PART 9:THE SAMSON OPTION ...NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL & INJUSTICE

You are deaf,blind,and dumb if you cannot see that we in America are still under this Israeli Nuclear blackmail thumb here in 2018. I am of the opinion that they have a number of nuclear devices already in place here in this country,in numerous of our cities,right out in the open public, posing as public 'art'....

THE SAMSON OPTION 

Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and 

American Foreign Policy

By Seymour M. Hersh

17 

Nuclear Blackmail 

Moshe Dayan's fears and Israel's gloom were turned around during a dramatic meeting on Monday, October 8, at Golda Meir's office in Tel Aviv, just a few hundred feet from "the Bor," the military's huge underground war complex. Meir's closest aides, the so-called kitchen cabinet, assembled for what turned out to be an all-night session. Among those in attendance, besides Dayan and Meir, were General David (Dado) Elazar, the army chief of staff; Yigal Allon, the deputy prime minister; Brigadier General Yisraei (Gingy) Leor, the prime minister's military aide; and Israel Galili, the influential minister without portfolio and longtime confidant of Meir. 

Over the next hours, the Israeli leadership—faced with its greatest crisis—resolved to implement three critical decisions: it would rally its collapsing forces for a major counterattack; it would arm and target its nuclear arsenal in the event of total collapse and subsequent need for the Samson Option; and, finally, it would inform Washington of its unprecedented nu clear action—and unprecedented peril—and demand that the United States begin an emergency airlift of replacement arms and ammunition needed to sustain an extended all-out war effort. 

The kitchen cabinet agreed that the nuclear missile launchers at Hirbat Zachariah, as many as were ready, would be made operational, along with eight specially marked F-4S that were on twenty-four-hour alert at Tel Nof, the air force base near Rehovot. The initial target list included the Egyptian and Syrian military headquarters near Cairo and Damascus. It could not be learned how many weapons were armed, although Dimona was known to have manufactured more than twenty warheads by 1973. No weapons were targeted on the Soviet Union, but there was little doubt that the Soviets would quickly learn what was going on. Israeli intelligence was intercepting indecipherable signals from what were presumed to be Soviet operatives inside the country; the encoded messages were beamed throughout the early morning. 

All of the key players are now dead, and none left any record of what took place. (In his daily diary, published in Hebrew, General Elazar blacked out the night of October 8 and recorded only the following phrase: "Crucial meeting.") There is wide spread knowledge among the Israeli defense and political leadership of what took place at the crucial meeting, but in subsequent years those who were there—including stenographers and advisers—have never talked publicly about it. 

The only significant objections came from within the nuclear community, some of whose senior officials—but not Freier— were said by an Israeli source to have accused the senior officials, in essence, of panicking. Their view was that the situation had not yet been reached for weapons of last resort, which were then code-named, appropriately, the "Temple" weapons. 

One former Israeli government official who was in the prime minister's office that night depicted the chain-smoking Meir, who slept very little during the early stages of the war, as con fused and concerned by Dayan's report of imminent collapse. The basic decision to arm the weapons of last resort was reached easily, he said;there were far more complicated discussions of how many warheads to arm and where they were to be targeted. There was a separate, preliminary briefing by technical experts from Dimona, led by Shalheveth Freier, who described the weapons and targets that were available for immediate assembly. 

The senior official also described the fear that swept through the prime minister's staff when the arming of nuclear weapons became known: "There were a few days there when it seemed that the end of the world was near. For those of us who lived through the Holocaust, we knew one thing—it will never happen again." The aide learned what happened from General Leor, Meir's military assistant: "Gingy told me about the arming of the weapons. We were very intimate." The young general, who later died of cancer, had a child on duty at the front and was, as he told the aide, "scared to death." 

One Israeli assumption was that the Soviets, who would learn—as they had learned other secrets inside Israel in recent years—of the nuclear arming, would then be compelled to urge their allies in Egypt and Syria to limit their offensive and not attempt to advance beyond the pre-1967 borders. And a Soviet warning was given, according to Mohammed Heikal, editor of Al-Ahram, the leading Egyptian newspaper, and eminence grise to Nasser and Sadat. In an interview, Heikal revealed that the Soviet Union had told the senior leadership of Egypt early in the war that the "Israelis had three warheads assembled and ready." The information was given to General Mohammed Abdel Ghany el-Gamasy, the Egyptian chief of staff, by a Soviet intelligence officer who had worked closely with elGamasy when he served earlier as chief of military intelligence. The Soviet message also reported, Heikal recalled, that Moshe Dayan had visited the front and returned to Tel Aviv "with a scary report" that was presented to Golda Meir's equally alarmed kitchen cabinet. 

There was an equally important second purpose for the arming of nuclear weapons, according to former Israeli government officials: such a drastic step would force the United States to begin an immediate and massive resupply of the Israeli military. There was widespread rage inside the Israeli cabinet at the Nixon White House—aimed especially at Henry Kissinger —over what was correctly perceived in Israel as an American strategy of delaying the resupply in an attempt to let the Arabs win some territory, and some self-respect, and thus set up the possibility of serious land-for-peace bargaining. Kissinger, just sworn in as secretary of state, would direct the negotiations. 

Kissinger made no secret of his initial strategy in the war, telling James R. Schlesinger, the secretary of defense, that his goal was to "let Israel come out ahead, but bleed." Kissinger's goal was defended by some of his fellow diplomats as business as usual. "Trying to take advantage of the situation?" rhetorically asked Nicholas Veliotes. "We always do this." 

In the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, Kissinger made no mention of a nuclear threat, but he did describe a series of urgent telephone calls from Simcha Dinitz, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, that began at 1:45 a.m. on Tuesday, October 9—just as the all-night meeting in Golda Meir's office was breaking up (it was 8:45 a.m. in Israel). Dinitz focused on one question, wrote Kissinger: "What could we do about resupply?" The same question was asked again, in a second telephone call, at 3:00 a.m. "Unless he wanted to prove to the Israeli cabinet that he could get me out of bed at will," wrote Kissinger, "something was wrong." Kissinger, accompanied by Peter W. Rodman, his longtime assistant, and Dinitz, accompanied by General Mordecai Gur, the Israeli military attache, met at 8:20 a.m. in the Map Room of the White House, where Kissinger was told of the desperate situation of the Israeli military and the need for more tanks and aircraft. "Israel stood on the threshold of a bitter war of attrition that it could not possibly win given the disparity of manpower," Kissinger said. "It had to do something decisive." At one point during the Map Room meeting, Kissinger wrote, Dinitz insisted that he and Kissinger needed to be alone. Rodman and Gur, who both could be trusted with the most sensitive information, were dismissed. Once they were alone, Dinitz's message, according to Kissinger, was merely that Golda Meir "was prepared to come to the United States personally for an hour to plead with President Nixon for urgent arms aid. . . ." It was a request that Kissinger could, and did, as he wrote, reject "out of hand and without checking with Nixon. Such a proposal could reflect only either hysteria or blackmail." 

A more complete account of the Dinitz message would undoubtedly show that it was closer to blackmail, as Kissinger knew, and it worked. "By the evening of October 9," Kissinger said in his memoir, "Israel had been assured that its war losses would be made up. Relying on this assurance, it stepped up its consumption of war materiel, as we had intended." 

How was Israel's warning of a potential Armageddon delivered to the United States? Neither Kissinger nor Dinitz could be reached to discuss the subject, although Dinitz's insistence on the one-on-one meeting with Kissinger—as well as Kissinger's description of the Dinitz message as "blackmail"— seems obviously linked to the nuclear issue. Word of the Israeli nuclear arming also came from the Soviets, according to a former Israeli intelligence official. The official said that Detachment 8200, the Israeli communications intelligence agency that had picked up the Soviet warning to Cairo—as acknowledged by Heikal—also intercepted on the morning of October 9 a Soviet warning to Washington about the Israeli arming of nuclear weapons. Asked why he thought the United States has never publicly mentioned such a warning, the Israeli responded: "Who in the U.S. is ready to admit that the Soviets were ahead?" 

Kissinger has never talked publicly about the Israeli nuclear arming, and his closest advisers at the time, including Rodman and William G. Hyland, then handling Soviet affairs for the National Security Council, said they knew of no such information. The best source for what happened, nonetheless, is Kissinger himself, who privately acknowledged that there had been an Israeli nuclear threat both to Anwar Sadat and to Hermann F. Eilts, the American ambassador to Egypt who worked closely with Kissinger during the intense Middle East shuttle diplomacy of the mid-1970s.* 

*Eilts, a career diplomat, retired in 1979 after spending six years as ambassador to Egypt to become director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. 

Eilts had been handpicked in October 1973 by Kissinger for the assignment to Cairo, and he arrived there at the end of the Yom Kippur War. His first detailed conversation with Kissinger about his new assignment couldn't have been more dramatic. It took took place, at Kissinger's request, at a hastily arranged breakfast in early November in Islamabad, Pakistan, where Kissinger had stopped overnight en route to a much delayed visit to China. "Henry spoke a lot about how on the fourth day of the war [October 9] the Israelis panicked," Eilts recalled, "and that's when the judgment was made to assist them. At that point"—and in similar discussions with Kissinger over the next three years—"there was never a word about nuclear arming." There was a final meeting in late 1976, at the end of the Ford administration—and the end of Kissinger's tenure as secretary of state—and Kissinger brought up the 1973 war again. "And then, in a sort of casual reference," Eilts said, "Henry threw in that there was concern that the Israelis might go nuclear. There had been intimations that if they didn't get military equipment, and quickly, they might go nuclear." Eilts recalled his surprise that "none of this had come out earlier." He also was surprised at the casualness of Kissinger's attitude: "It was just sort of a passing comment." 

Kissinger was far less casual at the time he learned of Israel's intention. He told none of his colleagues in the cabinet about the nuclear threat, of course, but changed his mind overnight about the need to get military arms—in huge quantities—to Israel. "Israel's ammunition consumption rate was gauged for a seven-day war," recalled James Schlesinger—a reflection of Washington's confidence in the fighting ability of Israel's army and air force. "But Kissinger just turned around totally. He got a little hysterical" in urging an immediate and massive resupply. "Henry seemed to be more concerned than I was over the possibility of a nuclear exchange" in the Middle East, Schlesinger added. Kissinger's actions led some senior officials to conclude that Israeli use of a nuclear weapon was not out of the question. "From where we sat," Schlesinger said, "there was an assumption that Israel had a few nukes and that if there was a collapse, there was a possibility that Israel would use them." William E. Colby, then director of the CIA, shared the assumption: "We were afraid Israel might go for broke." It was believed, Colby added, that nuclear weapons would be used "only in an extreme situation." 

Kissinger referred to the Israeli nuclear threat in his first extended private meeting in Cairo on November 7, 1973, with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat; it was a precursor of Kissinger's famed Middle East shuttle diplomacy that would begin the next year.* Sadat later briefed Mohammed Heikal about the off-the-record meeting and, according to Heikal, told of a senior "American"—it could only have been Kissinger—who explained the sudden American airlift to Israel as a decision aimed at avoiding a nuclear escalation. Sadat further quoted Kissinger as saying, "It was serious, more serious than you can imagine." Israel had at least three warheads and was preparing to use them, Sadat told Heikal. (Kissinger apparently was relying on Carl Duckett's 1968 CIA estimate of Israeli warheads— the only U.S. government estimate in existence in 1973—that had placed the number of warheads at three or four.) The Egyptian president, faithful to his promise of confidentiality to Kissinger, never explicitly told Heikal where his information came from, but Heikal had no doubt at the time or later: "The only American with that kind of credibility, who would make Sadat believe him [about the Israeli threat], was Henry Kissinger." Heikal subsequently wrote about the Kissinger comment, without indicating that Sadat had been his source, in AlAhram, saying that the Nixon administration had feared during the fighting that the Israelis "might lose their nerve and use one of the three bombs they had in order to repel the Arab offensive." 

* During a tense moment in the shuttle diplomacy, Kissinger, in Israel, suddenly declared to Golda Meir, according to an American eyewitness: "First, I am an American; second, I am the secretary of state of the United States of America; third, I am a Jew." Meir replied without missing a beat: "That's all right, sonny, we read from right to left." 

Sometime in this period, the American intelligence community got what apparently was its first look, via the KH-11, at the completed and operational missile launchers hidden in the side of a hill at Hirbat Zachariah. The launchers were left in the open, perhaps deliberately, making it much easier for American photo interpreters to spot them. (The Soviets also had satellite coverage in the Middle East, and presumably saw the same missile field.) One U.S. official also recalled seeing hollowed out nuclear storage bunkers and huge blast doors, with railroad tracks leading to a nearby mobile launching site. 

By mid-October, the Israeli military had successfully counter attacked in the Golan Heights and the Sinai, ending any immediate threat—and the necessity for the nuclear alert. The weapons were removed from their forward positions by October 14. The Egyptians, however, bolstered by a renewed airlift of Soviet arms that began on October 10, mounted a second offensive in the Sinai, which eventually was offset by a brilliant Israeli strike across the Suez Canal through a gap in the Egyptian lines. 

With Egypt suddenly on the defensive, Soviet Premier Alexei N. Kosygin flew to Cairo on October 16 and persuaded Sadat to call for a cease-fire. Kissinger flew to Moscow on October 20 and to Tel Aviv two days later, where he received Israeli acquiescence for a cease-fire in place. In the meantime, the Egyptian Third Army was in danger of being surrounded and left essentially to the mercy of the Israeli Defense Force. The Israelis continued their offensive in Egyptian territory, moving north and west to a point within sixty miles of Cairo. The continued encirclement of the Third Army led Soviet party leader Leonid Brezhnev to increase the alert status of his air borne divisions and warn the White House that unless Israel stopped violating the cease-fire, "we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally." The implication seemed to be that Brezhnev would send some of his troops as a blocking force behind the front lines in Egypt to prevent the Israelis from going on to Cairo. 

The perceived threat came a few days after Nixon, more deeply embattled than ever over the Watergate scandals, had publicly fired Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor, and accepted the resignation of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and William D. Ruckelshaus, Richardson's deputy, in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre." The President earlier had been rocked by the indictment on corruption charges and subsequent resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Another complication was the publicly announced Arab boycott of oil sales to the United States and the Arab decision to increase crude oil prices dramatically. 

There is no evidence that the Soviets did, in fact, contemplate any significant deployment of their airborne troops, despite their high alert status. Most scholars now agree that Brezhnev's warning to the White House was aimed at forcing Washington to urge the Israelis to adhere to the cease-fire. Kissinger did pressure the Israelis (there is no evidence that Nixon, consumed by Watergate, played any significant role in the issue) on the cease-fire, but at the same time he ordered the 82nd Airborne Division and the nuclear-armed B-52S of the Strategic Air Command to go on alert. The aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy also was dispatched to the Mediterranean, and at least fifty B-52S were redeployed from Guam to the United States. The nation, still reeling from the continuing Watergate revelations, was stunned—and distressed—by the White House's unilateral action; there was widespread belief that the alert had been ordered primarily for domestic political purposes and not because the Soviets were ready to move into the Middle East.* 
*Many of Kissinger's senior aides and others in the government, including William Colby, defended the alert. Colby recalled that there had been a steady stream of intelligence reports suggesting that the Soviet Union was preparing some of its most highly trained paratroop units and its transport fleet for deployment to the Middle East. On the night of the alert, he said, the American intelligence community "lost the transport fleet. We were afraid it'd gone" to the Middle East with Soviet paratroopers. Another senior NSC aide confirmed Colby's account and added: "I thought they were coming" —a point of view, he added, that he successfully urged on Kissinger. The NSC aide added that neither he nor Kissinger anticipated that word of the heightened alert would become known so quickly. "We weren't trying to signal the Soviets," the aide said. "We just didn't realize that the military would begin calling back privates and corporals from leave"—making it impossible to keep the alert secret from the press. Another equally senior American official, who had access to all of the available intelligence, viewed the actions of both Washington and Moscow simply as "posturing. We were publicly threatening to go [into the Sinai] ourselves and the Soviets were countering." 
Israel responded to the American alert by going on nuclear alert for a second time in the Yom Kippur War, according to Yuval Neeman, the physicist and nuclear expert who served in later Israeli governments as minister of science and technology. This time, the crisis resolved itself quickly, as Golda Meir ordered her army to stop all offensive action against Egypt, permitting a United Nations peacekeeping force to impose the cease-fire. At this point, however, a small undercover U.S. Navy intelligence unit, known as Task Force 157, operating in the waters of the Bosporus off Turkey, relayed data to Washington suggesting that one of the Soviet ships leaving the Black Sea en route to the Mediterranean was carrying radioactive material. The report from the Navy swept through the American intelligence community and the White House. Over the next few days, as the Soviets and many in Congress and the American media accused Nixon and Kissinger of overreacting, descriptions of the Soviet threat, including dramatic details of its shipment of nuclear warheads into Egypt, began appearing in the press. 

The most complete account of the alleged Soviet escalation, as seen from the White House, was published in Kissinger, a 1974 biography written by Marvin and Bernard Kalb, then correspondents for CBS. Kissinger, the main source for the book, was said on the morning after the alert to have been informed by the CIA of "an alarming report from Egypt—that the Russians might have landed nuclear weapons there." American intelligence, the Kalbs wrote, "had kept track of a Soviet ship carrying radioactive material and heading toward Port Said." It was presumed, the authors wrote, that several Soviet nuclear warheads had been provided to Egypt for deployment in Scud missiles. "The report tended to harden Kissinger's judgment that the Russians were going to send airborne troops to Egypt," the Kalbs added. "Nuclear weapons could serve as backup protection for a sizable Soviet force. On the other hand, Kissinger could not dismiss the possibility that the Russians were moving nuclear weapons into Egypt because they believed that the Israelis had nuclear weapons and intended to use them against Egypt." 

The only flaw in the Kissinger account, as told to the Kalbs, is that it was not true. In fact, the Task Force 157 report had been discounted almost immediately by the intelligence community. One high-ranking American officer, who was in charge of a major intelligence agency at the time, said that reconnaissance had established that the Soviets had loaded nuclear warheads on a cargo ship in a Black Sea port—but never shipped them. "A different ship goes through," the officer explained, "and dumb little 157 flashes a message" that Soviet warheads were heading for the Mediterranean, and possibly Egypt. "Everybody in the United States goes crazy, but it turns out to be a totally false reading. It was a different ship" that moved into the Black Sea. There was a direct approach to Soviet officials: "The Soviets said, 'We didn't send anything out.' " The intelligence community concluded that there was no evidence of a Soviet attempt to bring nuclear warheads into the battlezone.* The evidence that did exist, in fact, as was not reported at the time, or cited later by Kissinger in his memoirs, demonstrated that the Soviets had ordered their destroyers and other vessels in the Middle East to steam to the nearest ports and off load their nuclear weapons. There was a consensus among senior intelligence officials in the Pentagon, recalled Patrick J. Parker, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, that "the Soviets were understandably frightened of the situation and eager to contain it." 
* A former member of Task Force 157 acknowledged that there was no way that the unit on duty in Turkey, whose function was to photograph and monitor all Soviet ship deployments from the Black Sea, could independently establish the bona fides of its reports. The unit, he explained, was manned by specially recruited Turkish citizens who were not competent to make on-the-spot assessments, but instead relayed their tapes and other data by commercial aircraft to Washington for analysis. The conclusion that there were warheads aboard the Soviet cargo ship came from a Navy laboratory in Washington, the former 157 member said, and not from Turkey. "We never had any knowledge at all [in the field] whether anything was hot or not," he added. 

Kissinger also made no mention of the alleged Soviet war head shipment in the second volume of his memoirs, nor has he —or any American official—revealed that Israel issued two nu clear alerts during the crisis. He did emerge, however, from the October crisis with renewed official concern about Dimona. Some weeks afterward, Kissinger asked the CIA for a formal National Intelligence Estimate on the Israeli nuclear program; the paper, which concluded that Israel had at least ten nuclear warheads, took Carl Duckett's Office of Science and Technology months to prepare and then was submitted only to the White House.** 
** Another as yet unresolved question about the Yom Kippur War revolves around the question of nuclear deterrence: did Egypt and Syria limit their initial operations in fear of a nuclear response if they penetrated too deeply? Mohammed Heikal, for example, insisted that the Soviet reports about the Israeli nuclear arming—while taken very seriously—had no impact on the overall Egyptian military operation. Egypt's military goals, he said, had been sharply limited from the outset. There is clear evidence that Syria also set very limited goals for its military, for its army came to a literal stop— with no opposition in front of it—more than a day before Golda Meir's kitchen cabinet met in Tel Aviv to authorize the nuclear arming. The best guess at this point is that Syrian and Egyptian planners certainly were aware that any deep penetration inside the pre-1967 borders would have occasioned a massive, and perhaps nuclear, counterattack—but the fact that no such advance was planned or sought had much more to do with the myth of Israeli military invincibility than with a specific concern about the weapons at Dimona. 
The Israeli government concluded by the end of the war that the American intelligence community had somehow learned independently of what the Soviets or Ambassador Dinitz had revealed—of the arming of the Israeli warheads. "Somehow, and this I know for sure," a former member of Golda Meir's personal staff said, "the Americans found out about it and Mossad did an investigation as to how the U.S. found out. Golda asked Mossad to investigate how much damage it caused." There was another aspect to the inquiry, the Israeli added, based on Israel's understanding that American intelligence had discovered Soviet warheads being moved through the Black Sea: "Was there a threat? How much did they [the United States] tell us? What did the U.S. know and when did they tell us?" 

The results of the Mossad inquiry could not be learned, but Golda Meir's concern about America's ability to penetrate Israel seemed to diminish as Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy got under way. There was one tantalizing public reference, how ever, published with little fanfare seven years later, suggesting that the United States had known independently of the nuclear alert as it took place. On March 10,1980, journalist Jack Anderson's syndicated daily column—largely about the American oil industry's influence inside the Department of Energy—included a four-paragraph addendum entitled "Close Call." The filler item said in part: "Locked in secret Pentagon files is startling evidence that Israel maneuvered dangerously near the edge of nuclear war after the 1973 Arab assault. The secret documents claim that Israel came within hours of running out of essential arms. 'At this crucial moment, the possibility of nuclear arms was discussed with the U.S.,' declares one report. American authorities feared the Israelis might resort to nuclear weapons to assure their survival. This was the most compelling reason, according to the secret papers, that the United States rushed conventional weapons to Israel." 

Further evidence of the Israeli willingness to use nuclear weapons in the 1973 war—or to threaten their use—was provided at a meeting early the next year between David Elazar and Lieutenant General Orwin C. Talbott, deputy commander of the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). Talbott was on an extended visit to Israel to discuss some of the lessons learned in the 1973 war and to inspect captured Arab and Soviet military equipment; there was considerable contact with Elazar, still the Israeli chief of staff. At one meeting, Talbott recalled, Elazar suddenly began talking "out of the blue" about Israel's threat to use nuclear weapons in the desperate moments of the 1973 war: "My impression at the time was that he was trying through me to let Washington know how serious the situation was—approaching the point where they were ready to use them [nuclear weapons]." Talbott understood the significance of the information and quickly filed a top-secret one-page memorandum for General Creighton W. Abrams, the Army chief of staff. "I made no copies of it and gave it to nobody else," the general, now retired, said. "I figured this was not discussable information at that time. I assumed Dado was trying to get a message to us."* 
* Talbott was accompanied during the meeting with Elazar by Colonel Bruce Williams, the U.S. Army attache in Israel. Williams similarly remembered Elazar's re marks as revelatory: "I can't recall the exact words," he said, "but the message was clear: Israel was prepared to use nuclear weapons against the Syrians if they'd broken through." 
General Talbott had done his part, but his report to Creighton Abrams went nowhere. Carl Duckett, who at the time had direct responsibility for the CIA's intelligence on the Israeli nuclear arsenal, first learned of the Talbott message from the author; he also said he had never been informed of any intelligence suggesting that Israel had gone on two nuclear alerts during the Yom Kippur War. 

The disconnect when it came to a nuclear-armed Israel was near-total: a CIA official assigned to Israel also had direct knowledge of the nuclear alert and did not tell his superiors what he knew, just as Henry Kissinger had told no one. The CIA official was an expert in communications intelligence and spent three years in Israel in the early 1970s as an undercover liaison officer with Detachment 8200; one of his assignments was to help the Israelis monitor the sophisticated Soviet radar and communications gear that had been supplied to the Egyptians during the War of Attrition. Israel also was operating, with the aid of equipment leased from the National Security Agency, at least three supersecret listening posts capable of intercepting communications throughout the Middle East and as far north as southern Russia.* The intercepted intelligence was shared with the United States, and the American undercover operative was able to learn a great deal about the operations of the Israeli signals intelligence community. 
* One of the joint sites, at Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights, was overrun by Syria in the first day of the war. Within fifteen minutes, according to former Israeli intelligence officers, Soviet helicopters had arrived and began dismantling the equipment. It was a stunning loss: there were as many as seven underground levels full of most sensitive listening and recording gear—all of which ended up in Soviet possession. Israel reclaimed the destroyed facility by war's end. 
After the war, the official prepared a highly classified report on some of the Israeli deception techniques that had been successfully used for, among other things, relaying bogus orders to Egyptian and Syrian forces. "I wrote a small report for Jessup" —Peter Jessup had returned for a second tour as CIA station chief in the early 1970s,but I knew the Israelis would pick it up out of Washington if it was filed. So I was very careful in what I said. I did not mention that the conversations [with his Israeli counterparts] got to nuclear threats. I knew that the weapons available were something to be reckoned with, and they [the Israelis] told me that this had been communicated to the Egyptians. They said, 'We've developed this method of communication with each other.' " 

The CIA official was rotated back to Washington after the 1973 war and was summoned by James Angleton, the counterintelligence head, who was still handling Israeli affairs. Angleton had seen his report on Israeli deception techniques and wanted a special debriefing. It was a bizarre experience, the CIA official recalled: "I went through two days of debriefing by one of Angleton's guys with Angleton sitting outside the room at a secretary's desk." It was clear that the room was wired so that Angleton could monitor the conversation. The aide would occasionally leave the room to check a fact or line of query with Angleton, who never made an appearance, and whose presence was limited to an occasional scraping of his chair. 

"I did not talk about the nuclear issue," the CIA official acknowledged. "And I did not put it into any messages. I felt it was something that other people knew about—and nobody wanted to hear it from me." 

The Israeli and American governments returned to the policy of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. In June 1974, however, Anwar Sadat announced that his country had obtained intelligence indicating that Israel had developed tactical nuclear weapons. A week later, Shimon Peres, defense minister in a new Israeli government headed by Yitzhak Rabin, categorically denied the existence of any such weapons and accused Sadat of "gathering information of his own making." The squabble between the two countries was treated perfunctorily by the press and provoked no concern from President Gerald R. Ford or his senior aides. A National Security Council official did broach the issue, very gently, with an Israeli diplomat over lunch more than a year later. "I told him I thought my people had the perception that Israel had nuclear weapons," the aide reported in a subsequent internal memorandum. The Israeli diplomat denied the existence of any Israeli bomb and seemed to be "visibly disturbed. . . . He was not pleased with the course of the conversation, and switched the subject to music and the arts, where it remained." 

Carl Duckett made a career-ending mistake in March 1976: he talked openly about Israel's nuclear weapons. On March 11, 1976, Duckett was one of a group of CIA officials who participated in an informal seminar before a group of local members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Such sessions, held at an auditorium near the CIA's main head quarters building at McLean, Virginia, were standard Washington fare; any remarks were understood to be limited to unclassified materials. During a question-and-answer session, Duckett was asked about Israel's nuclear capability and replied without hesitation that Israel was estimated to have ten to twenty nuclear weapons "available for use." Within days, an account of his remarks was published in the Washington Post, forcing George Bush, the newly installed CIA director, to issue a public statement assuming "full responsibility" for the disclosure of the secret information. The obviously angry Bush added that he was "determined it will not happen again." Duckett was rumored to have been drinking at the time of his appearance—the assumption seemed to be that only someone  drunk would be so reckless as to discuss Israel's nuclear weaponry in public—and his subsequent request for retirement was accepted by Bush. 

Duckett, discussing those events years later, acknowledged that the rumors of his heavy drinking "led to a discussion with Bush and my decision to leave." The real issue, however, he insisted, was not his drinking but Bush's unwillingness to promote him to deputy CIA director. 

There was one enduring legacy: the CIA would continue to know very little about the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Duckett's 1974 estimate giving Israel ten to twenty nuclear weapons would remain the official American intelligence estimate until the early 1980s—years in which Israel was exponentially in creasing its nuclear warhead stockpile. Duckett acknowledged that there was no specific intelligence behind the estimate. "We were trying to think what their targets would be," he explained, and using that information to predict the number of warheads that would be manufactured. "We were speculating," he said of his staff. "Our guess was that the Israelis would not have a reason for building more bombs [than ten to twenty]— and that's why our numbers stayed fairly fixed. It was based on very little." 

18 

Injustice 

Carl Duckett's top-secret CIA estimate in 1968 that Israel had three or four nuclear bombs was primarily based on his conviction that an American Jew named Zalman Shapiro had smuggled more than two hundred pounds of enriched uranium into Israel—enough for four bombs. The alleged smuggled uranium also was a major factor in Duckett's second estimate, in 1974, that credited Israel with at least ten bombs; it was based on the amount of uranium he believed Shapiro had diverted plus a guess that the technicians at Dimona could have chemically separated enough plutonium from the reactor to have produced six weapons or more since 1970. Just how Israel would accomplish that feat without a chemical reprocessing plant—the CIA still had no proof that such a plant existed in Israel—was not clear, but what was clear was Shapiro's culpability. To Duckett and his colleagues, especially Richard Helms, the case against Shapiro was unassailable. 

In the CIA's view, Shapiro was more than just a Jew who supported Israel; he was a Jew in the nuclear-fuel-processing business who traveled regularly to Israel and was a partner with the Israeli government in some business ventures. He fit the dual-loyalty stereotype in many other ways: he was the high-achieving son of an Orthodox rabbi who emigrated from Lithuania; he was valedictorian of his high school class in Passaic, New Jersey, before attending Johns Hopkins University; he got a master's degree while going to night school; and—with the aid of a fellowship from Standard Oil of Indiana—he earned his doctorate in chemistry in 1948, at the age of twenty eight. Shapiro, with his brilliance and capacity for hard work, was among the first scientists—and most certainly one of the first Jews—to be hired to develop submarine reactors for a newly established laboratory operated by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation for the U.S. Navy. 

As his career progressed, Shapiro—who underwent rigorous national security checks while at Westinghouse—made no secret of his strong commitment to Israel; some of his family had been victims of the Nazis, and he believed in the need for an independent Jewish state. He became an active member of the Zionist Organization of America and also generously supported the American Technion Society, which raises funds and provides equipment to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel's most advanced school of science and engineering. 

In 1957, he organized a publicly owned nuclear fuel processing firm, with at least twenty-five stockholders, in an abandoned World War II steel plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, twenty-five miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The firm, known as the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), was a small company in a nuclear-fuel-processing world that was dominated by Fortune 500 firms; there was a constant struggle to get contracts. Shapiro was aggressive in the pursuit of work for his young company, and by the early 1960s NUMEC was providing nuclear services for at least nine foreign countries. There was a steady stream of foreign visitors to the factory, many at the instigation of the Department of Commerce and the State Department, which were eager to show off the government's Atoms for Peace effort. There were at least three foreign employees at NUMEC, including an Israeli metallurgist assigned to unclassified breeder reactor fuel research. There also was constant back-and-forth in those years between AEC security officials and NUMEC over the handling of classified materials, and the company was required to improve its procedures. 

In 1965, after years of internal audits and reviews, an AEC inspection team determined that more than two hundred pounds of enriched uranium that had been supplied by Westinghouse and the Navy to NUMEC for processing and fabrication could not be accounted for; eventually the Joint Atomic Energy Committee—as well as the CIA—came to suspect that Shapiro had diverted the uranium to Israel. 

Shapiro would be hounded by those suspicions for the next twenty-five years—although the most significant evidence against him seemed to be his Jewishness and the fact that one of the major investors in NUMEC shared his support for Israel. A number of experienced investigators from the government and the Congress, as well as dozens of journalists, assumed that Shapiro's emotional tie to Israel was enough of a motive for him to commit nuclear espionage, a crime punishable by death under the Atomic Energy Act. 

Despite more than ten years of intensive investigation involving active FBI surveillance, however, no significant evidence proving that Shapiro had diverted any uranium from his plant was ever found. Nonetheless, he remained guilty in the minds of many in the government and the press; reporters in variably included an account of Shapiro's ties to Israel and the alleged NUMEC diversion in any story about the development of nuclear arms in Israel. Some of the newspaper and book accounts did note that the charges against Shapiro were never proved; many others simply declared that it was the Shapiro uranium that gave Israel the nuclear bomb. 

Zalman Shapiro did not divert uranium from his processing plant to Israel, but there is little solace for the nuclear industry in that fact: the missing uranium was not stolen at all—it ended up in the air and water of the city of Apollo as well as in the ducts, tubes, and floors of the NUMEC plant. There is little solace, too, for the American intelligence community in Shapiro's non-involvement with nuclear diversion, for it failed to learn of Shapiro's close ties to Ernst David Bergmann and Binyamin Blumberg and the sensitive—and legitimate—mission he did conduct for his beloved Israel. 

Shapiro's business was not a pretty one: many of NUMEC's contracts involved the chemical isolation and recovery of enriched uranium from the dirt and scrap generated in fabricating nuclear fuel. The scrap was chemically treated— sometimes two or three times—in an attempt to isolate the salvageable uranium. The process inherently generated some 244 loss; small amounts of enriched uranium were constantly being flushed out in waste water or lodged in scrub brushes, air vents, filtration systems, cleaning pads, and air masks. It was the kind of work NUMEC's larger and more solidly financed competitors did not want. Other NUMEC contracts involved cleaner work, such the conversion of highly enriched uranium (93 percent U-235) from gaseous uranium hexafluoride—the form in which it was shipped from the government's huge uranium diffusion plants—into uranium oxide powder capable of being fabricated into nuclear fuel for Navy reactors. That process, too, created waste—as much as 10 to 15 percent of the uranium eventually ended up as scrap and needed to be recovered. Since working with weapons-grade material was exceedingly dangerous, NUMEC had to divide the uranium being processed into small lots—creating more opportunity for waste— to guard against the horrible possibility of setting off a chain reaction. Under the stringent AEC rules governing the reprocessing of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, Shapiro's firm was responsible and had to pay enormous penalties for any enriched materials that could not be accounted for —as much as $10 a gram; each missing pound thus meant a loss of more than $4,500. 

The term MUF, for "material unaccounted for," became a common one in the nuclear processing industry. Making the contractors pay for missing materials also was the backbone of the AEC's safeguards program; the assumption was that no reprocessing firm would divert or steal uranium if it resulted in a stiff fine. 

The AEC eventually worked out complicated rules for accounting for MUF that enabled private firms such as NUMEC to estimate in their regular reports how much missing but accountable uranium was believed to be in a plant's air filtration system or buried in its waste pits. NUMEC would routinely report seemingly huge losses of enriched materials on any given contract—thirty or forty pounds was not unusual—and then estimate that 80 percent or more of the lost materials would be recovered upon cleanup. The AEC accepted such estimates as realistic, and deferred the assessments of any penalties. 

The fact that nuclear waste was considered an inevitable by product of the business, just as sawmills produce sawdust, was not really a secret—it was just one of those facts that the public did not need to know, and especially so as the nation became increasingly sensitized to the environmental costs of the nuclear industry. The enriched materials handled by the workers at NUMEC were not "hot," as commonly understood, for they had not yet been irradiated in a reactor and thus did not emit penetrating and lethal radiation. The danger facing the NUMEC employees came from breathing in or otherwise ingesting uranium, which, like all heavy metals, accumulates in bones, where it eventually impacts on bone marrow, causing leukemia. Enriched uranium, if breathed into the lungs, also could trigger lung cancer, and the NUMEC employees were constantly urged to wear face masks, although many refused to do so in the summer. 

Zalman Shapiro's career-destroying problems began in 1962, when he was the low bidder for two complicated Westinghouse contracts, involving the processing of more than 2,500 pounds of enriched uranium. NUMEC was assured by Westinghouse that 60 percent or more of each hundred kilograms of uranium could successfully be processed—meaning that as much as 40 percent of the uranium would be scrap, to be separately recovered. In fact, NUMEC found that the process was far more difficult than Westinghouse had claimed for one of the contracts, and resulted in only a 35 percent yield of acceptable product. Nearly two thirds of the Westinghouse-supplied uranium ended up as scrap, much of it—so Shapiro and his associates thought—eventually buried in barrels, along with contaminated rags and other cleaning equipment, in two huge waste pits on the NUMEC grounds. The pits included contaminated waste not only from the Westinghouse contract but from other processing jobs for private companies; Shapiro had not isolated the scrap from each of his contracts, as the AEC demanded. AEC investigators subsequently became convinced that Shapiro had deliberately commingled the scrap from different contracts as a money-saving bookkeeping measure. Shapiro also angered the AEC by his reluctance—again for pocketbook reasons—to begin the time-consuming job of reprocessing the scrap to extract the missing uranium; he in stead kept his employees at work on new processing contracts, for which there would be immediate payment. Stalling the AEC inspection teams, which were demanding that the missing uranium be accounted for, one way or another, became a way of life at NUMEC. 

The AEC tried to resolve the complicated mess in a series of extensive negotiations in 1964 and 1965, with Shapiro constantly citing NUMEC's precarious financial condition to justify his actions. Portions of the 1963 waste pit eventually were dug up, and AEC inspectors found that the amount of enriched uranium buried there was not nearly enough to match the huge losses. The inspectors concluded that there was a MUF of 93.8 kilograms (206 pounds) of enriched uranium; they also told headquarters that because of NUMEC's "inadequate and in complete accounting records," a diversion could not be ruled out, although there was "no evidence" that a diversion had taken place. The issue was aired at a special meeting in February 1966 of the AEC commissioners and senior staff, and, according to a declassified transcript of that meeting, the commissioners agreed that NUMEC's employees be interviewed to find out what had happened. It was further agreed that a trip would have to be taken to Capitol Hill to inform the Joint Atomic Energy Committee of the loss. 

The report to Congress was a bombshell. The American nuclear community already had been rocked in October 1964 upon learning that China's first nuclear bomb had been triggered by uranium, and not plutonium, as the CIA and other intelligence agencies had widely anticipated. There was immediate suspicion that China had somehow bought on the black market—or stolen—the enriched uranium for its bomb (the CIA would not learn for another year or so that China had completed a huge diffusion plant much earlier than expected). A special study into AEC safeguards was commissioned, and it questioned the commission's heavy reliance on financial penalties as a sufficient bar against nuclear diversion. The Joint Committee's report noted that the AEC's position seemed to be  that all of its responsibility "had been fulfilled ... as long as material was paid for." 

The AEC, sensitive to the diversion issue, had referred the NUMEC losses to the FBI in October 1965, but the FBI saw no basis for an investigation; its senior counterintelligence officials concluded, according to declassified documents, that "this situation up to now has been rightfully treated by AEC as an administration matter and there appears to be no basis for us to take any action. . . ." An AEC inspection team eventually interviewed more than 120 employees at NUMEC. No evidence of a diversion was established. 

The CIA, nonetheless, found Shapiro's long-standing ties to Israel to be of continuing interest. Shapiro was a frequent visitor to Israel, and Israelis were among the many foreign visitors who had registered for tours of NUMEC. Shapiro also was a partner with the Israeli government in a business involving the pasteurization of food and the sterilization of medical supplies by irradiation; packages to and from NUMEC were being shipped out of and into Israel. By late 1966, although reports of Israel's progress in nuclear weaponry began to flow from the American embassy in Tel Aviv, John Hadden, the CIA station chief, was still unable to find proof that Israel had a chemical reprocessing plant at Dimona. And without such a plant, Israel would have needed an independent source of enriched uranium or plutonium to manufacture the bombs that, so Hadden's informants told him, existed. 

Duckett and Helms shared Hadden's view that Shapiro had to have been the source for the Israeli progress in nuclear weaponry; the two men would spend the next few years pushing their suspicions on anybody—including Presidents Johnson and Nixon—who would listen. They were mesmerized by Shapiro's links to Israel and the fact that one of the initial stockholders in NUMEC, David Lowenthal, had helped bring illegal immigrants into Israel before 1948. Duckett even came to believe, as he later told congressional investigators, that NUMEC had been set up in 1957 by Shapiro as part of a long range Israeli intelligence scheme to divert uranium. Duckett and Helms were supported in most of their suspicions by George F. Murphy, assistant staff director of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, who also was convinced that the two hundred pounds of enriched uranium could not simply have disappeared into NUMEC's refuse pits and air ducts. Murphy, who had no technical understanding of the nuclear fuel cycle, found Shapiro's alleged sloppy bookkeeping, as reported by the AEC, to be preposterous: in his view, "Shapiro was the sharpest, hardest-headed businessman I've ever known." Murphy also was appalled by what he considered to be a lack of security at NUMEC and told a congressional investigator of seeing uranium pellets scattered "all over the benches" during a visit to the Apollo plant. The possibility of a diversion to Israel seemed solid, and Shapiro was put under FBI surveillance in the late 1960s. 

Shapiro, meanwhile, in a desperate effort to save his company, hired James E. Lovett, a senior AEC scientist, to take over nuclear materials accountability at NUMEC. One of Lovett's first acts was to insist that the concrete floor of the old plant be protected with stainless steel; concrete, Lovett knew, absorbed far more uranium than suspected. Shapiro and other company officials "were deluding themselves," Lovett recalled. "They honestly thought that if it came down to the end, they'd recover most" of the two hundred or more pounds of missing uranium in NUMEC's waste pits. But most of the uranium was not in the plant's waste pits; it was embedded in the concrete floor, clinging to ventilation ducts, flushed out with other plant wastes into the local waterways, and scattered in the air. 

The continuing controversy over the alleged diversion be came widely known inside the tight-knit nuclear community, and Shapiro suffered. "I was a smelly dead fish," he bitterly recalled. "Contracts were pulled away and given to others." In 1967, Shapiro and his partners were forced to merge their interest in NUMEC into the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO); Shapiro, with his special Q Clearance (for atomic energy matters) still intact, continued to run the plant. 

Shapiro, as the CIA and AEC never learned, did have a secret life. He had met and befriended many of Israel's senior nuclear scientists on his visits there, and was especially devoted to Ernst David Bergmann, who was head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission until 1966. "He was a genius," Shapiro said of Bergmann. "He was a genius's genius. He worked night and day. I don't know when he slept." Bergmann was especially interested in a nuclear-powered water desalinization plant, Shapiro said. 

Water, of course, was the most precious of commodities in Israel. In 1964, the country completed a 150-mile conduit, known as the National Water Carrier, to bring water from the north to the Negev. The system, then Israel's largest development project, linked local and regional water conduits to form an integrated network that sought to capture all of the nation's rainfall and channel it into reservoirs. The National Water Carrier was not completed, however, without a series of disputes with Syria, especially over Israel's goal of bringing water south from Lake Kinneret in Galilee. There were huge stretches in northern Israel where water being moved to the south was in the open, protected only by fencing; the waterway was an obvious target for terrorists. El Fatah, the Arab guerrilla group (and later an important member of the Palestine Liberation Organization), boasted that it would poison the water. At one point, Israeli security officials suspected that El Fatah had attempted to cut the fence protecting the water works in what was feared to be an effort to plant a bomb. 

It was at this point that Zalman Shapiro was asked by Israel to devise a rapid and accurate method of determining whether water had been contaminated with toxic materials. There was a second problem: as much as 30 percent of the water was disappearing while traveling to the south, and Israeli officials were unable to determine where and how the loss was taking place. Shapiro acknowledged, reluctantly, that he also advised on that issue, eventually recommending that a radioactive tracer be added to the water in Lake Kinneret to monitor the flow. He had decided not to discuss specifically all of his activities on behalf of Israel during the many government and congressional investigations into NUMEC, he said, because of the continued threat to the Israeli water supply: "I didn't want to put any ideas into people's minds." 

In the late 1960s, Shapiro convened a series of meetings— some in his home—of American scientists and Israelis to discuss, he said, the issue of how to protect the National Water Carrier from potential terrorists. Some of the sessions, considered prima facie suspect by Duckett and his colleagues, were monitored by the FBI. At the time, NUMEC was under contract to provide to Israel specialized small power sources, whose function Shapiro refused to spell out, other than to acknowledge that they were linked to the security of the waterways. All of the items shipped were approved by the Commerce Department for export, he said. "We had permits for what we did. I never transmitted any documents to anybody," he insisted. "The meetings pertained only to the water supply." 

Shapiro would not say whether he knew—as did many American scientists—of the work being done at Dimona. He did acknowledge an acquaintanceship with Binyamin Blumberg, the director of Israel's Science Liaison Bureau: "I never said I didn't know him." But he denied revealing any American secrets or diverting any materials. "I worked my butt off to assure the security of this country—do you think for a moment I'd do anything to impair its security?" 

Duckett and Helms remained convinced that Shapiro was guilty of espionage. Duckett's conversation with Edward Teller and his early-1968 estimate of Israeli nuclear capacity led Helms to urge the FBI to renew its investigation into Shapiro's dealings with Israel. The FBI's J. Edgar Hoover was then in the midst of a bitter dispute with James Angleton's counterintelligence shop over the CIA's handling of defectors, as well as the continuing—and illegal—CIA spying inside the United States under a presidential mandate to determine whether the anti-Vietnam War movement was being directed by Moscow. Hoover chose to spar with Helms over the Shapiro issue for the next year, according to a former congressional investigator who has reviewed the Senate and House intelligence committees' files on Shapiro. "The CIA was saying to Hoover," the investigator recalled, " 'You're responsible for counterintelligence in America. Investigate Shapiro, and if he's a spy, catch him.' Hoover's answer was, 'We don't really know if anything's been taken. Go to Israel and get inside Dimona, and if you find it [evidence of the Shapiro uranium], let us know.' It was kind of a game," the investigator added. "The memos were hysterical—they went back and forth." 

The NUMEC file remained buried, with Shapiro again work ing for Westinghouse, until 1975, when James H. Conran, an analyst in the Nuclear Regulation Commission (NRC), one of two new agencies that had been formed when the AEC was dissolved earlier in the year, was assigned to write a history of nuclear safeguards. He was denied access to the NUMEC file on grounds of security, and began a fervid campaign to get a briefing on NUMEC for the five NRC commissioners and their immediate staffs. He could not write his report, he said, unless he got that file. 

There was another significant issue at stake: the nuclear power industry was pushing hard to get public and government support for a huge plutonium recycling industry. It seemed as if the future of nuclear power now depended on public acceptance of fast breeder reactors capable of generating more plutonium fuel than they consumed. The public policy issue was obvious: how could the world's governments prevent the diversion of plutonium for military use? Bringing up the NUMEC issue once again created a very much unwanted dilemma: either there had been a diversion, or the inherent loss of plutonium and uranium at processing facilities such as NUMEC—and there were many scattered across the nation— was far higher than publicly understood. 

The advocates of nuclear power, who included many in the NRC, shuddered at the prospect of more adverse publicity about nuclear reactor safety and possible widespread contamination. Antinuclear groups were being organized around the world and had begun large, and sometimes violent, demonstrations in an effort to halt nuclear power. 

Conran's insistence on determining what had happened to the missing uranium at NUMEC won him few friends, therefore, inside the NRC. A high-level briefing by Carl Duckett was arranged to discuss the possibility of a diversion. Victor Gilinsky, then an NRC commissioner, recalled Duckett's presentation as matter-of-fact: "Basically, Duckett was asked  [about an Israeli bomb] and said the CIA thought Israel had nuclear weapons and the Agency thought there was a diversion. He didn't say anything that would convince you that was the case—but the issue from our point, our little world, is that he said what he did. We [the NRC commissioners] did not have responsibility for dealing with the Israelis—we take what other agencies think as a starting point." Gilinsky's contention was that the NRC had no obligation to determine whether Duckett's assertions were correct, but it agreed on the basis of what Duckett said to tighten up procedures for dealing with nuclear materials. Most of those at the Duckett briefing "were not involved in foreign affairs," Gilinsky noted. "They were protecting the notion that the NRC's procedures were adequate to protect plutonium. It was a threat to our claims that you could protect the stuff." 

Duckett's briefing to the NRC and his subsequent informal talk at the CIA before the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Association, while ruinous to his career, did provoke another brief flurry of concern over NUMEC at the Ford White House—yet another investigation of Shapiro was initiated. Once again, however, the FBI could find no evidence of a diversion. 

There was independent evidence, moreover, demonstrating that Shapiro's problems in operating NUMEC were not as exceptional as the AEC had publicly indicated in the mid-1960s. A continuing NRC investigation of the plant, which had been taken over in the early 1970s by Babcock & Wilcox, one of the nation's major reactor designers, concluded that another 198 pounds of enriched uranium was missing over a twenty-nine month period beginning in April 1974. Further study showed that more than 110 pounds could be accounted for by what the NRC study called previously "unidentified and undocumented loss mechanisms"—such as the contamination of workers' clothing, losses from scrubber systems, material embedded in the flooring, and residual deposits in the processing equipment. The remaining lost uranium was attributed to "inevitable uncertainties in the measurement system and errors in the accounting system." In other words, uranium loss is hard to measure. The high volume of lost uranium raised obvious pollution questions for the immediate area; the Apollo facility had been discharging an average of 13,300 gallons of water and waste effluents daily into the nearby Kiskiminetas River, a tributary of the Allegheny River, which is the main source of drinking water for several communities in the Pittsburgh area.* 
*An Apollo housewife, Cynthia A. Virostek, eventually began a campaign to in crease public awareness of the potential pollution risk from the plant. In 1990, largely on the strength of her protests, she was elected local councilwoman. Mrs. Virostek, then thirty-five years old, lives with her husband and two sons five hundred feet from the Babcock & Wilcox plant. She became involved after company officials announced in the early 1980s that they were beginning decontamination operations. "That kind of opened my eyes," she said. "I began asking questions about the plant and nobody gave me answers." She then began a relentless campaign, through Freedom of Information inquiries, to force information out into the open. A Pennsylvania health department study eventually noted, Mrs. Virostek said,that her community was the only one in the immediate area to have a statistically significant excess in the number of cancer deaths. 
In October 1977, Jody Powell, President Jimmy Carter's press secretary, publicly announced that "four years of continuing investigation" by the AEC, FBI, and General Accounting Office had "failed to reveal" a diversion of uranium to Israel. By the end of the year the NUMEC case was being actively pursued by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, one of the most competent and aggressive investigative units in the Congress, as well as the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. Carl Duckett and John Hadden, both retired from the CIA, cooperated fully with the subcommittees; at one point, Duckett telephoned an investigator in the middle of the night and insisted that he go to a pay telephone at a gas station to return the call. He then urged that the investigation into Shapiro be carried forward. Hadden, meanwhile, was repeatedly suggesting that the Israeli government had to have a "mole"—a clandestine operative—inside the Atomic Energy Commission who had protected Shapiro in the early investigations of a possible diversion. 

There was little due process for Shapiro in all of this. The subcommittee investigators seemed to take every one of Duckett's and Kadden's claims at face value. But it is through those claims that outsiders can begin to understand how the CIA and the two congressional subcommittees weighed evidence and what kind of internal checks and balances were imposed on their investigations. 

Duckett's beliefs were most directly expressed in a 1981 ABC television interview, when he said there had been a "clear consensus" inside the CIA that the "most likely case" was that Israel had become a nuclear power because of uranium supplied by Shapiro. "I certainly believe that to be the case. ... I believe that all of my senior analysts who worked on the problem agreed with me fully," Duckett said. The subcommittee investigators had no way of knowing, of course, how little Duckett and his "senior analysts" had been able to learn about the Israeli nuclear arsenal. The subcommittees also did not know that Duckett's initial estimate of Israeli nuclear capability was primarily based on an assertion to that effect by Edward Teller, and not on any specific intelligence about the capacity of the Israeli reactor or the established existence of a chemical reprocessing plant at Dimona. There also was no specific evidence linking Shapiro to the delivery of enriched uranium to Israel. Nor did the subcommittees realize that Duckett's 1974 CIA estimate was not without its critics at the time. Intelligence officials at the Atomic Energy Commission insisted that a footnote be added to the estimate pointing out that "any information" about a diversion of uranium to Israel was unknown to the commission. "Duckett pushed real hard inside the USIB [United States Intelligence Board] to incorporate Israel and Apollo" in the special estimate, one AEC official recalled, "and it got in there." 

Nonetheless, Henry R. Myers and Peter D. Stockton, the chief investigators for the congressional subcommittees, have spent nearly fifteen years relaying the Duckett and Hadden suppositions to journalists as the views of knowledgeable intelligence sources; many reporters published the beliefs of Duckett and Hadden as "facts." [Yeah well 2018 says they were facts! DC]

For example, Myers, a specialist on energy issues for the House Subcommittee on Energy, told the author at the beginning of his research into Zalman Shapiro that there "are reasons to believe that NUMEC had been set up solely for the diversion. The reason for this," Myers explained, "is that no one's ever seen clearly where the money came from." Myers referred to David Lowenthal's role in 1948 in Israel and added: "There were reports of a secure telephone or teletype between and the Israeli embassy." Myers also told of sitting in on a meeting about NUMEC between Richard Helms and a group of legislators: "Helms said, in effect, that Shapiro was the head of a group of people collecting information, some classified and some not, for Israel." There was a further allegation that CIA operatives in Israel had found "traces of enriched uranium" near Dimona that was similar to the enriched products that had been delivered for processing to Shapiro's plant. There also was a highly suspicious meeting at the airport in Pittsburgh between Shapiro and Jeruham Kafkafi, an Israeli scientific attache, who flew, so the FBI reported, from Washington to Pittsburgh for the meeting and returned immediately to Washington. Myers described Kafkafi as "a possible Israeli intelligence officer." 

Myers continued to believe well into the early 1990s that his statements were correct. But the fact is that David Lowenthal was one of a number of investors in NUMEC, some of whom were not Jewish. There was no special secure telephone or teletype at NUMEC, a fact acknowledged by Duckett and others who have investigated the alleged diversion. Richard Helms may indeed have been convinced that Shapiro was the head of an Israeli spy ring, but there is no known factual basis for that assertion. Duckett and other government investigators into NUMEC acknowledged that there was no meaningful correlation between the uranium processed in the NUMEC plant and the traces of enriched uranium picked up by American agents outside Dimona. And, finally, Shapiro told the congressional investigators—who obviously did not believe him—that his airport meeting with Kafkafi was arranged at his request because he had not been paid for the anti-terrorist equipment his company had shipped to Israel; NUMEC was owed $32,000—a fact he found "embarrassing"—but the company needed the money. 

Duckett, in a 1991 interview, essentially recanted many of his previous assertions. "With all the grief I've caused," he said, referring to Shapiro's ruined career, "I know of nothing at all to indicate that Shapiro was guilty. There's circumstantial in formation, but I have never attempted to make a judgment on this. At no point did I have any vested interest in this whole process. It was a matter of trying to be sure when you had information that you passed it along. Ultimately," Duckett said, "you have no control over the information. I never met Shapiro and at no point was I interested in peddling the story." 

Peter Stockton also acknowledged in a 1991 interview that he'd had continuing doubts about the credibility of Hadden. "I was never overwhelmed with him," Stockton said. He had been troubled, he said, when Hadden told one story to subcommittee investigators and legislators, and then told a different version of the same event to officials of the Government Accounting Office, which did a separate investigation of the alleged NUMEC diversion. "We were dependent on certain people," Stockton said, "who jerked us around." Yet Stockton continued to meet with reporters about NUMEC and continued to spread the same misinformation, and many journalists remain convinced that Shapiro diverted uranium for the Israeli bomb. In their book Dangerous Liaison, published in 1991, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, who interviewed Stockton in 1989, depicted Shapiro's role in the Israeli acquisition of nuclear weapons as being so "delicate" that five American Presidents covered it up. "Stockton," they wrote, "found that at least one CIA official had a very clear idea of what the NUMEC affair was really all about. John Hadden. . . ." 

Babcock & Wilcox shut down Zalman Shapiro's Apollo plant in 1978, when the nuclear fuels business suffered a downturn, largely because of reduced business from the Navy. Shapiro's insistence that the missing uranium had seeped into the ground or been flung into the air eventually spawned a controversy over nuclear pollution; Babcock & Wilcox, under public pressure, agreed to keep the Apollo plant open in an attempt to determine how much contamination existed. In 1989 the firm began to decontaminate the plant, an expensive process that involved the virtual dismantling of some areas. Babcock & Wilcox told the community that it would explore ways to return the site to productive use—and promised that future operations would involve no radioactive materials. 

Late in 1990, Congress approved a Defense Department appropriations bill that included $30 million to be spent in an attempt to clean up the plant, with matching funds from Babcock & Wilcox. Company officials acknowledged that many sections of the plant, including its concrete floor, were so contaminated that they had to be dismantled, piece by piece, and buried at appropriate sites—after the valuable uranium was removed. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials subsequently admitted that more than one hundred kilograms of enriched uranium—the amount allegedly diverted to Israel by Zalman Shapiro—was recovered from the decommissioned plant by 1982, with still more being recovered each year. (Such recoveries are called "inventory gains" by the NRC.) It wasn't clear how much uranium would finally be found. It also wasn't clear whether the $60 million allotted for the cleanup by the government and Babcock & Wilcox would be enough to do the job. And it wasn't clear that the site would ever be safe for occupancy.