadcast a fictitious account of what happened to the people of Israel and to the whole world."
On the next day, Ben-Gurion publicly described to the full
membership of the Knesset what was being built, in the name
of Israel, in the Negev: a twenty-four-megawatt reactor "dedicated entirely to peaceful purposes." There was another facility
on the grounds of Dimona, the prime minister added: "a scientific institute for arid zone research." When completed, BenGurion
said, the entire facility "will be open to students from
other countries." It was the first time members of Israel's parliament had been officially told about the reactor construction.
Asked specifically about the published reports in Europe and
the United States, Ben-Gurion casually denied them as "either
a deliberate or unconscious untruth."[lying sack of horse dung DC]
Ben-Gurion was treating the Knesset as he always did when
it came to issues of state security: as a useless deliberative body
that debated and talked instead of taking action. He and his
colleagues simply did not believe that the talkative Knesset had
a prominent role to play when it came to security issues. They
were not contemptuous of the Knesset, whose deliberations on other issues were accepted with respect, but saw themselves as
pragmatists who—unlike the Knesset—believed in acting first,
and then talking. Knesset members, for their part, accepted
Ben-Gurion's view that it would be inappropriate to assert
their legislative rights in a debate over Dimona. Not one member dared to ask the obvious question: if the reactor at Dimona
were nothing more than a peaceful research tool, as Ben-Gurion publicly insisted, why did it need to be swathed in such
secrecy? The Knesset was only too eager to accept any government statement denying the intent to produce nuclear weapons.
Even Ernst David Bergmann's categorical denial of any plan
to make the bomb was accepted without challenge, although
Bergmann's total involvement with the bomb was widely
known. Bergmann was in the embarrassing position of still
serving as chairman and sole member of the Israeli Atomic
Energy Commission, although there had been no commissioners for him to chair for years. The six other members all had
left their posts by the mid-1950s; the departures have repeatedly
been cited by scholars and in American intelligence files as
evidence of serious disagreement inside the Israeli scientific
community over Bergmann's plans for Dimona. For the most
part, they were not. The commission members moved en masse
to the physics department at the Weizmann Institute, according to Israeli sources, because senior government officials hos
tile to nuclear development, including Levi Eshkol and Pinhas
Lavon, then the defense minister, refused to allocate research
funds for them. Two of the former commissioners would
emerge in the 1960s as critics of the nuclear programs; others,
such as Amos Deshalit, Israel's most eminent nuclear physicist,
ended up being closely involved with Dimona.
The Israeli statements were not challenged in subsequent
days and weeks by the Eisenhower administration, which, hav
ing triggered the first public discussion of the Israeli bomb,
immediately retreated in the face of Israeli's shameless denials.
In a statement released to the press on the day after Ben-Gurion's speech, the White House joined with the Knesset in accepting the Israeli cover story for Dimona at face value: "The
government of Israel has given assurances that its new reactor is dedicated solely for research purposes to develop scientific knowledge and thus to serve the needs of industry, agriculture, health and science. . . . Israel states it will welcome
visits by students and scientists of friendly countries to the
reactor upon its completion." The statement, personally approved by the President, added, "It is gratifying to note that as
made public the Israel atomic energy program does not represent cause for special concern."
The administration's retreat continued on the next day: it
was now concerned with limiting the worldwide criticism directed at Israel. A private State Department circular sent on
December 22 to American embassies around the world, written
in cablese, noted that the government "believes Israel atomic
energy program as made public does not represent cause for
special concern." Officials of the department, who had been
involved in the initial decision earlier in the month to pressure
Israel, were now said, according to the circular, which was
released under the Freedom of Information Act, to be "considerably disturbed by large amount of info re USG [United
States Government] interest in Israel's atomic program which
has leaked into American and world press. Effort has been to
create more excitement than facts as revealed by Israelis war
rant. Department will do what it can in Washington and hopes
addressee posts can assist in stilling atmosphere." The notion
of "stilling atmosphere" would define America's enduring policy toward the Israeli bomb.[And here ladies and gentlemen is when the pond scum in Washington decided to whore out themselves to the delusional Zionist pond scum,and not speak up when they were getting sodomized by their jewish masters. I would also remind my fellow Americans in the 49 states, that in 2018,we still face this evil menace,as the piece of crap land below North Carolina,like a dog returning to it's own vomit has once again fallen to a foreign power,and done away with the first amendment.You folks who are on that land with functioning brain cells,should pack yourselves up,and move.The rest of us should treat that land like it is infested with a plague!DC]
There was one final protest, in secret.[Oh that really helps to get the Truth to the public DC] On January 6, 1961,
Christian Herter gave his farewell briefing as secretary of state
to a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
(the transcript was declassified in 1984). Dimona came up, and
Herter was discussing the "disturbing" new element in the
Middle East when Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper, the conservative Republican from Iowa, interrupted testily. "I think
the Israelis have just lied to us like horse thieves on this thing,"
Hickenlooper said. "They have completely distorted, misrepresented, and falsified the facts in the past. I think it is very
serious ... to have them perform in this manner in connection with this very definite production reactor facility which
they have been secretly building, and which they have consistently, and with a completely straight face, denied to us they
were building." Hickenlooper knew what he was talking
about: at the time he was chairman of the Joint Committee on
Atomic Energy.
The powerful senator also knew that he was just blowing off
steam in a secret hearing. No one in the lame-duck Eisenhower
administration was going to do anything more to take on Israel.
"I'm not going to ask you as secretary of state to answer,"
Hickenlooper added limply. "I hope I am wrong."
Dimona would be left for the New Frontier of John F. Kennedy.[Yeah and we know what the Zionists did to Him,so they could get their guy in,who promptly sold out America for some coin in his pocket D.C]https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2017/10/part-1final-judgmentthe-missing-link-in.html
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Dual Loyalty
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