THE SAMSON OPTION
Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and
American Foreign Policy
By Seymour M. Hersh
11
Playing the Game
The ambivalence and hypocrisy at the top of the
American government about a nuclear-armed Israel inevitably
was mirrored by the bureaucracy. By the middle 1960s, the
game was fixed: President Johnson and his advisers would pretend that the American inspections amounted to proof that
Israel was not building the bomb, leaving unblemished America's newly reaffirmed support for nuclear nonproliferation.
The men and women analyzing intelligence data and writing
reports for their higher-ups understood, as Arthur Lundahl
and Dino Brugioni had learned earlier, that there was little to
be gained by relaying information that those at the top did not
want to know. Nonetheless, the information was there.
There was much known, for example, about the Israeli
Jericho missiles, rapidly being assembled by Dassault. "We had
a direct line to God," a middle-level CIA technical analyst re
called. "We had everything—not only from the French but also
from the Israelis. We stole some and we had spies. I was able to
draw a scale model of the system. I even designed three war
heads for it—nuclear, chemical, and HE [high explosive]—as a
game. We were predicting what they could do." What Israel
could do, the former CIA official said, was successfully target
and fire a nuclear warhead. The problem arose in conveying
the intelligence. "I was never able to get anything officially
published" by the CIA for distribution throughout the government, he said. "Everybody knew" about the Israeli missile, he
added, "but nobody would talk about it." The official said he
decided to bootleg a copy of the intelligence report—risking his
job by doing so—to senior officials in the Pentagon and State
Department. "I remember briefing a DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] admiral. He wasn't ready to believe it. I got him
turned around, but he retired and no one else cared."
Even James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's director of counter
intelligence, who also was responsible for liaison with Israel,
had his problems when it came to the Israeli bomb. The moody
Angleton was legendary—and feared—for his insistence on secrecy and his paranoia about Soviet penetration of the Agency.
He was a master of backchannel and "eyes only" reports, and
his increasing inability to deal with the real world eventually
led to his firing in late 1974, but his glaring faults in counter
intelligence apparently did not spill over to Israel.* Former
Agency officials, who, in prior interviews with me, had been
unsparing in their criticism of Angleton's bizarre methods in
counterintelligence, acknowledged that he had performed correctly and proficiently in his handling of Israel. Angleton had
worked closely with members of the Jewish resistance in Italy
while serving with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the
end of World War II; it was a dramatic period when thousands
of Jewish refugees and concentration camp survivors were being illicitly funneled from Europe into Palestine, then under
British control.
* The first prominent public mention of Angleton's role in counterintelligence came in a major front-page expose by the author in the New York Times of December 22, 1974. The story linked Angleton and his office to Operation chaos, the massive and illegal spying by the CIA on antiwar dissidents in America. Angleton, in a telephone conversation with me before the story was published, suggested that he could provide better stories, dealing with Communist penetration of the antiwar movement and CIA operatives in the Soviet Union, if the domestic spying story was not published. On the day of its publication, a Sunday, as I later wrote in the Times, Angleton telephoned me very early at home and complained that Cecily, his wife of thirty-one years, had learned only by reading my story that her husband was not a postal employee, as Angleton claimed he had told her. He added: "And now she's left me." The call shook me up; the upset in his voice seemed real. I mumbled something about a newsman's responsibility to the truth, hung up, and telephoned an old friend who had served in the CIA with Angleton. He laughingly told me that Cecily of course had known from the beginning what her husband did for a living, and had left him three years earlier to move to Arizona, only to return.
One of Angleton's closest colleagues was Meir (Meme)
Deshalit, a resistance leader and Israeli intelligence official who
had been posted to Washington in 1948. Deshalit was the older
brother of Amos Deshalit, the physicist who had done much to
develop Israel's nuclear arsenal before dying of cancer in 1969.
Angleton shared Meir Deshalit's view of the Soviet and Arab threat to Israel; his personal contacts and strong feelings made
him the logical choice to handle liaison between the CIA and
the Israeli government. His was one of the most important
assignments in the 1950s and early 1960s, the height of the Cold
War, because of the continuing flow of Soviet and Eastern European refugees into Israel. Angleton and his Israeli counter
parts ran the "rat lines," as the Jewish refugee link became
known. It was the Jewish refugee operations, as many in the
CIA understood, that provided the West in the early postwar
years with its most important insights into the Soviet bloc.
Some of the programs were financed off the shelf by CIA contingency funds, as part of kk mountain.
Angleton's love for Israel and his shared views on the Arab
and Soviet question, however, did not keep him from investigating, as a counterintelligence officer, any Israeli or American
Jew he suspected of trafficking in classified information. One of
the big question marks was nuclear technology. The CIA knew
from its analysis of the fallout of the ongoing French nuclear
tests in the Sahara that the increasingly modernized and miniaturized French warheads were based on United States design.
A former American nuclear intelligence official recalled that he
and his colleagues "were driven crazy" by the suspicion that
Israel's quid pro quo for the French help at Dimona included
access to design information purloined from the government's
nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore, California.
No evidence of such a link was found, but intelligence community investigators were surprised to discover at the end of
the chaos inquiry a cache of Angleton's personal files, secured
with black tape, that revealed what obviously had been a long running—and
highly questionable—study of American Jews in
the government. The files showed that Angleton had constructed what amounted to a matrix of the position and Jewishness of senior officials in the CIA and elsewhere who had access
to classified information of use to Israel. Someone in a sensitive
position who was very active in Jewish affairs in his personal
life, or perhaps had family members who were Zionists, scored
high on what amounted to a Jewishness index.
One government investigator, talking about the Angleton
files in a 1991 interview, recalled his surprise at discovering that even going to synagogue was a basis for suspicion. "I remembered the First Amendment," the investigator added sardonically. "You know, Freedom of Religion." The Angleton matrix
suggested that at some point a suspect who measured high
enough on the Jewishness scale was subjected to a full-bore
field investigation. "Was there simply a background check, or
was there physical or electronic surveillance?" the investigator
asked rhetorically. "I don't know. I was angry but at the same
time thought it wasn't irrational because a lot of Jews were
giving help to Israel." In the end, the Angleton files were not
investigated further or even brought to the attention of the
House or Senate intelligence committees: "We decided not to
do anything with it."
Samuel Halpern, a Jew who served for years as executive
assistant to the director of the CIA's clandestine services, was
under constant investigation by Angleton. Halpern's position,
the highest reached by any Jew in the clandestine service, gave
him access to the name and background of every foreigner who
had ever been recruited by the CIA. His father, Hanoch, was a
Pole who had become active in Zionism before World War II
and, after emigrating to Palestine, had worked closely with
Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, among others, after the State
of Israel was formed in 1948. "Jim looked at me real hard,"
Halpern recalled with a laugh, "but I told him, 'I'm not going
to muck up your desk.' The Israelis never approached me. Why
should they when I'm sitting on the third floor [of the CIA] and
Jim's on the second?"
Angleton did more than just collect information on American Jews. He also was a sponsor, through the chaos program, of a highly secret CIA operation involving the Agency's purchase of a Washington trash collection company. The firm, known in the CIA as a proprietary, had contracts to pick up garbage at various Third World embassies, including the Israeli embassy. Another of its stops was the downtown Washington offices of B'nai B'rith, the powerful Jewish social and volunteer organization with worldwide activities. The trash would be systematically sorted and analyzed for any possible intelligence.
Angleton's close personal ties with the Deshalit family and others in Israel made it inevitable that he would learn about the construction in the Negev. One senior official recalled that Angleton's first intelligence report on Israel's plans to build the bomb was filed routinely in the late 1950s, and not by backchannel, and thus could be made available to those who needed to know inside the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the unit responsible for clandestine action. "I have no idea who his sources were," the senior official said. "He probably never told the director." Over the next few years Angleton continued to produce intelligence on Dimona, also based on information supplied by his personal contacts, but never learned—or, at least, never reported—the extent to which Israel was deceiving Washington about its nuclear weapons progress.
Angleton, of course, had been given periodic briefings in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Lundahl or Brugioni on the intelligence collected by the U-2 overflights of the Negev, but never evinced much interest. His forte was human intelligence, or humint, as the intelligence community calls it, and not technical intelligence, such as the U-2 imagery. "He was a real funny guy," Brugioni recalled. "I'd meet with him, brief him; he'd ask a few questions, you'd leave—and never know what he's holding. Sometimes he'd have his office real dark and have a light only on you. He was a real spook."
For all of his mystique and freedom to operate, Angleton, too, was stymied by the Israeli bomb. His reports on Dimona, buttressed by the U-2 data, did not even result in an official CIA estimate that Israel was going nuclear. Such formal estimates, which are distributed to the President and other key government officials, were the responsibility of analysts in the CIA's Office of National Estimates (ONE). "Jim kept saying, 'Yes, they've got it,' and the analysts would say, 'I don't believe it,' " one former intelligence official recalled. The analysts simply did not think Angleton's humint sources were reliable, the official said, adding that tension and second-guessing over human intelligence sources were a way of life in the CIA. By 1965, an extensive dossier of humint reports on Dimona had built up, the official said, and the nuclear issue was again raised with the ONE analysts: "They told me that even if Israel did have the bomb, they'd never use it."
The intelligence official, recalling the issue in an interview, got angry again at the analysts: "They were so stupid. You'd have to put the bomb under their noses before they'd believe it. They didn't have any understanding of Israel; didn't know what made them think. They were so stupid."
It is not known how many CIA analyses on the Israeli bomb were produced in the early 1960s by the Office of National Estimates, but the one memorandum that does exist was astonishingly inept about Israeli attitudes. The paper, entitled "Consequences of Israeli Acquisition of Nuclear Capability," was dated March 6,1963, and was made available nearly twenty years later at the John F. Kennedy Library without any deletions. The national estimate concluded that Israel, once having attained a nuclear capability, "would use all the means at its command to persuade the U.S. to acquiesce in, and even to support, its possession. . . . Israel could be expected to use the argument that this possession entitled it to participate in all international negotiations respecting nuclear questions and disarmament." The staggering flaw in the CIA analysis was its basic assumption: that Israel would make public or otherwise let its nuclear capability become officially known. The reality was precisely the opposite: Israel had no intention of going public with the bomb in fear of American and worldwide Jewish disapproval that would result in international reprobation and diminished financial support from the Diaspora.
Such flawed intelligence analyses went a long way toward keeping the men at the top officially ignorant of what no one wanted to know. In public, the Johnson administration, as were its predecessors, was firmly opposed to the spread of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world; official acknowledgment of an Israeli bomb would have presented Washington with an unwanted dilemma—either sanction Israel or be accused of a nuclear double standard.
Israel was not considered a nuclear weapons state on October 18,1964, when China exploded its long-awaited first nuclear bomb. President Johnson, three weeks away from his overwhelming election triumph over Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate, reaffirmed his commitment to nonproliferation in a nationally televised speech: "Until this week, only four powers [the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France] had entered the dangerous world of nuclear explosions. Whatever their differences, all four are sober and serious states, with long experience as major powers in the modern world. Communist China has no such experience. . . . It's expensive and demanding effort tempts other states to equal folly," the President said. "Nuclear spread is dangerous to all mankind. . . . We must continue to work against it, and we will."*
*Johnson also reassured the nation that his administration had not been surprised by the Chinese test. The President perhaps did not know it at the time of his talk, but the American intelligence community was aghast to learn from air sampling that the Chinese bomb had been fueled by enriched uranium, and not, as predicted by the CIA, by far-easier-to-produce plutonium. The American guess had been that China would chemically reprocess plutonium from the spent uranium rods in a reactor, as at Dimona. Confronted with evidence to the contrary, some in the CIA believed that China might have stolen or otherwise misappropriated the enriched uranium for its bomb.
The President may have believed his impassioned words, but not all of his senior advisers did. Six weeks later, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk discussed what they considered the administration's real policy options at a secret meeting on nonproliferation. Among those taking careful notes was Glenn T. Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who recounted the session in his little-noted 1987 memoir, Stemming the Tide:
"Rusk said he thought a basic question was whether we really should have a nonproliferation policy prescribing that no countries beyond the present five might acquire nuclear weapons. Were we clear that this should be a major objective of U.S. policy? For example, might we not want to be in a position where India or Japan would be able to respond with nuclear weapons to a Chinese threat? Rusk mentioned the possibility of having an Asian group of nuclear weapons countries, pointing out that the real issue was among Asian countries and not between northern countries and the Asians.
"McNamara thought it would take decades for India or Japan to have any appreciable deterrent. Nevertheless, he thought the question Rusk had raised should be studied. He pointed out that adoption of a nonproliferation policy by the United States might require us to guarantee the security of nations that renounced nuclear weapons.
"I [Seaborg] expressed doubt that a policy condoning further proliferation should be considered, saying that, once a process of making exceptions was started, we would lose control and that this would inevitably lead to serious trouble. . . .
"Bundy warned about the need to keep very quiet the fact that we were discussing the basic questions of whether U.S. policy should be nonproliferation, because everyone assumed that this was our policy. Any intimation to the contrary would be very disturbing throughout the world. McNamara added that we had to the stop the leaks that come out of meetings like this. He agreed with Bundy that the fact that the U.S. commitment to non-proliferation was being questioned simply must not be allowed to leak."*
*Rusk carried his fight to other bureaucratic forums, with the focus on a nuclear India. Daniel Ellsberg recalled being told by his Pentagon superiors after the Chinese test in 1964 that Rusk's position was that "India needed a nuclear weapon as a deterrent and there was no reason for them not to have it." Rusk's basic approach, Ellsberg added, was "Why shouldn't our friends have nuclear weapons now that our enemies have them?" It should be noted that there was no mention of this extraordinary debate in McGeorge Bundy's seemingly comprehensive history of the atom bomb, Danger and Survival, published in 1988. India's drive for the bomb, wrote Bundy, "remains a doubtful prize in that something about this apocalyptically destructive standard of greatness is not truly Indian." Bundy could have added that there were a few Americans in high Washington positions in 1964 who had no doubt then that India's desire for the bomb was quite truly Indian.
One senior American who resisted the persuasive talk about expanding the nuclear club was John McCone, the increasingly frustrated CIA director. McCone sorely felt the loss of John Kennedy; his relationship with Lyndon Johnson was much less intimate and his advice not always welcome. McCone's solution to the Chinese bomb (and to the problems with North Vietnam) was to send in the Air Force. "McCone just raised hell" about the Chinese bomb, recalled Walt Elder. "He wanted permission to fly U-2S over the test site and was turned down." The CIA director wasn't daunted: he next floated "the idea of what if we got in and took out the Chinese capability?" Daniel Ellsberg recalled similar talk at high levels in the Pentagon: "We were saying, in essence, that if we could have stopped the Russian bomb, we would have saved the world a lot of trouble. It's too bad the Soviets got the bomb." One thought was to use unmarked bombers to strike at the Chinese, thus avoiding identification. Cooler heads prevailed, Ellsberg recalled: "The mission just looked too big to be plausibly denied."
McCone resigned as CIA director in 1965, despite his support for Johnson's continuing escalations in Vietnam. He explained to a colleague: "When I cannot get the President to read my reports, then it's time to go." McCone knew that Floyd Culler's inspections were accomplishing little; he also understood what Israel's continuing refusal to permit full-fledged international inspections meant. But, said Elder, the CIA director found that Johnson "didn't understand the implications" of the inspection issue and didn't want to hear about it. By the end of McCone's tenure, Elder added, he believed Lyndon Johnson as President had three basic concerns: "His standing in polls. 'Can I sell it to Congress?' And 'How can I get out of Vietnam?' "
There was yet another concern: Johnson's understanding that good nonproliferation policies made for bad politics. The President needed no one to remind him that any serious move to squeeze the Israelis on their nuclear weapons program would lead to a firestorm of protest from American Jews, many of whose leaders had consistently supported his presidency and the Vietnam War. He got another reminder of the political danger of nonproliferation from a special panel on that subject he convened a few weeks after the Chinese test. The distinguished panel, headed by Roswell L. Gilpatric, who had served John Kennedy as deputy secretary of defense, returned on January 21, 1965—the day after Johnson's inauguration—with a report that amounted to an indictment of past and present policy.* It warned that the world was "fast approaching a point of no return" in opportunities for controlling the spread of nuclear weapons and urged the President, "as a matter of great urgency, to substantially increase the scope and intensity of our effort if we are to have any hope of success." The report also advocated the establishment of nuclear-free zones in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, including Israel and Egypt. Most significantly, it suggested that the President should reconsider—in terms of nonproliferation—a controversial American plan to create a multilateral force (MLF) that would give NATO members, including the West Germans, a joint finger on the nuclear trigger. The raising of any question about the MLF issue was especially sensitive, for the Soviet Union was insisting that any proposed nonproliferation treaty prohibit a separate European nuclear force, which it viewed as nothing more than a vehicle for providing the West Germans with the bomb.
* Panel members included the retired Allen Dulles, the former secretary of state Dean Acheson, the former defense secretary Robert A. Lovett, the former White House science adviser George B. Kistiakowsky, and IBM chairman Arthur K. Watson.
At a White House meeting with the President, individual members of the panel listed a sweeping series of priorities— including encouraging France to turn its force defrappe into a NATO nuclear missile battery—that prompted the President to note caustically, according to Glenn Seaborg, that implementation of the committee's report would be "a very pleasant undertaking." Johnson and his aides at the meeting, who included McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk, warned Gilpatric and the committee members not to discuss the report with any outsiders or even to acknowledge that a written document had been presented to the White House (the Gilpatric report remains highly classified today). Seaborg, who attended the meeting, noted in his memoir that Rusk, when asked by the President for his views, depicted the report as being "as explosive as a nuclear weapon." Its premature release, Rusk added, "could start the ball rolling in an undesirable manner"—in terms of the MLF and future negotiations on a nonprolifera tion treaty. The report went nowhere, despite the President's promise of further consultations with Gilpatric.
Political disaster, from the White House's point of view, struck in June, when newly elected Senator Robert Kennedy based his maiden Senate floor speech on many of the until then unknown and ignored recommendations of Gilpatric's panel. Kennedy, often invoking his dead brother, urged the President to rise above the immediate issues and begin dealing with nu clear proliferation: "Upon the success of this effort depends the only future our children will have. The need to halt the spread of nuclear weapons must be a central priority of American policy." Kennedy specifically called for Johnson to immediately open worldwide negotiations for a comprehensive test ban treaty; such talks, he proposed, should include Communist China, one of North Vietnam's allies, and he indirectly criti cized Johnson for his preoccupation with Vietnam by stating: "We cannot allow the demands of day-to-day policy to obstruct our efforts to solve the problems of nuclear spread. We cannot wait for peace in the Southeast—which will not come until nuclear weapons spread beyond recall."* Johnson, of course, was made apoplectic by what he was convinced was Gilpatric's leaking of the report to Kennedy and responded by deleting material on nonproliferation from a speech he was scheduled to deliver the day after the Kennedy speech. Over the next months, Glenn Seaborg recalled, there was nothing more heard about the Gilpatric report from the White House, and nonproliferation continued to be treated as a topic fit only for the arms controllers in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), whose advice—no matter how prudent— rarely carried weight with the White House. President John son held out for two years before agreeing in secret talks with the Soviets to drop the MLF, clearing the way for the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty and giving the government's arms controllers an important victory.
*Kennedy also warned that Israel and India "already possess weapons-grade fissionable material, and could fabricate an atomic device within a few months." Further Israeli progress on the bomb, he added, "would certainly impel the Egyptians to intensify their present efforts." The senator's remarks caused a sensation in Israel, but were little noted elsewhere. The New York Times's page-one account of the Kennedy speech included no mention of Israel.
In the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union had begun to step up its military and economic aid programs in the Middle East, and Israel was increasingly seen by the Johnson White House as a regional American bulwark. It was inevitable that high-level interest in the perennial and profitless issue of international inspection for Dimona began to wane in 1967—as the A-4E Skyhawks began arriving in Israel, as the routine Floyd Culler inspections proceeded, and as America got more and more enmeshed in the Southeast Asian war.
There were strong public clues, nonetheless, that Israel never stopped planning to build its bombs. In mid-1966, the Israeli government delayed in accepting nearly $60 million in possible American aid for the construction of a much-needed nuclear desalinization and power plant because the aid was contingent on an Israeli commitment to permit IAEA inspection of Dimona. Johnson and Eshkol had announced a preliminary agreement to build the plant in 1964, amid much fanfare, and subsequent studies showed the facility could produce two hundred megawatts of power and 100 million gallons of de salted water daily. Continued American insistence on IAEA inspections made the Israelis walk away, without any explicit explanation, from the project. The proposed desalinization plant was studied for the next decade, but the American conditions were never accepted, and the plant was never built. The pro-nuclear advocates in the Rafi Party, including Peres and Bergmann, urged Israel to refuse American aid for the plant and publicly accused the United States of attempting to violate Israeli sovereignty by linking its support to Dimona's IAEA inspection.
Privately, Peres and Bergmann—still influential, although out of office—suspected that the United States had a hidden agenda in its support of the nuclear desalinization plant: to divert Israeli funds, manpower, and resources from Israel's nuclear arsenal, in the hope that Israel would at some point be forced to make a choice between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.
A second clue came in July 1966, during a debate in the Knesset on the most recent inspection of Dimona by Floyd Culler, whose conclusion—that there was still no evidence of a bomb facility—had again been made available by American officials to John Finney of the New York Times and, so some Israelis thought, also to Egypt. During the debate, Shimon Peres[liar D.C] told of his recent participation at an international conference on nuclear weapons where, he said, the Middle East was discussed: "I found that there is unfortunately no possibility of limiting the spread of nuclear weapons in the near future—not because of Israel, but because big powers are not agreeing among themselves. ... I was glad to discover that most experts on the subject do not believe it possible to envisage nuclear disarmament for the Middle East in isolation from the conventional arms race. . . ."* Peres was, in essence, defending Israel's decision not to give in to Washington's IAEA inspection demands on the ground that the Arabs had conventional superiority. The same argument—Warsaw Pact tank and troop superiority —had been used a few years earlier by the United States and its allies to justify the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe.
*Peres misstated the conference's findings. His Knesset statement was initially reported in Israel and Nuclear Weapons, by Fuad Jabber, published in 1971 by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. Jabber wrote that the conference, known as the International Assembly on Nuclear Weapons and sponsored in part by the IISS, had, in fact, issued a call for "a serious effort" to negotiate a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The assembly took place June 23-26, 1966, in Toronto, Canada.
By the late 1960s, much of the United States' primary analysis of nuclear intelligence had been shifted from the CIA to the design and engineering laboratories for nuclear weapons at Los Alamos and Sandia and, later, Livermore, where intelligence units dealing with the Soviet Union and China had been set up after World War II. The growing danger of proliferation be came starkly clear during the Kennedy administration, when a group of scientists awaiting clearance before beginning work at Los Alamos successfully designed a nuclear bomb from the open literature. The laboratories' primary targets continued to be the reactors and research centers in the Soviet Union and China, but the intelligence units eventually began monitoring the transfer of nuclear technology and those countries that were viewed as "nth" nations, as near-nuclear countries came to be known. "We had tremendous data" that went beyond satellite photography and intercepted communications, a closely involved official said. "We had people who had worked inside plants in the USSR and China. We were even able to do mock-ups of their weapons system—go from the warhead back through the plant. As part of the drill, I was required to summarize who's got the bomb and who was next, in near-term capability." Israel was always at the top of his list, the official recalled, followed by South Africa. "We were watching the relationship between France and Israel and between Israel and South Africa," he added. "Those were the links."
His assignment also included monitoring the flow of uranium ore into Israel from supplier nations such as Argentina and South Africa. Such ore, known as yellowcake, served as the raw fuel for the heavy-water reactor at Dimona; by the mid-1960s, its sale was a highly competitive and profitable business whose transfer in lots under ten tons was not monitored by the IAEA in Vienna. The first known shipment of ore from South Africa to Israel had arrived in 1963 and, since it totaled ten tons, was duly reported. In subsequent years, however, clandestine shipments of South African yellowcake began to arrive at Dimona, often escorted by a special operations unit of the Israeli Defense Force. Israel's goal was to prevent outsiders from learning that the reactor was operating at two to three times greater capacity than publicly acknowledged, utilizing that much more uranium ore—and therefore capable of reprocessing greater amounts of plutonium. At least some of those later clandestine shipments from South Africa became known in the late 1960s to the intelligence officers in Los Alamos and Sandia, who were carefully watching—by satellites and other means— most of the major uranium mines in the world. But after Israel's overwhelming victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, the intelligence about Dimona and its nuclear potential became highly compartmentalized, as the White House decided to side more openly with Israel in the Middle East, and thus much harder to access. "We knew about the yellowcake," the official recalled, "but we weren't allowed to keep a file on it. It simply wasn't part of the record. Anytime we began to follow it, somebody in the system would say, 'That's not relevant.'" [So basically our government for 55 years has just watched,at least what they caught,what concerns me given how busy these little beavers can be,just how many 'nukes' do you think these folks have built while Washington watched all these years?Too Many,does Washington know where Israels nukes are pointed,does Washington know if some are in place,and they are not telling us? I see bomb shelters being back in vogue,these folks are so messing with fire and willing to set back humanity thousands of years in evolution.D.C]
The U-2 was still flying, but Lundahl and Brugioni had gone on to new assignments in photo interpretation and were no longer directly involved in Israeli nuclear matters. Far more intelligence was being collected by America's corona and gambit satellite systems, which, after much trial and error, had by the mid-1960s begun consistently to produce high-resolution photography from their orbital perches in outer space. Any interesting intelligence on Israel was now being routed to Livermore and Los Alamos through the CIA's Office of Science and Technology, headed by Carl E. Duckett, to which Lundahl's National Photo Interpretation Center was now reporting.
Duckett, a college dropout, had been recruited to the Agency
in 1963 from the Army's Missile Command headquarters at the
Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. As a civilian Army expert on
Soviet missile systems, he had been regularly consulted in prior
years by Lundahl and Brugioni on U-2 photo intelligence, but
had been told nothing about the findings on Dimona. That
process reversed once Duckett joined the CIA, where he got his
own special access to the Israeli intelligence. In the beginning,
Brugioni recalled, there were long meetings in the late after
noon, usually over a few drinks, at which Duckett and his colleagues would openly discuss the day's findings. Eventually
those faded away. Duckett was a quick study, Brugioni said:
"By the mid-1960s, it was all his baby." Lundahl and Brugioni
soon came to understand that Duckett was no longer sharing
all of his information about the Israeli bomb—the U-2's spy
flights were no longer as important, and there was no longer
any need for them to know. It was the end of an era.
The screening out of Lundahl and Brugioni was perhaps more of a loss than Duckett and his colleagues in the Office of Science and Technology could understand: those two were the institutional memory of the U-2 intelligence on Dimona—almost none of which had been reduced to writing prior to 1960. "Duckett knew very little about what went on before," Brugioni said. "He never asked me and I never told him. Lundahl always said, 'This is very, very sensitive.'" In subsequent years, even the most senior officials of the American government would learn little about the pre-1960 U-2 flights over Dimona; the lack of written history meant that there was nothing in the files. It was the first of many disconnects that would come to dominate the processing of U.S. intelligence on Dimona.
Walworth Barbour, the American ambassador to
Israel, was a compelling presence to the Israelis—a tall, shy,
hugely overweight diplomat with a gluttonous appetite and
acute emphysema. He constantly sprayed his throat with a vaporizer, wore yellowing white suits with brown-and-white
shoes, and walked with a shambling gait, an outsized Sydney
Greenstreet. Barbour spoke no Hebrew and by the end of
his stay in Israel still had little to do with the people of the
country, rarely attending educational, cultural, or social
events. And yet he was beloved by Israel's leadership, and had
been since his appointment in 1961 by John F. Kennedy; he
remained on the job for the next twelve years. Only three
American ambassadors ever served longer in one post.* A life
long bachelor, Barbour retired quietly in 1973, along with his
spinster sister, to the family home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, taking with him an extensive knowledge of Israel's nuclear capability.
*The State Department's historical office lists George P. Marsh, minister to Italy from 1861 to 1882; Edwin V. Morgan, ambassador to Brazil from 1912 to 1933; and Claude G. Bowers, ambassador to Chile from 1939 to 1953.
Barbour's long assignment as ambassador was not a testament to his intelligence and competence, which were exceptional, but to his understanding of when and when not to accept every Israeli assertion at face value and his willingness to operate the American embassy as a subsidiary, if necessary, of the Israeli foreign ministry. The ambassador often reminded his questioning subordinates that he was not a servant of the Department of State or its secretary, but a President's man with a personal mandate in an important embassy—a functionary who would stand aside when ordered to do so, and permit the White House and the Israeli ambassador to Washington to run the real policy behind his back.
A graduate of Exeter and Harvard, Barbour was unfailingly courteous and correct to his subordinates, and in his first six years as ambassador, when some of the most accurate reporting on Dimona was forwarded to Washington, rarely interfered with the job of those working in his embassy. But the field reports had no impact; they simply disappeared into the bureaucratic maze. Barbour did nothing to keep them alive, and after the 1967 Six-Day War ordered his staff—over the objection of one key aide—to stop reporting on nuclear weapons in Israel. Barbour's assignment at that moment was to insulate Lyndon Johnson and his men from those facts that would compel action, and he did his President's bidding. He was the best, and the worst, of American diplomacy.
Barbour's important role in the history of U.S.-Israeli relations—and his knowledge of Israel's nuclear capability—was hidden by his insistence on a low profile. He was a virtual nonperson to the American correspondents assigned to Israel; he rarely met with them, unlike most ambassadors, and he never spoke on the record. His name occurs only six times in the New York Times Index for the years 1961 to 1966, a period of political turmoil in which the United States, after intense diplomatic activity, emerged as Israel's chief arms supplier. His reclusiveness was legendary in his embassy, a five-story building located near the beach at Tel Aviv. Barbour's daily pattern was inviolate, and interrupted only by international crises or the visits of the traveling secretary of state and senior White House advisers: he was chauffeured to the embassy's basement garage around nine in the morning, rode an elevator to his top floor office, stayed there until noon, rode the elevator down to the garage, and returned home. There were afternoon rounds of golf, weather permitting, dips in his pool, and an occasional evening of bridge. When Barbour did entertain—he did so less frequently over the years—his guests often included prominent visiting Jews, such as Abe Feinberg and Victor Rothschild of London.* Such events, Barbour once explained to William N. Dale, who arrived in 1964 as deputy chief of mission, were his way of fulfilling a direct assignment from Lyndon Johnson: "I'm here under orders from Johnson, who told me, 'I don't care a thing about what happens to Israel, but your job is to keep the Jews off my back.' Everything I do is designed to keep Jews off the President's back," Barbour added. "To keep them happy." He told another newcomer to the embassy, upon being asked why he did not respond to messages from the State Department, "I go back to Washington every year to see the President and I get my orders directly from him—not from those pipsqueaks [at State]." Barbour also was phobic about using a newly installed State Department telephone scrambler system, designed to protect conversations from being intercepted. "If they can talk to you over a secure telephone line," he told an aide, "then you have to do what they want." He repeatedly urged Bill Dale to send embassy reports by mail, especially if the intelligence was adverse to Israeli interests, because "Israel has friends all over the State Department" and would intercept the information.
*His sister, Ellen, served as embassy hostess during her extended annual visits to Israel. Barbour kept photographs of Ellen and one other woman on his desk; a personal aide recalled Barbour explaining, when queried, that the other woman was someone he'd known in Cairo, where he was serving as political officer during World War II. "What happened to her?""I asked her to marry me and she said no," Barbour replied. The young aide was astonished: "She said no and he kept her picture there twenty years later."
Most junior members of the embassy staff had no contact
with the ambassador and could go for months or longer with
out even seeing him; Barbour's weekly staff meetings were only
for senior subordinates. One personal aide recalled being asked
by Barbour in 1967, six years after he became ambassador,
whether it was possible to cash a check in the embassy. "He
had never been on the second floor," the aide added, where the
cashier's office was located. Still, many subordinates viewed
him with awe. "He was the finest man I've ever known in the
government," said John L. Hadden, who served as CIA station
chief in Tel Aviv in the mid-1960s. "He was a real professional.
He was Boston Back Bay and friendship was not in the books
with him. Respect is a better word. He didn't bother with friends." Barbour's closest associates were not his fellow Americans, but senior officials of the Israeli government, including
Golda Meir, who became prime minister in 1969, and Major
General Aharon Yariv, director of military intelligence from
1964 to 1972.
Of course, no senior Israeli official would talk to an outsider about nuclear weapons, and Barbour, in the end, shared that taboo.
Yet it was Barbour's men who reported before the June 1967 war that Israel had completed its basic weapons design and was capable of manufacturing warheads for deployment on missiles. Israel also may have had a crudely manufactured bomb or two ready to go, but—as the embassy could not know—no decision had been made by Prime Minister Eshkol to begin mass production.
Spying on Dimona was not the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency, as in most foreign countries, but left to the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy attaches assigned to the embassy; the Agency's espionage functions included the monitoring of Soviet activities and the providing of special cameras, film, and free bottles of wine to any officer who wanted to picnic on the weekend with his family in the Negev.
The 1963 restrictions on the CIA's operations inside Israel, American officials acknowledged, were a sop aimed at avoiding any undue embarrassment for the Israeli government, whose extensive penetration of the United States government needed to be curbed. "We were helpful to the Israelis" in terms of supplying essential intelligence, explains a senior American diplomat, "but we knew that if we weren't—they'd get it anyway." The few espionage attempts organized by the CIA before 1963 had gone nowhere, in part because of the nature of Israel's close knit society but also because of Israel's ability to monitor the activities of the Americans assigned to Israel.
All of the U.S. embassy contacts with Israeli citizens and government officials were—and continue to be—funneled through a special liaison office of the Israeli foreign ministry. It was understood that American intelligence and military officials who tried to evade the liaison system would be carefully watched. Given the difficulty of operating clandestinely inside Israel, the function of the CIA station chief was reduced to writing political assessments and staying in close touch with his counterparts in Mossad and in military intelligence, Aman. Israel, with its steady stream of Soviet and Eastern European Jewish refugees, remained the most important country for collecting intelligence on the Soviet Union, but those operations were left to James Angleton and his men in Washington. It was sometimes hard for a newcomer, like John McCone, to keep things straight.
McCone was still eager to have his agency prove what he knew to be true: that a chemical reprocessing plant did exist under ground at Dimona. Peter C. Jessup, the CIA station chief in the early 1960s, recalled being peremptorily ordered to fly to Rome early in McCone's tenure, where the director—then on a grand tour of CIA facilities in Europe—was scheduled to see the pope. The trip, in the days before jet travel, had taken many hours, but McCone had only a moment to spare. "He was in a great hurry," Jessup recalled, "and told me that President Kennedy thinks the most serious problem facing us is the proliferation of nuclear weapons." McCone wanted the questions about Israel put to rest, and urged the station chief to put "his staff" to work. At the time, the bemused Jessup added, his "staff" at the CIA station consisted of two aides.
Despite the difficulties, the men in the U.S. embassy wanting, like most people, to do their job as well as possible—kept on trying to find out what they could about Dimona. Getting close was fun and a little dangerous—one American officer was chastised by Barbour after being caught by the Israelis with a butterfly net outside Dimona's barbed-wire fence—but occasionally added something useful to the intelligence. Colonel Carmelo V. Alba was the U.S. Army's military attache to Israel in the mid-1960s and, like the other attaches from Western embassies, spent many weekends cruising in the Negev with his long-range telescopic camera. "All I was doing was taking pictures," Alba recalled. He did so at least once a month, shipping the film off to Washington, with no reaction—until one of his photographs showed "evidence of activity at Dimona. Smoke was coming out of the dome," Alba added. "Finally, the CIA got excited."
Dimona had gone critical, and the embassy continued its watch. John Hadden, who began his tour as CIA station chief in 1963, sent Alba one weekend to Beersheba to do a census of French names on the mailboxes of the city's apartment complexes.* A constant goal was to try to determine who was doing what at Dimona. Barbour did not interfere with the hunt; William Dale, as the second-highest-ranking American diplomat, was given wide latitude in the day-to-day management of the embassy, and he encouraged his staff to find out what it could. The embassy's scientific attache was a physicist named Robert T. Webber, who shared Dale's interest in Dimona. Webber, who had earned a doctorate in physics at Yale University, worked closely with John Hadden—in clear violation of a State Department decree forbidding scientific attaches to engage in intelligence work.** Webber also relied on the intelligence gathered by Mel Alba and encouraged the Army colonel to collaborate with his British and Canadian counterparts in collecting more.
* Alba got Hadden in trouble with the Israeli foreign office by inadvertently putting Hadden's American license plates on a jeep before taking one of his weekend jaunts to the Negev. All diplomatic cars in Israel were required to have special license plates, and the embassy mechanics routinely removed the American license plates from the private cars of newly arrived diplomatic personnel and placed them on the walls for decoration. Alba had asked the embassy car pool for a black jeep. It arrived with no plates, and the colonel, in a hurry, ordered the mechanic to grab a set at random from the walls and throw them on. The plates turned out to be Hadden's. The jeep, of course, was monitored by the Israelis, leading to a stiff protest: why was the CIA station chief sneaking around in the Negev?
** "We were very strict," recalled Herman Pollack, then the director of the State Department Bureau of International Scientific and Technological Affairs. "No intelligence work by science attaches. He was supposed to keep his hands very clean." Had den, who retired from the Agency a few years after returning from Israel, acknowledged with a laugh that he "never paid any attention to organizational charts and titles. Life seemed to be better run if people worked together to accomplish joint goals that made sense."
It was a hunt, and the men in the embassy got a break some time in 1966 from an unlikely source—an American Jew living in Israel. Dale and the rest of the embassy staff stayed on good terms—as American diplomats do all over the world—with the many American citizens who chose to live abroad. Americans in Israel were routinely invited to embassy parties and picnics,as well as to screenings of American movies. Dale and his wife had become especially friendly with Dr. Max Ben, a Princeton trained pharmacologist who was helping the Israelis set up a pharmacology institute under United Nations auspices. "One morning," Dale recalled, "Max came into the embassy and said, 'I have a story to tell you. I've been down to Dimona and I was shown the nuclear facilities. I'm convinced that Israel is making nuclear warheads.'" Ben, contacted later, vividly recalled his trip to Dimona. He had become a close friend and confidant of Ernst Bergmann's while in Israel, and it was that friendship, he claimed, that led to the invitation to take a firsthand look at the reactor. Though he had studied physics at Princeton, Ben found the visit to be "exciting" but confusing: "A lot of it I didn't understand." What troubled him, however, was not any concern about proliferation, but his belief that the United States was not helping Israel in its serious pursuit of the bomb: "I thought we ought to do something about it—to give them an assist." He talked to Dale and then agreed to discuss what he knew on a more sophisticated level with Bob Webber. Dale arranged the meeting. Ben explained years later that his purpose in taking up the issue with Dale and Webber had not been to inform on Israel's nuclear progress, as Dale obviously assumed, but to try to pass word of the accomplishments at Dimona to Washington. "My goal," he recalled, "was to see how the U.S. could help Israel. I tried to walk a line." [You gave them all the help they needed,by just standing there doing nothing but watch them D.C]
Dale felt he had enough to report. He brought Webber and others into the embassy's most secure room—a lead-sealed facility known as the "bubble"—and the group drafted a highly classified dispatch to Washington summarizing their intelligence. Its essential message, Dale recalled, was: "Israel is getting ready to start putting warheads into missiles so they can be quickly assembled into weapons for delivery by plane." The paper had to be approved by the ambassador, who was approached with trepidation. "Barbour harrumphed," Dale recalled, "and said, 'Well, I suppose it's time. Go ahead, they deserve it. Let it go.' " Dale forwarded it with a sense of accomplishment. It was, Dale thought, the embassy's most definitive report by far on Dimona.
"So what happened?" asked Dale. "Not a damn thing. Nobody responded." Webber eventually was replaced as science attache by someone much less interested in Dimona, and Colonel Alba was reassigned as an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Adding to the frustration, Dale said, was the fact that more revealing information about Israeli intentions was provided early the next year by another American Jew. The embassy was entertaining a group of American government officials who were en route from India after attending a regional meeting of American economic and commercial attaches. There was a party set up in Tel Aviv with Israeli trade officials. On the next day, Eugene M. Braderman, then a deputy assistant secretary of state for commercial affairs, approached Dale, "looking ashen. He said, 'One of the Israelis at the party told me that my primary duty, as an American Jew, was to help the United States government accept Israeli nuclear weapons.' Braderman was very agitated," Dale added. "He said to me: I'm an American first, not a Jew first.' He told me to do whatever was right with the information."* By that point, Dale understood that Braderman's story had nowhere to go. "I didn't do anything with it," he said. "I knew it'd not do any good."
*Braderman, now retired and living in Washington, recalled the 1967 visit to Israel and said it was "possible that I'd said something like that" to Bill Dale. He added that Dale's recollection certainly reflected his general view of the issue of Jewish loyalty.
There were other issues, of course, for the embassy. Israel decided in early June 1967 to preempt the increasing Arab buildup in the Sinai and go to war. A year of steady tension had culminated two weeks before in an Egyptian blockade of the Israeli port city of Elat. An increasingly confident Nasser had sent his troops to occupy Sharm el Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, blocking the access of Israeli shipping to the Strait of Tiran, which leads from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba and then to Elat. Israel considered the Egyptian move to be an act of war, but —under pressure from the Johnson administration not to attack—the Eshkol government wavered. The prime minister, confronted by a public that wanted to initiate war with the Arabs, was viciously criticized for his indecisiveness and lack of military experience. To maintain political control—intelligence reports reached the White House of military coup plotting—Eshkol was forced in late May to turn to his political enemies, including Moshe Dayan and Menachem Begin, and form a government of national unity. For Begin, now a minister without portfolio, the appointment meant that he was serving in the Israeli government for the first time in his political career. Dayan's nomination as defense minister had to be much more difficult for Eshkol; it amounted, in essence, to an acknowledgment that he was unable to lead the nation in war time. Dayan, with his romantic image, was as admired among the population as the hesitating Eshkol was not. Dayan came to the defense portfolio with enormous political strength, raising the possibility that the hard-line pro-nuclear Rafi Party of David Ben-Gurion would once again be dominant in Israeli military affairs.
The army, led by Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, was ready. Israel struck first on June 5 and achieved its stunning victory in six days, humiliating the Soviet-supplied Arabs and seizing Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, Jordan's West Bank, and Syria's Golan Heights, and, most stirring of all, fulfilling a two-thousand-year-old dream by bringing the Old City of Jerusalem under Jewish control. But Israel suddenly found itself in control of one million more Palestinians.
Wally Barbour spent much of the war in the Israeli war room, and he shared the jubilation throughout the nation—and in much of America—over the stunning Israeli victory. There was no pretense of objectivity in his reporting to Washington; his views and those of the Israeli leadership were identical. For example, Barbour urged that Washington downplay the Israeli Air Force's rocket and strafing attack on the USS Liberty, a naval intelligence ship, on the third day of the war. The Liberty, flying the American flag, had been monitoring Middle East communications traffic in international waters off the coast of Israel and had been identified as an American ship before the attack, which resulted in a death toll of thirty-four with 171 men wounded. The incident triggered resentment throughout the United States government. Barbour, however, was anything but angered. A declassified cable on file in the LBJ Library shows that hours after the incident he reported that Israel did not intend to admit to the incident and added: "Urge strongly that we too avoid publicity. Liberty's proximity to scene could feed Arab suspicions of U.S.-Israel collusion. . . . Israelis obviously shocked by error and tender sincere apologies."*
*The Johnson Library documents also show that Clark Clifford, a key presidential adviser and later secretary of defense, complained about the government's initially tepid response at a National Security Council meeting the next day: "My concern is that we're not tough enough. Handle as if Arabs or USSR had done it." It was "inconceivable," Clifford added, according to the NSC notes, that Israel destroyed the Liberty by error, as it claimed.
At war's end, Bill Dale was summoned by Barbour and told
of a change in policy regarding the collection of intelligence
about Dimona. Dale was to inform the embassy's military attaches, Barbour said, that they were no longer to report on
Dimona and no longer to undercut the Israelis by conducting
operations with their British or Canadian counterparts. "Israel
is going to be our main ally," Barbour told Dale, "and we can't
dilute it by working with others." There was a second message,
Dale recalled: "Barbour said, 'Arab oil is not as important as
Israel is to us. Therefore, I'm going to side with Israel in all of
my reporting.' And maybe he was right," added Dale. "From
that time on, it was a different Wally Barbour."**
** It was a different CIA, too. A former senior intelligence officer recalled that "a big change took place" inside the Agency after the Six-Day War. "All of a sudden a lot of people were saying the Israelis were wonderful," the former official added. "Israeli intelligence became untouchable, and the professional suspicion you should have about another intelligence service—even a friendly one—disappeared." This became especially true in the Nixon administration; Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser, became renowned inside the CIA for preferring Mossad's intelligence assessments on the Middle East to those supplied by the Agency.
Dale objected to the policy change, "and our relationship
soured." Barbour subsequently attempted to amend a favorable
fitness report he had turned in on Dale's behalf; Dale remains
convinced that his disagreement over Dimona set back his career (he was named ambassador to the Central African Republic in 1973 and retired from the Foreign Service in 1975). Dale
did, however, file one more embassy intelligence report on
Dimona. In the fall of 1967, Henry A. Kissinger, then a Harvard University professor and a consultant on Vietnam to the
Johnson administration, showed up in Tel Aviv to teach for a
week at the Israeli Defense College. At the end of the course, Kissinger went to Dale's office in the embassy and announced
that he needed to send an urgent, top-secret message to the
White House. "He wrote it in longhand," Dale recalled, "and
gave it to me to send." It was a warning about Dimona, and
Dale vividly recalled its conclusion: "As a result of my course
here, I am convinced Israel is making nuclear warheads." Dale
also vividly recalled a Kissinger warning to him: " 'I'll have
your ass if this gets out.' Those were my first words from Kissinger."
After leaving Israel, Dale gave a series of perfunctory end-of the-tour debriefings in Washington to W. Walt Rostow, John son's national security adviser, and other senior government officials; not surprisingly, he said, "Nobody asked me about the Israeli bomb." In his next post, with the State Department's Policy Planning Council, he again tried to raise questions about Dimona, with similar results. One of his early assignments on the council, the State Department's in-house think tank, was to do a paper on nonproliferation. He wanted to include a chapter on Dimona, but was refused permission to discuss that issue with members of Congress or members of the Atomic Energy Commission. When he protested, said Dale, a senior State Department official, declaring that the Israeli bomb "was the most sensitive foreign policy issue in the United States," threatened to discuss his conduct with the secretary of state. His final paper, Dale said, did not mention Dimona.
With Barbour staying on and on, the Israeli bomb disappeared after 1967 as a significant issue in the American embassy. Dimona became a non-place and the Israeli bomb a non-bomb. Sometime that year the Israelis invited Arnold Kramish, an American expert on nuclear fuel cycles, to visit the reactor. "I made a mistake," recalled Kramish, who was then visiting Israel as a fellow at London's International Institute of Strategic Studies. "I paid a courtesy call on Barbour. He said I couldn't go—it would imply U.S. recognition of Dimona." Kramish had read about the American inspections in the New York Times and raised the obvious argument: "I'm not even an official visitor." The ambassador didn't budge, and Kramish decided not to challenge his dubious theory: "I didn't go."
Joseph O. Zurhellen, Jr., Bill Dale's replacement as deputy chief of mission, followed the ambassador's cue and was also much less interested in the subject. "Barbour was not well versed in anything technical—words such as 'reprocessing plant,' et cetera," Zurhellen explained. "Of course, he knew something screwy had gone on in Dimona. The French had pulled wool over our eyes, and so had the Israelis." But, Zurhellen added, the embassy's view was that much of the international concern about Dimona had been deliberately fostered by Israel. "A strong element of their policy is to convince others they have the bomb. It's disinformation." Anyway, he added, "the nuclear issue was not on our mind. We had a war of attrition." Zurhellen was referring to the steadily escalating air and artillery battles in the late 1960s and early 1970s between Israel and Egypt, whose army and air force had been dramatically reinforced by the Soviet Union after the Six-Day War.
After the inauguration of President Richard M. Nixon in January 1969, Barbour was even less than uninterested in Dimona—he exorcised the issue. A senior American intelligence officer recalled summoning a group of staff aides to provide Barbour, then in Washington, with a special briefing on the Israeli nuclear weapons program. "Barbour listened to it all," said the intelligence official, "and then said, 'Gentlemen, I don't believe a word of it.' " The official was astonished: he had given the same briefing in Israel to Barbour without challenge a few months before. He privately took Barbour aside. "Mr. Ambassador," he recalled saying, "you know it's true." Barbour replied: "If I acknowledge this, then I have to go to the President. And if he admitted it, he'd have to do something about it. The President didn't send me there to give him problems. He does not want to be told any bad news."
Barbour had many good reasons for not wanting to tell President Nixon bad news. His emphysema was getting worse. He was increasingly phobic about death, Zurhellen said, and kept an oxygen tent near his bed. The ambassador also continued his easygoing work habits; Zurhellen recalled only two occasions in their five years together when Barbour stayed at the embassy after his usual noon departure time.
The overweight ambassador had a huge scare early in the Nixon presidency upon being informed that he had been selected to serve in the Foreign Service's most prestigious ambassadorial post—in Moscow. The appointment, as were all such assignments, was contingent upon medical approval, but, said Zurhellen, Barbour hadn't had a State Department physical in years, and knew he'd never pass one. "We'd finessed it by having a local Israeli physician write a note every two years saying, 'You're capable of carrying out your mission.' I drafted the answer, thanking State for its confidence, but saying that 'in seven years here I have carved out a unique situation.'" Barbour was allowed to stay on the job.
In 1970, Barbour made one of his rare public appearances, sharing a podium with Prime Minister Golda Meir at the opening of an American school in Tel Aviv. The ambassador congratulated Meir for attending and said, "I wish I knew how to influence the premier to do what I ask her to do." She replied: "I will now reveal the secret to you—you must only ask me to do what I want to do."
When it came to Dimona, Barbour did what Israel wanted— without asking. His support for Israel was profound and heart felt; nonetheless, many of his former colleagues in the Foreign Service were confounded and distressed when on April 3,1974, a year after retirement, he agreed to become a board member of the American branch of Bank Leumi, the Israeli state bank. There was nothing illegal in doing so, but many State Department officials consider such appointments to pose an obvious conflict of interest. Barbour, characteristically, couldn't have cared less about what his peers thought, and he remained on the board until his death.
Next
An Israeli Decision
Angleton did more than just collect information on American Jews. He also was a sponsor, through the chaos program, of a highly secret CIA operation involving the Agency's purchase of a Washington trash collection company. The firm, known in the CIA as a proprietary, had contracts to pick up garbage at various Third World embassies, including the Israeli embassy. Another of its stops was the downtown Washington offices of B'nai B'rith, the powerful Jewish social and volunteer organization with worldwide activities. The trash would be systematically sorted and analyzed for any possible intelligence.
Angleton's close personal ties with the Deshalit family and others in Israel made it inevitable that he would learn about the construction in the Negev. One senior official recalled that Angleton's first intelligence report on Israel's plans to build the bomb was filed routinely in the late 1950s, and not by backchannel, and thus could be made available to those who needed to know inside the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the unit responsible for clandestine action. "I have no idea who his sources were," the senior official said. "He probably never told the director." Over the next few years Angleton continued to produce intelligence on Dimona, also based on information supplied by his personal contacts, but never learned—or, at least, never reported—the extent to which Israel was deceiving Washington about its nuclear weapons progress.
Angleton, of course, had been given periodic briefings in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Lundahl or Brugioni on the intelligence collected by the U-2 overflights of the Negev, but never evinced much interest. His forte was human intelligence, or humint, as the intelligence community calls it, and not technical intelligence, such as the U-2 imagery. "He was a real funny guy," Brugioni recalled. "I'd meet with him, brief him; he'd ask a few questions, you'd leave—and never know what he's holding. Sometimes he'd have his office real dark and have a light only on you. He was a real spook."
For all of his mystique and freedom to operate, Angleton, too, was stymied by the Israeli bomb. His reports on Dimona, buttressed by the U-2 data, did not even result in an official CIA estimate that Israel was going nuclear. Such formal estimates, which are distributed to the President and other key government officials, were the responsibility of analysts in the CIA's Office of National Estimates (ONE). "Jim kept saying, 'Yes, they've got it,' and the analysts would say, 'I don't believe it,' " one former intelligence official recalled. The analysts simply did not think Angleton's humint sources were reliable, the official said, adding that tension and second-guessing over human intelligence sources were a way of life in the CIA. By 1965, an extensive dossier of humint reports on Dimona had built up, the official said, and the nuclear issue was again raised with the ONE analysts: "They told me that even if Israel did have the bomb, they'd never use it."
The intelligence official, recalling the issue in an interview, got angry again at the analysts: "They were so stupid. You'd have to put the bomb under their noses before they'd believe it. They didn't have any understanding of Israel; didn't know what made them think. They were so stupid."
It is not known how many CIA analyses on the Israeli bomb were produced in the early 1960s by the Office of National Estimates, but the one memorandum that does exist was astonishingly inept about Israeli attitudes. The paper, entitled "Consequences of Israeli Acquisition of Nuclear Capability," was dated March 6,1963, and was made available nearly twenty years later at the John F. Kennedy Library without any deletions. The national estimate concluded that Israel, once having attained a nuclear capability, "would use all the means at its command to persuade the U.S. to acquiesce in, and even to support, its possession. . . . Israel could be expected to use the argument that this possession entitled it to participate in all international negotiations respecting nuclear questions and disarmament." The staggering flaw in the CIA analysis was its basic assumption: that Israel would make public or otherwise let its nuclear capability become officially known. The reality was precisely the opposite: Israel had no intention of going public with the bomb in fear of American and worldwide Jewish disapproval that would result in international reprobation and diminished financial support from the Diaspora.
Such flawed intelligence analyses went a long way toward keeping the men at the top officially ignorant of what no one wanted to know. In public, the Johnson administration, as were its predecessors, was firmly opposed to the spread of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world; official acknowledgment of an Israeli bomb would have presented Washington with an unwanted dilemma—either sanction Israel or be accused of a nuclear double standard.
Israel was not considered a nuclear weapons state on October 18,1964, when China exploded its long-awaited first nuclear bomb. President Johnson, three weeks away from his overwhelming election triumph over Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate, reaffirmed his commitment to nonproliferation in a nationally televised speech: "Until this week, only four powers [the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France] had entered the dangerous world of nuclear explosions. Whatever their differences, all four are sober and serious states, with long experience as major powers in the modern world. Communist China has no such experience. . . . It's expensive and demanding effort tempts other states to equal folly," the President said. "Nuclear spread is dangerous to all mankind. . . . We must continue to work against it, and we will."*
*Johnson also reassured the nation that his administration had not been surprised by the Chinese test. The President perhaps did not know it at the time of his talk, but the American intelligence community was aghast to learn from air sampling that the Chinese bomb had been fueled by enriched uranium, and not, as predicted by the CIA, by far-easier-to-produce plutonium. The American guess had been that China would chemically reprocess plutonium from the spent uranium rods in a reactor, as at Dimona. Confronted with evidence to the contrary, some in the CIA believed that China might have stolen or otherwise misappropriated the enriched uranium for its bomb.
The President may have believed his impassioned words, but not all of his senior advisers did. Six weeks later, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk discussed what they considered the administration's real policy options at a secret meeting on nonproliferation. Among those taking careful notes was Glenn T. Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who recounted the session in his little-noted 1987 memoir, Stemming the Tide:
"Rusk said he thought a basic question was whether we really should have a nonproliferation policy prescribing that no countries beyond the present five might acquire nuclear weapons. Were we clear that this should be a major objective of U.S. policy? For example, might we not want to be in a position where India or Japan would be able to respond with nuclear weapons to a Chinese threat? Rusk mentioned the possibility of having an Asian group of nuclear weapons countries, pointing out that the real issue was among Asian countries and not between northern countries and the Asians.
"McNamara thought it would take decades for India or Japan to have any appreciable deterrent. Nevertheless, he thought the question Rusk had raised should be studied. He pointed out that adoption of a nonproliferation policy by the United States might require us to guarantee the security of nations that renounced nuclear weapons.
"I [Seaborg] expressed doubt that a policy condoning further proliferation should be considered, saying that, once a process of making exceptions was started, we would lose control and that this would inevitably lead to serious trouble. . . .
"Bundy warned about the need to keep very quiet the fact that we were discussing the basic questions of whether U.S. policy should be nonproliferation, because everyone assumed that this was our policy. Any intimation to the contrary would be very disturbing throughout the world. McNamara added that we had to the stop the leaks that come out of meetings like this. He agreed with Bundy that the fact that the U.S. commitment to non-proliferation was being questioned simply must not be allowed to leak."*
*Rusk carried his fight to other bureaucratic forums, with the focus on a nuclear India. Daniel Ellsberg recalled being told by his Pentagon superiors after the Chinese test in 1964 that Rusk's position was that "India needed a nuclear weapon as a deterrent and there was no reason for them not to have it." Rusk's basic approach, Ellsberg added, was "Why shouldn't our friends have nuclear weapons now that our enemies have them?" It should be noted that there was no mention of this extraordinary debate in McGeorge Bundy's seemingly comprehensive history of the atom bomb, Danger and Survival, published in 1988. India's drive for the bomb, wrote Bundy, "remains a doubtful prize in that something about this apocalyptically destructive standard of greatness is not truly Indian." Bundy could have added that there were a few Americans in high Washington positions in 1964 who had no doubt then that India's desire for the bomb was quite truly Indian.
One senior American who resisted the persuasive talk about expanding the nuclear club was John McCone, the increasingly frustrated CIA director. McCone sorely felt the loss of John Kennedy; his relationship with Lyndon Johnson was much less intimate and his advice not always welcome. McCone's solution to the Chinese bomb (and to the problems with North Vietnam) was to send in the Air Force. "McCone just raised hell" about the Chinese bomb, recalled Walt Elder. "He wanted permission to fly U-2S over the test site and was turned down." The CIA director wasn't daunted: he next floated "the idea of what if we got in and took out the Chinese capability?" Daniel Ellsberg recalled similar talk at high levels in the Pentagon: "We were saying, in essence, that if we could have stopped the Russian bomb, we would have saved the world a lot of trouble. It's too bad the Soviets got the bomb." One thought was to use unmarked bombers to strike at the Chinese, thus avoiding identification. Cooler heads prevailed, Ellsberg recalled: "The mission just looked too big to be plausibly denied."
McCone resigned as CIA director in 1965, despite his support for Johnson's continuing escalations in Vietnam. He explained to a colleague: "When I cannot get the President to read my reports, then it's time to go." McCone knew that Floyd Culler's inspections were accomplishing little; he also understood what Israel's continuing refusal to permit full-fledged international inspections meant. But, said Elder, the CIA director found that Johnson "didn't understand the implications" of the inspection issue and didn't want to hear about it. By the end of McCone's tenure, Elder added, he believed Lyndon Johnson as President had three basic concerns: "His standing in polls. 'Can I sell it to Congress?' And 'How can I get out of Vietnam?' "
There was yet another concern: Johnson's understanding that good nonproliferation policies made for bad politics. The President needed no one to remind him that any serious move to squeeze the Israelis on their nuclear weapons program would lead to a firestorm of protest from American Jews, many of whose leaders had consistently supported his presidency and the Vietnam War. He got another reminder of the political danger of nonproliferation from a special panel on that subject he convened a few weeks after the Chinese test. The distinguished panel, headed by Roswell L. Gilpatric, who had served John Kennedy as deputy secretary of defense, returned on January 21, 1965—the day after Johnson's inauguration—with a report that amounted to an indictment of past and present policy.* It warned that the world was "fast approaching a point of no return" in opportunities for controlling the spread of nuclear weapons and urged the President, "as a matter of great urgency, to substantially increase the scope and intensity of our effort if we are to have any hope of success." The report also advocated the establishment of nuclear-free zones in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, including Israel and Egypt. Most significantly, it suggested that the President should reconsider—in terms of nonproliferation—a controversial American plan to create a multilateral force (MLF) that would give NATO members, including the West Germans, a joint finger on the nuclear trigger. The raising of any question about the MLF issue was especially sensitive, for the Soviet Union was insisting that any proposed nonproliferation treaty prohibit a separate European nuclear force, which it viewed as nothing more than a vehicle for providing the West Germans with the bomb.
* Panel members included the retired Allen Dulles, the former secretary of state Dean Acheson, the former defense secretary Robert A. Lovett, the former White House science adviser George B. Kistiakowsky, and IBM chairman Arthur K. Watson.
At a White House meeting with the President, individual members of the panel listed a sweeping series of priorities— including encouraging France to turn its force defrappe into a NATO nuclear missile battery—that prompted the President to note caustically, according to Glenn Seaborg, that implementation of the committee's report would be "a very pleasant undertaking." Johnson and his aides at the meeting, who included McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk, warned Gilpatric and the committee members not to discuss the report with any outsiders or even to acknowledge that a written document had been presented to the White House (the Gilpatric report remains highly classified today). Seaborg, who attended the meeting, noted in his memoir that Rusk, when asked by the President for his views, depicted the report as being "as explosive as a nuclear weapon." Its premature release, Rusk added, "could start the ball rolling in an undesirable manner"—in terms of the MLF and future negotiations on a nonprolifera tion treaty. The report went nowhere, despite the President's promise of further consultations with Gilpatric.
Political disaster, from the White House's point of view, struck in June, when newly elected Senator Robert Kennedy based his maiden Senate floor speech on many of the until then unknown and ignored recommendations of Gilpatric's panel. Kennedy, often invoking his dead brother, urged the President to rise above the immediate issues and begin dealing with nu clear proliferation: "Upon the success of this effort depends the only future our children will have. The need to halt the spread of nuclear weapons must be a central priority of American policy." Kennedy specifically called for Johnson to immediately open worldwide negotiations for a comprehensive test ban treaty; such talks, he proposed, should include Communist China, one of North Vietnam's allies, and he indirectly criti cized Johnson for his preoccupation with Vietnam by stating: "We cannot allow the demands of day-to-day policy to obstruct our efforts to solve the problems of nuclear spread. We cannot wait for peace in the Southeast—which will not come until nuclear weapons spread beyond recall."* Johnson, of course, was made apoplectic by what he was convinced was Gilpatric's leaking of the report to Kennedy and responded by deleting material on nonproliferation from a speech he was scheduled to deliver the day after the Kennedy speech. Over the next months, Glenn Seaborg recalled, there was nothing more heard about the Gilpatric report from the White House, and nonproliferation continued to be treated as a topic fit only for the arms controllers in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), whose advice—no matter how prudent— rarely carried weight with the White House. President John son held out for two years before agreeing in secret talks with the Soviets to drop the MLF, clearing the way for the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty and giving the government's arms controllers an important victory.
*Kennedy also warned that Israel and India "already possess weapons-grade fissionable material, and could fabricate an atomic device within a few months." Further Israeli progress on the bomb, he added, "would certainly impel the Egyptians to intensify their present efforts." The senator's remarks caused a sensation in Israel, but were little noted elsewhere. The New York Times's page-one account of the Kennedy speech included no mention of Israel.
In the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union had begun to step up its military and economic aid programs in the Middle East, and Israel was increasingly seen by the Johnson White House as a regional American bulwark. It was inevitable that high-level interest in the perennial and profitless issue of international inspection for Dimona began to wane in 1967—as the A-4E Skyhawks began arriving in Israel, as the routine Floyd Culler inspections proceeded, and as America got more and more enmeshed in the Southeast Asian war.
There were strong public clues, nonetheless, that Israel never stopped planning to build its bombs. In mid-1966, the Israeli government delayed in accepting nearly $60 million in possible American aid for the construction of a much-needed nuclear desalinization and power plant because the aid was contingent on an Israeli commitment to permit IAEA inspection of Dimona. Johnson and Eshkol had announced a preliminary agreement to build the plant in 1964, amid much fanfare, and subsequent studies showed the facility could produce two hundred megawatts of power and 100 million gallons of de salted water daily. Continued American insistence on IAEA inspections made the Israelis walk away, without any explicit explanation, from the project. The proposed desalinization plant was studied for the next decade, but the American conditions were never accepted, and the plant was never built. The pro-nuclear advocates in the Rafi Party, including Peres and Bergmann, urged Israel to refuse American aid for the plant and publicly accused the United States of attempting to violate Israeli sovereignty by linking its support to Dimona's IAEA inspection.
Privately, Peres and Bergmann—still influential, although out of office—suspected that the United States had a hidden agenda in its support of the nuclear desalinization plant: to divert Israeli funds, manpower, and resources from Israel's nuclear arsenal, in the hope that Israel would at some point be forced to make a choice between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.
A second clue came in July 1966, during a debate in the Knesset on the most recent inspection of Dimona by Floyd Culler, whose conclusion—that there was still no evidence of a bomb facility—had again been made available by American officials to John Finney of the New York Times and, so some Israelis thought, also to Egypt. During the debate, Shimon Peres[liar D.C] told of his recent participation at an international conference on nuclear weapons where, he said, the Middle East was discussed: "I found that there is unfortunately no possibility of limiting the spread of nuclear weapons in the near future—not because of Israel, but because big powers are not agreeing among themselves. ... I was glad to discover that most experts on the subject do not believe it possible to envisage nuclear disarmament for the Middle East in isolation from the conventional arms race. . . ."* Peres was, in essence, defending Israel's decision not to give in to Washington's IAEA inspection demands on the ground that the Arabs had conventional superiority. The same argument—Warsaw Pact tank and troop superiority —had been used a few years earlier by the United States and its allies to justify the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe.
*Peres misstated the conference's findings. His Knesset statement was initially reported in Israel and Nuclear Weapons, by Fuad Jabber, published in 1971 by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. Jabber wrote that the conference, known as the International Assembly on Nuclear Weapons and sponsored in part by the IISS, had, in fact, issued a call for "a serious effort" to negotiate a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The assembly took place June 23-26, 1966, in Toronto, Canada.
By the late 1960s, much of the United States' primary analysis of nuclear intelligence had been shifted from the CIA to the design and engineering laboratories for nuclear weapons at Los Alamos and Sandia and, later, Livermore, where intelligence units dealing with the Soviet Union and China had been set up after World War II. The growing danger of proliferation be came starkly clear during the Kennedy administration, when a group of scientists awaiting clearance before beginning work at Los Alamos successfully designed a nuclear bomb from the open literature. The laboratories' primary targets continued to be the reactors and research centers in the Soviet Union and China, but the intelligence units eventually began monitoring the transfer of nuclear technology and those countries that were viewed as "nth" nations, as near-nuclear countries came to be known. "We had tremendous data" that went beyond satellite photography and intercepted communications, a closely involved official said. "We had people who had worked inside plants in the USSR and China. We were even able to do mock-ups of their weapons system—go from the warhead back through the plant. As part of the drill, I was required to summarize who's got the bomb and who was next, in near-term capability." Israel was always at the top of his list, the official recalled, followed by South Africa. "We were watching the relationship between France and Israel and between Israel and South Africa," he added. "Those were the links."
His assignment also included monitoring the flow of uranium ore into Israel from supplier nations such as Argentina and South Africa. Such ore, known as yellowcake, served as the raw fuel for the heavy-water reactor at Dimona; by the mid-1960s, its sale was a highly competitive and profitable business whose transfer in lots under ten tons was not monitored by the IAEA in Vienna. The first known shipment of ore from South Africa to Israel had arrived in 1963 and, since it totaled ten tons, was duly reported. In subsequent years, however, clandestine shipments of South African yellowcake began to arrive at Dimona, often escorted by a special operations unit of the Israeli Defense Force. Israel's goal was to prevent outsiders from learning that the reactor was operating at two to three times greater capacity than publicly acknowledged, utilizing that much more uranium ore—and therefore capable of reprocessing greater amounts of plutonium. At least some of those later clandestine shipments from South Africa became known in the late 1960s to the intelligence officers in Los Alamos and Sandia, who were carefully watching—by satellites and other means— most of the major uranium mines in the world. But after Israel's overwhelming victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, the intelligence about Dimona and its nuclear potential became highly compartmentalized, as the White House decided to side more openly with Israel in the Middle East, and thus much harder to access. "We knew about the yellowcake," the official recalled, "but we weren't allowed to keep a file on it. It simply wasn't part of the record. Anytime we began to follow it, somebody in the system would say, 'That's not relevant.'" [So basically our government for 55 years has just watched,at least what they caught,what concerns me given how busy these little beavers can be,just how many 'nukes' do you think these folks have built while Washington watched all these years?Too Many,does Washington know where Israels nukes are pointed,does Washington know if some are in place,and they are not telling us? I see bomb shelters being back in vogue,these folks are so messing with fire and willing to set back humanity thousands of years in evolution.D.C]
The U-2 was still flying, but Lundahl and Brugioni had gone on to new assignments in photo interpretation and were no longer directly involved in Israeli nuclear matters. Far more intelligence was being collected by America's corona and gambit satellite systems, which, after much trial and error, had by the mid-1960s begun consistently to produce high-resolution photography from their orbital perches in outer space. Any interesting intelligence on Israel was now being routed to Livermore and Los Alamos through the CIA's Office of Science and Technology, headed by Carl E. Duckett, to which Lundahl's National Photo Interpretation Center was now reporting.
The screening out of Lundahl and Brugioni was perhaps more of a loss than Duckett and his colleagues in the Office of Science and Technology could understand: those two were the institutional memory of the U-2 intelligence on Dimona—almost none of which had been reduced to writing prior to 1960. "Duckett knew very little about what went on before," Brugioni said. "He never asked me and I never told him. Lundahl always said, 'This is very, very sensitive.'" In subsequent years, even the most senior officials of the American government would learn little about the pre-1960 U-2 flights over Dimona; the lack of written history meant that there was nothing in the files. It was the first of many disconnects that would come to dominate the processing of U.S. intelligence on Dimona.
12
The Ambassador
*The State Department's historical office lists George P. Marsh, minister to Italy from 1861 to 1882; Edwin V. Morgan, ambassador to Brazil from 1912 to 1933; and Claude G. Bowers, ambassador to Chile from 1939 to 1953.
Barbour's long assignment as ambassador was not a testament to his intelligence and competence, which were exceptional, but to his understanding of when and when not to accept every Israeli assertion at face value and his willingness to operate the American embassy as a subsidiary, if necessary, of the Israeli foreign ministry. The ambassador often reminded his questioning subordinates that he was not a servant of the Department of State or its secretary, but a President's man with a personal mandate in an important embassy—a functionary who would stand aside when ordered to do so, and permit the White House and the Israeli ambassador to Washington to run the real policy behind his back.
A graduate of Exeter and Harvard, Barbour was unfailingly courteous and correct to his subordinates, and in his first six years as ambassador, when some of the most accurate reporting on Dimona was forwarded to Washington, rarely interfered with the job of those working in his embassy. But the field reports had no impact; they simply disappeared into the bureaucratic maze. Barbour did nothing to keep them alive, and after the 1967 Six-Day War ordered his staff—over the objection of one key aide—to stop reporting on nuclear weapons in Israel. Barbour's assignment at that moment was to insulate Lyndon Johnson and his men from those facts that would compel action, and he did his President's bidding. He was the best, and the worst, of American diplomacy.
Barbour's important role in the history of U.S.-Israeli relations—and his knowledge of Israel's nuclear capability—was hidden by his insistence on a low profile. He was a virtual nonperson to the American correspondents assigned to Israel; he rarely met with them, unlike most ambassadors, and he never spoke on the record. His name occurs only six times in the New York Times Index for the years 1961 to 1966, a period of political turmoil in which the United States, after intense diplomatic activity, emerged as Israel's chief arms supplier. His reclusiveness was legendary in his embassy, a five-story building located near the beach at Tel Aviv. Barbour's daily pattern was inviolate, and interrupted only by international crises or the visits of the traveling secretary of state and senior White House advisers: he was chauffeured to the embassy's basement garage around nine in the morning, rode an elevator to his top floor office, stayed there until noon, rode the elevator down to the garage, and returned home. There were afternoon rounds of golf, weather permitting, dips in his pool, and an occasional evening of bridge. When Barbour did entertain—he did so less frequently over the years—his guests often included prominent visiting Jews, such as Abe Feinberg and Victor Rothschild of London.* Such events, Barbour once explained to William N. Dale, who arrived in 1964 as deputy chief of mission, were his way of fulfilling a direct assignment from Lyndon Johnson: "I'm here under orders from Johnson, who told me, 'I don't care a thing about what happens to Israel, but your job is to keep the Jews off my back.' Everything I do is designed to keep Jews off the President's back," Barbour added. "To keep them happy." He told another newcomer to the embassy, upon being asked why he did not respond to messages from the State Department, "I go back to Washington every year to see the President and I get my orders directly from him—not from those pipsqueaks [at State]." Barbour also was phobic about using a newly installed State Department telephone scrambler system, designed to protect conversations from being intercepted. "If they can talk to you over a secure telephone line," he told an aide, "then you have to do what they want." He repeatedly urged Bill Dale to send embassy reports by mail, especially if the intelligence was adverse to Israeli interests, because "Israel has friends all over the State Department" and would intercept the information.
*His sister, Ellen, served as embassy hostess during her extended annual visits to Israel. Barbour kept photographs of Ellen and one other woman on his desk; a personal aide recalled Barbour explaining, when queried, that the other woman was someone he'd known in Cairo, where he was serving as political officer during World War II. "What happened to her?""I asked her to marry me and she said no," Barbour replied. The young aide was astonished: "She said no and he kept her picture there twenty years later."
Of course, no senior Israeli official would talk to an outsider about nuclear weapons, and Barbour, in the end, shared that taboo.
Yet it was Barbour's men who reported before the June 1967 war that Israel had completed its basic weapons design and was capable of manufacturing warheads for deployment on missiles. Israel also may have had a crudely manufactured bomb or two ready to go, but—as the embassy could not know—no decision had been made by Prime Minister Eshkol to begin mass production.
Spying on Dimona was not the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency, as in most foreign countries, but left to the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy attaches assigned to the embassy; the Agency's espionage functions included the monitoring of Soviet activities and the providing of special cameras, film, and free bottles of wine to any officer who wanted to picnic on the weekend with his family in the Negev.
The 1963 restrictions on the CIA's operations inside Israel, American officials acknowledged, were a sop aimed at avoiding any undue embarrassment for the Israeli government, whose extensive penetration of the United States government needed to be curbed. "We were helpful to the Israelis" in terms of supplying essential intelligence, explains a senior American diplomat, "but we knew that if we weren't—they'd get it anyway." The few espionage attempts organized by the CIA before 1963 had gone nowhere, in part because of the nature of Israel's close knit society but also because of Israel's ability to monitor the activities of the Americans assigned to Israel.
All of the U.S. embassy contacts with Israeli citizens and government officials were—and continue to be—funneled through a special liaison office of the Israeli foreign ministry. It was understood that American intelligence and military officials who tried to evade the liaison system would be carefully watched. Given the difficulty of operating clandestinely inside Israel, the function of the CIA station chief was reduced to writing political assessments and staying in close touch with his counterparts in Mossad and in military intelligence, Aman. Israel, with its steady stream of Soviet and Eastern European Jewish refugees, remained the most important country for collecting intelligence on the Soviet Union, but those operations were left to James Angleton and his men in Washington. It was sometimes hard for a newcomer, like John McCone, to keep things straight.
McCone was still eager to have his agency prove what he knew to be true: that a chemical reprocessing plant did exist under ground at Dimona. Peter C. Jessup, the CIA station chief in the early 1960s, recalled being peremptorily ordered to fly to Rome early in McCone's tenure, where the director—then on a grand tour of CIA facilities in Europe—was scheduled to see the pope. The trip, in the days before jet travel, had taken many hours, but McCone had only a moment to spare. "He was in a great hurry," Jessup recalled, "and told me that President Kennedy thinks the most serious problem facing us is the proliferation of nuclear weapons." McCone wanted the questions about Israel put to rest, and urged the station chief to put "his staff" to work. At the time, the bemused Jessup added, his "staff" at the CIA station consisted of two aides.
Despite the difficulties, the men in the U.S. embassy wanting, like most people, to do their job as well as possible—kept on trying to find out what they could about Dimona. Getting close was fun and a little dangerous—one American officer was chastised by Barbour after being caught by the Israelis with a butterfly net outside Dimona's barbed-wire fence—but occasionally added something useful to the intelligence. Colonel Carmelo V. Alba was the U.S. Army's military attache to Israel in the mid-1960s and, like the other attaches from Western embassies, spent many weekends cruising in the Negev with his long-range telescopic camera. "All I was doing was taking pictures," Alba recalled. He did so at least once a month, shipping the film off to Washington, with no reaction—until one of his photographs showed "evidence of activity at Dimona. Smoke was coming out of the dome," Alba added. "Finally, the CIA got excited."
Dimona had gone critical, and the embassy continued its watch. John Hadden, who began his tour as CIA station chief in 1963, sent Alba one weekend to Beersheba to do a census of French names on the mailboxes of the city's apartment complexes.* A constant goal was to try to determine who was doing what at Dimona. Barbour did not interfere with the hunt; William Dale, as the second-highest-ranking American diplomat, was given wide latitude in the day-to-day management of the embassy, and he encouraged his staff to find out what it could. The embassy's scientific attache was a physicist named Robert T. Webber, who shared Dale's interest in Dimona. Webber, who had earned a doctorate in physics at Yale University, worked closely with John Hadden—in clear violation of a State Department decree forbidding scientific attaches to engage in intelligence work.** Webber also relied on the intelligence gathered by Mel Alba and encouraged the Army colonel to collaborate with his British and Canadian counterparts in collecting more.
* Alba got Hadden in trouble with the Israeli foreign office by inadvertently putting Hadden's American license plates on a jeep before taking one of his weekend jaunts to the Negev. All diplomatic cars in Israel were required to have special license plates, and the embassy mechanics routinely removed the American license plates from the private cars of newly arrived diplomatic personnel and placed them on the walls for decoration. Alba had asked the embassy car pool for a black jeep. It arrived with no plates, and the colonel, in a hurry, ordered the mechanic to grab a set at random from the walls and throw them on. The plates turned out to be Hadden's. The jeep, of course, was monitored by the Israelis, leading to a stiff protest: why was the CIA station chief sneaking around in the Negev?
** "We were very strict," recalled Herman Pollack, then the director of the State Department Bureau of International Scientific and Technological Affairs. "No intelligence work by science attaches. He was supposed to keep his hands very clean." Had den, who retired from the Agency a few years after returning from Israel, acknowledged with a laugh that he "never paid any attention to organizational charts and titles. Life seemed to be better run if people worked together to accomplish joint goals that made sense."
It was a hunt, and the men in the embassy got a break some time in 1966 from an unlikely source—an American Jew living in Israel. Dale and the rest of the embassy staff stayed on good terms—as American diplomats do all over the world—with the many American citizens who chose to live abroad. Americans in Israel were routinely invited to embassy parties and picnics,as well as to screenings of American movies. Dale and his wife had become especially friendly with Dr. Max Ben, a Princeton trained pharmacologist who was helping the Israelis set up a pharmacology institute under United Nations auspices. "One morning," Dale recalled, "Max came into the embassy and said, 'I have a story to tell you. I've been down to Dimona and I was shown the nuclear facilities. I'm convinced that Israel is making nuclear warheads.'" Ben, contacted later, vividly recalled his trip to Dimona. He had become a close friend and confidant of Ernst Bergmann's while in Israel, and it was that friendship, he claimed, that led to the invitation to take a firsthand look at the reactor. Though he had studied physics at Princeton, Ben found the visit to be "exciting" but confusing: "A lot of it I didn't understand." What troubled him, however, was not any concern about proliferation, but his belief that the United States was not helping Israel in its serious pursuit of the bomb: "I thought we ought to do something about it—to give them an assist." He talked to Dale and then agreed to discuss what he knew on a more sophisticated level with Bob Webber. Dale arranged the meeting. Ben explained years later that his purpose in taking up the issue with Dale and Webber had not been to inform on Israel's nuclear progress, as Dale obviously assumed, but to try to pass word of the accomplishments at Dimona to Washington. "My goal," he recalled, "was to see how the U.S. could help Israel. I tried to walk a line." [You gave them all the help they needed,by just standing there doing nothing but watch them D.C]
Dale felt he had enough to report. He brought Webber and others into the embassy's most secure room—a lead-sealed facility known as the "bubble"—and the group drafted a highly classified dispatch to Washington summarizing their intelligence. Its essential message, Dale recalled, was: "Israel is getting ready to start putting warheads into missiles so they can be quickly assembled into weapons for delivery by plane." The paper had to be approved by the ambassador, who was approached with trepidation. "Barbour harrumphed," Dale recalled, "and said, 'Well, I suppose it's time. Go ahead, they deserve it. Let it go.' " Dale forwarded it with a sense of accomplishment. It was, Dale thought, the embassy's most definitive report by far on Dimona.
"So what happened?" asked Dale. "Not a damn thing. Nobody responded." Webber eventually was replaced as science attache by someone much less interested in Dimona, and Colonel Alba was reassigned as an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Adding to the frustration, Dale said, was the fact that more revealing information about Israeli intentions was provided early the next year by another American Jew. The embassy was entertaining a group of American government officials who were en route from India after attending a regional meeting of American economic and commercial attaches. There was a party set up in Tel Aviv with Israeli trade officials. On the next day, Eugene M. Braderman, then a deputy assistant secretary of state for commercial affairs, approached Dale, "looking ashen. He said, 'One of the Israelis at the party told me that my primary duty, as an American Jew, was to help the United States government accept Israeli nuclear weapons.' Braderman was very agitated," Dale added. "He said to me: I'm an American first, not a Jew first.' He told me to do whatever was right with the information."* By that point, Dale understood that Braderman's story had nowhere to go. "I didn't do anything with it," he said. "I knew it'd not do any good."
*Braderman, now retired and living in Washington, recalled the 1967 visit to Israel and said it was "possible that I'd said something like that" to Bill Dale. He added that Dale's recollection certainly reflected his general view of the issue of Jewish loyalty.
There were other issues, of course, for the embassy. Israel decided in early June 1967 to preempt the increasing Arab buildup in the Sinai and go to war. A year of steady tension had culminated two weeks before in an Egyptian blockade of the Israeli port city of Elat. An increasingly confident Nasser had sent his troops to occupy Sharm el Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, blocking the access of Israeli shipping to the Strait of Tiran, which leads from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba and then to Elat. Israel considered the Egyptian move to be an act of war, but —under pressure from the Johnson administration not to attack—the Eshkol government wavered. The prime minister, confronted by a public that wanted to initiate war with the Arabs, was viciously criticized for his indecisiveness and lack of military experience. To maintain political control—intelligence reports reached the White House of military coup plotting—Eshkol was forced in late May to turn to his political enemies, including Moshe Dayan and Menachem Begin, and form a government of national unity. For Begin, now a minister without portfolio, the appointment meant that he was serving in the Israeli government for the first time in his political career. Dayan's nomination as defense minister had to be much more difficult for Eshkol; it amounted, in essence, to an acknowledgment that he was unable to lead the nation in war time. Dayan, with his romantic image, was as admired among the population as the hesitating Eshkol was not. Dayan came to the defense portfolio with enormous political strength, raising the possibility that the hard-line pro-nuclear Rafi Party of David Ben-Gurion would once again be dominant in Israeli military affairs.
The army, led by Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, was ready. Israel struck first on June 5 and achieved its stunning victory in six days, humiliating the Soviet-supplied Arabs and seizing Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, Jordan's West Bank, and Syria's Golan Heights, and, most stirring of all, fulfilling a two-thousand-year-old dream by bringing the Old City of Jerusalem under Jewish control. But Israel suddenly found itself in control of one million more Palestinians.
Wally Barbour spent much of the war in the Israeli war room, and he shared the jubilation throughout the nation—and in much of America—over the stunning Israeli victory. There was no pretense of objectivity in his reporting to Washington; his views and those of the Israeli leadership were identical. For example, Barbour urged that Washington downplay the Israeli Air Force's rocket and strafing attack on the USS Liberty, a naval intelligence ship, on the third day of the war. The Liberty, flying the American flag, had been monitoring Middle East communications traffic in international waters off the coast of Israel and had been identified as an American ship before the attack, which resulted in a death toll of thirty-four with 171 men wounded. The incident triggered resentment throughout the United States government. Barbour, however, was anything but angered. A declassified cable on file in the LBJ Library shows that hours after the incident he reported that Israel did not intend to admit to the incident and added: "Urge strongly that we too avoid publicity. Liberty's proximity to scene could feed Arab suspicions of U.S.-Israel collusion. . . . Israelis obviously shocked by error and tender sincere apologies."*
*The Johnson Library documents also show that Clark Clifford, a key presidential adviser and later secretary of defense, complained about the government's initially tepid response at a National Security Council meeting the next day: "My concern is that we're not tough enough. Handle as if Arabs or USSR had done it." It was "inconceivable," Clifford added, according to the NSC notes, that Israel destroyed the Liberty by error, as it claimed.
** It was a different CIA, too. A former senior intelligence officer recalled that "a big change took place" inside the Agency after the Six-Day War. "All of a sudden a lot of people were saying the Israelis were wonderful," the former official added. "Israeli intelligence became untouchable, and the professional suspicion you should have about another intelligence service—even a friendly one—disappeared." This became especially true in the Nixon administration; Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser, became renowned inside the CIA for preferring Mossad's intelligence assessments on the Middle East to those supplied by the Agency.
After leaving Israel, Dale gave a series of perfunctory end-of the-tour debriefings in Washington to W. Walt Rostow, John son's national security adviser, and other senior government officials; not surprisingly, he said, "Nobody asked me about the Israeli bomb." In his next post, with the State Department's Policy Planning Council, he again tried to raise questions about Dimona, with similar results. One of his early assignments on the council, the State Department's in-house think tank, was to do a paper on nonproliferation. He wanted to include a chapter on Dimona, but was refused permission to discuss that issue with members of Congress or members of the Atomic Energy Commission. When he protested, said Dale, a senior State Department official, declaring that the Israeli bomb "was the most sensitive foreign policy issue in the United States," threatened to discuss his conduct with the secretary of state. His final paper, Dale said, did not mention Dimona.
With Barbour staying on and on, the Israeli bomb disappeared after 1967 as a significant issue in the American embassy. Dimona became a non-place and the Israeli bomb a non-bomb. Sometime that year the Israelis invited Arnold Kramish, an American expert on nuclear fuel cycles, to visit the reactor. "I made a mistake," recalled Kramish, who was then visiting Israel as a fellow at London's International Institute of Strategic Studies. "I paid a courtesy call on Barbour. He said I couldn't go—it would imply U.S. recognition of Dimona." Kramish had read about the American inspections in the New York Times and raised the obvious argument: "I'm not even an official visitor." The ambassador didn't budge, and Kramish decided not to challenge his dubious theory: "I didn't go."
Joseph O. Zurhellen, Jr., Bill Dale's replacement as deputy chief of mission, followed the ambassador's cue and was also much less interested in the subject. "Barbour was not well versed in anything technical—words such as 'reprocessing plant,' et cetera," Zurhellen explained. "Of course, he knew something screwy had gone on in Dimona. The French had pulled wool over our eyes, and so had the Israelis." But, Zurhellen added, the embassy's view was that much of the international concern about Dimona had been deliberately fostered by Israel. "A strong element of their policy is to convince others they have the bomb. It's disinformation." Anyway, he added, "the nuclear issue was not on our mind. We had a war of attrition." Zurhellen was referring to the steadily escalating air and artillery battles in the late 1960s and early 1970s between Israel and Egypt, whose army and air force had been dramatically reinforced by the Soviet Union after the Six-Day War.
After the inauguration of President Richard M. Nixon in January 1969, Barbour was even less than uninterested in Dimona—he exorcised the issue. A senior American intelligence officer recalled summoning a group of staff aides to provide Barbour, then in Washington, with a special briefing on the Israeli nuclear weapons program. "Barbour listened to it all," said the intelligence official, "and then said, 'Gentlemen, I don't believe a word of it.' " The official was astonished: he had given the same briefing in Israel to Barbour without challenge a few months before. He privately took Barbour aside. "Mr. Ambassador," he recalled saying, "you know it's true." Barbour replied: "If I acknowledge this, then I have to go to the President. And if he admitted it, he'd have to do something about it. The President didn't send me there to give him problems. He does not want to be told any bad news."
Barbour had many good reasons for not wanting to tell President Nixon bad news. His emphysema was getting worse. He was increasingly phobic about death, Zurhellen said, and kept an oxygen tent near his bed. The ambassador also continued his easygoing work habits; Zurhellen recalled only two occasions in their five years together when Barbour stayed at the embassy after his usual noon departure time.
The overweight ambassador had a huge scare early in the Nixon presidency upon being informed that he had been selected to serve in the Foreign Service's most prestigious ambassadorial post—in Moscow. The appointment, as were all such assignments, was contingent upon medical approval, but, said Zurhellen, Barbour hadn't had a State Department physical in years, and knew he'd never pass one. "We'd finessed it by having a local Israeli physician write a note every two years saying, 'You're capable of carrying out your mission.' I drafted the answer, thanking State for its confidence, but saying that 'in seven years here I have carved out a unique situation.'" Barbour was allowed to stay on the job.
In 1970, Barbour made one of his rare public appearances, sharing a podium with Prime Minister Golda Meir at the opening of an American school in Tel Aviv. The ambassador congratulated Meir for attending and said, "I wish I knew how to influence the premier to do what I ask her to do." She replied: "I will now reveal the secret to you—you must only ask me to do what I want to do."
When it came to Dimona, Barbour did what Israel wanted— without asking. His support for Israel was profound and heart felt; nonetheless, many of his former colleagues in the Foreign Service were confounded and distressed when on April 3,1974, a year after retirement, he agreed to become a board member of the American branch of Bank Leumi, the Israeli state bank. There was nothing illegal in doing so, but many State Department officials consider such appointments to pose an obvious conflict of interest. Barbour, characteristically, couldn't have cared less about what his peers thought, and he remained on the board until his death.
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An Israeli Decision
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