PART 5:THE SAMSON OPTION: YEARS OF PRESSURE & THE SAMSON OPTION

THE SAMSON OPTION 

Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and 

American Foreign Policy

By Seymour M. Hersh

9 

Years of Pressure 

John Kennedy, profoundly committed to the principle of nonproliferation, continued throughout 1962 to pressure Ben-Gurion about international inspection and continued to receive the prime minister's bland and irritating assurances that Israel had no intention of becoming an atomic power. The President was far too politically astute not to understand, as he angrily told his friend Charles Bartlett, that the Israeli "sons of bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability." One solution was to help get Ben-Gurion, then embattled in the most serious crisis of his political career, out of office. 

A few days after Christmas 1962, Kennedy made what amounted to a direct move against the prime minister's leadership. He invited Foreign Minister Golda Meir, one of Ben Gurion's leading critics inside the cabinet and the Mapai Party, to his Palm Beach, Florida, home for a seventy-minute private talk. Meir made no secret of the fact that she resented Ben Gurion for permitting his acolytes, Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan, to operate behind the back of the foreign ministry; she and other party members who had been born in Eastern Europe, such as Levi Eshkol, the treasury minister, were convinced that Ben-Gurion chose to rely on young men such as Peres and Dayan only because they would be more reluctant to stand up to him. 

The declassified memorandum on the Kennedy-Meir meeting contains no specific mention of nuclear weapons (some paragraphs were deleted for national security reasons), but there is little doubt that Kennedy pointedly raised the issue. The memorandum further shows that Kennedy made an extraordinary private commitment to Israel's defense. "We are asking the cooperation of Israel in the same way that we are cooperating with Israel to help meet its needs," Kennedy told Meir. "Israel doubtless thinks of itself as deeply endangered. . . . Our position in these matters may seem to be asking Israel to neglect its interests. The reason we do it is not that we are unfriendly to Israel; but in order to help more effectively. I think it is quite clear that in case of an invasion the United States would come to the support of Israel. We have that capacity and it is growing." It was language no Israeli had ever heard from Dwight Eisenhower. 

Moments later, according to the memorandum, Kennedy— anticipating the chronic crisis that would be created by the refugees of the West Bank and Gaza Strip—expressed his regret that the Arab resettlement plan had failed and said his administration would not give up trying to find some solution to the refugee situation. He added that the United States "is really interested in Israel. . . . What we want from Israel arises be cause our relationship is a two-way street. Israel's security in the long run depends in part on what it does with the Arabs, but also on us." 

Kennedy's commitment to Golda Meir, along with his decision to sell the Hawk missiles, amounted to a turning point in American foreign policy toward Israel—one little noted even today. The Kennedy offer might have been enough, if Israel's goal had been to forge a military partnership with the United States. But Israel's needs were far more basic. 

John McCone remained agitated about the Israeli bomb and the failure of his agency to determine whether a chemical reprocessing plant was buried underground at Dimona. He also was more outspoken than any other Kennedy insider on the issue; at a 1962 Washington dinner party he publicly reprimanded Charles Lucet, a senior French foreign ministry official, for France's role in the Israeli bomb. Lucet, who had served as deputy ambassador in Washington in the late 1950s (and would become ambassador in 1965), was seated near McCone, who at one point abruptly asked: "So, Mr. Lucet, your country is building a reprocessing plant for the Israelis?" Lucet replied with what was France's public position on the issue: "No, we are building a reactor." McCone then turned his back on Lucet and did not speak to him for the rest of the evening; it was, given France's high standing with the President and his wife, who were both Francophiles, a pointed rebuff.* 

* Lucet was offended by McCone's action and, upon his return to Paris, relayed the incident to Bertrand Goldschmidt. "He asked me if we could separate France from responsibility for the [Israeli] bomb,"Goldschmidt recalled with a laugh. "I said, 'No. Not only did we take the girl when she was a virgin, but we made her pregnant.'" 

Kennedy was constantly raising the nuclear issue in his discussions with senior Israelis—and constantly getting boilerplate answers. In early April 1963, Shimon Peres flew to the capital to meet at the White House on the still-pending Hawk sale, and was directly asked by the President about Israeli intentions. An Israeli nuclear bomb, Kennedy said, "would create a very perilous situation. That's why we have been diligent about keeping an eye on your effort in the atomic field. What can you tell me about that?" Peres's answer was a fabrication that would become the official Israeli response for years to come: "I can tell you forthrightly that we will not introduce atomic weapons into the region. We certainly won't be the first to do so. We have no interest in that. On the contrary, our interest is in de-escalating the armament tension, even in total disarmament." 

The administration's lack of specific information about Israeli intentions was complicated by the fact, as the President had to know, that many senior members of Congress supported the concept of a nuclear-armed Israel. A few days before his meeting with the President, Peres had discussed nuclear weapons with Senator Stuart Symington, a Kennedy supporter and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and had been told, as Peres told his biographer: "Don't be a bunch of fools. Don't stop making atomic bombs. And don't listen to the administration. Do whatever you think best." 

Israel was doing just that. The physical plant at Dimona continued to mature. The reactor went critical—that is, began a sustained chain reaction—sometime in 1962 with no significant problems, and was capable of being operated at more than seventy megawatts, far greater than the twenty-four megawatts publicly acknowledged by the Ben-Gurion government. Running the plant hotter would create more plutonium by-product to be reprocessed, and a larger nuclear weapons stockpile than any outsider could anticipate. Later that year, the private French construction companies at Dimona, always eager for business, began once again to work on the vital chemical reprocessing plant underground at Dimona—despite de Gaulle's insistence that France would have nothing more to do with the Israeli bomb. The French would build at a furious pace for the next three years, at high pay, finishing the reprocessing plant and the elaborate waste treatment and safety facilities that were essential. French technicians and engineers, who had begun drifting away, were back in force in Beersheba, whose population was growing steadily (it reached seventy thousand by 1970). 

Israeli and French scientists continued to cooperate at the French nuclear test site in the Sahara, as the experiments be came more weapons-oriented. By late 1961, the French had be gun a series of underground tests and were perfecting a series of miniaturized warheads for use in aircraft and, eventually, missiles. There were further tests in the early 1960s of a more advanced Shavit rocket system, with no more public announcements; CIA analysts assumed that the long-range rocket was meant for military use. And in 1963 Israel paid $100 million to the privately owned Dassault Company of France, then one of the world's most successful missile and aircraft firms, for the joint development and manufacture of twenty-five medium range Israeli missiles. It was anticipated that the missile, to be known to the American intelligence community as the Jericho I, would be able to deliver a miniaturized nuclear warhead to targets three hundred miles away. 

By spring of 1963, Kennedy's relationship with Ben-Gurion remained at an impasse over Dimona, and the correspondence between the two became increasingly sour. None of those letters has been made public* 

* The Kennedy exchanges with Ben-Gurion also have not been released to U.S. government officials with full clearances who have attempted to write classified histories of the period. "The culminate result" of such rigid security, one former American official lamented, "is a very poorly informed bureaucracy—even if there are people willing to buck the system and ask taboo questions." 

Ben-Gurion's responses were being drafted by Yuval Neeman, a physicist and defense ministry intelligence officer who was directly involved in the nuclear weapons program. "It was not a friendly exchange," Neeman recalled. "Kennedy was writing like a bully. It was brutal." 

The President made sure that the Israeli prime minister paid for his defiance. In late April, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq united to form the short-lived Arab Federation; such unity was Ben-Gurion's recurring nightmare. He instinctively turned to Washington, and proposed in a letter to the President that the United States and Soviet Union join forces to publicly declare the territorial integrity and security of every Middle Eastern state. "If you can spare an hour or two for a discussion with me on the situation and possible solutions," Ben-Gurion asked, "I am prepared to fly to Washington at your convenience and without any publicity." Kennedy rejected Ben-Gurion's offer of a state visit and expressed "real reservations," according to Ben-Gurion's biography, about any joint statement on the issue with the Soviets. Five days later, a disappointed Ben-Gurion sent a second note to Kennedy: "Mr. President, my people have the right to exist . . . and this existence is in danger." He re quested that the United States sign a security treaty with Israel. Again the answer was no, and it was clear to the Mapai Party that Ben-Gurion's leadership and his intractability about Dimona were serious liabilities in Washington. Golda Meir acknowledged to Ben-Gurion's biographer, "We knew about these approaches. . . . We said nothing, even though we wondered." 

A few weeks later, on June 16, 1963, Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned as prime minister and defense minister, ending his fifteen-year reign as Israel's most influential public official. 

The many accounts of Ben-Gurion's resignation have accurately described the resurgence of scandal, public distrust, and polarization that marked his last years. The Lavon Affair, stemming from the series of pre-Suez War sabotage activities inside Egypt, had come by the early 1960s to dominate much of the public agenda inside Israel, as new revelations came to light suggesting that low-level officials in the defense ministry might have falsified documents and given misleading testimony in an effort to accuse Pinhas Lavon, the former defense minister, of authorizing the operation. Lavon, still one of the most influential members of the Mapai Party, was serving as head of the Histadrut, the powerful federation of labor unions (85 percent of the work force in Israel belonged to unions) that also con trolled a large segment of Israeli industry. Lavon asked BenGurion for exoneration. Ben-Gurion refused, and Lavon took his case to the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee. Once at the Knesset, he charged that Ben-Gurion, Peres, and Dayan had undermined civilian authority over the military; then he made sure that his allegations were leaked to the press. With those actions, Lavon broke two cardinal rules of Israeli politics: he discussed defense matters in public and he failed to keep the party dispute behind closed doors. The next step was a cabinet-level committee, set up at Levi Eshkol's instigation, that was to recommend procedures for investigating the Lavon allegations. But the committee, instead of dealing with the procedural issue, cleared Lavon of authorizing the failed operation in Egypt. 

Ben-Gurion accused the committee of overstepping its mandate, resigned once again, and called for a new government in an unsuccessful effort to annul the decision. Many of those who opposed Ben-Gurion, especially Levi Eshkol and Pinhas Sapir, also opposed Lavon's violation of political norms and successfully moved for his dismissal from the Histadrut job. The primary goal of the Mapai Party leaders at that moment was to get the tiresome affair behind them before the Israeli citizenry, distressed by the continuing discussion of so many government secrets, became convinced that Mapai was unable to manage the country effectively. Ben-Gurion, arguing that someone had lied, continued to insist, however, that a judicial inquiry be convened. The public came to see him as a stubborn old man who was trying to keep the issue alive; the affair tarnished his reputation and made what seemed to be his dictatorial methods of running the government more vulnerable than ever. The clear victors in the scandal were Eshkol, Sapir, and Golda Meir, who emerged with higher public standing and with renewed determination not to permit Ben-Gurion to bypass them in favor of Dayan and Peres. Dayan and Peres joined Ben-Gurion as losers: Dayan never became prime minister, and Peres waited twenty years for the job. 

A second public scandal surfaced in 1962 and 1963 when it was reported that Egypt had developed—with support from some West German scientists—what were alleged to be advanced missiles capable of hitting Israel. Golda Meir and her supporters took a hard line on the Egyptian-West German activities, warning that the coalition posed a danger to Israel's national security. Ben-Gurion was far more skeptical of the threat posed by Egypt's dalliance with West German scientists and, in his public statements, emphasized the contribution that West Germany had made to Israeli security. What the public did not know was that Ben-Gurion had just completed a successful, and secret, negotiation with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer for modern weaponry, including small arms, helicopters, and spare parts. For Ben-Gurion, there now was "an other Germany," profoundly different from the Germany of Hitler's time and far more willing than France and America to keep Israel armed. Ben-Gurion's point of view was ignored in the wake of press hysteria over the German aid to Egypt, with newspaper talk of German "death rays" and renewed "final solutions"—all of which turned out to be exaggerated. The public campaign over the West German help for Egypt soon evolved into a wave of criticism and scorn for Ben-Gurion and his notion of "another Germany." Ben-Gurion's colleagues in the Mapai Party—especially Golda Meir, who, like many Israelis, wanted nothing to do with Germans—joined in the attack.* 

*The German issue was a never-ending and emotional one for a nation led by survivors of the Holocaust; any diplomatic contact resulted in a crisis. There had been street riots in front of the Knesset in 1952 to protest the initial Israeli-West German talks over compensation for the loss of Jewish lives and property in the Holocaust. Cash-starved Israel eventually accepted more than $800 million in reparations. Tensions remained, despite the flow of money: an Israeli violinist was later stabbed on the street after performing the music of Richard Strauss in public. In June 1959, a furor over the sale of Israeli munitions to West Germany resulted in another brief resignation by Ben-Gurion and yet another call for new elections.The Mapai Party held on to its Knesset majority, and Ben-Gurion, confidence vote in hand, returned to office. 

The controversy over Lavon and West Germany appeared to be more than enough to convince Ben-Gurion to leave public life and return once again to his kibbutz in the desert. Tired and distracted after years of leadership, the Old Man was looking forward to writing his memoirs and telling his version of the history of Israel and Zionism. There was no way for the Israeli public, surfeited with accounts of Lavon and the German scandal, to suspect that there was yet another factor in Ben-Gurion's demise: his increasingly bitter impasse with Kennedy over a nuclear-armed Israel. 

Levi Eshkol, the new prime minister, was, like Ben-Gurion, a product of Eastern Europe (he was born in 1895) who turned to Palestine and Zionism at an early age. There were few other similarities. Eshkol was far more democratic, both in politics and in personality; the notion of compromise—so foreign to Ben-Gurion—returned to the leadership of the government and the Mapai Party. Eshkol moved quickly to lighten government control of the press and also set up an independent broadcasting authority to ease the government's monitoring and censorship of the state-run television network—reforms that Ben-Gurion had bitterly resisted. Most significantly, Eshkol had spent the last eleven years as finance minister, much of it in a struggle against funding for Dimona, and was far less committed emotionally than Ben-Gurion to the concept that hundreds of millions of dollars should be spent each year on nuclear activity to the detriment of what he and his supporters saw as Israel's most immediate need—better weapons and training for the army and air force. 

Kennedy, confronted with intelligence reports showing that Israel, far from slowing down its nuclear program during his presidency, had been expanding it, wasted little time in urging nuclear restraint on the new Israeli government; private presidential messages reiterating the need for international inspection of Dimona began arriving shortly after Eshkol took office. The President's belief in arms control had been strengthened in the early fall of 1963 by the positive American response to the Senate ratification of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space.* Continued political support for nuclear disarmament meant less reason to fear the Jewish lobby. Israel's Jeri cho I missile was another factor in the continued White House pressure on Eshkol. American experts considered the Jericho's guidance system to be highly unstable and inaccurate, suggesting—so the analysts concluded—that only one type of war head made sense. 

* Arthur Schlesinger described in A Thousand Days how Kennedy, "almost by accident," raised the nuclear test ban during a speech in Billings, Montana. The President casually praised Senator Mike J. Mansfield, the majority leader from Montana, for his support for the treaty. "To his surprise," wrote Schlesinger, "this allusion produced strong and sustained applause. Heartened, he [Kennedy] set forth his hope of lessening the chance of a military collision between those two great nuclear powers which together have the power to kill three hundred million people in the short space of a day.' The Billings response encouraged him to make the pursuit of peace increasingly the theme of his trip." 

Kennedy's persistent pressure on Israel stemmed from his belief that Israel had not yet developed any nuclear weapons; that it was not yet a proliferator. There is evidence that once Israel actually began manufacturing bombs—as the French had done —the President was prepared to be as pragmatic as he needed to be. While Kennedy remained resolutely opposed to a nuclear Israel to the end, he did change his mind about de Gaulle's bombs. Daniel Ellsberg, who would later make public the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War, was involved in high-level nuclear weapons issues in 1963 as a deputy in the Pentagon's Office of International Strategic Affairs. He recalled seeing one morning a "Top Secret, Eyes Only" memorandum from McGeorge Bundy to the President summarizing a change in policy toward the French: "We would, after all," Ellsberg recalled Bundy's memorandum stating, "cooperate with the French and allow them to use the Nevada test site for under ground testing." At the time, the French had refused to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and de Gaulle had announced that France would continue to test its bombs in the atmosphere.** Kennedy's obvious goal was to bring France in line with the test ban treaty, whether officially signed or not. The Bundy memorandum remained fixed in Ellsberg's memory: it was dated November 22, 1963, the day of Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas. 

** The French had been cut out from any postwar nuclear cooperation by the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, which prohibited the transfer of American nuclear weapons information to any other country. In 1958, President Eisenhower recommended, and Congress approved, an amendment to the 1946 act that permitted the United States to exchange nuclear design information and fissionable materials with the British; France, of course, was enraged by the exclusion. (Britain ended up completely dependent on the United States by the early 1960s for its strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, a status that existed into the early 1990s.) The Kennedy administration continued to antagonize the French on nuclear issues. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, distressed at France's nuclear independence and its continued testing in the Sahara, went on a public campaign in 1962 against the force defrappe. In a famous spring commencement address at the University of Michigan (in which he announced that the United States was moving away in its targeting from massive retaliation to limited nuclear war), McNamara criticized "weak national nuclear forces" as being "dangerous, expensive, prone to obsolescence, and lacking in credibility as a deterrent." Instead, he insisted, the nations of Europe should buy American arms and rockets to build up their conventional forces and let the United States handle the issue of nuclear deterrence. He had delivered essentially the same message a few weeks earlier in Athens, enraging not only de Gaulle, but America's NATO allies.". . . All the allies are angry," British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, "with the American proposal that we should buy rockets to the tune of umpteen million dollars, the warheads to be under American control. This is not a European rocket. It's a racket of the American industry. . . . It's rather sad, because the Americans (who are naive and inexperienced) are up against centuries of diplomatic skill and finesse." Continued U.S. opposition to the force de frappe was one reason for de Gaulle's 1966 decision to remove France from NATO's military organization and evict NATO headquarters and all allied military facilities from French territory. 

Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, like many Vice Presidents, had been left in the dark on sensitive national security issues by the President and his top aides. "Johnson went berserk upon being briefed in by the Agency," a former high-level American intelligence official recalled. "He didn't know any thing about the problem and he cursed Kennedy for cutting him out."* 

*Johnson similarly had been excluded from the intense meetings and discussions during the Cuban missile crisis the year before, and it was left to John McCone to tell the Vice President about the issue just hours before it was to be made public. "Johnson was pissed," McCone later told Walt Elder, and, "harrumphing and belching," threatened not to support the President on the issue if the Senate leadership did not. McCone assured the Vice President that the Senate was indeed backing the President, and the placated Vice President reversed course. 

Johnson's ties to Israel were strong long before he became President. Two of his closest advisers, lawyers Abe Fortas (later named to the Supreme Court) and Edwin L. Weisl, Sr., while not particularly religious, felt deeply about the security of Israel. Johnson also had known of Abe Feinberg and his fund-raising skills since the Truman years; Feinberg was among those who had raised money for Johnson's successful 1948 campaign for the Senate. 

There was a much deeper link, however, that had nothing to do with campaign funds: Johnson had visited the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau while on a congressional fact-finding trip at the end of World War II. His wife, Lady Bird, told a Texas historian years after Johnson's death that he had re turned "just shaken, bursting with overpowering revulsion and incredulous horror at what he had seen. Hearing about it is one thing, being there is another." There are no photographs of the visit, but Johnson's congressional archives contain a full set of U.S. Army photos taken two days after the liberation of the death camp on April 30, 1945. 

Johnson's sensitivity to the plight of European Jews had be gun even before World War II when, as a young congressman from Texas, he was urged by Jewish supporters in his home district to cut through Washington's red tape and get asylum in America for German refugees running for their lives. Once the refugees got into the country, Johnson had worked hard to keep them in, and his congressional files show that Erich Leinsdorf, the eminent conductor, was among those whose deportation Johnson had prevented. Leinsdorf had made a stunning American debut with New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1938, but was scheduled to be deported late in the year when his six month visa was up. Deportation to Austria after the Nazi Anschluss in Vienna meant slow death in a concentration camp. Johnson won the respect and the financial backing of the Jewish community in Texas by taking on the Leinsdorf case, and others, and finding a way to circumvent the rules.* 

*Johnson similarly had been excluded from the intense meetings and discussions during the Cuban missile crisis the year before, and it was left to John McCone to tell the Vice President about the issue just hours before it was to be made public. "Johnson was pissed," McCone later told Walt Elder, and, "harrumphing and belching," threat ened not to support the President on the issue if the Senate leadership did not. McCone assured the Vice President that the Senate was indeed backing the President, and the placated Vice President reversed course. 

President Johnson stayed loyal to his old friends. Five weeks after assuming office, he dedicated a newly constructed Austin synagogue, Agudas Achim, as a favor to James Novy, a long time Texas political ally and Zionist leader who was chairman of the building committee. He was the first American President to do so, yet only a few newspapers took note of the event. In his introduction, Novy, once the Southwest regional chairman of the Zionist Organization of America, looked at the President and said, "We can't ever thank him enough for all those Jews he got out of Germany during the days of Hitler." Lady Bird Johnson later explained: "Jews have been woven into the warp and woof of all his years." 

Lyndon Johnson was quickly consumed by the Vietnam War, and what he saw as the struggle of a small democratic nation against the forces of Communism. But Israel likewise was perceived as a besieged democracy standing up to the Soviet Union and its clients in the Arab world. Johnson's strong emotional ties to Israel and his belief that Soviet arms were altering the balance of power in the Middle East drove him to become the first American President to supply Israel with offensive weapons and the first publicly to commit America to its defense. The American Jewish community eventually would be torn apart by Johnson's continued prosecution of the Vietnam War, with many Jewish leaders insisting that Johnson's steadfast support of Israel entitled him to loyalty on Vietnam, while others continued to oppose the war on principle. 

In the early years of his presidency, however, Johnson echoed Kennedy's policy by urging Israel to submit Dimona to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection. His support for nonproliferation and his desire to end the Cold War were motivated by his belief that only by a relaxing of international tensions could he achieve his ultimate goal—the extension of the New Deal to all Americans. A nuclear Israel was unacceptable: it could mean a nuclear Egypt, increased Soviet involvement in the Middle East, and perhaps war.

10 

The Samson Option 

Levi Eshkol's goal was to find a middle ground between the White House, with its insistence on international inspections, and the pro-nuclear faction of the Mapai Party, led by David Ben-Gurion, who, from retirement, turned his insistence on an Israeli nuclear arsenal into a political Last Hurrah. 

The prime minister's dilemma was not whether to go nuclear, but when and at what cost, in terms of the competing need to equip and train the conventional units of the army, navy, and air force. 

The debate over the nuclear option had surfaced in the nation's newspapers, in deliberately innocuous language, long before Eshkol took office. In mid-1962, for example, Shimon Peres and former army chief of staff Moshe Dayan, then Ben-Gurion's minister of agriculture, took advantage of the funeral of a prominent Zionist military leader to warn their peers that Israel's existence was linked to the "technological achievements of the 1970s" and investment in "equipment of the future." In April 1963, Dayan wrote an article for Maariv, the afternoon newspaper, urging the Israeli arms industry to keep pace with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's effort to build nuclear weapons. "In the era of rockets with conventional and unconventional warheads," Dayan wrote, "we must diligently develop those weapons so that we don't lag." 

Ben-Gurion was even more explicit in an interview with columnist C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times five months after leaving office. Sulzberger quoted Ben-Gurion's concern about a rocket-armed Egypt and added: "As a result he [Ben-Gurion] hints grimly that in its nearby Dimona reactor Israel itself may be experimenting with military atomics." Nuclear energy can not be ruled out, the ex-prime minister was quoted as saying, "because Nasser won't give up. Nor will he risk war again until he's sure he can win. That means atomic weapons—and he has a large desert in which to test. We can't test here." Sulzberger's column was published on Saturday, November 16, 1963. It got to Ben-Gurion in a hurry, for on that same day he wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times denying that he in any way had suggested or hinted of nuclear weapons during the interview with Sulzberger. [yeah from one zionist to another just throwing Zionist propaganda out there posing as 'news',telling the united states how it is going to be, sharing a laugh over the big changes coming to the united states,and their relationship with Israel.DC]

The Eshkol government, under pressure first from President Kennedy and then from Johnson, worked at keeping the lid on, and had no qualms about stretching the truth to do so. In December 1963, Shimon Yiftach, director of scientific programs for the defense ministry, publicly told a group of Israeli science writers that, as they had assumed, the advanced reactor at Dimona would produce plutonium as a by-product. However, Yiftach insisted that the Israeli government had no plans to build a separate plant for chemically reprocessing plutonium. Yiftach, who had been trained at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, was then one of Israel's leading experts in the chemistry of plutonium and knew that French construction companies had started up once again on the underground reprocessing plant at Dimona. 

Eshkol's apprehension about committing Israel to the mass production of nuclear weapons did not impede the steady progress at Dimona. By mid-1964, the reactor had been in operation for almost two years and the reprocessing plant, with its remote-controlled laboratories and computer-driven machinery, was essentially completed and ready to begin producing weapons-grade plutonium from the reactor's spent uranium fuel rods. Israel's nuclear facilities eventually would include a weapons assembly plant in Haifa, to the north, and a well fortified nuclear storage igloo at the Tel Nof fighter base near Rehovot. Extreme security is a way of life inside the nuclear complex, and especially at Dimona, which is under the constant watch of Israeli troops, electronic detection systems, and radar screens linked to a missile battery. All aircraft, including those belonging to the Israeli Air Force, are forbidden to over fly the facility and do so at perilous risk.* 

* During the 1967 Six-Day War, an Israeli Mirage III was shot down when its pilot, either confused or dealing with equipment problems, ventured into Dimona's airspace. In February 1973, a Libyan airliner flew off course over the Sinai because of a navigational error and also, after ignoring or failing to see signals to land, was destroyed by fighter planes of the Israeli Air Force, killing 108 of the 113 people aboard. Israel claimed, without evidence, that the plane was headed for Dimona. 

Well-placed Israeli sources say that the physicists and technicians at Dimona conducted at least one successful low-yield nuclear test sometime in the mid-1960s at an underground cavern near the Israeli-Egyptian border in the Negev desert. Such detonations, known in the weapons community as "zero yield," produce a fission yield that is low, but discernible, and are considered to be a perfectly reliable measurement of the overall weapons assembly system.** The test was said to have shaken parts of the Sinai. 

** During the 1967 Six-Day War, an Israeli Mirage III was shot down when its pilot, either confused or dealing with equipment problems, ventured into Dimona's airspace. In February 1973, a Libyan airliner flew off course over the Sinai because of a navigational error and also, after ignoring or failing to see signals to land, was destroyed by fighter planes of the Israeli Air Force, killing 108 of the 113 people aboard. Israel claimed, without evidence, that the plane was headed for Dimona. 

In early 1965, completion of the underground reprocessing plant removed the last barrier to Israel's nuclear ambitions; it also heightened the ongoing debate inside the government over the issue. Completion of the reprocessing plant also made it even more essential that Floyd Culler's annual visits to Dimona continue to produce nothing, and the Israeli cover-up was constantly being improved and embellished by Binyamin Blumberg and his colleagues in the Office of Special Tasks. (International inspections by the IAEA were, of course, considered and rejected in the Kennedy years.) In the mid-1960s, Dimona's managers came up with a new method of hiding its underground world. Members of the Israeli Defense Force's 269th General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, the most elite under cover group in the nation, were ordered to the nuclear facility a few weeks before the arrival of a Culler inspection and told to bring with them, one former 269th member recalled, "eight semitrailers loaded with grass. It was sod—all for camouflage," he added. "Our job for ten days is to cover the walks and bunkers with dirt, sod, and bushes. When the delegation comes, I'm standing watering grass that looks like it's been there for years." The scene remains vivid in his memory, the former officer said, because he'd never before seen sod.* 

*The CIA's photo interpreters, recalled Dino Brugioni, were far from fooled by the sudden appearance of seemingly new grass. "It was a foolish move on their [the Israelis] part and confirmed what we knew," he said."You could see what they were doing in the aerial photos. They planted sod, trees, and bushes. Nothing grows in Beersheba like that. I mean, why in hell would you plant that stuff there and not around their homes? It just spotlights activity." 

There is no evidence that the American intelligence community, and President Johnson, had any idea how close Israel was to joining the nuclear club; the available documents show that the President's men somehow managed to convince themselves that by continuing to focus on IAEA inspection as the solution, all of the nagging questions about Dimona and Israeli nuclear proliferation would go away.** Eshkol was invited for a state visit in June 1964,the first visit to Washington by an Israeli prime minister and declassified presidential documents on file at the LBJ Library at the University of Texas show that the White House believed that Eshkol could be induced by the promise of American arms to open up Dimona to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The President's men were, in essence, operating in self-inflicted darkness when it came to Dimona: they were convinced that Israel had the technical skill to build a bomb and install it on a warhead, but no one seemed to know whether Israel seriously intended to do so or not. It was as if the White House believed there really were two atoms, one of which was peaceful. 

**Washington may have gotten the wrong signal when the Eshkol government, after extended negotiations, finally went forward in April 1965 with an American request to shift responsibility for inspection of the Nahal Soreq reactor to the IAEA. American teams had conducted the inspection two times a year until then, without incident, under the original 1955 agreement that had set up the small research reactor— which, unlike Dimona, was constantly being used for medical and scientific research by the staff of the Weizmann Institute. The American request was consistent with the Johnson administration's policy of strengthening IAEA safeguards by insisting that all countries participating in the Atoms for Peace program submit to international, and not American, inspection. Another factor in the switch to international safeguards, a former nonproliferation official explained, was the widespread belief that the bilateral American inspections were weak. In return for the Israeli acquiescence, the United States agreed to provide forty more kilograms of enriched uranium, under safeguards, for Nahal Soreq's research program. [40 kilograms enough to make 6 Fat Boy bombs DC]

McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, who had been involved with the Israeli weapons question since early 1961, professed to Johnson not to have any intelligence about Israel's nuclear intentions, according to the White House documents, in a memorandum summarizing the potential threat to Israel posed by Egypt's missile systems. Both nations could make missiles, Bundy told the President on May 18, two weeks before the Eshkol visit, but "the difference was that the Israelis could make nuclear warheads to put on their missiles, while the UAR [United Arab Republic] couldn't. The real issue was whether Israel was going for a nuclear capability." It's inconceivable that Bundy and his colleagues did not know what Israel was doing with a secret nuclear reactor in the Negev. 

Eshkol wanted to buy American M-48 tanks, and was delighted when Johnson agreed before their summit meeting to use the prestige of his office to persuade West Germany to sell Israel the M-48 out of its NATO stockpiles. Such a purchase, even if circuitous, would be a first for offensive weapons, and would open the American arms pipeline. The Johnson men had a fallback in case Eshkol did not agree to international inspections, as many must have expected he would not: they wanted Israel's permission to brief Arab nations on the results of the annual Floyd Culler inspections. 

Eshkol's mission in coming to America was to get what he could—in the way of U.S. arms and commitments—without making any real concessions on Dimona, which, of course, he could not. He had told the White House prior to his arrival that he would continue to accept the Culler inspections of Dimona, but he wanted nothing to do with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Israel offered the public argument, as did other putatively nonnuclear nations, that it should not be forced to place its national laboratories under IAEA aegis until all of the world's nuclear powers did so. China and France were not parties to the agreement. There was a second issue, equally contrived: the contention that the IAEA, like the United Nations, had systematically discriminated against Israel in favor of the Arab nations. There were perhaps some inside Israel who profoundly believed that such discrimination existed, but it had nothing to do with the reason the IAEA was not welcome. Eshkol also drew the line at any briefing of the Arabs. 

The White House staff had to anticipate hard bargaining on the Arab and IAEA issues; Eshkol's delegation included Peres, who was violently opposed to international inspection and to the sharing of anything about Dimona with the Arab world. Nonetheless, NSC aide Robert Komer, in his pre-summit memorandum to Johnson, suggested that the President try to change Eshkol's mind on both issues. "We hope you'll person ally tell Eshkol they should bite the bullet now," he said of the IAEA inspections. "Without in any way implying that Israel is going nuclear, one has to admit that a functioning . . . reactor plus an oncoming missile delivery system add up to an inescapable conclusion that Israel is at least putting itself in a position to go nuclear. This could have the gravest repercussions on U.S.-Israeli relations, and the earlier we try to halt it the better chance we have. This is why you are raising a to-do . . . even if unsuccessful, will at least put Israel firmly on notice that we may be back at it again." 

Turning to the relaying of information about Dimona to the Arabs, Komer wrote, "We're firmly convinced that Israel's apparent desire to keep the Arabs guessing is highly dangerous. To appear to be going nuclear without really doing so is to invite trouble. It might spark Nasser into a foolish preemptive move." 

Komer, who served for years with the CIA before joining Bundy's National Security Council staff, had few illusions at the time about what was going on underground at Dimona. He vividly recalled discussing the Israeli nuclear bomb project with John McCone, his boss: "We knew the program was continuing. They never told us they would stop." 

His recommendations to the President, as he had to know, had no chance of being accepted by the Israelis, nor could they even serve as a negotiating device. Raising a "to-do" to put Israel "firmly on notice" was not going to stop the bomb. 

A declassified summary of the June 1 Johnson-Eshkol conversation shows that Johnson indeed did follow his staff's advice to the letter, as if he, too, believed that Washington could negotiate Israel out of its nuclear arsenal. Johnson was emphatic in telling Eshkol that international inspection of Dimona would calm the Arabs and slow the Middle East missile race. "The President pointed out that the Arabs will inevitably tie Israeli missiles to Israel's nuclear potential," the official memorandum of conversation said. "This is why we see IAEA control as in Israel's interest. We should like to remind the Prime Minister that we are violently against nuclear proliferation." 

The President also reminded Eshkol that the Soviet Union was becoming more of a factor in the Middle East, and an Israeli reassurance on Dimona could go a long way toward keeping the Russians out. Komer summarized the issue for the President on the day after the Eshkol meeting: "Peres said yesterday Israel wasn't worried so much about present UAR missiles but about better stuff Soviets might give Nasser. This is our whole point too—if Nasser thinks Israel is getting better missiles than he has, and is not reassured on Dimona, he'll be forced to pay Soviet price to get missiles. Therefore, you urge Eshkol to agree both to Dimona reassurances, and to IAEA controls. These two acts would help diminish Nasser's incentive to get exotic weapons help from the USSR. Eshkol's argument, 'Why reassure an enemy?' is short-sighted." 

Komer added, "All in all, we understand why Israel, being under the gun, is more fearful of its future than Washington. But Israel can count on us. All we ask in return is that Israel recognize our Arab interests and our common aim of keeping the Soviets out of the Middle East." 

Israel, of course, was willing to play along in any way to get more American arms. But it would never "count" on America to protect its future. Komer's comment referred to the main message of the June i summit meeting, one that echoed the assurances that John Kennedy had privately given Golda Meir two years earlier: the United States would become Israel's sup plier of arms as long as Israel did not produce nuclear weapons. It was this proposal, not found in any of the declassified documents in the Johnson Library, that drove the June 1 summit meeting. The White House's offer soon became known to David Ben-Gurion and Ernst David Bergmann, who viewed any such commitment by the Eshkol government, according to a former Israeli official, "as compromising the security of Israel." 

Johnson's pleas about IAEA inspection and the sharing of information with the Arabs went nowhere, but his promise of continued arms support became a factor in what emerged by the fall of 1964 as a major strategic issue for the State of Israel: when to begin the mass production of a nuclear arsenal. Eshkol obviously was far from a pacifist; he had, for example, no ambivalence about continuing Israel's ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs. "Maybe he looks now to you as a moderate, but he was—like all our leaders then—a pragmatic son of a bitch," a former aide recalled with pride. "This was a man who grew up in a generation that saw the Holocaust, the Communists in Russia, the Arabs—all wanting to destroy Jews." 

Eshkol's only doubts about Dimona were practical ones: Dimona was costing upward of $500 million a year, more than 10 percent of the Israeli military budget. It was money not being spent elsewhere, the former aide added: "Eshkol would say, 'I don't have the money for it. How many children will go without shoes? How many students will not go to university? And there's no threat. None of our neighbors are going nuclear. Why should we go nuclear?'" 

Eshkol's questions led to a series of high-level and highly secret conferences on the bomb in late 1964 and early 1965 at the Midrasha, a Mossad retreat outside Tel Aviv. The meetings were attended by senior officials of the leading Israeli political parties, as well as many defense experts. "The issue was not whether to go nuclear or not," one participant recalled. "But when." 

Dimona's supporters had convinced most of the leadership that only nuclear weapons could provide the absolute and final deterrent to the Arab threat, and only nuclear weapons could convince the Arabs—who were bolstered by rapidly growing Soviet economic and military aid—that they must renounce all plans for military conquest of Israel and agree to a peace settlement. With a nuclear arsenal there would be no more Masadas in Israel's history, a reference to the decision of more than nine hundred Jewish defenders—known as the Zealots—to commit suicide in a.d. 73 rather than endure defeat at the hands of the Romans. 

In its place, argued the nuclear advocates, would be the Samson Option. Samson, according to the Bible, had been captured by the Philistines after a bloody fight and put on display, with his eyes torn out, for public entertainment in Dagon's Temple in Gaza. He asked God to give him back his strength for the last time and cried out, "Let my soul die with the Philistines." With that, he pushed apart the temple pillars, bringing down the roof and killing himself and his enemies. For Israel's nuclear advocates, the Samson Option became another way of saying "Never again."* 

*In a 1976 essay in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz accurately summarized the pronuclear argument in describing what Israel would do if abandoned by the United States and overrun by Arabs: "The Israelis would fight . . . with conventional weapons for as long as they could, and if the tide were turning decisively against them, and if help in the form of resupply from the United States or any other guarantors were not forthcoming, it is safe to predict that they would fight with nuclear weapons in the end. ... It used to be said that the Israelis had a Masada complex . . . but if the Israelis are to be understood in terms of a 'complex' involving suicide rather than surrender and rooted in a relevant precedent of Jewish history, the example of Samson, whose suicide brought about the destruction of his enemies, would be more appropriate than Masada, where in committing suicide the Zealots killed only themselves and took no Romans with them." Podhoretz, asked years later about his essay, said that his conclusions about the Samson Option were just that—his conclusions, and not based on any specific information from Israelis or anyone else about Israel's nuclear capability. 

The basic argument against the nuclear arsenal went beyond its impact on the readiness of the military: these were years of huge economic growth and business expansion inside Israel, and Dimona still was absorbing far too much skilled man power, in the view of many industrial managers—whose constant complaints to government officials on that issue went nowhere. Dimona continued to distort the economy and limit development. There was, for example, no private computer industry in Israel by the late 1960s, although American intelligence officials had rated Israel for years as an international leader—with Japan and the United States—in the ability to design and program computer software. 

The long-range social and military costs of Dimona were most certainly the concerns of Yitzhak Rabin, the new army chief of staff, and Yigal Allon, a close Eshkol adviser and former commander of the irregular Palmach forces before the 1948 War of Independence. Less compelling to the military men was the moral argument against the bomb raised by some on the left and in academia: that the Jewish people, victims of the Holocaust, had an obligation to prevent the degeneration of the Arab-Israeli dispute into a war of mass destruction. Those who held that view did not underestimate the danger of a conventional arms race, but believed that, as Simha Flapan, their passionate spokesman, wrote, "the qualitative advantages of Israel—social cohesion and organization, education and technical skills, intelligence and moral incentive—can be brought into play only in a conventional war fought by men." 

A major complication in the debate, seemingly, was the Arab and Israeli press, which routinely published exaggerated accounts of each side's weapons of mass destruction. In Israel, there were alarmist accounts of Soviet and Chinese support for an Egyptian nuclear bomb. Egypt, in turn, publicly suggested that it had received a Soviet commitment to come to its aid in case of an Israeli nuclear attack, and President Gamal Nasser warned in an interview that "preventive war" was the "only answer" to a nuclear-armed Israel. It was a period, Simha Flapan later wrote, when both Israel and Egypt "were trapped in a vicious circle of tension and suspicion and were doing everything possible to make them a self-fulfilling prophecy." 

The officials at the top in Israel understood the difference between public perceptions and private realities. Before the Midrasha conference, for example, Binyamin Blumberg prepared an analysis estimating that the Arab world would not be able to develop sophisticated nuclear weapons for twenty-five years—until 1990. The paper was important to Eshkol, who, as he told the conference, was considering three postures: a ready to-go bomb in the basement; the nuclear option, with the weapons parts manufactured but not assembled; and further research. "He said," an Israeli recalled, " 'We're not in a hurry. It'll take the Arabs twenty-five years.'" Eshkol's choice was to merely continue research and use that added time to "jump a stage"—to bypass the crude plutonium weapon detonated by the United States at Nagasaki and go directly to more efficient warhead designs. There was a second compelling argument, along with the issue of money, for temporarily limiting the work at Dimona to research: Israel as yet had no long-range aircraft or missiles in place that were capable of accurately delivering a bomb to targets inside the Soviet Union, which was always Israel's primary nuclear target; no Arab nation would dare wage war against Israel, so the Israeli leadership thought, without Soviet backing. 

Levi Eshkol parlayed the Midrasha decision into a strategic asset: he told Washington that he would defer a decision on the nuclear arsenal in return for a commitment to supply offensive arms that would match the quality of arms being supplied to Egypt by the Soviet Union. It was more than good enough for Johnson, who was losing interest with each passing year in waging political war with Israel over the bomb. The President rewarded Eshkol's pledge of a delay by authorizing the sale to Israel in 1966 of forty-eight advanced A-4E Skyhawk tactical fighters, capable of carrying a payload of eight thousand pounds. Johnson's refusal to ask more of the Israelis on the nuclear issue was eased by the strong evidence of renewed Soviet economic and military commitments in the Middle East: Moscow was moving to encourage Arab socialism and unity. For Johnson, this meant that the Cold War was moving to the Arab world, with Israel serving as a surrogate for America. 

Eshkol's decision to put a hold on the nuclear issue enraged Ben-Gurion, still smarting over the Mapai Party's handling of the Lavon Affair; Ben-Gurion eventually would publicly compare Eshkol to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who attempted to appease Adolf Hitler before World War II. In June 1965, Ben-Gurion, talking darkly of Eshkol's "endangering the nation's security," dramatically resigned from the Mapai Party and created a new party, known as Rafi (an acronym for the Israel Workers' List). He was joined by a reluctant but loyal Peres, who became Rafi's power broker, and the rest less Dayan, who had recently resigned as agricultural minister. Ben-Gurion's hope was that Rafi could capture as many as twenty-five seats in the 120-member Knesset and emerge as a major power broker in Israeli politics. 

Ben-Gurion and his followers changed forever the political structure of Israel. Rafi would now become an opposition party, and play the role that had traditionally belonged to right-wing groups. Ben-Gurion's immediate reason for splitting with the Mapai leadership was his continued anger over Lavon, but the Rafi Party, under Peres's leadership, stood for a more aggressive position across the spectrum of defense issues, and especially on nuclear weapons. Ernst Bergmann was another founding member of Rafi, and once again had Ben-Gurion's ear: "Ben-Gurion was quoting Bergmann all the time," recalled an Israeli, about the dangers of not initiating the production of a nuclear arsenal. The issue emerged as a dominant one in the 1965 elections, although it was played out in code language. Israeli newspapers were full of criticism from Peres and Ben-Gurion over what was referred to in Hebrew as hayanoseh ha'adin, "the sensitive topic," orb'cbia ledorot, "a lament for generations"; the Rafi leaders also constantly criticized what they euphemistically called Eshkol's "big mistake," language understood by many inside Israel as referring to Eshkol's hesitations about opening a nuclear weapons assembly line at Dimona. None of this was reported by American or other newspapers: the foreign correspondents in Israel apparently did not understand what really was at stake.* Neither did the American intelligence community. 

* John Finney of the New York Times did a little better with the Floyd Culler inspections. Finney, who remained on the nuclear beat for the Times, reported on June 28, 1966, that the American team had arrived at "the same tentative conclusion as a year ago, that the reactor is not being used at this time for producing plutonium for weapons." The reporter wisely cautioned, however, that the team's conclusion "was tentative because it is difficult to establish in once-a-year inspections that none of the reactor fuel rods have been removed for extracting the plutonium. . . ." 

It was an ugly election, with insults and accusations from all parties. One prominent lawyer with close ties to Golda Meir referred publicly to Ben-Gurion as a "coward" and Rafi as a "neo-Fascist group." Many Israelis understood, in a way that no outsider could, that the debate was not only about defense policy or the bomb, but about Ben-Gurion's profound belief that Israel could survive only by relying on the state and not on the traditional volunteerism of the Zionist movement. In Ben-Gurion's view, the kibbutzim, the Mapai Party, the Hagannah of the 1948 war—all populated by volunteers who believed in the cause—had to give way to the more impersonal institutions of universal military service, universal public education, and promotion on the basis of competence and merit rather than party affiliation. Many aspects of this debate coalesced—at least for his critics—in Ben-Gurion's unwavering support of the nuclear arsenal. Some of his opponents in the 1965 election viewed Dimona as nothing more than a collection of competent scientists and bureaucrats, with unclear ideological affiliations, who had created a powerful weapon away from public scrutiny and approval. For many, the election was perhaps a last-ditch struggle between an Israel that continued to utilize the willing spirit of dedicated volunteers and an Israel that relied on the use of science, objective knowledge, and the state. 

Ben-Gurion and his Rafi Party were sorely disappointed by the election, winning only ten seats in the Knesset, not enough to provide Ben-Gurion with a power base. The election amounted to a brutal referendum on his dream of returning to power, and the end of his role in the public policy of Israel.* 

* Ben-Gurion was an inveterate diarist and spent many hours in his later years—he died in early 1974—assembling his papers and helping his biographer, Michael BarZohar. Myer Feldman recalls being accompanied on one of his last scheduled meetings with Ben-Gurion by Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem and longtime associate of the Old Man. The two men stood waiting as Ben-Gurion scribbled away in his note book. "I said to Kollek, 'What's he doing?'" Feldman recalled. Kollek replied, with a smile, "Oh, he's falsifying history." 

The election also was interpreted by Levi Eshkol as a referendum on his handling of the nuclear issue; Dimona would remain a standby operation. The country seemingly had rejected the efficient "can do" approach of Ben-Gurion, Dayan, and Peres in favor of the social-democratic and volunteerist goals of the Meir-Eshkol wing of Mapai. It was a low point for Ben-Gurion and his followers. 

By the spring of 1966, Ernst David Bergmann had had enough: he resigned under pressure as director of the commissioner less Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, as well as from his two high-level defense science posts. Many in the Eshkol cabinet viewed his departure as long overdue, and it showed; Bergmann was angered and hurt when a ministry of defense official came to his apartment within an hour of his resignation to retrieve his government car. Eshkol moved quickly to make the Bergmann portfolio less independent: bureaucratic responsibility for the AEC was shifted from the defense ministry to the prime minister's personal staff, and Eshkol himself became chairman of an expanded and revitalized commission. Decisions about the future of nuclear weapons in Israel would now be made by the highest political authority. A pouting Bergmann retreated, with the aid of Lewis Strauss, to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University, but not before granting an interview to Maariv, the popular Israeli newspaper. The New York Times account of that interview provides a classic example of the public doubletalk and doublethink that then surrounded the nuclear issue in Israel and the American press: "The scientist [Bergmann] suggested that the Eshkol Government was less sympathetic to long-term scientific planning than former Premier David Ben-Gurion, with whom Professor Bergmann was closely associated. He spoke of the lack of funds for research and the risk of dependence on foreign sources." 

Nonetheless, the nuclear weapons issue, even if depicted as "long-term scientific planning," had moved into the open inside Israel. In the United States, where all foreign policy was rapidly becoming consumed by the Vietnam War, Israel's nuclear option continued to be an issue solely for government insiders, who weren't talking.

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Playing the Game