I am going to embed a video(could not embed,just a link with a few added words) at the end of these 2 chapters.I feel it very important for as many people as possible to become aware of this video's 'news',as it has far reaching consequences.It ties in with what you are reading in this book.Myself I see this video has a plant by the Zionists for use in the future with multiple purposes for it's unveiling at this present time...
THE SAMSON OPTION
Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and
American Foreign Policy
By Seymour M. Hersh
7
Dual Loyalty
Lewis Strauss, John McCone's predecessor as chair
man of the Atomic Energy Commission, was the epitome of the
1950s Cold Warrior, an American booster who was adamantly
opposed to the spread of nuclear weapons. Strauss certainly
knew as much about Dimona as anybody in the intelligence
community by the time he left the AEC in 1958. There is no
evidence, however, that he raised questions about the Israeli
weapons program while in government; nor was he known to
have ever discussed Dimona after leaving office. He most certainly did not tell McCone, a devout Roman Catholic, about it.
Strauss chose not to talk about the Israeli nuclear program
because, as a Jew with deep feelings about the Holocaust, he
approved of it. His strong private feelings about Israel and its
need for security were in sharp contrast to his public image of
a thoroughly assimilated Jew who offended many—and amused
others—by insisting that his name be pronounced "Straws."
A conservative investment banker from Virginia who rose to
admiral in the Navy Reserves during World War II, Strauss
viewed America's nuclear arsenal as essential to survival
against the Soviet Union; those who disagreed with him were
not merely wrong, they were Communist dupes. He had left
his Wall Street firm after the war to serve until 1950 as one of
the original members of the Atomic Energy Commission, an
independent federal agency set up to be custodian of America's
nuclear materials, just as the Army's Manhattan Engineering
District had been administratively in charge of Oppenheimer's
secret work in Los Alamos. Strauss and his five fellow commissioners now found themselves the proprietors of all fissionable
materials; they also were responsible for operating the nation's nuclear reactors and developing atomic bombs. Civilian control
of the nuclear arsenal was so total that the commission initially
did not tell the military either the number or the yield of the
bombs being manufactured, creating havoc with the Joint
Chiefs of Staff's early nuclear war planning. (The Department
of Energy is in charge of nuclear weapons production today.)
Strauss quickly emerged as the strongman of the commission, and he became even more powerful in 1953 when Eisenhower asked him to return to the AEC as its chairman. Strauss
supported loyalty oaths for citizens with access to nuclear in
formation. He was insistent on continued nuclear testing and
publicly took issue with those who claimed that fallout from
the tests was dangerous to human health. He also fought
against attempts by the Eisenhower administration to negotiate
a nuclear test ban treaty or any other nuclear arms agreement
with the Soviet Union. Strauss sided with those in the government and Congress who sought to prevent the passing of weapons information to the European allies in fear that the Soviet
bloc would gain access to it. [What an idiot,clearly he seen Major Jordan as a threat because his diaries(which are at this blog)tell us exactly how much help the united states was giving the Russians in getting the nuclear bomb themselves.cold war was all theater for the control of the population of BOTH countries DC]
At the same time, he championed Atoms for Peace, the Eisenhower administration program that called for America's allies to be provided with American nuclear technology and
nuclear fuel—under international safeguards—to promote the
peaceful use of atomic energy. The assumption, which turned
out to be dreadfully wrong, was that smaller nations, once supplied with the enriched uranium or plutonium needed to drive
a nuclear power plant, would have no incentive or desire to
develop nuclear weapons. Strauss was, not surprisingly, a proponent of private enterprise and worked hard to ensure that
industry—and not the government—would be permitted to
build and operate nuclear power plants.[The reason for that is,he knew private plants would be easier to infiltrate then a government plant,as the state of Pa. was to find out DC]
The AEC commissioner became best known to most Americans, however, for his dislike of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who
had sparked a furor in the early 1950s by calling on the United
States to abate the arms race by forgoing the hydrogen bomb.
In 1954, Strauss led a bitter and successful fight to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance; the hearings, which eventually centered on Oppenheimer's loyalty and integrity,
captivated the nation. Strauss's activities against Oppenheimer were not always in the open; evidence subsequently was revealed showing that Strauss had directed the FBI to monitor
Oppenheimer's movements and tap his telephone, including
calls to his attorney, in an effort to make sure that the clearance
would be denied.[Gee that sounds similar to the current Russia hoax with Trump,and the FBI's tactics in both DC]
Strauss's tactics and his prickly public demeanor ensured
that he would never be well liked, despite his playing a major
role in American nuclear policy until his death in 1974, at age
seventy-seven. Even close associates viewed him as aloof, arrogant, and calculating; many others viewed his demand that he
be called "Straws" as a sign that he was defensive about being
Jewish. None of this seemed to matter to Dwight Eisenhower,
who trusted his judgment and would later describe him as
among the "towering governmental figures" of Western civilization. Eisenhower offered him a series of top jobs after Strauss
decided in 1958 to leave the AEC—as secretary of state and
White House chief of staff, both of which Strauss refused—and
finally got him to agree to become secretary of commerce. The
1959 confirmation hearings were a disaster—Strauss was caught
being less than candid with the Senate Commerce Committee
—and led to a humiliating rejection. He was the only cabinet
nominee not to be confirmed during Eisenhower's two terms,
and only the eighth such rejection in American history.[Well it is no surprise that the puppet Ike liked him,he had no choice,seeing that Strauss's people put him in the white house(cannot capitalize what I do not respect) DC]
Strauss remained undaunted in his hostility to the Soviet
Union after leaving public life, telling a congressional panel
during hearings on the Kennedy administration's proposed nu
clear test ban, "I'm not sure that the reduction of [U.S.-USSR]
tension is necessarily a good thing." He also continued to advocate the use of atomic energy, and in 1964 made a visit to Israel
—apparently his first—to consult with the government on a
proposed nuclear-powered water desalination plant.[He is right,the string pullers needed the tension in order to continue DC]
At some point in his AEC career, Strauss, who attended most
of the international conferences on the peaceful uses of the
atom, met and befriended his Israeli counterpart, Ernst David
Bergmann. It was a relationship shared with few; neither
Strauss's biographer nor his son, Lewis, who has had access to
all of his father's personal papers, knew that the two had met.
The friendship with Bergmann provides the strongest evidence of Strauss's sympathy for the Israeli nuclear weapons program. In the fall of 1966, Strauss used his influence to get
Bergmann a two-month appointment as a visiting fellow at the
prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.
Strauss, who never graduated from college, had joined the institute's board of trustees during World War II, and he continued to be one of its major contributors and fund-raisers. The
institute rarely dealt with chemists—its fellows are physicists
and mathematicians—but the rules were bent for Strauss. Berg
mann was a bitter man at that point; he had been forced to
resign his posts at the defense ministry and as head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission after his continued objections to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol's decision—in part
because of pressure from President Lyndon B. Johnson—to de
lay full-scale nuclear weapons production.
"Strauss had nudged me about Bergmann," recalled Carl
Kaysen, then the institute's newly appointed director. "He told
me he was a very distinguished scientist." It was only after
Bergmann arrived, Kaysen added, that he learned who he was
and what he did. Bergmann wasn't very busy, and "he would
come by and talk to me. It became clear that he and Strauss
were close, and also clear that he was working on the Israeli
nuclear weapons program. He was very relaxed about it." It
was also obvious that Bergmann was telling Kaysen all that he
had told Strauss. Kaysen, a distinguished political economist
who had been deputy assistant to the President for national
security affairs, wasn't surprised to learn that Israel was interested in nuclear bombs, but it was a jolt to realize that Strauss
—seemingly so ambivalent about his Jewishness and so opposed to any spread of nuclear weapons technology—privately
was in favor of a nuclear-armed Israel.
Perhaps because Strauss's political life was so mired in turbulence, the public and the press never had a chance to get more
than a glimpse of his private feelings about being Jewish and
his guilt about not doing more in the 1930's to save Jews caught
up in the Holocaust.
There was really no secret about his Jewishness—Strauss had
been a leader since 1938 of Congregation Emanu-El, the largest
and most prominent Reform synagogue in New York City. In 1957 Eisenhower had briefly toyed with the idea of naming him
secretary of defense, but decided that his Jewishness would
cause too many problems with the Arab nations in the Middle
East. Yet Strauss's activities on behalf of a Jewish homeland
apparently were not known, not even to his close associates in
the Atomic Energy Commission. In his memoirs, published in
1962, Strauss wrote bitterly about the Nazi Holocaust and those
—including himself—who did not do enough: "The years from
1933 to the outbreak of World War II will ever be a nightmare to
me, and the puny efforts I made to alleviate the tragedies were
utter failures, save in a few individual cases—pitifully few." [Like most this Zionist lies about W.W 2,he also forgot the old saying,'everything is fair in love and WAR, as to that war,the liars always forget who started it.Headline below is 6 YEARS before the Zionist controlled media tells you when the war started.While I am at it,think about this also.When England declared war on Germany in 1939 for invading Poland, how come the invasion from the East of Poland was not recognized in the same light by the pond scum in England?DC]
In 1933, Strauss had been asked by the American Jewish Committee to attend an international conference in London on the
Jewish plight. There he met Dr. Chaim Weizmann and listened
as the conferees agreed that an "astronomical sum" of money
from the United States must be raised to help resettle what
could be millions of Jews. Strauss, then fervently opposed to a
Jewish state in Palestine, was the only delegate to raise his
voice in dissent during the conference, a position he came to
regret. Six years later, Strauss would spend much time and
effort in an unsuccessful attempt to convince the British government to donate a large chunk of colonial Africa for resettlement by European refugees, Jews and non-Jews alike. With the
Nazi blitzkrieg only months away, money was no longer an
object: Strauss and his American colleagues, who included Bernard Baruch, the financier, were agreed that as much as $300
million could be raised.* It was too late; Strauss's strong feelings about that failure—and the failure of world leadership—
are explicit in his memoir: "The tidal wave of war swept over
the continents and across the ocean and a world in shock closed its eyes, figuratively and literally, to the plight of the unfortunate beings who were engulfed."**[We see total denial of any responsibility or culpability,when it clearly states JUDEA DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY,and today the abomination reacts in outrage when the same idea of a boycott is directed at them,biggest effing hypocrites on the planets DC]
* The goal was to convince the British to cede a tract of land in Kenya, Tanganyika
(now Tanzania), or northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Strauss carried a letter to
London from Baruch in the late summer of 1939 noting that the land to be ceded in
Africa could be "cleaned up with modern equipment. The world has not always been
as clean as it is now. Our own country was full of morasses. Panama and Cuba were
cleaned up, and Africa can be cleaned up, too. . . . [I]n this new land there would be a
place for tens of millions and they would be the best, the strongest and the most
courageous peoples. ..." Missing from the Baruch-Strauss proposal is any thought or
concern about the Africans who lived in the areas to be ceded. Any such resettlement
would have inevitably resulted in internal conflict similar to that raging then—and
now—between the Israelis and those Palestinians who were ousted from their home
lands by the Zionist movement.
**Neither Strauss nor the CIA's Dino Brugioni knew it at the time, of course, but reconnaissance aircraft of the Mediterranean Allied Air Force and the Fifteenth U.S. Air Force repeatedly overflew and photographed the Nazi crematoriums at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland in the last year of the war, where twelve thousand Jews and gypsies were being murdered daily by 1944. The death camps were about five miles from an I.G. Farben synthetic oil and rubber complex that was bombed four times in World War II. In 1978, Brugioni and Robert Poirier, a CIA colleague, noticed that the camps were in direct alignment with the reconnaissance path for the Farben complex. Bru gioni knew from his own experiences that reconnaissance cameras were always turned on well before the target was reached. Were there aerial photos of the camps buried in Pentagon World War II archives? In a subsequent essay, Brugioni wrote: "We found that the extermination complex had been photographed at least thirty times. Analyzing the photographs, we could see the four large complexes of gas chamber and crematoriums. . . . Bodies were being buried in trenches or burned in large open pits. Some of the photos showed victims being marched to their deaths, while others showed prisoners being processed for slave labour." The photographs were invaluable as a historical record—the Nazis had forbidden any photography while the camps were in operation —and President Jimmy Carter personally presented a monograph based on them to the President's Commission on the Holocaust. During the war, Brugioni added, there was no historical or social background that would have enabled Air Force photo interpret ers, intent on targeting the I.G. Farben plant, to understand what they were seeing: "Anytime a line of people near a building were seen in a picture, it was usually labeled 'mess hall., " There were other factors that prevented a close study of the camp photographs at the time, insisted Brugioni, most significantly the intense intelligence needs of the June 1944 D-Day invasion of Europe, which resulted in heavy workloads for all Allied photo interpreters. Allied warplanes also were attempting to break the back of the Luftwaffe in late 1944 by heavy raids on all of the synthetic fuel plants in Germany, Brugioni said, creating yet another demand for photo interpretation and bomb damage assessment.[Still waiting to see a picture of a gas chamber,all they have pics of are crematoriums and defestation chambers DC]
Like many Jews, Strauss remained hostile to Zionism all of
his life, but he won the confidence of his colleagues in the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission by publicly joining them in
prayer in Geneva during the 1955 United Nations Conference
on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, at the time the largest
international scientific conference ever held. More than fifteen
hundred delegates from seventy nations, including Israel,
whose delegation was led by Ernst Bergmann, took part.
Moshe Sharett, then foreign minister, received a full report—as
he noted in a diary entry for September 18, 1955—from a deputy, who characteristically thought it important to tell Sharett
that at least three hundred of the delegates were Jewish. Despite that large number, Sharett wrote, when the Jewish community of Geneva arranged for a special Friday-night service,
"present only were the Jewish delegation [to the conference]
and the head of the U.S. delegation, Admiral Strauss."
Strauss, nonetheless, worked hard while in Washington at
reining in his intense feelings about being Jewish and about the
Holocaust, although many of his former subordinates from the
AEC remarked in interviews about his unrelenting hostility to
Germans and his reluctance to deal with Germans on any is
sue. Yet the longtime AEC official Myron Kratzer, who is also
Jewish, did not find out until Strauss had left the AEC that the
former chairman followed the tradition of fasting during Yom
Kippur, the holiest Jewish holiday. Strauss had been asked by
Eisenhower after his retirement to head the American delegation to an international meeting in Vienna, and on Yom Kippur, Kratzer recalled, "Strauss did not show up. He simply
closed himself in his room on that day."
Strauss's background and his strong feelings about the Holocaust cannot be disregarded in analyzing why he did not tell
anyone—especially John McCone—about Dimona. Fair or not,
the issue of "dual loyalty"—exemplified by Strauss's actions—
has been a very real concern to the American intelligence community since the creation of Israel in 1948. American Jews, for
example, were routinely barred for many years from dealing
with Israeli issues inside CIA headquarters; none of the early
station chiefs or agents assigned to Israel was Jewish. One Jew
who served decades later in a high position in the CIA angrily
acknowledged that when he arrived, "every fucking Jew in the
CIA was in accounting or legal." The official wasn't quite
right, but even those few Jews who did get to the top, such as
Edward W. Proctor, who served as deputy director for intelligence in the mid-1970's, were not given access to all of the sensitive files in connection with Israel. Jews also were excluded
from Hebrew language training (at one time called "special
Arabic") in the National Security Agency; such training, of
course, is a prerequisite for being assigned to NSA field stations that intercept Israeli communications. There was a flat
ban in the Navy communications intelligence agency (known
as the Naval Security Group) on the assignment of a Jew to a
Middle East issue.
There was—and still is—a widespread belief among American foreign service officers that any diplomatic reporting critical of Israel would somehow be delivered within days to the
Israeli embassy in Washington. In 1963 the Kennedy administration informally agreed with Israel that neither country
would spy on or conduct espionage activities against the other.
The agreement was sought by American officials, a former
Kennedy aide recalled, in an attempt to limit the extent of Israeli penetration of America.
The truth is that Jews and non-Jews alike looked the other
way when it came to Israel's nuclear capability. The notion of
dual loyalty solely as a Jewish problem is far too narrow; the
Jewish survivors who became Israelis, with their incredible
travails and sufferings during World War II, had and still have
enormous appeal to Americans of all backgrounds. The primary effect of "dual loyalty" has been a form of self-censorship
that has kept the United States government from dealing rationally and coherently with the strategic and political issues
raised by a nuclear-armed Israel. The issue is not whether rules
or laws have been broken, but that very few officials who supported Israel, Jewish or not, have used their position to try to
obtain a complete and accurate picture of the Israeli nuclear
program. And no one tried to stop it. Those few government
bureaucrats in the nonproliferation field who even tried to
learn all there was to learn about Dimona were often accused
of being "zealots"—and thus not fully trustworthy.
Yet, being Jewish inevitably raised questions, even among
the most fair-minded of men. Dino Brugioni briefed Strauss
regularly on U-2 nuclear intelligence, but found him inscrutable when it came to information on the Israeli nuclear reactor:
"I never knew what he was thinking; never understood him.
I'd get the reaction That's all right.'" Brugioni had his own
reasons for wondering about Strauss. He knew there was evidence inside the CIA suggesting that American and European
Jews had been directly involved in the financing and construction of Dimona from the start. "There was a fervor, especially
among New York Jews," Brugioni added. "The attitude was
'You had to protect Israel,' and anybody [in the intelligence
community] who did not suffered."
In interviews for this book with senior officials of the American nuclear weapons program—men similar to Lewis Strauss, who spent part or all of their life making bombs—none expressed any doubt about Israel's nuclear ambitions. Most told
of close personal friendships with Israeli physicists who were
working on the Israeli weapons program. No one with the sophistication and expertise of Lewis Strauss could have had any
question about the significance of a secret reactor in the Negev.
His widow, Alice, still spry in 1991 at the age of eighty-eight,
acknowledged that her husband, who was very close mouthed
about his work, "would have approved of Israel trying to defend itself. No question of that." Strauss also had to know that
a Jewish nuclear physicist named Raymond Fox had created
high-level consternation by emigrating to Israel in 1957 from
California, where he had access to weapons design information
at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the nuclear
research facility operated by the University of California for
the Atomic Energy Commission. Fox's secrets could be invaluable to the Israelis at Dimona.
Strauss's failure to discuss Dimona with John McCone may
have been done in the belief that he had an obligation to ensure
that what happened to the Jews of Europe under Hitler could
not happen again. Perhaps he thought he was atoning for what
he did not do, or could not do, to help the Jews of Europe
before World War II. Similar choices were made over the next
thirty years by Jews and non-Jews in the American government, who looked the other way when it came to Dimona.
Were they guilty of a double standard, as Dino Brugioni and
others in the intelligence community suggest? Did Lewis
Strauss, who so eagerly assumed the worst when it came to the
loyalty of men such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, fail to fulfill the
obligations of his office in terms of the known intelligence on
Dimona and his obligation to tell his successor about it?
Many American Jews, perhaps understandably, believe the
question of "dual loyalty" is an issue that should never be
raised in public. They fear that any discussion of Jewish support for Israel at the expense of the United States would feed
anti-Semitism; the fear seems to be that non-Jews are convinced
that any Jewish support for Israel precludes primary loyalty to
the United States. A second issue, in terms of American Jewish support for Israel, is that any public accounting of Israel's nuclear capacity would trigger renewed fears among Arab nations of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy and a redoubling of
Arab efforts to get the bomb.[No fear of,WE KNOW about the zionist plot against Western Culture,through their own words,no speculation needed,as the following attest DC]
Weighing against those concerns are several questions. Can
the world afford to pretend that Israel is not a nuclear power
because to do otherwise would raise difficult issues? Can any
international agreement to limit the spread of nuclear weapons
be enforced if Israel's bombs are not fully accounted for? Can
the Arab nations truly be expected to ignore Israel's possession
of atomic weapons simply because the weapons are not publicized? Should Israel, because of its widespread and emotional
support in America, be held to a different moral standard than
Pakistan or North Korea or South Africa?
Many senior nonproliferation officials in the American government were convinced by the early 1990s that the Middle
East remained the one place where nuclear weapons might be
used. "Israel has a well-thought-out nuclear strategy and, if sufficiently threatened, they will use it," said one expert who has
been involved in government studies on the nuclear issue in
the Middle East for two decades.
Some of Strauss's former subordinates in the AEC find it difficult to believe that his Jewishness would have been the reason
that Strauss would or would not tell John McCone about
Dimona. Algie A. Wells, who was director of international affairs for the AEC in mid-1958, at the time McCone replaced
Strauss, suggested that there were far more trivial reasons for
Strauss to have ignored his statutory responsibility as AEC
chairman: "Why would Strauss have told McCone? The men
weren't close. They both had colossal egos. I can't imagine
them being buddy-buddy and having a drink together."
In Wells's view, whether Strauss did or did not tell McCone
wasn't that important. Wells had been in Israel in 1958, he re
called, and learned then—as had any government official who
chose to do so—that Israel was building a nuclear reactor. If
McCone was surprised to learn about the reactor in late 1960,
added Wells, "he shouldn't have been."
8
A Presidential Struggle
Abraham Feinberg shared Lewis Strauss's belief in operating behind the scenes on behalf of Israel, but Feinberg operated in a way Strauss could not—with single-mindedness and
abandon. Feinberg, a New Yorker who made his fortune in the
hosiery and apparel business, had helped bankroll Harry S.
Truman's seemingly doomed 1948 presidential campaign; by
the presidential campaign of 1960 he was perhaps the most important Jewish fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. There
was nothing subtle in his message: the dollars he collected were
meant to ensure continued Democratic Party support for
Israel.
Feinberg also had been a "player"—to use his word—who
shared the early dreams of his good friend Ernst David Bergmann of a nuclear-armed Israel. He served publicly as president of the Israel Bond Organization, while privately helping
to raise some of the many millions of dollars needed to build
the controversial reactor and reprocessing plant at Dimona.
Feinberg accepted the fact that the expanding and expensive
operations at Dimona had to be financed outside of the normal
Israeli budget process; there were too many critics of the nuclear program inside and outside Israel to raise money any
other way. The unwanted publicity at the end of the Eisenhower administration had only added to Ben-Gurion's and
Shimon Peres's determination to protect the secret. Feinberg
was more than just a fund-raiser in all this; he became an inside
advocate for Ben-Gurion and Peres as President Kennedy, who
brought in John McCone as director of central intelligence in
September 1961, established himself as firmly opposed to the
Israeli bomb. There was a particularly close association with Peres: "He came to me often for money. If he gave the assignment to me, I helped him."
Feinberg remains proud of his support for Israel and its secret weapons program. His most pitched battle on behalf of
Israel came in the early days of the Kennedy administration
when he successfully helped fight off the initial Kennedy insistence that an American inspection team be permitted full and
unfettered access to Dimona. Feinberg's success was rooted in
the American political process. "My path to power," he explains, "was cooperation in terms of what they needed—campaign money."
Feinberg's first taste of political power had come in the waning days of the Truman campaign against Thomas E. Dewey,
the New York Republican governor who was seemingly running away with the 1948 election. "From the beginning of my
political affiliation with Truman," he explained, "I felt it was
the duty of every Jew to help Israel." Feinberg, as a member of
a Democratic campaign finance committee, was invited to a
White House meeting with the President, who had won the
worldwide admiration of Jews for his decision to recognize the
State of Israel earlier in the year. "If I had to bet money,"
Feinberg recalled Truman saying, "I'd bet on myself—if I
could go across the country by train." At least $100,000 would
be needed, the President said. Feinberg told Truman's aides
that he would be able to guarantee the money by the end of the
day, and subsequently he arranged for Truman's whistle-stop
train campaign to be met by local Jewish leaders at each stop
"to be refueled"—that is, provided with additional contributions as needed.
Among Feinberg's prize possessions is a seven-page hand
written letter of thanks and praise from Truman. Feinberg estimates that he and his Jewish colleagues raised "in the
neighborhood of $400,000" during the 1948 whistle-stop campaign. Truman understood the rules and at some later point
discussed naming Feinberg ambassador to Israel. Feinberg declined: "I told him no Jew should be ambassador to Israel until
the peace was solved."
Feinberg's account of his bankrolling of Harry Truman is found in none of the contemporary histories of that period,*
and—like some of his later special fund-raising activities for
Dimona—cannot be fully verified. Strong evidence is available,
however, that Feinberg's role was as pivotal as he suggests. For
example, Clark Clifford, the eminent Washington attorney who
was a Truman aide and poker-playing crony, has a vivid recollection of a crucial Feinberg intervention during the whistle stop
campaign. Clifford was not involved in Democratic Party
fundraising, but he did know that midway through the train
trip, the presidential campaign was out of money. Keeping the
campaign alive, he recalled, was "as difficult a task as anybody
ever had. We couldn't find anyone who thought we'd win."
Disaster loomed in Oklahoma City when one of the radio networks—this was the pre-television era—informed the campaign that it would not nationally broadcast a much-touted
Truman foreign policy speech unless "it was paid for in advance. This put us in shock," Clifford added. "It would have
been embarrassing beyond measure." Something like $60,000
in cash was needed—immediately. "Truman thought about
who he could turn to," continued Clifford. "The fellow he later
spoke about who came through for him was Abe Feinberg. I
always gave credit to Abe for saving that particular program
and saving us that embarrassment. He really came through."
* Campaign historians were not the only ones who missed the Feinberg story; none of the contemporary daily press or television journalists covering events in 1948 wrote about the financial ties between Feinberg and the Truman campaign.
Feinberg was also active in fund-raising for Adlai E. Stevenson, the losing Democratic candidate in 1952 and 1956, and was a
strong backer of Senator Stuart Symington, Democrat of Missouri, for the Democratic presidential nomination. (Symington
would emerge later as an ardent supporter of a nuclear-armed
Israel and, paradoxically, as author of key Senate legislation to
limit the spread of such weapons.) He played no role in John
Kennedy's primary campaign for the Democratic nomination:
like many Jews, Feinberg was convinced that Kennedy's father
was anti-Semitic. Joseph P. Kennedy, a self-made millionaire
and prominent Catholic, had fought against going to war with
Germany while serving as Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambassador
to England before World War II. A few weeks after Kennedy's nomination by the Democrats, however, Feinberg was contacted by Governor Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, who had
been Kennedy's floor manager during the Democratic convention. "I was the only Jew for him," Ribicoff recalled. "And I
realized that Jews were for anybody but Jack Kennedy. I told
Kennedy I was going to get in touch with Abe Feinberg, who I
thought was a key Jew. I arranged a meeting with Kennedy in
Feinberg's apartment in the Hotel Pierre and we invited all the
leading Jews." About twenty prominent businessmen and financiers showed up.*
* Kennedy's social friends and colleagues agreed that Kennedy, like many wealthy Irish Catholics of his time, had gone through prep school at Choate and Harvard College with few close Jewish friends. One especially close schoolboy friend, according to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the presidential biographer, was Alan J. Lerner, with whom Kennedy traveled widely as a youth. There were few other Jewish childhood friends, as Benjamin C. Bradlee, Jr., the longtime editor of the Washington Post and close Kennedy friend, acknowledged: "I don't remember a whole lot of Jewish buddies." That changed quickly once Kennedy got into national politics after World War II.
It was a rough session. Kennedy had just returned from a
brief vacation at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and it was a prominent Bostonian, Dewey D. Stone,
who set the tone with the first question, as recalled by Feinberg: "Jack, everybody knows the reputation of your father
concerning Jews and Hitler. And everybody knows that the
apple doesn't fall far from the tree." Kennedy's response was to
the point: "You know, my mother was part of that tree, too."
Ribicoff, who would join Kennedy's cabinet, understood the
message: "The sins of the father shouldn't fall on the son."
Fortunately for Kennedy, that message was enough for the
men at Feinberg's apartment. Kennedy had gone upstairs to a
separate room with Ribicoff to await their judgment, Feinberg
recalled. The group agreed on an initial contribution of
$500,000 to the presidential campaign, with more to come. "I
called him [Kennedy] right away," said Feinberg. "His voice
broke. He got emotional" with gratitude.
Kennedy was anything but grateful the next morning in
describing the session to Charles L. Bartlett, a newspaper columnist and close friend. He had driven to Bartlett's home in
northwest Washington and dragged his friend on a walk, where
he recounted a much different version of the meeting the night before. "As an American citizen he was outraged," Bartlett recalled, "to have a Zionist group come to him and say: 'We know
your campaign is in trouble. We're willing to pay your bills if
you'll let us have control of your Middle East policy.'" Kennedy, as a presidential candidate, also resented the crudity with
which he'd been approached. "They wanted control," he angrily told Bartlett.
Bartlett further recalled Kennedy promising to himself that
"if he ever did get to be President, he was going to do something about it"—a candidate's perennial need for money and
resulting vulnerability to the demands of those who contributed. Kennedy, in fact, kept that promise before the end of his
first year in office, appointing a bipartisan commission in October to recommend ways to broaden "the financial base of our
presidential campaigns." In a statement that was far more
heartfelt than the public or the press could perceive, he criticized the current method of financing campaigns as "highly
undesirable" and "not healthy" because it made candidates "dependent on large financial contributions of those with special
interests." Presidential elections, Kennedy declared, were "the
supreme test of the democratic process" in the United States.
Kennedy was ahead of his time, however: the campaign financing proposals went nowhere.*
* Kennedy's social friends and colleagues agreed that Kennedy, like many wealthy Irish Catholics of his time, had gone through prep school at Choate and Harvard College with few close Jewish friends. One especially close schoolboy friend, according to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the presidential biographer, was Alan J. Lerner, with whom Kennedy traveled widely as a youth. There were few other Jewish childhood friends, as Benjamin C. Bradlee, Jr., the longtime editor of the Washington Post and close Kennedy friend, acknowledged: "I don't remember a whole lot of Jewish buddies." That changed quickly once Kennedy got into national politics after World War II.
It is impossible to reconcile the differing accounts of Kennedy's attitude toward the meeting in Feinberg's apartment in
the Hotel Pierre. But the fact remains that despite Kennedy's
tough words to Bartlett, Abe Feinberg's influence inside the
White House was established by the end of Kennedy's first year
in office, and the young President did little to diminish it over
the next two years. One factor obviously was political: a higher
percentage of Jews (81 percent) voted for Kennedy in i960 than
did Roman Catholics (73 percent); it was the Jewish vote that
provided Kennedy's narrow plurality of 114,563 votes over Nixon. Feinberg got a specific reward after the election: his
lawyer brother, Wilfred, was given a federal judgeship by the
President.* "Feinberg only wanted one thing—to put his
brother on the federal bench," Ribicoff recalled. "I sat in on the
meeting with Kennedy and recommended that he do it. The
President said, 'Look, Abe, when all is said and done, the only
Jew who was for me early in the campaign was Abe Feinberg.' "
* Wilfred Feinberg, a legal scholar who had been editor in chief of the Columbia Law Review, served from 1961 to 1966 as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson, anxious to do something for his good friend Abe Feinberg, promoted Wilfred to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. To do so, he had to override the recommendation of Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, the late President's younger brother, who had resigned as attorney general to run, successfully, for the Senate. Robert Kennedy pushed for the nomination of Edward Weinfeld, widely considered to be the most distinguished jurist on the lower federal court, but Kennedy understood that he could never match Abe Feinberg's influence with Johnson. "It was pure politics," recalled Peter B. Edelman, then a senior Kennedy aide, "but not one of those cases where politics produced a poor judge." Wilfred Feinberg served with distinction and went on to become chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1980.
The issue of Jewish political power and the Israeli bomb was
complicated during these years by the fact that John Kennedy
was intellectually and emotionally committed to a halt in the
spread of nuclear weapons. Carl Kaysen, who moved from the
Harvard faculty to the National Security Council in 1961, re
called: "There were two subjects that you could get the President started on and he'd talk for hours. One was the gold
standard, the other was nonproliferation." The political expediencies that forced him to be ambivalent about Dimona had to
be frustrating. Kennedy eventually agreed to a series of facesaving
American inspections of the Israeli nuclear facilities,
although the label "inspection" hardly does justice to what the
Israelis would permit.
Kennedy's complicated feelings about Jewish political power
and the Israeli issue were summarized in his appointment of
former campaign aide Myer (Mike) Feldman as the presidential
point man for Jewish and Israeli affairs. The President viewed
Feldman, whose strong support for Israel was widely known,
as a necessary evil whose highly visible White House position
was a political debt that had to be paid. Feldman recalled being
summoned by the President the day after the inauguration and authorized to monitor all of the State Department and White
House cable traffic on the Middle East: "I said, 'Mr. President,
I come with a strong bias toward Israel.' He told me, 'That's
why I want you to look at them.' " Feldman's special relation
ship and his special access created havoc inside the White
House, as Kennedy had to know it would. The President's
most senior advisers, most acutely McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, desperately sought to cut Feldman out
of the flow of Middle East paperwork; the result often was
bureaucratic chaos. "The White House staff under Kennedy
was not harmonious," acknowledged Kaysen, who is Jewish.
"Bundy was very suspicious of Feldman, and anxious about me
and Bob Komer"—another Jewish National Security Council
staff member, assigned to monitor South Asia. "He worried
about us handling Israeli issues."* Robert W. Komer, who
would later run the pacification program in South Vietnam for
Lyndon Johnson, recalled the tension: "Mac Bundy had a
standing rule. He sent nothing to Feldman, because Feldman
was getting involved in issues in which he had no business. It
was hard to tell the difference between what Feldman said and
what the Israeli ambassador said."
* Jerome B. Wiesner, the President's science adviser, who also was Jewish, had a different concern: he was totally cut out of the intelligence about Dimona and "assumed" that Ben-Gurion had requested that he not deal with that issue in the White House. Wiesner, who played a major role on disarmament issues for the Kennedy administration, had served as a board member of the Weizmann Institute and repeatedly ran into Ben-Gurion on visits to Israel. "Ben-Gurion would always ask me two questions," Wiesner recalled: "Can computers think? And should we build a nuclear weapon? I'd always say no." That answer,Wiesner thought, marked him as a liberal in Ben-Gurion's eyes and limited his access.
The White House staff aides might well have been taking
their cues on treating Feldman from their young President.
Kennedy, having provided special access for Feldman, couldn't
resist making wisecracks behind his back. Charles Bartlett re
called Kennedy interrupting a pleasant moment in Hyannis
Port by pointedly remarking—it was a Saturday morning, the
traditional time for synagogue services—"I imagine Mike's
having a meeting of the Zionists in the cabinet room." An
equally cynical view of Feldman was publicly expressed by
Robert Kennedy in an interview published in 1988 by the John
F. Kennedy Library. Speaking of Feldman, Kennedy noted that his older brother, the President, had valued Feldman's work
but added: "His major interest was Israel rather than the
United States."
Feldman had no illusions about the backbiting inside the
White House, but his obvious influence made it all tolerable: he
continued to operate as Kennedy's special envoy to the Israeli
government on a variety of sensitive issues, including nuclear
weapons. He had been allowed to visit Dimona in 1962 and
knew firsthand, as those around the President only suspected,
that Israel was intent on building the bomb.
Israel's bomb, and what to do about it, became a White House
fixation, part of the secret presidential agenda that would remain hidden for the next thirty years. None of the prominent
John F. Kennedy presidential biographies, including those
written by insiders Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore C. Sorensen,
who was the President's special counsel and chief
speechwriter, say anything about a nuclear-armed Israel or
even mention Abe Feinberg. The U-2 intelligence collected by
the CIA's Arthur Lundahl and Dino Brugioni continued to be
treated as higher than top-secret, leaving a huge gap in knowledge between the bureaucracy and the men at the top. There
were inevitably farcical results. [And people wonder why Americans in increasing numbers no longer trust the government or this countries one sided relationship with a nation that is CLEARLY practicing apartheid DC]
Shortly after Kennedy's inauguration, the State Department
appointed William R. Crawford, a young foreign service officer, as director of Israeli affairs. Early on, Crawford recalled,
the Air Force attache in Israel managed to snap yet another
long-range photograph of the reactor dome at Dimona. "It was
as if there was no previous information," Crawford said. "As if
the whole thing was a total surprise to the White House, intelligence community, and so forth." Meetings were held on the
critical new intelligence. "This was very hot stuff. We decided
that this was not what Israel was telling us."
Crawford was asked to draft a letter for the President to BenGurion.
The letter emphasized that America's worldwide position on nonproliferation would "be compromised if a state regarded as being dependent on us, as is Israel, pursues an
independent course." Other key points, Crawford said, "were a
demand for inspection and the right to convey the results to Nasser." The idea was to reassure the Egyptian president that
Dimona was not a weapons plant and to prevent Egypt from
beginning its own nuclear research. The inspection of Dimona
was to be carried out by an independent team of experts from
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nuclear
safeguarding agency based in Vienna; Israel had agreed in principle to permit the IAEA to replace the United States in the
twice-a-year monitoring of its small research reactor at Nahal
Soreq. "I drafted it very carefully," Crawford recalled. "It was
the most important letter of my life at this point in my career."
The letter was forwarded to the office of George Ball, then the
under secretary of state, rewritten,* and dispatched. "In due
course," recalled Crawford, "in comes a long, long reply from
Ben-Gurion, pages and pages." Ben-Gurion's letter to Kennedy
has not been made public, either by the United States or by
Israel, but Crawford, nearly thirty years later, had no trouble
recalling its tone. "It was very hard to see what he was saying.
It seemed evasive; didn't say he was going the nuclear route:
'We're a tiny nation surrounded by enemies,' et cetera, et
cetera. There may have been an allusion to a nuclear umbrella
—language like 'Were we able to rely on the United States,' et
cetera." In that first exchange, Crawford said, Ben-Gurion did
not agree to the IAEA inspection of Dimona.
* Balls office held on to the letter for days, Crawford said, eventually provoking a complaint from the White House. Crawford asked a friend on Ball's staff to check into it and was told that "Mr. Ball wants me to understand that this letter sounds as if it had been translated from the original in Sanskrit." When Ball's rewritten version finally emerged, Crawford said, it had the same message but "in JFK prose." Crawford was impressed.
Israel's bomb program, and the continuing exchange of letters
about it, would complicate, and eventually poison, Kennedy's
relationship with David Ben-Gurion. The Israeli prime minister had been rebuffed in seeking a state visit to Washington but,
with the aid of Abe Feinberg, contrived a May 1961 visit to the
United States. The specific occasion was an evening convocation in his honor at Brandeis University near Boston. Feinberg
managed to get the President to agree to a private meeting with
Ben-Gurion at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. A nervous Kennedy asked Abe Feinberg to sit in. Feinberg refused,but agreed to make the introductions. Ben-Gurion similarly
was anxious about the session, in fear that the continued American pressure over Israel's nuclear weapons project would lead
to an unwanted flare-up. Dimona already was on politically
shaky ground among the various factions inside Israel, and a
flap between Ben-Gurion and Kennedy on the issue could be
devastating to the concept of a nuclear-armed Israel. This concern had prompted the Israeli government to assign physicist
Amos Deshalit to accompany two equally distinguished American physicists, I. I. Rabi of Columbia University and Eugene
Wigner of Princeton, to visit the still-incomplete reactor at
Dimona sometime early in 1961. Neither reported seeing evidence of a weapons facility.*
* Wigner, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1963, was visiting Israel when he was asked—seemingly spontaneously—by the Israelis to visit Dimona. He "vaguely" recalled, he said in telephone interviews in 1989 and 1991, being accompanied by Rabi, a 1944 Nobel laureate. "We didn't see much of it," Wigner, who was born in 1902, added. "I thought it was practically completed." Israeli scientists already may have begun some experimental work, he said: "They played with it." Wigner, who had joined with Albert Einstein in urging the United States to begin building the atom bomb before World War II, cautioned the author that his memory had faded with age. Rabi, a longtime consultant on technical and scientific issues to the United States government, died in 1988; neither his wife, friends, nor officials in charge of Columbia University's oral history project dealing with his career had information about his visit to Dimona.
The meeting with Kennedy was a major disappointment for
the Israeli prime minister, and not only because of the nuclear
issue. "He looked to me like a twenty-five-year-old boy," BenGurion
later told his biographer. "I asked myself: 'How can a
man so young be elected President?' At first, I did not take him
seriously." (Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who met Kennedy a month later at the Vienna summit, also was struck by
Kennedy's youth and inexperience.) No public record of the
Kennedy-Ben-Gurion meeting has been released, and it is not
reliably known what transpired on the nuclear issue. Ben-Gurion later recalled that he once again asserted that Dimona was
being constructed solely for research purposes. Kennedy
brought up the Rabi-Wigner visit to Dimona and expressed
satisfaction with their conviction that the reactor was designed
for peaceful purposes. Ben-Gurion was relieved: "For the time
being, at least, the reactor had been saved."
Another important summit issue was Egypt. Kennedy was intent on improving relations with the Nasser government,
and the President outlined his new policy. Ben-Gurion renewed a standing Israeli request for the sale of U.S. Hawk
surface-to-air missiles: the Hawk was needed to match the arrival of Soviet-built MiG fighters in Egypt. Kennedy promised
to look into it.
The most memorable moment for Ben-Gurion came when he was leaving the hotel room. Kennedy suddenly walked him back inside to tell him "something important." It was a political message: "I know that I was elected by the votes of American Jews. I owe them my victory. Tell me, is there something I ought to do?" Ben-Gurion had not come to New York to haggle with the President about Jewish votes. "You must do whatever is good for the free world," he responded. He later told his aides: "To me, he looks like a politician." Ben-Gurion, known to his associates as B.G., made similar complaints to Abe Feinberg. "There's no way of describing the relationship between Jack Kennedy and Ben-Gurion," Feinberg said, "because there's no way B.G. was dealing with JFK as an equal, at least as far as B.G. was concerned. He had the typical attitude of an old-fashioned Jew toward the young. He disrespected him as a youth." There was an additional factor: Joseph Kennedy. "B.G. could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man."[No way JFK said that to him DC]
Ben-Gurion's complaints about Kennedy and the continuing pressure about Dimona unquestionably were also linked to an all-important agenda that was remaining on track. In April, a Norwegian official named Jens C. Hauge had spent two weeks conducting Norway's first—and only—inspection of the heavy water that had been sold to Israel. The inspection, closely monitored by Ernst Bergmann, couldn't have gone better. Dimona was not yet in operation, and the water, still in its original shipping barrels, was safely stored near the small and totally innocent Nahal Soreq research reactor at Rehovot. Hauge's report to the Norwegian foreign ministry was astonishing in its uncritical acceptance of all of Bergmann's assertions. "As far as I know," Hauge wrote, "Israel has not attempted to keep secret the fact that they are building a reactor. . . . Professor Bergmann at an earlier point had given information to his colleagues in the U.S. about the reactor, but Israel had not kept America officially informed about the reactor. This was possibly the background for the uproar that took place in America about the reactor." At another point, Hauge quoted Bergmann as explaining that Norway's heavy water would be used to power a twenty-four-megawatt "research reactor" that would be a model for a planned much larger power reactor. In a second memorandum to the foreign ministry, Hauge added: "Israel is interested in keeping the location of reactor building quiet and wants any commotion about it ended."
Two months after the visit with Kennedy, in July 1961, Ben Gurion and his top advisers attended the widely publicized launching in the Negev of Israel's first rocket, known as Shavit II.* Such military events normally were kept secret, but Mapai Party leaders—with general elections scheduled for mid-August—decided to go public after receiving reports that Egypt was planning to fire some of its rockets on July 23, the ninth anniversary of the coup that had eventually brought Nasser to power. The multistage, solid-propellant Shavit II, which soared fifty miles into the upper atmosphere, was said to be designed to measure upper atmospheric winds as part of a series of experiments for the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. Ernst Bergmann subsequently told a scientific journal: "We are not particularly interested in the prestige of space, but in the scientific aspects of it." The American intelligence community —and Israel's Arab enemies—got the message: it was only a matter of time and money before Israel developed a missile system capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Bergmann had created another light bulb for his nuclear lamp.
* There was no Shavit I, Shimon Peres told a political rally on the night of the launch, because of the possibility that the name would be corrupted to Shavit Aleph, since aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph also was an electoral symbol for the Mapai Party. If the rocket had been named Shavit I, Peres said, "we would be accused of making propaganda."
Kennedy, despite his remarks to Ben-Gurion, was far from persuaded by the inspections by Rabi and Wigner that Dimona was anything but a nuclear weapons production facility. A nuclear-armed Israel seemed to be looming, and it could threaten Middle East stability as well as the President's strong desire for a treaty with the Soviet Union to ban the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. And there was no indication that Ben-Gurion, who was admitting nothing, would back off. The Israeli prime minister, in subsequent private communications to the White House, began to refer to the President as "young man"; Kennedy made clear to associates that he found the letters to be offensive.
The President's apprehension about the Israeli bomb undoubtedly was a factor in his surprising appointment of John McCone to replace Allen Dulles as CIA director in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle. There was every political reason not to appoint him: McCone not only was a prominent Republican but had spoken out against the White House's much-desired test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. Arthur Schlesinger writes that Kennedy, obviously sensitive about his preference, invited McCone to a private two-hour meeting "on the pretext of asking his views on nuclear testing." There is no public record of what the two men discussed, although Ben-Gurion's latest annoying letter had arrived only days before and the Soviet Union had announced the resumption of nuclear testing, ending the informal U.S.-USSR moratorium. In any case, McCone subsequently told Walt Elder, his executive assistant in the CIA, that Kennedy had complained to him about the fact that he was "getting all sorts of conflicting advice on the whole range of nuclear issues," including the Israeli bomb. Kennedy asked McCone to prepare a written analysis of the issue and report back within a few weeks. McCone did so and, upon his return, as he told Elder, the President tossed the report aside— "Give it to the staff"—and offered him the CIA job. He also asked McCone to keep word of his pending appointment "quiet. Those liberal bastards in the basement on Bundy's National Security Council staff will complain about it."
Foreseen or not, Kennedy had found a soulmate. McCone had his own policy goals, and they meshed closely with the young President's, said Elder: "McCone was most adamant about American nuclear superiority, but his trinity included the Catholic Church and nonproliferation." A nuclear-armed Israel did not fit into that vision: "He thought an Israeli bomb would lead to escalation and then you could just cross off oil from the Middle East for years." There were other virtues, of course, that appealed to Kennedy: McCone would join the administration with enormous credibility with the press, with the Congress, and especially with Dwight Eisenhower, who was quietly going about life in retirement in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. "Kennedy never took a major foreign policy move without checking it out with Eisenhower," recalled Elder, who, when he retired from the CIA in 1983, was executive secretary of the National Foreign Intelligence Board. "He was terrified of having Ike on the other side."
In one of their first meetings after McCone took the job, Kennedy complained about the most recent of Ben-Gurion's letters, which continued to shrug off the issue of international inspection of Dimona, the White House's key demand that had been initially articulated by Bill Crawford. Ben-Gurion's letter was "a waffle," Walt Elder recalled. "It wasn't strong. Kennedy talked to McCone about it and McCone said, 'Write him a stiff note. Mention the United States' international obligations, and our suspicions of the French. Lay it on the line.'" The President followed McCone's advice and received what he perceived as yet another rude response: "Ben-Gurion in effect said, 'Bug off, this is none of your business,' " said Elder, who spent years after McCone left the CIA preparing and indexing all of his still-classified personal files.* At that point, McCone insisted to the President that he could "take care of it. The attaches and the State Department can't do it," Elder recalled McCone telling the President, referring to the need to get an answer to the most important question about Dimona: was there an underground chemical reprocessing plant at Dimona? "Turn it over to me." Kennedy did so, and McCone began a two-track operation.
* McCone, said Elder, ended up being very close to Kennedy: "He saw him literally whenever he wanted. He would call the White House and say, 'I'm on my way to see the President" After such meetings, McCone would immediately dictate a detailed memorandum to the file, which was eventually made available to Elder for further action and safekeeping.
The first step was another series of U-2 missions; its far more risky and ambitious counterpart was an attempt to infiltrate spies into Dimona and, with luck, into the suspected reprocessing plant. "It was one hell of an operation," Elder said. "Even the station chiefs in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East didn't know of it. We ran it right out of McCone's office." McCone's orders were, in retrospect, almost cavalier, his former executive assistant said: McCone, recognizing that the Israelis were keeping close watch over the American intelligence officers inside their country, told his men, "We can't do our job without leaving traces. Do the best job you can." Running American intelligence operatives inside Israel posed an extraordinary risk, as McCone and Kennedy had to know: any exposure would have led to a violent domestic backlash inside America. It also could end the debate about what Israel was, or was not, doing at Dimona.
The operation was not compromised—but it also didn't work. The CIA's on-the-ground agents, obviously recruited from a foreign country, were unable to get inside. "I could not say we had an agent who physically saw a bomb inside Dimona," Elder acknowledged.
The U-2 once again proved that photographs—even sensational ones—weren't enough. By December 1961, CIA officials had set up a new agency, the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC), with Arthur Lundahl in charge, and assigned it the mission of providing more sophisticated photo intelligence. NPIC came through early with a huge photographic mosaic of Israel, capturing not only Dimona but all other possible nuclear facilities. "It was as big as two French doors," Elder recalled. "Kennedy loved it." The only problem was that the new set of photographs did little to move the basic issue: there was no way to see underground in Dimona. "McCone said that based on his evidence," Elder said, "there is no external evidence of a nuclear capability. There's no evidence of a weapons plant." McCone was still skeptical, Elder added, telling the President, "Given their [the Israelis'] attitude toward inspection, you can't trust them."
Dimona remained a major impediment to another of Kennedy's early foreign policy ambitions—rapprochement with Nasser's Egypt. Increased economic aid and a series of private letters had led to a warming of relations by mid-1962, and senior Egyptian officials were reassuring the White House that they also desired improved relations, within the context of nonalignment. Nasser, badly rattled by the prospect of a nuclear Israel, had responded to the December 1960 revelations about Dimona by publicly insisting that Egypt would never permit Israel to be its superior; if necessary, he said, Egypt would attack and "destroy the base of aggression even at the price of four million casualties." The question of Dimona was repeatedly raised at Arab League conferences on defense and foreign ministry issues during 1961, with no resolution—except for a shared Arab determination to build up conventional arms. The Kennedy administration reassured the Egyptians that it would continue to press until it obtained IAEA inspection rights to Dimona, and would provide a summary—with Israel's agreement—of the findings to Nasser.
But securing inspection rights remained impossible. Ben-Gurion had no intention of permitting a legitimate inspection— for obvious reasons. His first line of defense was straight forward: political pressure, in the person of Abe Feinberg. "I fought the strongest battle of my career to keep them from a full inspection," Feinberg recalled. "I violently intervened not once but half a dozen times." He had been tipped off about the inspection demands by Myer Feldman and relayed his political complaints through him; he said he never discussed the matter directly with the President. The message was anything but subtle: insisting on an inspection of Dimona would result in less support in the 1964 presidential campaign. This message, Feinberg said, was given directly to Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of state, and Paul H. Nitze, then a senior defense aide: "I met with them together and said, 'You've got to keep your nose out of it.' "[arrogant little prick DC]
Nitze, in a subsequent interview, did not recall that meeting, but he did remember a later one-on-one confrontation with Feinberg over Dimona. The Israelis wanted to purchase advanced U.S. fighter aircraft: "I said no, unless they come clean about Dimona. Then suddenly this fellow Feinberg comes into my office and says right out, 'You can't do that to us.' I said, A I've already done it.' Feinberg said, I'll see to it that you get overruled.' I remember throwing him out of the office."
Three days later, Nitze added, "I got a call from McNamara. He said he'd been instructed to tell me to change my mind and release the planes. And I did." Nitze hesitated a moment and added: "Feinberg had the power and brought it to bear. I was surprised McNamara did this." McNamara, subsequently asked about the incident, would only say cryptically: "I can understand why Israel wanted a nuclear bomb. There is a basic problem there. The existence of Israel has been a question mark in history, and that's the essential issue."
In the end, however, Feinberg and Ben-Gurion could not overcome the continued presidential pressure for inspection of Dimona. Ben-Gurion's categorical public denial of any weapons intent at Dimona had left the Israeli government few options: refusing access would undercut the government's credibility and also lend credence to the newly emerging antinuclear community inside Israel. In late 1961 a group of prominent Israeli scholars and scientists—including two former members of Bergmann's Atomic Energy Commission—had privately banded together to form the Committee for the Denuclearization of the Middle East. The new group's agenda was straightforward: to stop Israel's search for the nuclear option and to defuse the secrecy surrounding the activities at Dimona. In April 1962, the committee went public, stating that it considered the development of nuclear weapons "to constitute a danger to Israel and to peace in the Middle East." It urged United Nations intervention "to prevent military nuclear production." Others, who knew precisely what was going on at Dimona, were equally critical: Pinhas Lavon, former defense minister, eager to build housing for the constant stream of refugees, sarcastically complained to a Dimona official in the early 1960s, "We're taking five hundred million dollars away from settling the Galilee [in northern Israel] and instead we build a bomb."
The most important factor, clearly, in Ben-Gurion's decision to permit the inspections was the Kennedy administration's decision in mid-1962 to authorize the sale of Hawk surface-to-air missiles to Israel. The United States had provided Israel with specialized military training and sensitive electronic gear in the past, but sale of the Hawk—considered an advanced defensive weapon—was a major departure from past policy of selling no weaponry to Israel, and, as Israel had to hope, could lead to future sales of offensive American arms. The administration had spent months secretly reviewing and analyzing the Hawk sale and carefully laying the political groundwork in an attempt to avoid a political explosion in the Middle East. Armin Meyer, now the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs, recalled that a special presidential message about Israel was sent in June to a regional meeting in Athens of American ambassadors serving in the Middle East, in which Kennedy reported that "it was necessary for him to do something special for Israel." The President solicited the group's advice on four options, all of which, Meyer recalled, "would have adverse effects in the Arab world." The ambassadors chose the Hawk sale as "least damaging" to American interests, and it was agreed that Egypt and other Arab nations would be informed in advance.
What Kennedy did not tell his ambassadors was that inspection rights to Dimona were at stake. That message was personally relayed to Ben-Gurion by Myer Feldman, who was dispatched in August to inform the Israeli government of the sale and what Jack Kennedy wanted in return. Feldman, asked about his mission, said that it would be "too strong" to suggest that the inspection of Dimona was a "quid pro quo" in return for the Hawks. "It was more like," explained Feldman, " 'We're going to show you how accommodating we are. This is what we want.' Israel said, 'This is a good friend and we're going to let you in.'" Feldman himself was taken on a private tour of the reactor at Dimona that week.
There was one major concession by Washington. Dimona did not have to be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ben-Gurion had insisted in his private exchanges with Kennedy that such inspections would violate Israel's sovereignty. The White House eventually agreed to send a specially assembled American inspection team into Dimona. That agreement was further softened by a second concession that, in essence, guaranteed that the whole procedure would be little more than a whitewash, as the President and his senior advisers had to understand: the American inspection team would have to schedule its visits well in advance, and with the full acquiescence of Israel. There would be no spot checks permitted.
Ben-Gurion took no chances: the American inspectors—most of them experts in nuclear reprocessing—would be provided with a Potemkin Village and never know it.
The Israeli scheme, based on plans supplied by the French, was simple: a false control room was constructed at Dimona, complete with false control panels and computer-driven measuring devices that seemed to be gauging the thermal output of a twenty-four-megawatt reactor (as Israel claimed Dimona to be) in full operation. There were extensive practice sessions in the fake control room, as Israeli technicians sought to avoid any slips when the Americans arrived. The goal was to convince the inspectors that no chemical reprocessing plant existed or was possible. One big fear was that the Americans would seek to inspect the reactor core physically, and presumably discover that Dimona was utilizing large amounts of heavy water— much of it illicitly obtained from France and Norway—and obviously operating the reactor at far greater output than the acknowledged twenty-four megawatts. It was agreed that the inspection team would not be permitted to enter the core "for safety reasons." In Abe Feinberg's view, Kennedy's unyielding demand for an inspection had left Israel with no option: "It was part of my job to tip them off that Kennedy was insisting on this. So they gave him a scam job."
The American team, following a pattern that would be repeated until the inspections came to an end in 1969, spent days at Dimona, climbing through the various excavations—many facilities had yet to be constructed—but finding nothing. They did not question the fact that the reactor core was off-limits and gave no sign that they were in any way suspicious of the control room. The Israelis even stationed a few engineers in a concealed area in the control room to monitor the machinery and make sure that nothing untoward took place.
Another aspect of the cover-up was made much easier by the fact that none of the Americans spoke or understood Hebrew. One former Israeli official recalled that his job was to interpret for the American team. "I was part of the cover-up team. One of the engineers would start talking too much" in front of the Americans, the official said, and he would tell him, in seemingly conversational Hebrew, " 'Listen, you mother-fucker, don't answer that question.' The Americans would think I was translating."
The Americans were led by Floyd L. Culler, Jr., a leading expert in the science of nuclear reprocessing who was then deputy director of the Chemical Technology Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where the first uranium for American nuclear weapons had been enriched. At the time, Culler said, he reported to the White House that the reactor he and his colleagues inspected was nothing more than a "standard reactor. All the elements were counted and tagged." Culler, who retired in 1989 as president of the Electrical Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, seemed surprised but not shocked upon being informed that his team had been duped by a false control room. "It's possible to make a system appear that it's controlling something when it's not," he explained, adding that simulated control rooms have been widely and effectively used for training purposes in reactor systems worldwide. Culler was far more disturbed to learn that by 1960 the CIA's photo interpretation team had concluded that a site was being excavated at Dimona for a chemical reprocessing plant and had even attempted to measure the amount of dirt being scooped. Such intelligence had not been provided to him, he said, and should have been.
Culler shrugged off the Israeli cheating as inevitable, but not necessary. "It's not possible to make archaeological findings about what was going on just by seeing footprints," he explained. "No one really has that much wisdom." He viewed his inspection as "part of the game of wearing away, of finding ways to not reach the point of taking action" against Israel's nuclear weapons program. He is not at all convinced today, he said, that Israel was wrong to develop its own independent deterrent.
"They were terrified that they'd be bombed," Culler recalled. After the first inspection in 1962, he said, "I was asked by an Israeli to raise the question" of an American nuclear umbrella upon his return to Washington. Culler wrote his secret report on the inspection during stopovers in Athens and Rome, and dutifully included an account of the Israeli concern. The CIA "got to me as soon as I got off the plane" in Washington, he added, and he was rushed into a debriefing. There was no further talk of nuclear umbrellas on subsequent inspections, and Culler eventually came to ask himself the following rhetorical question: Would the United States initiate nuclear war to protect any country in the Middle East, or India, or Pakistan, or Argentina? "We were all in a bind," Culler said. "We have to be careful in assigning blame. It may be a story, but there is no right or wrong."
The constant bargaining over Dimona was a factor in aborting an ambitious Kennedy administration initiative to resolve the Palestinian refugee issue. Like all American Presidents since 1948, Kennedy came into office with a belief that he could find a way to bring long-term peace to the Middle East. As a House and Senate member, Kennedy had always been a public supporter of Israel, but he had repeatedly expressed understanding of the aspirations of Arab nationalism and sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian refugees. For example, in a February 1958 speech before a Jewish group, he declared that the refugee question "must be resolved through negotiations, resettlement, and outside international assistance. But to recognize the problem is quite different from saying that the problem is insoluble short of the destruction of Israel ... or must be solved by Israel alone."
State Department Arabists were pleasantly surprised early in 1961 to get word from the White House, according to Armin Meyer, that "just because 90 percent of the Jewish vote had gone for Kennedy, it didn't mean he was in their pocket." Kennedy asked for innovative ideas, and the department suggested that another try be made to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem in the West Bank and Gaza Strip stemming from Israel's victory in the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli War. The United Nations had approved Resolution 194 after the war, directing that the refugees had to be given the option of returning to Israel if they wished to do so.[here we are in 2018 still waiting on the do nothing UN to implement 194 DC]
The State Department came up with a new twist, in which individual refugees would be asked in a confidential questionnaire if they wanted to return to a former home in Israel. Those who ruled out a return would be compensated by Israel for the seizure of their property and be given a chance to emigrate to another Arab country or anywhere else in the world. There had been bitter protests by Arabs during the Eisenhower years over the failure to implement the United Nations resolution. State Department studies on the resettlement issue showed that no more than 70,000 to 100,000 Palestinians would opt to return to their seized Israeli homesteads over ten years, a number that was deemed to be manageable. The Israelis also would be given veto power over every returning Palestinian, in an attempt to minimize the security risk. [And now the way they have treated the Palestinian's leaves open to zionist interpretation,that they are all a security risk DC]
Kennedy had discussed his Arab initiative with a far from enthusiastic Ben-Gurion in their May 1961 New York meeting. A few weeks later, President Kennedy authorized a major— and highly secret—State Department effort to implement the new variant of Resolution 194; over the next eighteen months, said Armin Meyer, a workable compromise was accepted by the Arab states and endorsed by the White House. Meyer, who served as ambassador to Jordan, Iran, and Japan before retiring from the Foreign Service in 1972, is convinced today that BenGurion's decision not to torpedo the resettlement project was based on his belief that the Arabs would never accept direct negotiations on any issue with Israel; any discussion of repatriation, in their eyes, would be tantamount to formal recognition. When the expected last-minute Arab rejections did not come, Meyer said, "Israel panicked," and provoked a wave of intense political pressure from American Jews upon the White House. In the end, President Kennedy—already in a war with Ben-Gurion over Dimona—backed down, bitterly disappointing his State Department supporters by doing so.* The Palestinians would remain stateless refugees in their squalid homes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. "I think we could have been spared all this terrorism business and other miseries," said Meyer, "if we had gone ahead with that project at that time." But, at that time, getting Dimona inspected seemed more important.
* There were many in the State Department, however, who understood from the outset that the resettlement plan had little chance. "We were struggling with bigger issues at the time," explained Phillips Talbot, then Armin Meyer's boss as the assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs. "It was not at the top of my A priority list." Talbot recalled President Kennedy's comment after an early briefing: "Phil, that's a great plan with only one flaw—you've never had to run for election."
NEXT
Years of Pressure
This is the article I was talking about,actually a short video here
http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/06/01/563557/Israel-selling-nuke-information-to-Saudi-Arabia
I am well aware of press tv being an Iranian source,on the other hand I am also well aware of the cozying up of Israel and Saudi Arabia that the Western media has been planting in the narrative since Trump's appointment to the white house.What I would suggest is this headline has deep implications in The Middle East in the following ways.
1)Israel is feeding the Saudi's the information in order to let them attack Iran with nukes via this new proxy,or...
2)Israel is planning a false flag nuke attack on Iran, and will blame Saudi Arabia,or...
3)Or Israel and Iran have been pulling the wool over the eyes of the world all these years(as there is plenty evidence of this if one looks,of Israeli/Iran collusion on oil and weapons particularly During the Iran/Iraq war,and the contra affair) and Saudi Arabia is the real target,and Israel is setting them up.
I suggest we pay attention to this, as these people who see themselves as the rulers of the planet,never make any move without purpose,take care all.
The most memorable moment for Ben-Gurion came when he was leaving the hotel room. Kennedy suddenly walked him back inside to tell him "something important." It was a political message: "I know that I was elected by the votes of American Jews. I owe them my victory. Tell me, is there something I ought to do?" Ben-Gurion had not come to New York to haggle with the President about Jewish votes. "You must do whatever is good for the free world," he responded. He later told his aides: "To me, he looks like a politician." Ben-Gurion, known to his associates as B.G., made similar complaints to Abe Feinberg. "There's no way of describing the relationship between Jack Kennedy and Ben-Gurion," Feinberg said, "because there's no way B.G. was dealing with JFK as an equal, at least as far as B.G. was concerned. He had the typical attitude of an old-fashioned Jew toward the young. He disrespected him as a youth." There was an additional factor: Joseph Kennedy. "B.G. could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man."[No way JFK said that to him DC]
Ben-Gurion's complaints about Kennedy and the continuing pressure about Dimona unquestionably were also linked to an all-important agenda that was remaining on track. In April, a Norwegian official named Jens C. Hauge had spent two weeks conducting Norway's first—and only—inspection of the heavy water that had been sold to Israel. The inspection, closely monitored by Ernst Bergmann, couldn't have gone better. Dimona was not yet in operation, and the water, still in its original shipping barrels, was safely stored near the small and totally innocent Nahal Soreq research reactor at Rehovot. Hauge's report to the Norwegian foreign ministry was astonishing in its uncritical acceptance of all of Bergmann's assertions. "As far as I know," Hauge wrote, "Israel has not attempted to keep secret the fact that they are building a reactor. . . . Professor Bergmann at an earlier point had given information to his colleagues in the U.S. about the reactor, but Israel had not kept America officially informed about the reactor. This was possibly the background for the uproar that took place in America about the reactor." At another point, Hauge quoted Bergmann as explaining that Norway's heavy water would be used to power a twenty-four-megawatt "research reactor" that would be a model for a planned much larger power reactor. In a second memorandum to the foreign ministry, Hauge added: "Israel is interested in keeping the location of reactor building quiet and wants any commotion about it ended."
Two months after the visit with Kennedy, in July 1961, Ben Gurion and his top advisers attended the widely publicized launching in the Negev of Israel's first rocket, known as Shavit II.* Such military events normally were kept secret, but Mapai Party leaders—with general elections scheduled for mid-August—decided to go public after receiving reports that Egypt was planning to fire some of its rockets on July 23, the ninth anniversary of the coup that had eventually brought Nasser to power. The multistage, solid-propellant Shavit II, which soared fifty miles into the upper atmosphere, was said to be designed to measure upper atmospheric winds as part of a series of experiments for the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. Ernst Bergmann subsequently told a scientific journal: "We are not particularly interested in the prestige of space, but in the scientific aspects of it." The American intelligence community —and Israel's Arab enemies—got the message: it was only a matter of time and money before Israel developed a missile system capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Bergmann had created another light bulb for his nuclear lamp.
* There was no Shavit I, Shimon Peres told a political rally on the night of the launch, because of the possibility that the name would be corrupted to Shavit Aleph, since aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph also was an electoral symbol for the Mapai Party. If the rocket had been named Shavit I, Peres said, "we would be accused of making propaganda."
Kennedy, despite his remarks to Ben-Gurion, was far from persuaded by the inspections by Rabi and Wigner that Dimona was anything but a nuclear weapons production facility. A nuclear-armed Israel seemed to be looming, and it could threaten Middle East stability as well as the President's strong desire for a treaty with the Soviet Union to ban the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. And there was no indication that Ben-Gurion, who was admitting nothing, would back off. The Israeli prime minister, in subsequent private communications to the White House, began to refer to the President as "young man"; Kennedy made clear to associates that he found the letters to be offensive.
The President's apprehension about the Israeli bomb undoubtedly was a factor in his surprising appointment of John McCone to replace Allen Dulles as CIA director in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle. There was every political reason not to appoint him: McCone not only was a prominent Republican but had spoken out against the White House's much-desired test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. Arthur Schlesinger writes that Kennedy, obviously sensitive about his preference, invited McCone to a private two-hour meeting "on the pretext of asking his views on nuclear testing." There is no public record of what the two men discussed, although Ben-Gurion's latest annoying letter had arrived only days before and the Soviet Union had announced the resumption of nuclear testing, ending the informal U.S.-USSR moratorium. In any case, McCone subsequently told Walt Elder, his executive assistant in the CIA, that Kennedy had complained to him about the fact that he was "getting all sorts of conflicting advice on the whole range of nuclear issues," including the Israeli bomb. Kennedy asked McCone to prepare a written analysis of the issue and report back within a few weeks. McCone did so and, upon his return, as he told Elder, the President tossed the report aside— "Give it to the staff"—and offered him the CIA job. He also asked McCone to keep word of his pending appointment "quiet. Those liberal bastards in the basement on Bundy's National Security Council staff will complain about it."
Foreseen or not, Kennedy had found a soulmate. McCone had his own policy goals, and they meshed closely with the young President's, said Elder: "McCone was most adamant about American nuclear superiority, but his trinity included the Catholic Church and nonproliferation." A nuclear-armed Israel did not fit into that vision: "He thought an Israeli bomb would lead to escalation and then you could just cross off oil from the Middle East for years." There were other virtues, of course, that appealed to Kennedy: McCone would join the administration with enormous credibility with the press, with the Congress, and especially with Dwight Eisenhower, who was quietly going about life in retirement in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. "Kennedy never took a major foreign policy move without checking it out with Eisenhower," recalled Elder, who, when he retired from the CIA in 1983, was executive secretary of the National Foreign Intelligence Board. "He was terrified of having Ike on the other side."
In one of their first meetings after McCone took the job, Kennedy complained about the most recent of Ben-Gurion's letters, which continued to shrug off the issue of international inspection of Dimona, the White House's key demand that had been initially articulated by Bill Crawford. Ben-Gurion's letter was "a waffle," Walt Elder recalled. "It wasn't strong. Kennedy talked to McCone about it and McCone said, 'Write him a stiff note. Mention the United States' international obligations, and our suspicions of the French. Lay it on the line.'" The President followed McCone's advice and received what he perceived as yet another rude response: "Ben-Gurion in effect said, 'Bug off, this is none of your business,' " said Elder, who spent years after McCone left the CIA preparing and indexing all of his still-classified personal files.* At that point, McCone insisted to the President that he could "take care of it. The attaches and the State Department can't do it," Elder recalled McCone telling the President, referring to the need to get an answer to the most important question about Dimona: was there an underground chemical reprocessing plant at Dimona? "Turn it over to me." Kennedy did so, and McCone began a two-track operation.
* McCone, said Elder, ended up being very close to Kennedy: "He saw him literally whenever he wanted. He would call the White House and say, 'I'm on my way to see the President" After such meetings, McCone would immediately dictate a detailed memorandum to the file, which was eventually made available to Elder for further action and safekeeping.
The first step was another series of U-2 missions; its far more risky and ambitious counterpart was an attempt to infiltrate spies into Dimona and, with luck, into the suspected reprocessing plant. "It was one hell of an operation," Elder said. "Even the station chiefs in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East didn't know of it. We ran it right out of McCone's office." McCone's orders were, in retrospect, almost cavalier, his former executive assistant said: McCone, recognizing that the Israelis were keeping close watch over the American intelligence officers inside their country, told his men, "We can't do our job without leaving traces. Do the best job you can." Running American intelligence operatives inside Israel posed an extraordinary risk, as McCone and Kennedy had to know: any exposure would have led to a violent domestic backlash inside America. It also could end the debate about what Israel was, or was not, doing at Dimona.
The operation was not compromised—but it also didn't work. The CIA's on-the-ground agents, obviously recruited from a foreign country, were unable to get inside. "I could not say we had an agent who physically saw a bomb inside Dimona," Elder acknowledged.
The U-2 once again proved that photographs—even sensational ones—weren't enough. By December 1961, CIA officials had set up a new agency, the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC), with Arthur Lundahl in charge, and assigned it the mission of providing more sophisticated photo intelligence. NPIC came through early with a huge photographic mosaic of Israel, capturing not only Dimona but all other possible nuclear facilities. "It was as big as two French doors," Elder recalled. "Kennedy loved it." The only problem was that the new set of photographs did little to move the basic issue: there was no way to see underground in Dimona. "McCone said that based on his evidence," Elder said, "there is no external evidence of a nuclear capability. There's no evidence of a weapons plant." McCone was still skeptical, Elder added, telling the President, "Given their [the Israelis'] attitude toward inspection, you can't trust them."
Dimona remained a major impediment to another of Kennedy's early foreign policy ambitions—rapprochement with Nasser's Egypt. Increased economic aid and a series of private letters had led to a warming of relations by mid-1962, and senior Egyptian officials were reassuring the White House that they also desired improved relations, within the context of nonalignment. Nasser, badly rattled by the prospect of a nuclear Israel, had responded to the December 1960 revelations about Dimona by publicly insisting that Egypt would never permit Israel to be its superior; if necessary, he said, Egypt would attack and "destroy the base of aggression even at the price of four million casualties." The question of Dimona was repeatedly raised at Arab League conferences on defense and foreign ministry issues during 1961, with no resolution—except for a shared Arab determination to build up conventional arms. The Kennedy administration reassured the Egyptians that it would continue to press until it obtained IAEA inspection rights to Dimona, and would provide a summary—with Israel's agreement—of the findings to Nasser.
But securing inspection rights remained impossible. Ben-Gurion had no intention of permitting a legitimate inspection— for obvious reasons. His first line of defense was straight forward: political pressure, in the person of Abe Feinberg. "I fought the strongest battle of my career to keep them from a full inspection," Feinberg recalled. "I violently intervened not once but half a dozen times." He had been tipped off about the inspection demands by Myer Feldman and relayed his political complaints through him; he said he never discussed the matter directly with the President. The message was anything but subtle: insisting on an inspection of Dimona would result in less support in the 1964 presidential campaign. This message, Feinberg said, was given directly to Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of state, and Paul H. Nitze, then a senior defense aide: "I met with them together and said, 'You've got to keep your nose out of it.' "[arrogant little prick DC]
Nitze, in a subsequent interview, did not recall that meeting, but he did remember a later one-on-one confrontation with Feinberg over Dimona. The Israelis wanted to purchase advanced U.S. fighter aircraft: "I said no, unless they come clean about Dimona. Then suddenly this fellow Feinberg comes into my office and says right out, 'You can't do that to us.' I said, A I've already done it.' Feinberg said, I'll see to it that you get overruled.' I remember throwing him out of the office."
Three days later, Nitze added, "I got a call from McNamara. He said he'd been instructed to tell me to change my mind and release the planes. And I did." Nitze hesitated a moment and added: "Feinberg had the power and brought it to bear. I was surprised McNamara did this." McNamara, subsequently asked about the incident, would only say cryptically: "I can understand why Israel wanted a nuclear bomb. There is a basic problem there. The existence of Israel has been a question mark in history, and that's the essential issue."
In the end, however, Feinberg and Ben-Gurion could not overcome the continued presidential pressure for inspection of Dimona. Ben-Gurion's categorical public denial of any weapons intent at Dimona had left the Israeli government few options: refusing access would undercut the government's credibility and also lend credence to the newly emerging antinuclear community inside Israel. In late 1961 a group of prominent Israeli scholars and scientists—including two former members of Bergmann's Atomic Energy Commission—had privately banded together to form the Committee for the Denuclearization of the Middle East. The new group's agenda was straightforward: to stop Israel's search for the nuclear option and to defuse the secrecy surrounding the activities at Dimona. In April 1962, the committee went public, stating that it considered the development of nuclear weapons "to constitute a danger to Israel and to peace in the Middle East." It urged United Nations intervention "to prevent military nuclear production." Others, who knew precisely what was going on at Dimona, were equally critical: Pinhas Lavon, former defense minister, eager to build housing for the constant stream of refugees, sarcastically complained to a Dimona official in the early 1960s, "We're taking five hundred million dollars away from settling the Galilee [in northern Israel] and instead we build a bomb."
The most important factor, clearly, in Ben-Gurion's decision to permit the inspections was the Kennedy administration's decision in mid-1962 to authorize the sale of Hawk surface-to-air missiles to Israel. The United States had provided Israel with specialized military training and sensitive electronic gear in the past, but sale of the Hawk—considered an advanced defensive weapon—was a major departure from past policy of selling no weaponry to Israel, and, as Israel had to hope, could lead to future sales of offensive American arms. The administration had spent months secretly reviewing and analyzing the Hawk sale and carefully laying the political groundwork in an attempt to avoid a political explosion in the Middle East. Armin Meyer, now the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs, recalled that a special presidential message about Israel was sent in June to a regional meeting in Athens of American ambassadors serving in the Middle East, in which Kennedy reported that "it was necessary for him to do something special for Israel." The President solicited the group's advice on four options, all of which, Meyer recalled, "would have adverse effects in the Arab world." The ambassadors chose the Hawk sale as "least damaging" to American interests, and it was agreed that Egypt and other Arab nations would be informed in advance.
What Kennedy did not tell his ambassadors was that inspection rights to Dimona were at stake. That message was personally relayed to Ben-Gurion by Myer Feldman, who was dispatched in August to inform the Israeli government of the sale and what Jack Kennedy wanted in return. Feldman, asked about his mission, said that it would be "too strong" to suggest that the inspection of Dimona was a "quid pro quo" in return for the Hawks. "It was more like," explained Feldman, " 'We're going to show you how accommodating we are. This is what we want.' Israel said, 'This is a good friend and we're going to let you in.'" Feldman himself was taken on a private tour of the reactor at Dimona that week.
There was one major concession by Washington. Dimona did not have to be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ben-Gurion had insisted in his private exchanges with Kennedy that such inspections would violate Israel's sovereignty. The White House eventually agreed to send a specially assembled American inspection team into Dimona. That agreement was further softened by a second concession that, in essence, guaranteed that the whole procedure would be little more than a whitewash, as the President and his senior advisers had to understand: the American inspection team would have to schedule its visits well in advance, and with the full acquiescence of Israel. There would be no spot checks permitted.
Ben-Gurion took no chances: the American inspectors—most of them experts in nuclear reprocessing—would be provided with a Potemkin Village and never know it.
The Israeli scheme, based on plans supplied by the French, was simple: a false control room was constructed at Dimona, complete with false control panels and computer-driven measuring devices that seemed to be gauging the thermal output of a twenty-four-megawatt reactor (as Israel claimed Dimona to be) in full operation. There were extensive practice sessions in the fake control room, as Israeli technicians sought to avoid any slips when the Americans arrived. The goal was to convince the inspectors that no chemical reprocessing plant existed or was possible. One big fear was that the Americans would seek to inspect the reactor core physically, and presumably discover that Dimona was utilizing large amounts of heavy water— much of it illicitly obtained from France and Norway—and obviously operating the reactor at far greater output than the acknowledged twenty-four megawatts. It was agreed that the inspection team would not be permitted to enter the core "for safety reasons." In Abe Feinberg's view, Kennedy's unyielding demand for an inspection had left Israel with no option: "It was part of my job to tip them off that Kennedy was insisting on this. So they gave him a scam job."
The American team, following a pattern that would be repeated until the inspections came to an end in 1969, spent days at Dimona, climbing through the various excavations—many facilities had yet to be constructed—but finding nothing. They did not question the fact that the reactor core was off-limits and gave no sign that they were in any way suspicious of the control room. The Israelis even stationed a few engineers in a concealed area in the control room to monitor the machinery and make sure that nothing untoward took place.
Another aspect of the cover-up was made much easier by the fact that none of the Americans spoke or understood Hebrew. One former Israeli official recalled that his job was to interpret for the American team. "I was part of the cover-up team. One of the engineers would start talking too much" in front of the Americans, the official said, and he would tell him, in seemingly conversational Hebrew, " 'Listen, you mother-fucker, don't answer that question.' The Americans would think I was translating."
The Americans were led by Floyd L. Culler, Jr., a leading expert in the science of nuclear reprocessing who was then deputy director of the Chemical Technology Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where the first uranium for American nuclear weapons had been enriched. At the time, Culler said, he reported to the White House that the reactor he and his colleagues inspected was nothing more than a "standard reactor. All the elements were counted and tagged." Culler, who retired in 1989 as president of the Electrical Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, seemed surprised but not shocked upon being informed that his team had been duped by a false control room. "It's possible to make a system appear that it's controlling something when it's not," he explained, adding that simulated control rooms have been widely and effectively used for training purposes in reactor systems worldwide. Culler was far more disturbed to learn that by 1960 the CIA's photo interpretation team had concluded that a site was being excavated at Dimona for a chemical reprocessing plant and had even attempted to measure the amount of dirt being scooped. Such intelligence had not been provided to him, he said, and should have been.
Culler shrugged off the Israeli cheating as inevitable, but not necessary. "It's not possible to make archaeological findings about what was going on just by seeing footprints," he explained. "No one really has that much wisdom." He viewed his inspection as "part of the game of wearing away, of finding ways to not reach the point of taking action" against Israel's nuclear weapons program. He is not at all convinced today, he said, that Israel was wrong to develop its own independent deterrent.
"They were terrified that they'd be bombed," Culler recalled. After the first inspection in 1962, he said, "I was asked by an Israeli to raise the question" of an American nuclear umbrella upon his return to Washington. Culler wrote his secret report on the inspection during stopovers in Athens and Rome, and dutifully included an account of the Israeli concern. The CIA "got to me as soon as I got off the plane" in Washington, he added, and he was rushed into a debriefing. There was no further talk of nuclear umbrellas on subsequent inspections, and Culler eventually came to ask himself the following rhetorical question: Would the United States initiate nuclear war to protect any country in the Middle East, or India, or Pakistan, or Argentina? "We were all in a bind," Culler said. "We have to be careful in assigning blame. It may be a story, but there is no right or wrong."
The constant bargaining over Dimona was a factor in aborting an ambitious Kennedy administration initiative to resolve the Palestinian refugee issue. Like all American Presidents since 1948, Kennedy came into office with a belief that he could find a way to bring long-term peace to the Middle East. As a House and Senate member, Kennedy had always been a public supporter of Israel, but he had repeatedly expressed understanding of the aspirations of Arab nationalism and sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian refugees. For example, in a February 1958 speech before a Jewish group, he declared that the refugee question "must be resolved through negotiations, resettlement, and outside international assistance. But to recognize the problem is quite different from saying that the problem is insoluble short of the destruction of Israel ... or must be solved by Israel alone."
State Department Arabists were pleasantly surprised early in 1961 to get word from the White House, according to Armin Meyer, that "just because 90 percent of the Jewish vote had gone for Kennedy, it didn't mean he was in their pocket." Kennedy asked for innovative ideas, and the department suggested that another try be made to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem in the West Bank and Gaza Strip stemming from Israel's victory in the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli War. The United Nations had approved Resolution 194 after the war, directing that the refugees had to be given the option of returning to Israel if they wished to do so.[here we are in 2018 still waiting on the do nothing UN to implement 194 DC]
The State Department came up with a new twist, in which individual refugees would be asked in a confidential questionnaire if they wanted to return to a former home in Israel. Those who ruled out a return would be compensated by Israel for the seizure of their property and be given a chance to emigrate to another Arab country or anywhere else in the world. There had been bitter protests by Arabs during the Eisenhower years over the failure to implement the United Nations resolution. State Department studies on the resettlement issue showed that no more than 70,000 to 100,000 Palestinians would opt to return to their seized Israeli homesteads over ten years, a number that was deemed to be manageable. The Israelis also would be given veto power over every returning Palestinian, in an attempt to minimize the security risk. [And now the way they have treated the Palestinian's leaves open to zionist interpretation,that they are all a security risk DC]
Kennedy had discussed his Arab initiative with a far from enthusiastic Ben-Gurion in their May 1961 New York meeting. A few weeks later, President Kennedy authorized a major— and highly secret—State Department effort to implement the new variant of Resolution 194; over the next eighteen months, said Armin Meyer, a workable compromise was accepted by the Arab states and endorsed by the White House. Meyer, who served as ambassador to Jordan, Iran, and Japan before retiring from the Foreign Service in 1972, is convinced today that BenGurion's decision not to torpedo the resettlement project was based on his belief that the Arabs would never accept direct negotiations on any issue with Israel; any discussion of repatriation, in their eyes, would be tantamount to formal recognition. When the expected last-minute Arab rejections did not come, Meyer said, "Israel panicked," and provoked a wave of intense political pressure from American Jews upon the White House. In the end, President Kennedy—already in a war with Ben-Gurion over Dimona—backed down, bitterly disappointing his State Department supporters by doing so.* The Palestinians would remain stateless refugees in their squalid homes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. "I think we could have been spared all this terrorism business and other miseries," said Meyer, "if we had gone ahead with that project at that time." But, at that time, getting Dimona inspected seemed more important.
* There were many in the State Department, however, who understood from the outset that the resettlement plan had little chance. "We were struggling with bigger issues at the time," explained Phillips Talbot, then Armin Meyer's boss as the assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs. "It was not at the top of my A priority list." Talbot recalled President Kennedy's comment after an early briefing: "Phil, that's a great plan with only one flaw—you've never had to run for election."
NEXT
Years of Pressure
This is the article I was talking about,actually a short video here
http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/06/01/563557/Israel-selling-nuke-information-to-Saudi-Arabia
I am well aware of press tv being an Iranian source,on the other hand I am also well aware of the cozying up of Israel and Saudi Arabia that the Western media has been planting in the narrative since Trump's appointment to the white house.What I would suggest is this headline has deep implications in The Middle East in the following ways.
1)Israel is feeding the Saudi's the information in order to let them attack Iran with nukes via this new proxy,or...
2)Israel is planning a false flag nuke attack on Iran, and will blame Saudi Arabia,or...
3)Or Israel and Iran have been pulling the wool over the eyes of the world all these years(as there is plenty evidence of this if one looks,of Israeli/Iran collusion on oil and weapons particularly During the Iran/Iraq war,and the contra affair) and Saudi Arabia is the real target,and Israel is setting them up.
I suggest we pay attention to this, as these people who see themselves as the rulers of the planet,never make any move without purpose,take care all.
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